Aleksandar Hemon: The Making of Zombie Wars

He considered stopping by to see Kimmy before sleep. The glow in her bedroom window suggested she was reading. Kee-mee-ko. He relished the sound of her name, shaped exactly like her: the long legs, the curved hips, the long hair. He liked her confidence, the peace with which she made decisions. She was a child psychologist, specializing in divorce trauma. Also, molestation trauma. She’d been married once before, right out of college, to a self-professed guy named Haskell Something the Third. She mentioned him rarely, but whenever she did she referred to him as the Third. The Third liked three things: his Porsche, lacrosse, and Newt Gingrich . She never explained the role of the Third in her life, as though the marriage happened to someone else. She analyzed others, but not herself. She read Harry Potter because it helped her better understand her little patients better. She always referred to the kids as little patients.

Joshua adored the way she laughed: she constricted her mouth, shook her head, then snorted, then exploded. He wanted to serenade her with the John Wayne joke, so he dialed her number from the street: perhaps she would invite him up for a triple-header of laughter, BJ, and full intercourse. But the network was down and his calls were repeatedly dropped and then her light went out. He would’ve rung her doorbell if it wasn’t for his fear of her finding the joke stupid. Moreover, the piss aspect of the joke put extra pressure on his buckling bladder, which now insisted that he quicken his step. That made something down there hurt. Could that be his prostate? By the time he reached his door, merely two blocks down Magnolia, his bladder was bulging to the point of bursting. The mind strives to imagine those things that increase the body’s power. Say, urination.

He hastily unlocked his front door, dropped the keys and the phone on the table under the cracked mirror, and hurried on to the bathroom. Before he reached it, he noticed the billowing curtains in the living room; he heard the tiny peals of oriental chimes. He was almost sure he hadn’t left any windows open — it was, after all, the end of March. A deep memory of the way late-night ninjas sensed presences was consequently activated and like a ninja he did tiptoe. All flimsy skin and hollow bones, Joshua was practically weightless: he cast no shadow; the floor did not creak. The living room was empty, but dust balls led him, levitating, to his bedroom.

No deep movie memory was available to help him decide what to do if indeed there was someone in the bedroom. Hence he became instantly paralyzed when he discovered a man kneeling on the floor, weeping with his face buried in what was, without a shred of a doubt, a pair of Joshua’s boxer shorts patterned with stars and stripes. He’d dropped the shorts in the dirty-laundry basket this morning, and there was indeed the wicker basket, pitilessly knocked over, and there was the rest of his dirty underwear lined up on the floor for some perverse inspection. The man’s ponytail was tightly pulled back, fluttering in concert with his sobs; he wore a sleeveless denim jacket, so that the tattoo of an eagle with the earth in its talons was blazingly visible on his sinewy biceps. I know this man, Joshua realized — for a fleeting micromoment, the realization was soothing.

“Stagger! What the fuck are you doing?”

Stagger leapt to his feet and charged toward the open window, managing to wipe away his tears with Joshua’s underwear, as if the actual problem were that he’d been caught crying. He batted the billowing curtains apart and slipped out like a true ninja and the former marine that he was. Stagger, it might be pertinent to mention, was Joshua’s landlord and downstairs neighbor.

The room was cold as a morgue. His prostate hurt like hell, but Joshua sat down on his bed, puffing out vapor, and stared at the boxer shorts array on the floor as if it contained a message that needed to be urgently decoded. His heart was galloping toward a heart attack, his brain away from comprehension. He let out a primally inarticulate scream at the still-billowing curtains and went over to shut the window. He kicked up the boxer shorts arrangement. The heart was pounding, the prostate collapse imminent, but Joshua lay down on the bed to look up at the motionlessly indifferent ceiling fan.

A siren wailed down the street, reminding Joshua that time sometimes did flow forward on its way to consequences. He did wish the police to come by, but that was all he was going to do about it. In the mind there is no free will, but the mind is determined to will this or that by a cause that is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so on to infinity. He would’ve watched the ceiling to infinity, had his bladder not started leaking.

When the going gets tough, the tough might find comfort in the smallest of pleasures: Joshua’s urine stream was thick and steady with relief.

When Joshua had signed the lease the previous summer, Stagger had appeared as stolid and reliable, his cut-off denim jacket notwithstanding, as one would expect from a marine who’d proudly served his country. But soon after moving in, Joshua could occasionally hear Guns N’ Roses blasting from downstairs, accompanied by the sound of things being smashed and Stagger’s screaming “Watch it bring you to your knees” and such in unison with Axl Rose. More than once, the party would go on for an entire night. The following morning Stagger would come up to apologize and ascribe his appetite for destruction to his alleged Desert Storm trauma. It made him act crazy, he’d said. It hadn’t always been clear to Joshua whether that was a concealed threat or a way to invite pity and forgiveness. Either way, Joshua hoped his continued understanding would keep the rent low. As a way of additional reconciliation, Stagger had offered to show him his samurai sword, so sharp, he’d said, it could slice a running dog in half and both halves would still jump at the same time to catch the Frisbee.

He was moving out of this fucking place, Joshua decided, come the weekend. He should have already moved out for the Guns N’ Roses abuse alone. Above the toilet hung an inexplicable reproduction of a foxhunt painting: red coats and black bubble caps and tall horses and a few clouds bumbling forth over a composed Victorian landscape. Joshua heard his front door clicking, whereupon something shifted in the corner where the fox was frozen in her escape, her future forever foreclosed. The voice Joshua instantly identified as Stagger’s said: “What’s going on in here?”

In a lightning move, Joshua turned, swinging the dick in his trembling hand to spray — from right to left — the upright toilet seat, the toilet paper roll next to it, A Spinoza Reader , and a basket full of magazines, until he — still emitting spurts onto his own thigh — faced Stagger, who stood akimbo under the hallway light, his face calm and composed to the sharp point of insanity.

“Everything okay, Jonjo?” Stagger lowered his gaze to grin at Joshua’s trickling dick.

Joshua broke out of the bathroom, bouncing off Stagger’s flank to fly through the front door, conveniently unclosed. He raced down the stairs, not stopping until he found himself in the middle of Magnolia, where he finally returned his penis to its natural habitat. His groin and pant legs were completely wet, his left hand sticky with panic and urine. With his right one he groped for his cell phone to call the police (another siren wailed up Clark), only to recall the very motion of dropping the keys and the phone on the front-hall table. He rolled up into a squatting pose of pain, but then unrolled like a fern in sped-up footage, because a cab hit the brakes not to run him over. The cabbie, grim as a nightmare, stepped out of the car and said: “Hey, man!”—and Joshua, his mind loosened by the combination of alcohol and Stagger, retorted: “Hay is for horses!”