Aleksandar Hemon: The Making of Zombie Wars

* * *

Naturally, Joshua wished he could reverse the flow of time and make everything the way it had been before he found Stagger sobbing into his filthy underwear. But the before was no longer available, nor would it ever be, while the after was mercilessly launched between the glad ding of Kimiko’s bell and its despondent dong . It was well past midnight, so that when she came down to open the door and look unpleasantly surprised, he was wise enough to appear apologetic. Bushy welcomed him by rubbing his fat-cat ass against his ankle. My fair girlfriend is innocently sleeping, Joshua thought. What would love be without mutually assured oblivion?

Bushy would not quit and Joshua picked him up. He stroked the cat pantingly telling Kimmy what had happened, minus the details of self-urination, though her smirk indicated that she might’ve found his odor disagreeable. She wore a large Chicago Fire T-shirt, its hem touching her knees. It was a man’s shirt.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“What can I do? He’s my landlord. I can’t go back there. He lives on the first floor.”

“You could call the police,” she said. She was beautiful, even if her calmness could be interpreted as indifference. He was aware, of course, that the reasonable course of action would indeed be to call the police. But he couldn’t bear the thought of the CPD, ever happy to go gun crazy, confronting the batshit Stagger. Going back was also impossible. Stagger might be trashing his place, for all he knew, wearing Jonjo’s underwear on his head to the soundtrack of “Welcome to the Jungle,” armed with his Desert Storm trauma and samurai sword.

“What do you want to do?” Kimmy asked again. What he wanted to do was nothing, every day, all day long, until the glacier of time ground everything back into its smooth shape. The force by which a man perseveres in existing is limited, and infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes. He wanted to press up against Kimmy’s warm, soft back and stay there until things sorted themselves out. Music was coming from her bedroom — she liked to read and fall asleep listening to Bach’s cello suites. Everything about her was gentle and sovereign. There was always a self-evident reason for whatever she did, even if he seldom knew what it was.

There was a reason for the shirt she was wearing as well. His groin and inner thighs were now beginning to itch. The Fire-shirt hem was fondling her knees.

“I think,” Joshua said, “I need to take a shower right now.”

“Whatever you want,” Kimmy said. He wanted her to embrace his bepissed body, to kiss him, slipping her tongue into his mouth, to approve of him as he was, to take him unconditionally. It didn’t seem likely at that moment. Bushy suddenly swung his declawed paw at Joshua’s face, missing his eyeball by a missing claw. Joshua dropped him on the floor to trot toward the promise of food.

“Is that your shirt?” he asked.

“No,” she said. Why would she wear a soccer shirt? Foreigners wear soccer gear, particularly foreign men. He waited for her follow-up elucidation, but she stayed silent, as if daring him to ask whose shirt it was. He wasn’t so much jealous as he wanted Kimiko to confess that she experienced lust independent of him — the thought of her sovereign lechery turned him on, because it frightened him. He wouldn’t have admitted it, but one of the reasons he was attracted to her was that he couldn’t read her.

“I might need something clean to wear,” Joshua said. She glanced out the window at a dark back alley, then pulled the shirt over her head and handed it to Joshua, exhibiting her beautiful, lithe body: the perky breasts, the smiley navel, the curly crotch. In the parlance of child psychology, the shirt would be a transitional object.

In the shower, tired though he was, he acquired a hard-on prompted by the fantasy of Kimmy grabbing the buttocks of a man in the Fire shirt who gradually attained an impromptu shape: he was Kimmy’s fellow therapist; he was a soccer player, therefore tattooed and tall and not Jewish; he was probably Latino, thus automatically adept at fucking on the sly or in threesome formation. Brushing his teeth with Kimmy’s wet toothbrush, Joshua examined his face in the mirror: narrow; his eyes too big and sunken; an archipelago of zits stretching below a dandruff-peppered peninsula of hair; the overbite reliably overbiting. He speculated about the man’s name: Hector, Fidel, Enrique. Enrique was the name. Enrique the Fucker.

Joshua put his clothes into the washer and considered searching the dirty laundry basket for other man-sized clothes. The Kimmy-scented Fire T-shirt reached his mid-crotch. Somehow, inexplicably, she wanted him. At least that was what she’d said the first time they’d hooked up. She could have any other man, a squadron of Enriques, but she wanted him. He’d asked her to tell him what it was in him that attracted her, but she never wanted to talk about it. Only once did she say: “I love the way you think without thinking,” and he hadn’t dared to ask whether she would like him more if he thought with thinking, or, perhaps, if he didn’t think at all. He’d asked her instead if she loved his naked body, and she’d rolled on top of him. Only later would he realize that the subsequent coitus allowed her to avoid answering. It was all terribly disconcerting, as he thought (without thinking) that she could at any time look at him and realize her mistake. This relationship: the fanciest item in Joshua’s fear booth.

When he slipped into bed next to her, Bach was off and she was hugging Bushy. Joshua inched toward her and pressed his dick, at attention again, into her lower backside like a gun. She smelled of lavender.

“Kimmy!” he whispered. “Kimmy!”

She did not move. He held her at dickpoint for another moment, in the hope she would change her mind and roll over to him, and confirm that, as of tonight, she chose to let her lust loose upon him.

“I have two little patients tomorrow morning,” she whispered.

Joshua repositioned to look up at the ceiling. They seldom had sex before sleep — when she was done with the day, she immediately directed her attention to the next one. Sometimes he managed to wedge himself into her schedule and solicit a random fuck. The ceiling fan was moving above in the dark, like a killer drone. A Harry Potter book lay like a brick on the nightstand.

But then Kimmy released Bushy, rolled over to him, and placed her dainty hand on his undainty cock.

“What about the little patients?” whimpered Joshua.

“They’ll be fine,” Kimmy said, “they’re just spoiled little brats.” She moved her hand in all the right directions, and, as Enrique bled to death in the shower, Joshua submitted himself to the pleasures of being the chosen one.

* * *

She’d left for work when he woke up. A world of unavoidable actions presented itself to Joshua. First, the least painful: he transferred his damp clothes to the dryer. Then he went back into the bedroom to rummage through Kimmy’s life: his current status as the chosen one demanded further confirmation.

Kimmy had many fashionable pieces of clothing in her closet: tasteful dresses, delicate blouses, silky stockings, most of which he’d never laid eyes on in the seven months they’d been dating. When did she wear those things? She was from elsewhere, and not just because she was Asian; it was because beyond her appearances there was the unknown. He had never met anyone from her work, least of all Enrique; her family was forever in California. Linda notwithstanding, all of her friends were in New York or Los Angeles. She had a much older sister she hadn’t spoken to in months; she had thoughts she never expressed. He moved on to her dresser drawer: her ascetic running gear, her lacy bras, her diminutive underwear. He pressed his nose into the scentful pair of her porn-red panties — she always kept bags of dry lavender in her drawers. From the depths of the duvet, Bushy watched him inspecting Kimmy’s jewelry. Joshua was just about to feel creepily stupid when in the far corner of her bottom drawer he discovered, still in its original packaging, a shiny cock ring.