Aleksandar Hemon: The Making of Zombie Wars

“A cock ring?” he exclaimed to Bushy, who blinked back listlessly at him. The packaging claimed the ring diameter was two inches. Was it a present for him? Or was it for Enrique? Regrettably, he was not sure what his cock’s diameter was, though he liked to think of it as respectably thick. The human mind does not involve adequate knowledge of the parts composing the human body. Joshua continued the search, somewhat heedlessly, until he discovered a pair of handcuffs. These were not in their original packaging; they were rattly, with a key in the lock; they appeared to have been used. Did she handcuff the Third? Didn’t seem like something Enrique would be into. Maybe he handcuffed her. He’d had no idea Kimmy would be into this kind of thing — she never discussed her desires. Their copulation was usually uncomplicated, if enjoyable: simple penetration and uncontorted positions — the wholesome bread and butter of American sex practices. Most of the time she had her eyes closed, even as she was coming; it had more than once occurred to him that at such moments she was fantasizing about someone or something else. He wanted to enter the domain where her fantasies were part of the resplendently horny landscape. She never responded to Joshua’s cautious inquiries, never confessed to any fantasies, but here they were shining in his hand now, the fantasies. He imagined her handcuffing him to the bed, his face down; his dick peeked out from under the Fire shirt. Script Idea #29: A man wakes up to find out that he’s a captive sex slave of a depraved rich woman he’d met at a cocaine party. His only chance: to make her fall in love with him. Struggle ensues.

The phones rang all over the house and Joshua, startled, quickly put the handcuffs and cock ring back in their places. The ringing abruptly stopped, but now there was hysterical buzzing coming from the dryer.

None of his clothes were fully dry, but he still put them on. His flannel shirt was tight in the shoulders; his denim pants were pinching his groin; even his socks’ heels slipped down his Achilles tendon. The clothes belonged to the before, and he had no attire for the after.

INT. SCHOOL — DAWN

Major Klopstock sneaks across a baseball diamond, pushes a lawn mower aside to uncover a small, broken window. He slips through it into the basement. He moves gingerly down the hallway, unlocking and locking doors. Children’s drawings on the walls; a few little coats still on the hooks. He’s armed with a twelve-gauge; a cluster of hand grenades and a pair of handcuffs hang off his belt. The final door opens into a small, dark lab. He turns on a lamp over a workbench with vials and petri dishes. A shabby mattress lies in the corner — this is Major Klopstock’s only home. He leans the twelve-gauge against the wall.

Major K puts away the hand grenades, and then out of his backpack pulls a zombie head: a small hole above the left eye, the eyes wide open. He puts on a mask and rubber gloves. Carefully, he cuts off the top of the head with a circular saw, scoops out some brain, puts it in a few petri dishes. He pours some solution over the samples and puts the rest of the head in the fridge, which hosts a collection of heads, all of their eyes wide open.

He sits down and writes in his notebook.

MAJOR KLOPSTOCK

(v.o.)

Intermittent life on North Side. Saw Dr. Goldman, roaming with a herd of the undead. Everyone alive is in hiding. Somebody needs to figure out why this is happening to figure out how it will end. Good news: found an army truck full of goodies up in Andersonville. Going downtown tomorrow. The moon waxing crescent. Goodnight stars. Goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere.

The samples in the petri dishes bubble up and spill over.

There were seven students in Joshua’s Level 5 ESL class, and they sat there facing him like a jury that had already reached its grim verdict. In the far back row, as far from Joshua’s dubious authority as they could get, sat Captain Ponomarenko and his rotund wife, Larissa. Captain Ponomarenko had been an officer of the KGB, unhappily decommissioned by the collapse of the USSR, and still resented the fact that America, the land of limp imbeciles — amply represented by Teacher Josh — somehow managed to win the Cold War. He steadily aimed his barbed questions and contemptuous scowls at Teacher Josh, while the fair and larded Larissa endorsed whatever her husband was hatefully thinking. Presently they were convinced that Teacher Josh was personally and primarily responsible for the ongoing invasion of Iraq. They brought up the whole mess in nearly every class, and not at all because they cared about the Iraqis, let alone democracy or justice, but rather to expose the eternal rottenness of America’s imperialist soul. Accordingly, Joshua had become adept at changing the subject and pushing the class toward discussing the challenges they would face while acquiring, say, a fish tank.

Then there was a pair of heavily postmenopausal matryoshki who could not possibly care less about invadable distant lands or English grammar or anything at all save for the intimidating presence of black people in their new country. The ladies never offered any thoughts, stories, or opinions that failed to reiterate their belief that African Americans were inherently criminal. The squatter of the two, Yekaterina, had been blessed with having once heard of one black stealing a car door off its hinges, which provided her with a conversation topic for the rest of her natural life.

There was Fyodor, an ex — rocket scientist prone to randomly quoting Dostoyevsky in Russian, who had demanded that Joshua help him translate an old VHS player manual; expertly egged on by Captain Soviet, he’d taken Joshua’s claim that VHS was obsolete at the beginning of the new millennium as yet another instance of blind American selfishness.

Then there was Varya, who, it had recently turned out, was iffily progressing through brutal chemotherapy. She’d been coming to class wearing a variable head scarf and sat always silent under the colorful map of Israel, all of which had misled Teacher Josh into thinking she was Orthodox. Only after he’d forced the class into one of those role-playing exercises whereby Captain Ponomarenko had become the doctor and Varya the patient had it come out that she’d been battling advanced ovarian cancer. Since Teacher Josh could formulate no appropriate response to the immense fact of cancer, he would consequently find himself providing the medical vocabulary for the entire female genital area. He clumsily sketched a lily-shaped vagina on the board, discovering along the way that he was entirely oblivious to many of its parts, and could not remember the words for others. The evil Ponomarenkos had kept nudging each other and chuckling, either at his ignorance or at his embarrassment — likely both.

The only bright light in all that post — Cold War darkness was Ana, she of the downcast eyes. A Bosnian in her late thirties, Ana was his best student by a long shot, not least because she kept away from the collective contempt of the whispering Russians, congenitally infected with Soviet malice. She used to study medicine, she’d said, adding a few small parts to the vagina floor plan, including a clitoris most impressively rendered as a large dot. She’d done it so unabashedly that Joshua thought up a pun— anabashedly —which often came to him whenever he laid eyes on her. And she was easy on the eyes too: she was partial to knee-length skirts and cleavage-enhancing décolletage, her heels high enough to be sexy, never high enough to be slutty. Her fashion style, however, seemed wholly incongruous with the indelible sorrow she constantly radiated, which Joshua found as compelling as her curves.

One day he’d given his students an assignment to write about their respective hometowns and read them aloud: the Ponomarenkos were from Vitebsk, a town barely worthy of a lazy paragraph; the Moscow matryoshki drew a poor picture of the magnificent monuments built by the tsars and Bolsheviks; Varya was from Kazakhstan and wrote about the radiant and radioactive beauty of the desert. But Ana, raising her sea-green eyes to meet Joshua’s, read her composition mournfully, recalling the normal life back in Sarajevo, her hometown, before the war: people greeted one another on the street; the youth danced all night; there was a linden tree smelling sweetly and quaintly right under her window. He understood that her hot attire did not signify promiscuity — contrary to the consensual interpretation of the other male teachers — but a kind of nostalgia: this was what she used to wear when she was happy, when she used to live the normal life . She simply could not let go, just as Captain Soviet could not let go of his Cold War bullshit, or Varya of her cancer. All bodies agree in certain things.