The Making of Zombie Wars

by Aleksandar Hemon

  “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 nos
talgia: 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.

  The thing was that Joshua wasn’t expected, let alone required, to teach female anatomy in his class, or indeed anything at all that could have significant application in his students’ lives. The ambition of his employers at the PRT Institute’s ESL program was to train the students to pass the mandatory state tests, which made the institute eligible for the funds needed to issue educational visas to Jews arriving from the former Soviet Union. The presence of other refugees—say, Bosnians—provided a convenient veneer for the noble scam the institute was perpetrating: the whole operation was really a front for a resettlement program, a leftover from the heroic Operation Exodus times. Joshua had no problem with anything that helped his people get the hell out of the Cossack lands, he’d assured his puny, frightfully balding boss, Mr. Strauss, who’d summoned him to his office to demand, softly and unequivocally, that he stay away from the vagina and similar genitals and stick to grammar, useless though it may be. “We,” Mr. Strauss said, patiently picking his point out of the depths of his nostril, “have larger roles to play.”

  * * *

  That particular Tuesday class was devoted to the elusive mysteries of the future perfect, a tense that in its dull clunkiness was bound to get on the nerves of Captain USSR and his troops. Bravely, Joshua consulted the textbook (Let’s Go, America! 5) and wrote an example on the chalkboard: By the time I am seventy-five I will have had my knees replaced. Facing the wall of contempt, he underlined I will have had with an unnecessary flourish. “This is the future perfect. It’s used for an action that will be completed by a defined point in the future,” he recited, slicing up the sentence into its bits, pretty much running out of the things he cared to say about it.

  Yet Ana was leaning forward, her eyes lit up as though she really cared how the idiotic tense worked. The rest watched him blandly, counting the minutes—in Russian, no doubt—to the break. Joshua conjugated the verb by erasing I and writing you, then erasing you and writing he/she/it. He read it all aloud, while considering the possibility that Ana might be focusing on him. He disliked his emaciated, bony frame (his father had once told him he had the body of a fanatic), his large feet, his overbite, and his pencil-shading facial hair, which made him look dark-skinned. He could never entirely reconcile the strange fact of Kimiko’s attraction with what he saw in the mirror. At best, it was related to her natural stoicism, as if Joshua were a kind of bonsai tree she trimmed and watered lovingly. “I enjoy being with you” was her preferred mode of expressing her affection. At worst, she kept him around so he could make her feel better when she needed it, a winning combination of a pet and a dildo. Somewhere along the range between the best and the worst, there was the possibility of her deep love. When we love a thing like ourselves, we strive, as far as we can, to bring it about that it loves us in return.

  Now then, what could Ana be seeing in Joshua?

  Back at the Westmoreland, Bega had ardently flaunted his own un-Americanness, complete with experience unattainable to the likes of Joshua. Whatever troubles Joshua had gone through to end up on the stool next to Bega were nothing compared with war and displacement and survival and all that heavy stuff. Bega had kept using the phrase life problems, which Joshua had previously been inclined to interpret as the problems inherent in being alive. According to Bega, however, even if there were different kinds and degrees of such problems, all of them could be reduced to the simple difference between being alive and staying alive. “There are people who just live and there are people who just survive,” Bega had said. “Americans live, we survive.” It’d all been told jokingly and back-slappingly, of course, and Joshua had laughed it up in drunkenness, but it had been undeniable that, as far as Bega had been concerned, Joshua’s life was too good to be good enough and that he could never attain the noble title of survivor. Joshua had submitted his survivor grandparents along with thousands of years of anti-Semitic oppression, to claim some legitimacy, but Bega would have none of it—Joshua’s fundamental Americanness was all that really mattered. “Your life,” Bega had told him, “is warm blanket.”

  But here was a random Tuesday when Joshua’s best student, a beautiful woman clearly belonging to the elect Bosnian survivor tribe, appeared interested in him, despite—or perhaps because of?—his warm-blanketness. The magnifying glass of her gaze burned the back of his neck as he was trying to come up with examples of the future perfect less moronic than Let’s Go, America! 5 offered. All he could think of was By the time the world ends we will all have lived, but he did not wish to put that up on the chalkboard, lest he look too pretentious, clearing the way for an argument with Captain Stalin. Nonetheless, his waffling was quickly punished.

  “Teacher Josh,” Larissa asked, “why you cannot say, ‘I will replace my knees’?”

  “You could,” Joshua responded. “But it’s much better this way.”

  “What is correct?” Captain P needed to know, testily banging at his notebook with a pencil, as if beating a dissident with a shovel handle. “One must be correct. Not two.”

  Joshua could hear the rustle of Ana’s stockings as she crossed her legs. At the Westmoreland, he’d drunkenly spun into claiming that necessity reigned in the world, a natural and therefore moral order was in place, only for Bega to reassert that Josh’s moral system consisted of a little bit of right and a little bit of wrong and a lot of reasonably comfortable—if the order was such, you didn’t have to do much, and it rhymed too. “Survivors have no time to dilly-dally,” Bega had said. Perhaps he hadn’t used that exact phrase; dilly-dally would be a strange idiom for a foreigner to use.

  “Both could be correct,” Joshua said. “It kind of depends on the sentence.”

  Captain Ponomarenko nodded, slowly, as if all of his expectations of Teacher Josh’s failure had once again been met. If it hadn’t been for the continued deafening rustle of Ana’s stockings, if her perfume had not suddenly floated his way—jasmine was certainly present—Joshua would’ve dared to further pursue his moot grammatical point. But he could sense that an insurrection was brewing, the Russians soon to be fully mobilized by Captain USSR’s susurrous slurs, so he called a break. The students went out to the hallway to stand in a discontented circle where Joshua and his warm-blanket ineptitude would doubtless be the preferred topic. And sure enough, there was an immediate quick fire of derisive laughter. Script Idea #38: A bizarrely rich Russian oligarch hires an American detective to find out what happened to his parents, who were once upon a time arrested by Communists as American spies; as the mystery deepens, the detective pairs up with a beautiful Russian woman; they discover that the Soviets sold the parents’ organs on the underground market; the oligarch wants the organs in order to clone his parents; adventures follow.

  Teacher Josh closed the door and embarked upon wiping the chalkboard, sneezing occasionally. The vagaries of the future perfect and Ana’s presence had allowed him to forget temporarily that he’d had to escape from his place and now stayed with Kimmy, the woman who hoarded cock rings and handcuffs. Erasing the future perfect from the board, he couldn’t escape what had happened. He didn’t hear Ana come in.

  “Teacher Josh,” she said. He turned around and immediately noticed that her nipples were hard. Looking into her eyes, sea green as they were, required effort.

  “Can I talk with you?” She even spoke in a rustly, deep voice.

  “Yes,” he said. “You may.”

  “There is party,” she said. A dimple in her left cheek appeared and disappeared without anything else in her face changing.

  “A party,” Joshua said.

  “Saturday in the evening.”

  “Saturday evening.”

  “What?”

  She was confused and glanced, possibly out of habit, at the blank board. He regretted his condescen
sion, but then it allowed him to spend time looking at her: at her carmine lips, at her jawline, at her perfect nose, at the dimple mirage.

  “You can say: Saturday evening,” he said.

  “Okay. Saturday evening there is a party,” she said. “Many friends, many Bosnians. Also students from here.”

  “What is the party for?” Joshua asked. She had the habit of readjusting her bra by pulling up the straps and straightening her shoulders. Her breasts leapt up like happy little animals.

  “It is my birthday.”

  “Well, happy birthday! May I ask how old you are?”

  “If you want to know, you must come.”

  “To your party?”

  “To my party.”

  The implicit requirements of the committed relationship Joshua was pursuing with Kimiko assumed spending Saturday nights together for the purposes of intimacy. It should’ve been easy for him to say no to Ana. He didn’t even need to explain.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It might be hard.”

  He was conscious of avoiding mention of Kimmy to Ana, conscious that he was thereby involved in negotiations.

  “On Saturday you will have had fun,” she said, and the dimple doubled—both of her cheeks were adorned with one—because she pursed her lips slightly, for an instant. It could’ve been just a twitch, certainly unconscious, or she could’ve been innocently proud of being clever, but to Joshua it looked like a conspiratorial signal, a hint of a kiss. He wasted the time he should’ve used to say no in an attempt to swallow a huge lump in his throat: at first it went down, but then it came back up tumescent. Ana, however, used that time to write down her phone number in the margin of Let’s Go, America! 5. She shouldn’t have done it, she shouldn’t have so brazenly violated the good book. Her insouciance was sexy.