Zombie

by J. R. Angelella

  One could go so far as to call it rage.

  96

  I descend the small, spiral staircase. More plastic over unfinished walls of exposed pink insulation, wood beams, and electrical wiring. The chemical stench returns. At the bottom, a dirt floor covered in plastic. The room is divided somehow with yellow lighting the rafters of the basement and darkness below.

  I count them, a room of thirty at least. Maybe more. Hard to say. No one talks, really. Some whisper. Some definitely whisper. The men shuffle and move, making room for each other. No one familiar or friendly enough to show signs of recognition. They all look the same. I catch one man watching me, his eyes bloodshot. He opens his mouth and wags a mangled stump of a tongue through his mask hole. I think of Dad and Vietnam and his necklace of tongues. I avoid. Masked men cram together, standing in the basement surrounded in silence, embracing the blackout like it’s some kind of religious experience. I keep the bat behind me and stay towards the back of the room, avoiding any kind of direct contact.

  I look to the man in front of me. To his arms. To his hands. He, missing all five of his fingers on both hands, like they’d been blown off with handgun. The man next to him, missing the lower half of his left leg, just below the knee—stump. Another lifts his mask to wipe sweat from under his eyes to reveal that he has no nose—a giant crater where it should be—like an inverted stalk of broccoli. One has an arm shaped like the tip of a hockey stick, his elbow the last bit of himself—a nub rotating around without direction. Another leans on a black metal crutch—red T-shirt and plaid shorts, one hairy leg fine with a shoe on a foot, the other leg gone as if erased by the pink rubber end of a pencil, the fabric of his shorts where his missing left should be pinned over to the side, covering his hip area, all that remains. A man in a shiny, silk suit with a Windsor knot and a gold watch around his wrist and slicked back hair doesn’t wear a mask at all, at least not yet. He removes an eye-patch, tucking it into his pocket—his socket all that is left, no eyeball, just a collapsed flap of black skin, no longer needed. He has scars on his eye, wide and thick and pink over a black-red patch of skin. He doesn’t stop smiling at no one in particular as he slides a leather mask over his face, his dead eye still peeking out from inside. A kid in a hemp necklace lifts the side of his mask to itch where his ear used to be but now only has a tiny maze of exposed cartilage canals, like one of those mazes in a kids’ magazine. Another man cracks his knuckles without thumbs, missing on either hand. One of the policemen licks his lips. He opens his mouth wide to show bottom teeth, but none up top, only a pink ring of flesh where they used to be as his tongue lathers it back and forth. Another man on crutches has his pants cuffed at his ankle because he has no feet. Another man has no lips, his face shaved back to big gums and yellowed teeth.” We could edit to be “Another man has no lips, his face shaved back to big gums and yellowed teeth, his mask crooked across his face, but perfectly placed to advertise his facial revision. Another, armless with a book bag on his back. Another without a lower jaw—gone. Only a row of top teeth to show for himself, underlining a masked face and two angry eyes, anxious for something to begin.

  A light bulb hangs from a wood beam at the front of the room above a raised stage. We wait like teenagers wait at a concert. The objects on the stage gutpunch—medical equipment, electrodes and wires, a tray of IV bags, a bed wrapped in plastic.

  This is the set of the Rembrandt video—Sublimation.

  Sound picks up. Men say the word, “move.” Plastic crunches under their feet as they separate. Moses must be parting the Red Sea as the men move aside, making room for someone to pass through. He wears a blue executioner’s mask. Him. Rembrandt. He glides down the aisle to an opening under the light on the stage. He wears the same dark jeans and leather jacket from earlier. He paces like a general, stopping to tug on the plastic running up the wall and is content when it doesn’t come undone. He moves to the left of the center of the stage and holds up the book he had been reading earlier, the book he had given Dad—Notes from Underground.

  The men are silent and alive.

  “I am a sick man,” he says loud and heavy like a sledgehammer. There is little inflection, only volume and content. “I am a wicked man.”

  The men repeat the words sick and wicked, saying them over and over and over and over.

  “We are sick men.” He walks to the far side of the stage. “We are but wicked men.” He crosses along the front now, slow. “This is what we are in our hearts as men. We are unattractive and without hope.”

  The men say, “Yes.”

  “We are base things. We don’t know what to name what we are. They think they do, though. They call us what they think we are, but they don’t know. The difference is that we know that it hurts. That there is no treatment for our sickness. There is no cure. We know this. But we don’t let this keep us from being who we are. Do we, gentlemen?”

  The men say, “No.”

  “Because we have this. We have others. Transgression. We are superstitious in the extremity of things. We ask the world to embrace us and our supreme wickedness, our contagious selves.” He claps once. “They will not be so good to understand us, sirs, gentlemen, but we understand this. You understand this. We are sick and wicked men. And this is all we know how to be.”

  The men repeat sick and wicked.

  Rembrandt loves a good call and response. The sick fuck. He continues, hovering over the surgical tray of instruments.

  “I will not, of course, be able to stand here and preach to you or explain to you precisely who is going to suffer tonight or in the larger context of life out there from this wickedness; we know perfectly well that we will fuck things up. I am a wicked civilian. But do you know the point of ourselves as wicked monsters, gentlemen? How the sickness takes us away from ourselves? The whole thing, that we were simply frightening the children and pleasing ourselves with it, like rabid dogs, foaming at the mouth of experience, a stinking mess, made up of its doubts, emotions, and of the contempt spat upon it by the direct men of action who stand solemnly about it as judges and arbitrators, laughing at it till their healthy sides ache. We are at the edge of things. At the crux of it all.” He throws the book against the wall. It slides down the plastic. “But now it’s time.” He points to a man in full green surgical scrubs next to the stage—cap, mask, short-sleeve shirt, and pants. “Doc, bring me some little man of ourselves. Maybe it’ll be enough to ease us a bit and calm us down. Cure us, if only for a minute.”

  The man is a doctor, someone familiar with the cult of things around here. He doesn’t wear an executioner’s mask, but he doesn’t have to. The doctor steps onto the stage and pulls back a sheet of plastic at the far end that reveals a room hidden away and knocks once before opening it. A gurney rolls through, pushed by another masked man, and the room disappears again as the door closes and the plastic drops back down into place. Another doctor. There are two of them and they bookend the gurney, tending to their own.

  97

  There’s a body on the gurney. It’s covered in a sheet of plastic—mask on the face, a plastic tube stuffed down his throat, poking out of his mouth. The person is asleep, unconscious. The doctors lift the body from the gurney and lay it on the bed. They roll down the plastic sheet and tie the body down with long leather restraints, crossing them over the forehead, chest, stomach, and thighs. It is a man and the man is fully naked on the bed except for his mask. We can see his dick, limp. He’s strapped down. Restrained for something that’s coming. The doctors hook the machine up to the body—sticking electrodes to the skin, running wires into the machine to monitor shit. An IV drips down a tube and through a needle in an arm vein. It happens fast, like they’ve done it a hundred times before, and Rembrandt waits off to the side in his blue mask. The doctors finish prepping the body and connect the open tube coming out of his throat to a machine that keeps him breathing and position the bed on the stage.

  Rembrandt then strolls out and takes point center.

 
; I look around for a camera and find a tripod across the room, red light flickering. This is what they film. This is the Rembrandt DVD. Mr. Rembrandt approaches the bed. He unrolls a case, horizontally on the body, filled with knives and serrated objects resting safely in their sleeves. Scalpels and clamps and God knows what all else. He lifts the case and hangs it from hooks off stage right, still in clear view, the yellow light glinting now off the steel.

  “We are alone, but we are never really alone. We are only one, but we are many more than that,” Rembrandt says. “We must help each other, brothers. Some call it God’s Will. Devil’s work. Fate. Destiny. It amounts to futile garbage.” Rembrandt hovers over the surgical tools, his fingers grazing the handle of each instrument. “We live a predetermined life, brothers, gentlemen, sirs. An inevitable existence of one, no matter how many exist under our roof.” He selects a stainless steel serrated knife several inches long and holds it up into the light, reflecting. “A name matters nothing but as an identifier. What we seek is absolution from this time. What we seek is beyond a higher power, a being by choice. What we seek is reckoning in this life. What we desire is an uncommon valor under a watchful eye. A code—this is it and it is all we have—a code. Wholeness. Oneness. Transgression. Without the slowed process of phases. Skip the burn and get right to the healing.” Rembrandt is at the man’s head now and he lowers the knife to the man’s throat, slides it up through the fabric, and cuts away the mask to reveal the face—a normal man, no different than any other man except with both eyes taped shut and a tube down his throat. He is still asleep. “Fractured, bitter, endless pieces familiarized into a singular thing. I’m talking about commitment. The Grand Sublimation. Of Spirit. Of Will. Of Fate. Of Destiny. Bullshit, I say. Bullshit, they know. One Code. One Path. Without it, we are but base animals.”

  The masked men shout, “Yes.”

  Rembrandt continues, “Do we agree, gentlemen?”

  A wall of deep and heavy male voices responds, “Yes.”

  Rembrandt continues. “Gentlemen, we are men who gun for a goal and maybe only a brick wall can stop him dead in his tracks.”

  The men respond, “Yes.”

  Rembrandt retrieves an electric drill and slides a flat circular blade to the tip. He squeezes the trigger and the blade sings. Rembrandt continues. “We are stupid beings, I won’t argue with you about that, but perhaps a normal man ought to be stupid? Perhaps it’s even a very beautiful thing. There it is again, thing, a thing. Ultimately unknown.”

  The men respond, “Yes.”

  The buzzing starts as the blade spins. Rembrandt leans over the man and the blade changes pitch and screeches, slicing through skin and muscle until it hits bone. I turn away, lifting my mask in time as I vomit against the back wall—bile, dark green, fuck. This means I’ll be dry heaving if this continues much longer. The man in the bed thrashes awake and fights against the restraints, gagging and choking on the tube stuffed down his throat. The doctors struggle to keep him down as the man on the bed twists. The blade never stops slicing.

  Rembrandt leans into the circular blade, forcing it through the leg, but I’m not sure where on the leg until the man in front of me steps aside and lifts his mask to vomit too and it is only then that I can see and wish that I never had. Men close to the stage are covered in the man’s black blood—spraying, pumping, pouring out from the jagged amputation just below the kneecap as the lower leg snaps off and away from the body. The buzzing stops, blood still flying off the blade as it spins, and as it winds down it ends in a single tragic jutting silence. Nothing more. No words. Black blood pumps out of the man’s exposed knee, the lower part of his leg separated and lifeless on the table. The man fights less now, just moaning and gagging as he loses more blood.

  I squat down, leaning away from the crowd. I let my stomach squeeze in on itself like a spasming muscle, but nothing comes up except gags. I cover my eyes with my hand as I turn back to the crowd and catch a glimpse of Rembrandt lifting the leg into the air like a newborn baby, blood pouring off the limb. Christ. He says, “Oh, absurdity of absurdities!”

  The men respond with an avalanche of sound, rising up and crashing down—a collective primal scream. A communal prayer. One voice. A release. They raise fists into the air, pumping them. Some others rub their erect dicks, humping air. Everyone, however, screams and none of them stop screaming until Rembrandt lowers the leg, a cue, dialing down the volume.

  A fever breaks out in my body, sweat pouring out of me. I lift my mask a bit to breath, but the sickfuck stench chokes me worse when my mask comes off, so I jam it back down.

  He says, “How much better it is to understand it all, to recognize it all, all the impossibilities and the stone wall; that even for the stone wall you are yourself somehow to blame, though again it is as clear as day you are not to blame in the least, and therefore grinding your teeth in silent impotence to sink into luxurious inertia, brooding on the fact that there is no one even for you to feel vindictive against, that you have not, and perhaps never will have, an object for your spite.”

  I look away. I want to stop this whole thing, but can’t. The doctors wrap him in blankets; shoot him up with God knows what. One doctor lights the end of a blowtorch, a thin blue flame firing. He aims it at the wound, searing it shut. The man on the bed rises up in a voiceless scream as the doctors fight to keep him down, and the blowtorch fully closes off the skin. The room stinks of burnt pig.

  Rembrandt says, “Things finally come down to the business of revenge itself.” His voice changes, taking registration. “Month—September. Day—Fourth. Sublimation one—Samuel Rustom.” He ejects the blood-soaked blade from his electric drill and dips the blade in a bucket of scalding water nearby, steam pouring off the top. He raises it into the light after—a clean, brand new blade, ready for round two.

  98

  I take self-inventory, but all I can focus on is breathing to calm my nerves and keep from vomiting more air. No one speaks. Some hyperventilate, gasping, fighting for air. A handful have their dicks out, erect, and carefully stroke without expression. Rembrandt walks to the center of the stage and wipes his hands with a towel, then claps in succession, like in class, and keeps clapping until the plastic drape opens and the secret room appears and the door opens and another gurney is pushed through covered in plastic.

  The surgical prep routine is the same as before, and I choose not to watch.

  Rembrandt cuts away the mask from the man’s head, but I cannot see his face from this distance. Rembrandt says, “We are but what we are—monsters—and cannot be a thing to be stopped unless presented with the opportunity of force.”

  The men respond, “Yes.”

  I say nothing.

  Rembrandt eyes the surgical tools and lifts what looks to be a stainless steel S-shaped blade. He walks around the table and points to the body. . Rembrandt continues. “Beauty. Ignorance. Isolation. Rapture. These are what we know to be true.”

  The men respond, “Yes.”

  I don’t say shit.

  The plastic still covers most of his body. For a flashing moment, I see his thick head of hair and how his eyes are taped shut and the tube jammed down his throat into his lungs.

  Rembrandt angles the S-shaped blade and chokes up on the handle. Silence cuts across the room. Not a sound. We watch, wide-eyed. Some smile. One wags his tongue. Rembrandt tilts the blade forward, then back, marking the skin with thin slices, like he’s outlining his intended target. Blood seeps out slowly from the cuts. He raises the blade above his head, before lowering it slow again to the markings. Like he is chopping wood, aiming with practice swings first. He exhales and looks up. The light surrounds and swallows him. Controlled. Then. One more time. And one more test—up and down. The blade at his wrist. His eyes close. More breathing. More control. Then. They open. His eyes black. Then. A gut growl. The blade pulls back, glinting the light. The blade swings down. Rembrandt is up on his feet, his body behind the force, bringing it down with force. Leverage. The
n. Contact. The blade chops through skin and bone like butter. Striking through to the bed with a heavy thud. Followed by a soft ching. The hand. Scrubbed raw. A dirty instrument. Now separate from his body. Flops to the floor like a wet and dirty rag.

  My legs buckle and collapse to the floor, covered in plastic and sprayed with black blood. I scramble to gather myself, using the bat as a crutch. I am not the only one. One man stands dead center in front of the stage and cries, weeping uncontrollably.

  Then, the man on the table erupts with life, flailing, shaking with seizure like movements, shaking blood from himself like water from a wet dog. Red streams of blood pump out in multiple sprays from his wound. Rembrandt—quiet. The only real sounds are of the plastic—the soft spray of blood in synchronized spurts as it hits. Plastic crunching under our feet. The man on the bed screams and gags and coughs through the tube. Just the way one would imagine it. A different man, one across from me, vomits onto the plastic covered floor.

  Someone else says, “My Jesus.”

  Rembrandt picks the hand up off the floor and says, “Oh, absurdity of absurdities!”

  The men in the basement explode, louder this time, in screams, war cries, bigger than before, infinite. They raise their fists, shake them, pump them, until Rembrandt lowers the lost hand.

  Rembrandt says, “… that you never will have an object for your spite. A sleight of hand. A bit of juggling. Card-sharper’s trick. It’s simply a mess. No knowing what and no knowing who, but in spite of all these uncertainties, still there is an ache in you, and the more you do not know, the worse the ache. Oh, the worse.” He looks over the masked men in the room. He says, “This is the business itself—to come at last to the deed itself, to the very act of revenge.” Then he says, “Month—September. Day—Fourth. Sublimation two—Ballentine Barker.”