Zombie (12 page)

The man in the bed gives up, stops fighting, breathing shallow breaths, and I keep breathing, breathing for him. He closes his one eye and breathes through the tube down his throat and then exhales and opens his one eye. A surge blasts from his chest as he throws everything into a final fight, twisting his body, seizure-like. The doctors rush back into frame, holding him down. The movement startles the crowd as they shift like current away from the stage and collide with the camera. The tripod with the camera crashes to the ground, the camera still filming, but only filming legs and the heavy plastic covering the floor and the crunching of feet stepping on the plastic. Then the audio goes silent as legs moves past the camera and the screen cuts to black.

Sublimation
goes back to Dad’s closet like a fucking bullet. Fucking leave that bullshit behind. I wish I had never found it. I wish I could make myself forget it.

This is the savage animal ripping through my body at this very moment.

I
throw open the door to the basement and, instead of hiding behind it, I charge down the stairs, making as much noise as possible. A zombie killer. Noise, noise, noise—bounding down the stairs in heavy strides. Here I come. If this were a zombie film, I’d be making a major faux pas and would most likely be dead in a matter of minutes. However, in this instance, I break my Zombie Survival Code Number Two—keep quiet—and embrace the chaos and calamity of my shitfuck life.

I pass antiques, wrapped in plastic, stacked in corners. I pass bicycles hung from the ceiling. I pass Dad’s toolshed. I pass luggage. I pass Dog’s cage. If this were back in the day, the basement would have been the jungle. It would be
the shit
. I would be in
the shit
. Dad says that in the Marines, they were told to scream
kill, kill, kill
or
ooh rah
. I say neither in the basement. In the basement, I say neither. In the back, I find the trunk where Dad keeps all of our sports equipment, collected together from over the years—deflated soccer balls and footballs; stiff, leather baseball gloves; chipped lacrosse sticks; three sets of used golf clubs that Dad bought for us but that we never used; camping equipment from when Jackson tried to be a boy scout but got kicked out because he kept getting caught fucking around with some girl scout or fighting with another boy scout in his troop; broken lawn furniture; soft seat cushions used for Orioles and Ravens games; Byron Hall Blue Jay water bottles; and wrap-around protective eyewear. All of this means nothing to me. All of this is exactly where it is supposed to be—out of sight and at the bottom of our lives. None of these things connect to us anymore.

Jackson—moved out.

Mom—moved out.

Dad—moved on.

Jeremy—still here.

What I want is still down here—an old, rubber kitchen trash can next to the trunk, filled with my big, bad, beautiful bastards—baseball bats. Covered in cobwebs, I slap them away. These are my zombie weapons. I’m the American version of Shaun in
Shaun of the Dead
. If they made a version based on me it’d be
Jeremy of the Dead
. Instead of a cricket mallet or pool cues to smash the living dead to goo, I’d simply substitute a baseball bat. If Shaun could whack them, so can I.

I grab the handle on the side of the trash can and drag it, like a dead body, across the cement floor of the basement, making an amazing scratching sound that would raise the dead. I lift the trash can and its contents up the basement stairs one step at a time, dropping it occasionally to rest, each drop making a tremendous thud that thunders throughout the house with great reverberating echoes. Every time I drop the fucker, wooden and aluminum bats
thwark
and
ping
against eachother. I drag that fucker across the hardwood of the first floor, scraping the fuck out of it. I pass Dog, who could give a shit what any of us do in this house so long as she is fed and walked. I rest in the foyer, catching my breath, looking outside to the street. Nothing. Only the shadows under the street lamp, but nothing real. I lift the trash can up to the second flight of stairs without stopping once and hustle through my bedroom door with a
28 Days Later
poster tacked to the front, the contagious symbol warning all who enter to beware.

In the zombie film
28 Days Later
, the main character, Jim, wakes in an abandoned hospital room, still attached to saline bags and shit. He is alone. There are no doctors. There are no nurses. No staff of any kind. No patients. Everyone is gone, disappeared, dead. If not, then they are rage-infected zombies. Jim learns this sad fact as he wanders the looted and lost streets of London. He survives off of vending machine food—candy and soda. He keeps to himself until
he meets up with other survivors, like himself, and finds a reason to continue to carry on and fight—for humanity. But in the beginning, when he wakes in that hospital room, by himself, he has nothing except fear.

I kick my bedroom door closed and set the trash can lovingly next to my bed.

Lights off, I lay in bed, fully dressed and on top of the covers, cooling off and calming down. I hate that fucking basement, but now I have what I need and don’t need anything else. Anyone else. Not Dad. Not Mr. Rembrandt. I close my eyes and see the man in the
Sublimation
DVD again—strapped to the bed, held down, stuffed full of tubes and liquids, one eye taped shut. I hear the bodiless man reciting philosophy like prayers or commandments.

Mybads. Oh, my beautiful bastards! I pull one and hold it across my chest. Sleep closes down on me. Fuck you, Sleep. I’m packing aluminum and wooden heat. Barefoot again at my window, Tricia’s blinds are closed, even though her light is on. I wish I could see her and make sure she was okay. I wish I could see if she needed me to save her. I can save people. Just like Shaun.

Who needs pills, Mom?

Who needs sex, Jackson?

Who needs tongues, Dad?

Zombie Survival Code Number Four—lock and fucking load. I just have to remember to choke that bastard up.

T
he morning sun sneaking through my blinds reminds me of two things:

First thing. I have a sick fuck for a father. I can set a clock by him, but not literally, just usually. He arrives home, evasive and different, after some night out doing God knows what. I see the morning sun and I am reminded of my fucking father, coming home. From being with Liza? I call bullshit.
Notes from Underground
, Ballentine.

Second thing. The morning sun rises up and sneaks in, serving me an acknowledgement to the sad fucking fact that nothing in my bedroom is my own. In many ways, this second thing is really, like, six things packed tightly into an explosion of things. Much of my room is a reminder of Mom, or a memory of Mom I’d rather forget.

The walls are painted midnight. The carpet that industrial gray. Two armless wicker chairs bookend a wood end table with a vase of red marbles and fake red flowers stuck inside. These are my Mom.

The only aspect of my room that is inherently my own is my zombie ceiling—every classic zombie poster imaginable stuck to the ceiling, covering every inch of the ceiling. Overlapping, crisscrossing, coming down on the room. Every George A. Romero
Living Dead
movie poster,
Planet Terror, Dawn of the Dead
the original
, Dawn of the Dead
the remake,
I Walked with a Zombie, Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland
. Mom hated that I put them up there. She preferred I get them framed and properly hung on the wall with a drill and a hook, not tacked into the ceiling. The
Night of the Living Dead
poster, the one with the little girl, the black-and-white one where she looks fucking demonic as shit is the focal point. But it’s
not just U.S. film posters. I collect internationally, yo. American movies released abroad and international horror released internationally and international horror released in the States, too. British. Chinese. German. Icelandic. Dutch. Russian. African. French. Hell, even Canadian. Whatever I can get my hands on. But why do I put them on my ceiling? Simple. Because when a stranger doesn’t know your ceiling is tricked out in zombie paraphernalia and they eventually look up, holy crap, it will scare the living shit out of them in a way that is simply indescribable. That and because it keeps the demon shadows off the ceiling, just like the “Thriller” poster did, way back when, kick-starting this whole thing. That story will come later.

Dad bangs around downstairs. He’s home. Just before 6
A.M
. Right on time.

Baseball bat in hand—wooden—I pretend to be blind with my sight taken from me by a combination of illness and freak accident. In order to survive and get along in the world, I must hone my hearing. Not my listening skills, but my hearing. My limbs are paralyzed too. It was a bad accident. And I can’t move at all. I am fully functioning otherwise. I close my eyes and embrace the darkness—tracking the movement of the living dead beneath me, choking up on the warm wood. A chair scrapes against the floor. The refrigerator door slams shut. Dog’s collar jingles. Dad coughs. He’ll come hunting for me soon. To give me my Ritalin. Keep me normal. He’s louder than usual this morning, actually, slamming all kinds of shit. I wonder if he had fun doing whatever it was he did last night. Whoever it was he did. Like Liza. I wonder if he’s watched that fucking crazyass DVD yet or if he’ll notice my beautiful bastards by my bed. I wonder if he knows what
sublimation
means.

Then I remember—today is a Mom day, which means that Mom is driving me to school, and on Mom days when she drives me to school, Mom is always early because Mom always wants to go to breakfast before I go to school.

Shitfuck.

Dicktroll.

I strip off my clothes, kicking them into a pile by the door and open my closet and pick up the Scrabble box when I hear Dad running up the stairs, then pounding down the hallway. I close the lid of the box and step out from the closet, still holding it. The door swings wide without a knock, revealing my whole damn self in the center of my room, naked, totally nude, but at least my closet door is closed. I cover my junk with the Scrabble box. Just as I’m naked, Dad’s in a pair of white boxers and white tank top.

“Dad,” I say, “you didn’t knock.”

“Fathers don’t need to knock,” he says, pinching the pill in his fingers, and aiming it toward my mouth—Ritalin. “Open.” The pill hits my teeth and rattles around my mouth like a silver ball in a pinball machine. My tongue knocks it to the back of my throat as I swallow without water. “Is it down?” he asks.

I show him the emptiness in my mouth. Even make a noise like at a dentist.

“Better get dressed,” he says. “She’ll be here soon. Don’t be like your brother. Your brother never wears any clothes. And he has emotional problems. Don’t be like him. Be better than him.” Dad walks away, stops, and turns back to me. “When we see him tonight, don’t tell him I said that.” He finally notices the board game strategically placed over my
self
. “Why are you holding a Scrabble box?” All I want to do is call him out about Liza again and tell him I watched the video, but can’t get up the nerve.

“I thought we could play later.”

“You know I hate that game.”

“When did she say she’d be here?” I ask, putting the box on my bed, shuffling sideways.

“Early,” he says. “Be on the street when she arrives. I don’t want to hear her horn. And you know she is going to ask you to spend the night over there, so be ready for it this time.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Do what you want. If you want to go, then go.”

“I want you to be okay.”

“I’ll be fine, so long as I don’t hear that fucking horn honk outside. I’ll be in the living room,” he says.

“Where did you go last night?” I ask, the words leaking out. “I just want to know you’re okay.”

“Jeremy,” Dad says, his back to me, his hand resting on the doorknob. He looks at the wall in front of him. “For better or worse, she’s still your mother.” He leaves without closing the door, pounding down the hallway, then descending the stairs.

I open the Scrabble board game and pluck out a pair of underwear and step into them, pulling them up. Mom bought me underwear as a back-to-school present a few weeks back, the kind people call
tighty-whiteys
. I hide them in the box of the board game Scrabble and keep it in my closet because I know Dad hates board games that make him think or have the potential to make him look stupid in front of someone dumber than him, so I know that he will never find them in that box. Scrabble holds my underwear and all of the other board game boxes hold my women’s magazines.

Dad says that real men don’t wear underwear. He says real men wear boxers. For his back-to-school gift, Dad bought me a week’s worth of boxers, but I haven’t worn them yet. They’re all white with a button at the crotch … like what he is wearing. I hate how everything just hangs loose in them and you have to unbutton them to pee standing up and then button them up when you are finished. At least with underwear, you have the hole you can snake your dick through.

Sometimes it’s just easier to sit down.

B
arefoot by the window, Tricia’s blinds are open and there is a light on inside, but she is not there. Cars drive past our house the way old men drive, signaling turns a mile in advance … and dangerously slow.

The night Mom left, her and Dad had been arguing. Jackson was away at school, probably fucking some girl in her dorm room. Dad called Mom a whore and slut and Mom begged him to keep his voice down so that I wouldn’t hear. Glass shattered somewhere. I heard almost everything.

“I’m unhappy,” she said.

“Preach that shit to the choir,” he said.