Zombies: The Recent Dead (71 page)

“I want a Mountain Dew,” Charley had said, making sure Eric understood that part.

“I know,” Eric said. He tried to show with his eyes how much he knew, and how much he didn’t know, but wanted to know.

“But you don’t want me to pay you for it.”

“I’m supposed to give you what you want,” Eric said, “and then you give me what you want to give me. It doesn’t have to be about money. It doesn’t even have to be something, you know, tangible. Sometimes people tell Batu their dreams if they don’t have anything interesting in their wallets.”

“All I want is a Mountain Dew,” Charley said. But she must have seen the panic on Eric’s face, and she dug in her pocket. Instead of change, she pulled out a set of dog tags and plunked it down on the counter.

“This dog is no longer alive,” she said. “It wasn’t a very big dog, and I think it was part Chihuahua and part collie, and how pitiful is that. You should have seen it. Its owner brought it in because it would jump up on her bed in the morning, lick her face, and get so excited that it would pee. I don’t know, maybe she thought someone else would want to adopt an ugly little bedwetting dog, but nobody did, and so now it’s not alive anymore. I killed it.”

“I’m sorry,” Eric said. Charley leaned her elbows against the counter. She was so close, he could smell her smell: chemical, burnt, doggy. There were dog hairs on her clothes.

“I killed it,” Charley said. She sounded angry at him. “Not you.”

When Eric looked at her, he saw that that city was still on fire. It was still burning down, and Charley was watching it burn. She was still holding the dog tags. She let go and they lay there on the counter until Eric picked them up and put them in the register.

“This is all Batu’s idea,” Charley said. “Right?” She went outside and sat on the curb, and in a while Batu came out of the storage closet and went outside as well. Batu’s pajama bottoms were silk. There were smiling hydrocephalic cartoon cats on them, and the cats carried children in their mouths. Either the children were mouse-sized, or the cats were bear-sized. The children were either screaming or laughing. Batu’s pajama top was red flannel, faded, with guillotines, and heads in baskets.

Eric stayed inside. He leaned his face against the window every once in a while, as if he could hear what they were saying. But even if he could have heard them, he guessed he wouldn’t have understood. The shapes their mouths made were shaped like Turkish words. Eric hoped they were talking about retail.

Kar ya
ğ
acak.

It’s going to snow.

The way the All-Night worked at the moment was Batu’s idea. They sized up the customers before they got to the counter—that had always been part of retail. If the customer was the right sort, then Batu or Eric gave the customer what they said they needed, and the customer paid with money sometimes, and sometimes with other things: pot, books on tape, souvenir maple syrup tins. They were near the border. They got a lot of Canadians. Eric suspected someone, maybe a traveling Canadian pajama salesman, was supplying Batu with novelty pajamas.

Siz de mi bekliyorsunuz?

Are you waiting too?

What Batu thought Eric should say to Charley, if he really liked her: “Come live with me. Come live at the All-Night.”

What Eric thought about saying to Charley: “If you’re going away, take me with you. I’m about to be twenty years old, and I’ve never been to college. I sleep days in a storage closet, wearing someone else’s pajamas. I’ve worked retail jobs since I was sixteen. I know people are hateful. If you need to bite someone, you can bite me.”

Başka bir yere gidelim mi?

Shall we go somewhere else?

Charley drives by. There is a little black dog in the passenger window, leaning out to swallow the fast air. There is a yellow dog. An Irish setter. A Doberman. Akitas. Charley has rolled the window so far down that these dogs could jump out, if they wanted, when she stops the car at a light. But the dogs don’t jump. So Charley drives them back again.

Batu said it was clear Charley had a great capacity for hating, and also a great capacity for love. Charley’s hatred was seasonal: in the months after Christmas, Christmas puppies started growing up. People got tired of trying to house-train them. All February, all March, Charley hated people. She hated people in December too, just for practice.

Being in love, Batu said, like working retail, meant that you had to settle for being hated, at least part of the year. That was what the months after Christmas were all about. Neither system—not love, not retail—was perfect. When you looked at dogs, you saw this, that love didn’t work.

Batu said it was likely that Charley, both her person and her Chevy, were infested with dog ghosts. These ghosts were different from the zombies. Nonhuman ghosts, he said, were the most difficult of all ghosts to dislodge, and dogs were worst of all. There is nothing as persistent, as loyal, as
clingy
as a dog.

“So can you see these ghosts?” Eric said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Batu said. “You can’t see that kind of ghost. You smell them.”

Civarda turistik yerler var mı, acaba?

Are there any tourist attractions around here, I wonder?

Eric woke up and found it was dark. It was always dark when he woke up, and this was always a surprise. There was a little window on the back wall of the storage closet, that framed the dark like a picture. You could feel the cold night air propping up the walls of the All-Night, thick and wet as glue.

Batu had let him sleep in. Batu was considerate of other people’s sleep.

All day long, in Eric’s dreams, store managers had arrived, one after another, announced themselves, expressed dismay at the way Batu had reinvented—
compromised
—convenience retail. In Eric’s dream, Batu had put his large, handsome arm over the shoulder of the store managers, promised to explain everything in a satisfactory manner, if they would only come and see. The store managers had all gone, in a docile, trusting way, trotting after Batu, across the road, looking both ways, to the edge of the Ausible Chasm. They stood there, in Eric’s dream, peering down into the Chasm, and then Batu had given them a little push, a small push, and that was the end of that store manager, and Batu walked back across the road to wait for the next store manager.

Eric bathed standing up at the sink and put on his uniform. He brushed his teeth. The closet smelled like sleep.

It was the middle of February, and there was snow in the All-Night parking lot. Batu was clearing the parking lot, carrying shovelfuls of snow across the road, dumping the snow into the Ausible Chasm. Eric went outside for a smoke and watched. He didn’t offer to help. He was still upset about the way Batu had behaved in his dream.

There was no moon, but the snow was lit by its own whiteness. There was the shadowy figure of Batu, carrying in front of him the shadowy scoop of the shovel, full of snow, like an enormous spoon full of falling light, which was still falling all around them. The snow came down, and Eric’s smoke went up and up.

He walked across the road to where Batu stood, peering down into the Ausible Chasm. Down in the Chasm, it was no darker than the kind of dark the rest of the world, including Eric, especially Eric, was used to. Snow fell into the Chasm, the way snow fell on the rest of the world. And yet there was a wind coming out of the Chasm that worried Eric.

“What do you think is down there?” Batu said.

“Zombie Land,” Eric said. He could almost taste it. “Zomburbia. They have everything down there. There’s even supposed to be a drive-in movie theater down there, somewhere, that shows old black-and-white horror movies, all night long. Zombie churches with AA meetings for zombies, down in the basements, every Thursday night.”

“Yeah?” Batu said. “Zombie bars too? Where they serve zombies Zombies?”

Eric said, “My friend Dave went down once, when we were in high school, on a dare. He used to tell us all kinds of stories.”

“You ever go?” Batu said, pointing with his empty shovel at the narrow, crumbly path that went down into the Chasm.

“I never went to college. I’ve never even been to Canada,” Eric said. “Not even when I was in high school, to buy beer.”

All night the zombies came out of the Chasm, holding handfuls of snow. They carried the snow across the road, and into the parking lot, and left it there. Batu was back in the closet, sending off faxes, and Eric was glad about this, that Batu couldn’t see what the zombies were up to.

Zombies came into the store, tracking in salt and melting snow. Eric hated mopping up after the zombies.

He sat on the counter, facing the road, hoping Charley would drive by soon. Two weeks ago, Charley had bitten a man who’d brought his dog to the animal shelter to be put down.

The man was bringing his dog because it had bit him, he said, but Charley said you knew when you saw this guy, and when you saw the dog, that the dog had had a very good reason.

This man had a tattoo of a mermaid coiled around his meaty forearm, and even this mermaid had an unpleasant look to her: scaly, corseted bottom; tiny black dot eyes; a sour, fangy smile. Charley said it was as if even the mermaid were telling her to bite the arm, and so she did. When she did, the dog went nuts. The guy dropped its leash. He was trying to get Charley off his arm. The dog, misunderstanding the situation, or rather, understanding the situation, but not the larger situation, had grabbed Charley by her leg, sticking its teeth into her calf.

Both Charley and the dog’s owner had needed stitches. But it was the dog who was doomed. Nothing had changed that.

Charley’s boss at the shelter was going to fire her, anytime soon—in fact, he had fired her. But they hadn’t found someone to take her shift yet, and so she was working there, for a few more days, under a different name. Everyone at the shelter understood why she’d had to bite the man.

Charley said she was going to drive all the way across Canada. Maybe keep on going, up into Alaska. Go watch bears pick through garbage.

“When a bear hibernates,” she told Batu and Eric, “it sleeps all winter and never goes to the bathroom. So when she wakes up in spring, she’s really constipated. The first thing she does is take this really painful shit. And then she goes and jumps in a river. She’s really pissed off now, about everything. When she comes out of the river, she’s covered in ice. It’s like armor. She goes on a rampage and she’s wearing armor. Isn’t that great? That bear can take a bite out of anything it wants.”

Uykum geldi.

My sleep has come.

The snow kept falling. Sometimes it stopped. Charley came by. Eric had bad dreams. Batu did not go to bed. When the zombies came in, he followed them around the store, taking notes. The zombies didn’t care at all. They were done with all that.

Batu was wearing Eric’s favorite pajamas. These were blue, and had towering Hokusai-style white-blue waves, and up on the waves, there were boats with owls looking owlish. If you looked closely, you could see that the owls were gripping newspapers in their wings, and if you looked even closer, you could read the date and the headline:

“Tsunami Tsweeps Pussy

Overboard, All is Lots.”

Batu had spent a lot of time reorganizing the candy aisle according to chewiness and meltiness. The week before, he had arranged it so that if you took the first letter of every candy, reading across from left to right, and then down, it had spelled out the first sentence of
To Kill a Mockingbird
, and then also a line of Turkish poetry. Something about the moon.

The zombies came and went, and Batu put his notebook away. He said, “I’m going to go ahead and put jerky with Sugar Daddies. It’s almost a candy. It’s very chewy. About as chewy as you can get. Chewy Meat gum.”

“Frothy Meat Drink,” Eric said automatically. They were always thinking of products that no one would ever want to buy, and that no one would ever try to sell.

“Squeezable Pork.
It’s on your mind, it’s in your mouth, it’s pork.
Remember that ad campaign? She can come live with us,” Batu said. It was the same old speech, only a little more urgent each time he gave it. “The All-Night needs women, especially women like Charley. She falls in love with you, I don’t mind one bit.”

“What about you?” Eric said.

“What about me?” Batu said. “Charley and I have the Turkish language. That’s enough. Tell me something I need. I don’t even need sleep!”

“What are you talking about?” Eric said. He hated when Batu talked about Charley, except that he loved hearing her name.

Batu said, “The All-Night is a great place to raise a family. Everything you need, right here. Diapers, Vienna sausages, grape-scented Magic Markers, Moon Pies—kids like Moon Pies—and then one day, when they’re tall enough, we teach them how to operate the register.”

“There are laws against that,” Eric said. “Mars needs women. Not the All-Night. And we’re running out of Moon Pies.” He turned his back on Batu.

Some of Batu’s pajamas worry Eric. He won’t wear these, although Batu has told him that he may wear any pajamas he likes.

For example, ocean liners navigating icebergs on a pair of pajama bottoms. A man with an enormous pair of scissors, running after women whose long hair whips out behind them like red and yellow flags, they are moving so fast. Spiderwebs with houses stuck to them.

A few nights ago, about two or three in the morning, a woman came into the store. Batu was over by the magazines, and the woman went and stood next to Batu.

Batu’s eyes were closed, although that doesn’t necessarily mean he was asleep. The woman stood and flicked through magazines, and then at some point she realized that the man standing there with his eyes closed was wearing pajamas. She stopped reading through
People
magazine and started reading Batu’s pajamas instead. Then she gasped, and poked Batu with a skinny finger.

“Where did you get those?” she said. “How on earth did you get those?”