Zombie (14 page)

I wonder if he could hear all the pills crashing and bottles clinking in her purse like I could.

We ride an elevator that overlooks the Inner Harbor through a glass wall; rising up, up, up, up to the top floor of the high rise, skyrocketing up over Baltimore, twenty-two floors up. This must be what a bottle rocket feels like. The elevator stops and the doors open and we step out into a long narrow hallway, a dark green carpet covered in heavy, industrial plastic.

Mom leads me to an open door at the end. It’s dim by the elevator, but the room at the end is overexposed with light cutting through more blue windows. This is a zombie’s wet dream as far as attack spaces go—there is no exit! You get half a dozen living dead fucks on either end of the hallway and each of these doors are locked, forget about it. End of game. Game over. I look at Mom and
her weak body, her heavy eyes and sluggish speech. She’s too fucked up to fight. I’d have to carry this one on my own, but I didn’t even bring my big bastard with me.

“They keep them off during the day to save money since it’s not move-in ready. They’re still selling units.”

“It’s a big building.”

“One of the tallest buildings in the entire city. It’s been a great job. People will wake up in a room I designed. They will work every day in spaces that I invented. And the financers are even thinking that if the spaces rent as quickly as they hope, that as a thank you, they’ll give me my very own suite for free.” Mom covers her mouth with her hands. “How amazing is that? My own suite.” We stop mid-hallway. She grabs my shoulder and turns me toward her. She looks confused or heartbroken or both, I don’t know. “You can come and stay with me. What do you think? They love the work I’ve done. Let me show you what the suites look like. Make up your mind after that. This is the model unit they are showing—the one with all of the light.”

She walks faster, tripping on the plastic. She enters the suite and disappears. I step carefully on the plastic where it bunches. I reach the doorway and cross over and feel hands grab me and pull me through, casting me into a wall of light. This must be what it’s like to be born—burning hot, white, white light blasting and shocking me into life.

It’s hot and humid up here, no ventilation, and I gasp for air—one whole side of the apartment covered in windows without shades. I no longer hear that crunching of plastic under my feet and instead it is soft—wall-to-wall green carpet. The room comes into focus now, the little white circles leaving my vision, and I see the whole fake setup—the fake, hollow, plastic couch across from the fake, hollow, plastic entertainment unit with fake flat-screen TV. The plants are fake and the tables and dining room table and chairs are fake. I knock them with my fist and they echo inside. Hollow. The kitchen is real and the kitchen island and chopping block on the counter are real and the big bowl next to the sink is real, but
the fruit in the bowl is fake. Mom leads me back through a small hallway past a bathroom with real toothbrushes in a real toothbrush stand, to the bedroom, which is just more of the same fake, hollow, plastic shit—queen size bed, dresser, lamps with fake light (I’m not even kidding—fake, yellow light!) and a fake TV. I look to Fell’s Point and see dark clouds forming and raindrops tapping against the windows. Everything still looks like plastic and smells like dust. “All of this looks almost real,” I say.

“It’s supposed to give prospective buyers a vision of their own stuff in the space.”

“This place is yours?”

“That’s what they said.”

“They?”

“The investors.” She walks to the window, her hands on her hips, then adjusts fake flowers in a real vase. “I’m your mother. You are supposed to root for your mother. Not treat her like a spy who’s committed treason.”

I don’t know why I am drilling her on all of this, really. I could give a fuck at the end of the day. Fuck this place. Fuck her. Fuck Zeke. Fuck Dad. Fuck it all. But she speaks with such fucking hope.

“This is what I’m telling you,” she says, her arms out to the room. “This is what I’m working on.” She slaps the wall—it is real, no echo. “This is the best I have right now and I want you to be a part of it, Jeremy. I want you here with me.”

Mom digs through her purse again, finds it, opens it, pops it into her mouth—a movement that should have been invisible but wasn’t. Not even a little bit. Tiny blue pills turn to dust between her teeth. And she doesn’t even say the Lord’s Prayer. This is something new—a change.

J
immy’s—a Fell’s Point diner best known for their Breakfast Bowl: grits, scrambled eggs, hash browns, bacon, and cheddar cheese heaped together and soaked in hot sauce—is predictably slammed. The small dining area is packed with every type of person imaginable. No one is too good for Jimmy’s. Construction workers. Businessmen. Businesswomen. Teenagers like me in groups. Old folks with walkers. Homeless folks, nickel-and-diming. Everyone’s drinking coffee and shoveling food into their mouths. The waitresses scream orders to the line cooks who crash into one another at the grill, serving plates and slapping them on the servers’ station to be delivered to tables.

The table is covered with a red and white-checkered plastic tablecloth, sticky from maple syrup or spilled apple juice. Our waitress is older than I had expected any waitress to ever be. Her silvery-blue hair doesn’t move when she walks. She limps a cup of coffee over and sets it down in front of Mom and lowers a tall glass of chocolate milk in front of me and asks if we are ready to order. Her voice is a super-shaky old lady voice, cracking so much that I think for second she might actually die on us right here. Mom says that we’re waiting for her other son, before we order. The granny waitress smiles and her whole face lights up in a beautiful glow as she walks over to the counter nearby and sits on a stool, breathing heavy, rubbing her knees.

“I want you to spend the night at my apartment tonight.” Mom puts up her hands, stopping me from responding. “Don’t say anything now. Think about it. I can call your Dad and arrange everything.

We can watch movies and eat pizza and stay up late and make ice cream sundaes like we used to do when you were little.”

“What about Zeke?” I ask.

“What about Zeke?” Her hand reaches across the table and grabs mine and I let her. She looks to the front door. “I wonder when Jackson will get here. He’s usually early.”

“Why did you leave?” I ask.

“It’s complicated,” she says. “Hard to explain.”

“Well, which one is it?” I ask. “Is it complicated? Or is it hard to explain?” I ask.

“Both,” Mom says, checking her watch, then the door. “Neither. I don’t know.” Mom roots through her purse, pulling out the damn phone, buzzing again. She flips it open, speaks softly. She stands and kisses my cheek without a sound and vanishes.

“You ready to order, hon?” our old lady waitress asks, sitting on a nearby stool. Her face hangs heavy, wrinkles from ear to ear. Brown spots splotch across her arms and neck. Her nametag reads Rhonda.

“Not yet. I think we’re still waiting for my brother. He’s always late.”

“My daughter was like that. Not a punctual bone in her body.”

“You have a daughter?”

“Had.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“Are you psychic?” she asks.

“No.”

“Then how would you know, hon?”

“What was her name?”

“Becca. Really it was Rebecca. My husband, Kirby, and I called her Becca, God rest his soul. She was more of a Becca than a Rebecca anyway.”

Not only did I bring up one painful loss for her, but I also brought up her dead fucking husband. I am a lump of cold crap. I take a sip of my milk and set the cold glass down next to Mom’s purse. I pull out a wallet, red pen, travel pack of tissues, Revlon lipstick, over-sized Ray Ban sunglasses, and a checkbook. I pull out
three prescription bottles. Each has a different name. None of them Corrine Barker.

Thirty milligram bottles of MS Contin. Morphine pills. Baby blues. Prescribed to other women or fake women, ultimately women that are not her—Jane Barker, Joanne Barker, Jill Barker. I line the bottles up like soldiers and sit back in my chair, facing them.

I close my eyes again and make a wish—that God would come down from Heaven and, in a moment of divine intervention, take my sight. Pluck out my eyes like apples from a tree. I want to say a prayer, some kind of new prayer, some kind of random hodgepodge of words that could pass as religious. With all the faith a non-Catholic, Catholic school kid can muster, I open my eyes and see her sitting there in front of me, my glass of chocolate milk and three prescription pill bottles between us.

She closes her eyes. Then, she verbalizes her prayer. “Jesus Christ,” she says.

M
om drops me off at school, leaving me enough time to get to my locker, open it without incident from my back-up secret combination still in my shoe, then to first period with Mr. Rembrandt. Jackson didn’t show for breakfast, of course, but we waited for him anyway, Mom making excuses for him the whole ride to school. I enter the class early today and on my own will, no need for Brother Lee to escort me again. Although, as soon as I sit down I am reminded of the DVD in Dad’s closet and that this motherfucker gave it to him.

The last to arrive, Mr. Rembrandt walks in and says, “Welcome, watch, and listen.” He writes
POV
on the board and claps chalk dust from his hands. “Point of View, gentlemen,” he says. “The point from which to best tell your story.” He combs wispy, brown hair over his bald spot and readjusts blue-rimmed glasses high up on the bridge of his nose, which make him look like he reads three newspapers a day. “It tells us what we see, but also—and equally as important—what we don’t see.” He wears a polka dot tie in a Windsor.

Mr. Rembrandt—Mr. 8-Fingers. Seriously. I’ve heard kids call him Four-Fingered Faggot. Let’s examine some sick-shit theories:

“We’ve all read Act One of
Hamlet
. Question—is Hamlet crazy? Is there a mental disorder in place? Is he mad or simply depressed and heartbroken? Is he really seeing the ghost of his dead father? What is your point of view?” He stalks the classroom, walking between rows, his mutilated hands behind his back. He points to the greasy-haired Dirtbag Boy in the back row.

“I think he’s a whole bag full of crazy from the start. He says: ’O, that this too too solid flesh would melt / Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! / Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d / His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter!’ He wants his flesh to melt and thaw? Self-slaughter? He’s twisted. He’s a nutbag.”

Super Shy Kid raises his hand and Mr. Rembrandt calls on him.

“It’s a fine line though. His dead father’s ghost has just told him to enact revenge on his behalf. If we are talking about POV and Shakespeare is showing us this crazy scene, but also showing us sane scenes without Hamlet, then the ghost could very well be fact, just as the Hamlet-less scenes are fact. We either believe it all as real or all as fake. It’s a point of view.”

“What about this ghost of the father?” Mr. Rembrandt says. “Why is this important?”

A kid that is either baked out of his mind or extremely sleepy speaks. “Hammy’s got Daddy issues.”

“Explain,” Mr. Rembrandt says, adjusting his glasses, moving
them farther up his nose. Then tightens up the knot of the fattest Windsor I have ever seen.

“His dad is dead. You have to let that shit—I mean stuff—go. But Hammy doesn’t. He not only sees his father’s ghost, but the ghost tells him to kill his uncle. It’s obvious to me that Hammy’s projecting. He wants his dad back, but can’t have his dad back, so goes all
Cuckoo’s Nest
.”

Someone behind me asks, “What do you think, Mr. Rembrandt?”

“What I think is not important. It’s important what
you
think. So in an effort to explore that a bit more and get a good grasp on POV, we’re going to do an interactive exercise,” he says. “We’re going to use questions to help us tell a story from a unique point of view.”

He calls out names in pairs.

Mykel’s in the class, and he’s who I’m partnered with. Mykel smiles at me and says, “Yo, Little Man.”

Mr. Rembrandt continues. “One of you is the subject and one of you is the biographer. Ask as many questions as you need to write your portrait. Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go.”

“Do you care what you are?” Mykel asks.

“How about I ask the questions?” I ask.

“Good,” he says. “I like being the subject.” Mykel wears tan corduroys, a pink shirt, and green and white striped tie in a Limp Dick. No plaid. I want to write these details down. I had completely forgotten about his odd name.

“My first question,” I say, “is about photography. You take the bus home from school. Stand out by the street. Wear those oversized headphones clamped around your head like a vice. That big camera.” I mimic the way he holds that enormous camera with an extra long lens in his hand that looks like a boner. “You take pictures at the bus stop of parked cars and old ladies holding brown paper bags full of groceries and shit.”

“I didn’t hear a question,” he says. He turns a big, gold stud in his ear and leans farther back in his chair.

“Find your unique point of view?” Mr. Rembrandt says, rubbing his nubby hands together. I never noticed it before, but his
hands look like guns, two fleshy firearms, his nubs like triggers. BLAM. BLAM.