“I’ve got to go to my screenwriting workshop later,” Joshua said.
“You’ll be fine,” Bernie said. “Let’s go to the lake.”
Whereupon he made a U-turn right in the middle of Broadway, cars honking furiously in their wake.
“How’s your movie stuff going?” Bernie asked. He didn’t really want to know, as he didn’t really care. Your movie stuff meant that, as far as he was concerned, it was all just plain indulgent.
“Swimmingly.”
“What are you working on now?”
All that screenwriting and film business was, as Bernie had once eloquently put it, “smoke up the ass.” It certainly didn’t help that Joshua never sold anything, never earned a dime with his writing; nor did it help that, for Bernie, Saul Bellow was the be all and end all of narrative art, truer than the truth itself, pretty close to displacing Moses as the greatest Jew of all time. Not least because Bernie had met him more than once at various dinner parties.
“It’s called Zombie Wars,” Joshua said, spitefully.
Bernie made another turn and now they were driving down the parking lot along the lake; the expanse of the Wilson Street beach opened up in the distance like a prairie. He kept tapping on the brake as if it were a bass-drum pedal, so that they kept lurching forward. There was nobody around, except for an occasional man sitting alone in a car. Joshua knew it was a daytime pick-up spot for cruising men, but he didn’t mention it to Bernie, sure he’d have no idea. Bernie parked two spots down from a man who tried to make eye contact to determine if he was going to get lucky with a threesome. The man looked exactly like Dick Cheney: pale and bald, egg-shaped head, rimless glasses, the detached gaze of a sociopath.
“What’s it about?” Bernie asked. Another annoying thing: relentless questions. He never let Joshua be silent, quick to counter his reticence with an onslaught of inquiries. It was love, but maddening still. It was also fear of being left out of his children’s lives: it had started after the divorce, after the routine of biweekly visits with him had been established. The waves crested far out on the lake and kept coming; the Wilson Street beach was desolate, except for a silhouette throwing something to a very speedy dog, maybe a greyhound.
“It’s about zombies. And wars,” Joshua said.
“Let me ask you a question: how do they turn into zombies? Medically speaking. That’s never been clear to me.”
“In my script they’re infected with a virus.”
“What virus?”
“It’s a virus, it doesn’t have a name. It’s a zombie virus.”
“Okay. But if you know it’s a virus, shouldn’t you have a name for it? You know, something like H1Z3 or something.”
“It’s called zombie virus.”
“Zombie virus. I get it.”
The water was brown-gray; the mud at its bottom had been disturbed. For Chicago, the lake was merely decoration: nobody lived on it or off it; if it somehow were drained, the city would just pave it for parking all the way to Michigan. Script Idea #79: A brutal storm releases a sunken sailboat from the bottom of the lake, and the body of a young man is found. Nobody in the small town knows who it is, as no one has been missing. Who was he? What happened to him?
The moment of quiet was evanescent, as Bernie was whipping up more questions in his head. Like all senescent Republicans, Levin the elder believed in leadership, which started with identifying the essence of the problem.
“But where does it come from, that virus? From a cat scratch? Or are there monkey zombies? Or bird zombies? Did the virus jump species?”
A car pulled up next to Cheney’s. The man in it was young, wearing a suit, blond as Hitlerjugend. He and Cheney rolled down their windows, conducted their negotiations, and were gone in a blink. A little bit of lunchtime dicksucking never hurt nobody. Joshua envied the ease with which homosexuals arrived at their common interest in sex. The sad fact of life was that there were no cruising spots for heterosexual men. If there were, Joshua would be parked somewhere every day of his life, willing to sleep with any woman generous enough to pull up alongside him.
“Maybe it’s not a virus, but some kind of cancer,” Bernie said. “I’m just thinking aloud.”
“Let’s not think,” Joshua hissed. “Let’s go to Charlie’s Ale House. I’m hungry.”
Charlie’s Ale House was a long way away, with a lot of stop signs for Bernie to force the Cadillac into a great leap forward. The way he leaned into the steering wheel, the way he looked over it, as if over the fence — it just drove Joshua crazy. People honked at them from behind at every traffic light. And then, for reasons unknown, Bernie took the residential streets, quaint and porchy and lousy with speed bumps, riding them like waves. Joshua was getting nauseated.
“Your grandfather had a cousin back in Bukovina,” Bernie said.
Goddamn, Joshua thought.
“Chaim was his name, I believe, and one day he stopped believing in God. The family saw that something was wrong, they took him to the rabbi. The rabbi took one look at Chaim and said: ‘My child, you will not die until you regain your faith.’ So he kept not believing. Once he was drowning and people jumped in to help him and he yelled: ‘I’m fine! I’m fine! I don’t believe in God.’ And he swam to the shore.”
It took him a few times to park right in front of Charlie’s, never interrupting his narration, bumping into the car behind.
“Then the Germans rounded up everyone in the village, crammed them in a house to burn them all alive. But he ran out of the burning house, screaming: ‘I don’t believe in God! I don’t believe in God!’ He lived, everyone else died.”
Joshua was unbuckled, ready to get out, but there was no getting out until the story was over. He watched Bernie’s eyebrows — two pointy tufts of hair — as they oscillated in harmony with his narrative excitement.
“So then after the war he made it to Israel and there he had a family and then a stroke, so went into a coma. But he couldn’t die. He could be still alive, for all I know. He might stay comatose forever. God is patient.”
“Nice story,” Joshua said. “What’s your point?”
“Maybe it’s not the virus. Maybe it’s that zombies lost faith.”
“You are something, Bernie!” Joshua said. “Zombies are self-hating Jews? If you don’t stand with Israel, you are one of the living dead? Is that what you’re saying?”
Bernie shrugged in the manner that was part of his annoying repertoire: slanting his head to the side, scrunching his shoulders, his face signaling, Maybe I know nothing, but I’m just saying—the shtetl shrug.