“I’m not buying you a drink,” Joshua said.
“It’s okay,” Bega said. “I’m buying you.”
Paco delivered the bourbons and returned to his spot, picking up Bega’s Sun-Times along the way, immediately flipping to the sports pages.
“So,” Bega said. “A Bosnian, we call him Mujo, hates his wife’s cat, wants to get rid of it. He puts cat in the bag. He drives to country, to forest outside his town, lets cat out of the bag, drives back home, cat is sitting on the stairs waiting for him. Tomorrow, his wife goes to work, Mujo does it again: cat in the bag, to country, deeper into forest, lets cat out, back home. Cat is sitting on the stairs waiting for him.”
Why would he bring up the cat again? Joshua would fight him, if he had to. He’d headbutt him, and kick at his knees, and then stomp on his fucking face. Paco looked up from the papers to listen to Bega. He never paid any attention to his patrons, but here he was, enamored with Bega.
“Tomorrow, again: cat in the bag, to country, even deeper in forest, cat out. But then Mujo gets lost in forest, can’t find way out. So he calls his wife at home. ‘How ya doin’?’ ‘Fine,’ she says. ‘Is cat at home?’ Mujo asks. ‘Yes,’ she says. He says: ‘Can you put him on the phone?’”
Bega slapped the bar with his open hand, exhorting Joshua and Paco to laugh. Joshua suppressed a feeble chuckle to maintain his mask of anger, but Paco chortled exactly once, which, in the gloomy world of the Westmoreland, was the equivalent of roaring laughter. The chortle turned out to be worth two shots on the house.
“I slept with Ana once too,” Bega said suddenly. “It was okay.”
The confession coincided with the return of the burning sensation from Joshua’s stomach to his throat.
“Back in Sarajevo. She was widow before Esko. We were tired.” Bega sipped his bourbon, smacking his lips. “We take it as it comes. We swim in catastrophe.”
“What is wrong with you people?” Joshua wheezed, his throat still burning but now accompanied by the pain in his lungs. Shed your wrath upon the assholes that do not recognize you, and on the kingdoms that will not proclaim your name! His eyes were now tearing up. He didn’t want Bega to think that he was going to cry. The way it should work: every day of your life you wake up knowing a little more. The way it ends up working: the less you know, the less you care, the less you’re scared, the better it is.
“You people? You think you are special?” Bega said. “You think you are her hero?”
“I don’t think anything,” Joshua said. “I just can’t get back to where I was before.”
“Nobody ever can,” Bega said. “Welcome to world.”
“Does Esko know that you slept with Ana?” Joshua asked.
“What happens in the war, stays in the war,” Bega said. “You can never get to where you was before. The war destroys all before.”
Joshua called for another round. There was a part of him — mainly abdominal — that wanted to elbow Bega’s nose and break it, that would enjoy a river of blood advancing along the filthy bar, coloring the beer puddles, soaking the coasters. But there was another part of him for whom merely lifting the elbow off the bar demanded effort and conviction he no longer possessed. Where did his konviksheyn go?
“What are you going to do with Ana?” Bega asked.
“What am I going to do? Nothing. What can I do? It’s up to her,” Joshua said. “She’s the battered woman.”
“Battered woman? Esko never touched her.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m their friend. I live close. I know.”
You people, he wanted to say again, but it hit him, with all the force of the bourbon, that he was turning into one of the you people too. Everyone at the Westmoreland was a foreigner, Bega the foremost of them; everyone everywhere was foreign and strange, the world equally populated with you peoples, here or in Bosnia or in fukn Iraq. He was leaving America, Joshua was, the bar stool and Jim Beam the only things tenuously providing koynekshen. And once he left, he was going to stay out, never to return. Like John Wayne at the end of The Searchers, leaving again, forever heroically outside, holding his elbow, until the door closes in his face.
* * *
I’m not going to be afraid. I’m going to be ready, thought Joshua. But ready for what? The night outside was disorderly, with the kind of wind that made him grind his teeth and pinch the skin on his forearms. I can’t even remember what okay looks like. What would okay actually look like? The only okay Joshua could presently recall was watching Dawn of the Dead with Kimmy in his arms. That particular okay was no longer okay and never would be. Ana biting his cheek while coming was almost okay too. He touched his wound as if to confirm that he hadn’t been imagining his life up to this point. Magnolia was deserted, not even random car alarms cared to provide evidence of human presence. No nightingales either. Bega had told him tonight he liked his zombies. He’d been well drunk, but he liked the zombies, and Joshua believed him because Bega had been too drunk to lie and Joshua had been too drunk not to believe him.
He stood under his apartment window, watching Ana’s shadow moving in and out of the weakly lit frame. He’d never looked from the outside at anyone inside his apartment — when he was not there, nobody was there. How was it that time passed even when you were not there, or when you were asleep? Before all this (what exactly was all this?), there had never been anybody in his space to bear witness to the alleged object permanence: it had to have been possible that all the objects inside his place disintegrated when he was not there to look at them, reintegrating into their ineluctable visibility only upon his return, which was why they always seemed so static. And what would happen if one day he didn’t return? Nothingness would permanently replace the stasis and reign in the space that once hosted his being. Tonight, Ana’s pacing shadow was surely what kept it all together.
The thing with zombies was, Bega had said, the more undead, the fewer living. Moreover, every living person was always a potential zombie. “Bosnians say: we fucked the hedgehog,” Bega had said, laughing and slapping the bar like he was insane, beer bottles hopping all over it. Why was that funny? What did it even mean? None of the things he said made much sense.
The warm wind made the branches on the street titter. The buildings, the cars, the city appeared tensely still, as if wound up and ready to spring into a frenzy. Could nightingales survive in Chicago? Are they migrating birds or do they shiver in tree holes all winter long? Darkness was centered around a burning dot on the porch.
“Good evening, sweet prince,” Stagger greeted him.
“I’m not in the mood, Stagger,” Joshua growled, coming up the stairs. “It hasn’t been a good day.”
Stagger exhaled an enormous cloud of smoke, infusing the night with the skunky smell of weed. “What’s wrong? Tell your landlord,” he said.
“Many things are wrong. In fact, almost everything is,” Joshua said.
“I happen to got a homemade stress inhibitor right here. This shit can smooth the wrinkles out of your grandmother’s ass,” Stagger said, offering him a fat joint. Joshua had already put his hand on the door handle to proceed upstairs, but the little weed light burned before him like a beacon. He took the fattie off the tips of Stagger’s fingers and inhaled a veritable storm cloud. The alcohol burn in his chest reactivated, and he started coughing so violently he had to sit down. His landlord rubbed his back, a bit too supportively. Joshua gave him back the weed.