“I dreamed last night I was a Mexican hockey player,” Stagger said, sucking in smoke. “I wore the skates and all the padding, but also a sombrero. Man! Why a sombrero? I was beating this dude with my hockey stick, cutting his face open, breaking his teeth. But I had a sombrero. Fuck me!”
Stagger passed back the joint.
“Sombrero’s weird,” Joshua said, and inhaled without expectoration.
They passed the diminishing joint back and forth for a while, even though a ball of coughing pain was still lodged deep in Joshua’s lungs. This child of Israel groans from the toil and cries to God from under the weight of his work. “Joint chiefs of good shit, we are,” Stagger announced.
Gradually, the lumps of anxiety in Joshua’s mind and body shrank and then began dissipating. He enjoyed the unwinding; he sagged into the wicker chair. The night was strangely warm. Why hadn’t he thought of drugs before? Alcohol had certainly helped some, but he should’ve been smoking or snorting something every day. Drugs were such a pleasantly simple solution and widely available too. There was a good reason why millions of good, decent Americans took drugs every day, legally and illegally, pursuing their happiness stresslessly and successfully. An idea unrolled itself before him like a beach toweclass="underline" he could get some real shit, or even some real good shit, and share it with Bernie. It would help with every problem, medical and mental. Bernie was drugged up anyway, but with boring shit. Now was the time for Joshua to explore some truly mind-altering shit while bonding at zeppelin-high altitudes with Bernie Levin. And while they were at it: there must be other things too that they could do together, Joshua and his father. Although he couldn’t think of any other things right now. Abruptly, scorchingly, it was clear how little time they had left to do anything.
“Fucking sombrero,” Stagger said.
Time maybe passes when you’re not there, but not when you’re really not there, because if you’re really not there, you’re dead. Time flows, all right, but it can at any moment just stop. Hence Joshua giggled to himself: life appeared to him exactly like the joint burning inexorably toward his fingertips — once it’s smoked it cannot be unsmoked. Stagger extended his arm to place the fattie before Joshua’s mouth, so that he only needed to lean forward and suck the smoke, and that was precisely what he did.
“They got no idea what they’re dealing with in that fucking desert,” Stagger said. “They think we’ll fuck them real hard and sooner or later they’ll learn to like it. Who wouldn’t wanna be fucked by the world’s only remaining superdick?”
Joshua had difficulties processing Stagger’s claims, so he continued to giggle until tears trickled down his cheeks. He wiped his wet face against his shoulders and inhaled another generous helping of the THC. The Messiah, whenever he decides to stop by, will surely be a supreme drug dealer; the promise of salvation is nothing if not the promise of being eternally high, never coming down. There will be a time of distress such as has not happened from the beginning of nations. But everyone whose name is found written in the book will get a little sack of crack and float like a swallow in the friendly sky. There will be great respect for the care and the precision, so it should all be okay. Giggling made Joshua’s cheek hurt.
“If there’s pain in every man’s heart you gotta shoot them in the head. Bang!” Stagger transformed his hand into a gun, using three fingers for the barrel.
Pain in the heart was right, Joshua thought. In fact, he may even have said it, but there was no way of really knowing, as Stagger failed to react or acknowledge. Every person is the first person, but who will be the last person? Not everyone can be the last person. There’ll be a lot of fighting over who gets to be the last person. He felt he was sweating.
“The only thing you can ever rely on are your buddies,” Stagger went on. “The jerk-off on the bed above you, from Kansas of all places, like what’s-her-name.”
Who will be the lucky guy to see everything off? To the last person everything is past. There is no future at the end of the world. How do zombies handle time? He should look it up in the Zombie Encyclopedia, under “Time.” If the undead could come back, how would they remember anything that happened in their undead pasts? Would they remember chomping on people’s intestines? Perhaps that’s why they look so spent and exhausted: they can fly to no fucking sky. It wasn’t improbable that Stagger had rolled another thick serving of THC and the Lord knew what else, for it appeared considerably fatter when the joint came back to Joshua. It may have been fattened with hashish, because the smell was now different. Although Joshua had never smoked hashish, so he couldn’t really know. There was so much more to find out about this life, a fearsome prospect if it wasn’t for the fact that life was always almost over. On top of it, he was now hungry like a zombie. And sweating like a human.
“We drank water out of our boots. Man!” Stagger shouted. “Out of our blasted boots! We rolled weed in lettuce. We died standing. We fucked standing. We shat standing.”
“What?” Joshua was finally compelled to ask. It wasn’t that he wanted to understand — understanding, he understood, wasn’t going to happen right now, or anytime soon; in fact, it seemed to be permanently out of his reach. “What are you talking about?” It was that he couldn’t afford to be further discombobulated, because discombobulation made him dizzy. Dizzy and voraciously hungry, and giggly, and discombobulated.
“Fucking sombrero,” Stagger said.
There were far too many things bombing him presently with care and precision. He needed Stagger to slow down, he was not cool. Stagger was now thrusting the three-finger-barrel gun at Joshua’s feet, as if shooting them off.
“Freedom itself was attacked, Jonjo,” Stagger said quietly and slowly, so Joshua could comprehend. “We’re talking about things that matter.”
“What things are we talking about?” Joshua asked, dropping the obese hashish motherfucker on the porch floor. What did matter a lot was the fattie, so he went down on his knees to look under his chair, but only darkness was there and then the light came, everything down there was flashing and moving. He saw a mouse scurrying along the wall, but it was a blue plastic bag with the phone book and coupons. There was a coin, a quarter possibly, shiny. Kimmy, Ana, and Joshua, a happy threesome in a perfect world, the three sides of the same coin. The healthy, happy Body family, living right across the street from the miserable, terminally ill Thought family. How good would that be? Stagger was barefoot and his toes were misaligned, his feet not symmetrical at all, the whole pedal anatomy completely fucked. He wore Joshua’s American flag underwear; the stars on it shone too. Was it summer already? Where was the fattie? And while we’re at it, where’s everything? The moment you lose sight of it, it vanishes. Where are people when they’re not here? Where does time go when it passes? What is the home of death? What is a nightingale? Where is Bernie, where is he going? He needed to find the fat motherfucker.
“Do you even know how huge that Iraq place is? And it keeps growing, like a tapeworm. I’m not kidding.” Stagger was back to speaking at the top of his voice, clapping his hands, as if to reduce the mysterious huge place into a patty-cake. “He was the first man I ever cared about. That’s God’s honest truth.”
“Fuck” was all Joshua could say. He still could not find the joint and he decided that giving up and getting up wouldn’t be honorable. The Pottery Barn rule: you fuck it up, you’re a fucking idiot. Don’t fuck it up.
“What’s down there?” Stagger asked and, moving his head like a turtle, joined Joshua on his knees to look under the chair, only to roll onto his back with a grunt.