It took Joshua an instant to realize that Esko was crying, pressing fingers against his eyeballs as if trying to gouge them out. Ana moved to put her hand on Esko’s shoulder, reluctantly, carefully, lest it be interpreted as reconciliation. Esko sobbed louder and louder, forcing Joshua to stumble in retreat, as if his tears were acid that could burn him. Ana knelt down next to Esko and put her arm across his shoulder. “It will be okay,” she must’ve said to him. His wound was agape now that he was kneeling, but Esko in no way showed he was aware of it. The velvet blood bubbled out of the wedge in his denim, darkening instantly. Joshua’s knees gave out and he floundered farther backward and dropped onto the sofa. His prostate was painful. Was this how survival was supposed to feel? There was a light hook right above the TV, available for hanging. He needed to pee really bad.
Stagger grunted and sat up. He grabbed a filthy napkin from the floor and pressed it against his nose. Ana kept repeating some Bosnian word, something, Joshua knew, she would never say to him. He wanted her to reconcile with Esko, thereby restoring some semblance of order, thereby allowing him to return from this exile to the land of the before, where there was no humiliation, no blood, no frogs, no lice, no locusts, no clotted darkness or pain, no chaos, let alone the possibility of urine-soaked underwear. Script Idea #1: Two or more people. Love, life, betrayal, hurt. Title: God Help Us All.
EXT. OUTSIDE THE PRISON — DAY
Jack is on Major K’s back, holding on to his shoulders with some effort. Major K slouches forth under the burden. Ruth stumbles through the mud, occasionally falling down, but still getting up. They’re followed by Alicia and a large herd of refugees, a few of them nursing gunshot wounds. Children BAWL. The prison fort is visible on the horizon, its high walls with watchtowers. The people are exhausted, but they know they’ve almost made it. GUNFIRE in the distance, zombies LOWING.
LATER
Major K BANGS at the steel door, exhausted, intermittently gasping for air. There is no response. He anxiously looks at the crowd behind him, huddled together in hope. Jack and Ruth are fixated on the door, desperate for it to open. Major K bangs again. The peephole slides open. A pair of anxious eyes.
MAJOR K
We’re all human.
In her demolished living room, her wounded husband in her care, Ana took charge of the entire catastrophe. She extinguished the drama in a most unequivocal way, its meaninglessness now perfectly self-evident. Even Stagger was compelled to comply, although that required his getting the hell out on the stairs to calm down. She then interrogated Esko, who was bleeding soundlessly on the sofa, pressing a towel against his thigh to stop the blood: Alma, she translated for Joshua, was at Bega’s. Joshua stood, confused, waiting for further instructions, but all she said was: “Thank you. You can go away now.” She pulled her bra straps up, no smile or dimples on her face, no love for Joshua; she had crossed back into the before. He received his order unquestionably, not least because he simply didn’t know what else to do.
But there was one last thing he needed before he embarked upon returning to his previous life: a moment to urinate. Releasing the stream, he stared at the water stain on the wall above the toilet: it resembled a werewolf version of a Hasid. Script Idea #300: Jerusalem is besieged by rapacious vampires … No! Fuck it! Enough of that, he decided.
* * *
He had to roll up the bottoms of his pants because they were bloody, which somehow resulted in their being too big at the waist. They hung on him like clown pants; to get into the car he had to pull them up, not unlike Bernie, well past his navel. Swordless, Stagger slid into the driver’s seat, failing to buckle up. Dried blood coated his neck and the tattoos on his chest, his jaw tightened into a painful grin of anger. He would’ve looked like a commercial for a pitiless warrior if it wasn’t for the two red-splattered Kleenex pluming out of his nostrils. He had to be in his mid-fifties, at least. The Lord supports me through my allies and so I face my enemies, and my enemies are just ecstatic to see us guys together. The sun emerged from the lake, as if from hiding; finger-fucked dawn crept over the building tops and bare tree crowns and the city in which some kind of violence was always afoot.
Devon Avenue was vacant, as before a zombie assault, except for a sole, inexplicable Lubavitcher, grim under his black fedora, vast as a fucking sombrero, walking speedily toward something, only to make a sudden turn and step onto the pedestrian crossing, just in time to be barely missed by Stagger. Joshua envied the comfort that comes with the Messianic promise, the life of someone whose story had always already been told, the ending the same through eternity, the future vouchsafed.
“Have you ever seen The Searchers?” Joshua asked.
“What’s that?”
“The Searchers, the John Wayne movie.”
“No,” Stagger said. “I can’t stand John Wayne.”
“So what’s your favorite movie?”
Stagger ripped the bloody tissue plumes out of his nostrils while considering the question, rolled down the window, and threw them out.
“Star Wars. Attack of the Clones,” he said. “But I don’t want to discuss stupid movies.”
“Let’s go and get the girl,” Joshua said without thinking. Stagger turned to look at him: first, in disbelief, and then, fist-pumping in the air. “Fuckin’ A!” he shouted and made a U-turn in front of a bus.
Few words were exchanged between them as they drove on. There was no quittin’ now. The realization provided joy and relief for Joshua — there was going to be an end to all this. He decided that, come Monday, he was going to write a long e-mail to Kimmy, lay down the whole story honestly and unflinchingly, detail all the undeserved humiliation, explain the exonerating circumstances, accept the responsibility, suggest that he’d been more than sufficiently punished, foreground the fact that he responsibly returned the girl to her mother, and promise he’d change his ways, having learned so much from his recent experiences. She will take him back in; or maybe she won’t. Either way all this will have been just a (heroic?) nightmare remembered; and selectively, God willing.
“Buckle up,” Joshua said. Stagger was gripping the steering wheel with his unbroken hand, the knuckles white with excitement.
“I don’t think so,” Stagger said. “I don’t think buckling up is something I can stand to do right now.”
They soon passed the Ambassador, turned a corner to behold Bega’s Honda, complete with the plush dice and a dent in the front right door, sitting in the driveway of a house with a porch — a very small house with a very small porch, but still. An immigrant with so much property? An asshole who constantly berates and complains about this country owns a fancy Japanese car and a cozy little house? Fuck that! They parked on the street, blocking the Honda with the STAGmobile. The street was asleep, except for a couple of sparrows chirping apoplectically at a half-empty birdbath on Bega’s lawn.
“I’ve got to pee again,” Joshua said. He didn’t, really, but he chased the sparrows away, undug his dick, and urinated into the birdbath. The arbitrary meanness of his act was gratifying: it was a form of freedom. “Fuck you!” he said to no one in particular. The sparrows landed on the skinny tree branches above the bath and watched, fidgeting as dark-yellow urine spread through the clear water like an oil spill.
Stagger rang the doorbell, and it buzzed like a laser in a James Bond movie. On the porch, there were a few cracked, empty pots, and a mound of coupon sheets so sodden they clearly predated the deprivations of the previous winter. Joshua thumbed the buzzer too, but this time there was no sound at all. Stagger pressed his face against the window in the parenthesis of his hands, even if the blinds prevented him from seeing anything. His nose was still bleeding, however; he left a bloody smudge on the pane.