“Hix. Bernie’s most successful client.”
“Surely, you’re not John O’Hara.”
“Tell him that terrific idea we talked about has come to fruition. We’re all in the money.”
“I’ll try to contact Mr. Kupperman. Hix, was it?”
After three and a half long minutes Bernie came on the line. “Hix, how many times have I warned you about using profanity with my secretaries?”
“I merely stated my name.”
“She apparently though Hix was a dirty word.”
“A common mistake, yeah. But the purpose of my call is to alert you to dust off my brilliant I Waltzed with a Zombie treatment, Bernie.”
“Why in the heck would I do something like that?”
“Because I am on the brink of turning into an international celebrity due to my exposure of insidious zombie trafficking in Tinsel Town,” he announced. “I’ll be exposing a major Hollywood studio that’s featured a dead actor in a starring role in their latest Technicolor historical epic.”
“Baloney. How can you do that?”
“Soon as I sell my exclusive story to the L.A. Times. And possibly give it to my old pal Johnny Whistler, too.”
“What sort of proof do you have? Photographs would be nice.”
Hix hesitated. “I had a whole stewpot of great shots, Bernie,” he said. “Unfortunately my camera fell out of my sweater while I was running through a section of Santa Rita Beach.”
“Exercising, were you?”
“Well, actually, I was running for my life.”
“So why didn’t you pick up the camera?”
“The ferocious dog that was chasing me over hill and dale stopped to eat the camera. Or at least take a couple of hefty bites out of it,” he explained. “But I can still provide the press with a first-hand account of my witnessing a noted actor being resurrected. An attempted resurrection maybe, because I fell off the roof before—”
“Who was, according to you, being revived? And who was doing this?”
“The actor in question was none other than Alex Stoner, Paramount’s star of The Holy Grail. The first time this old ham died was back three months ago and they—”
His agent made an exasperated sound. “Don’t you read the newspapers, Hix? Don’t you listen to Johnny Whistler’s seven-thirty a.m. broadcast on Mutual?”
“I overslept because . . . why?”
“Alex Stoner didn’t die three months ago. He died last night of a massive heart attack,” Bernie told him. “Paramount Pictures announced that early this morning.”
“I fell off the roof too soon. Looks like they couldn’t revive him this time.”
“Actually, Hix, they’re burying him at Forest Lawn on Friday,” the agent informed him. “Paramount says they’ve got enough footage in the can to put The Holy Grail together.”
“I Waltzed with a Zombie is still a terrific idea.”
“Tell you what, I’ll try it on Monogram,” said Bernie. “I hear they’re thinking of doing some cheapie musicals. Maybe we can get six thousand dollars out of them. What say?”
Hix was silent for a moment. “Sure, give it a try, Bernie,” he said, and hung up.
Aftermath
Joy Kennedy-O’Neill
Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.
I’m driving to Houston when Def Leppard’s “Love Bites” comes on the radio. I have to pull over and watch my hands shake; it’s been years since anyone aired anything like that—no “Reality Bites,” no “Once Bitten Twice Shy”—although I suppose that playing the song is a sign that the nation is moving on. I sit in the car and tremble, feeling angry and nauseous. Love bites, love bleeds, love lives, love dies . . .
After the epidemic, when a few radio stations had finally come back online, it was just news updates, dead lists, and static interrupted by the long silences of power outages. Then when some of the grids got stabilized it was “all Gershwin, all the time,” and then last year, when everyone was digging victory gardens to supplement rations, it was big band tunes. Swing, baby, swing. Pull ourselves up by bootstraps, brother. Moving on and moving up. I can hum “Jump, Jive, and Wail” in my sleep now. When you wake up, will you walk out? It can’t be love if you throw it about . . .
I’m so shaky that I think about turning around for home, but the car has its entire gas ration in the tank and I really need to see an optometrist. I’m starting to squint and tear up when I teach, so my prescription has probably changed. The headaches are awful. They started soon after last year’s Tres de Julio celebration and feel like an elastic band is wrapping around my forehead, squeezing with every heartbeat. Cal has been kissing each eye when I get home. There are no more eye doctors in Lake Jackson but he said there are a few in the city who are taking appointments as best they can around the rolling blackouts. He even heard that Bausch and Lomb’s Argentina plant might be going online again, so there may be contact lenses soon.
I have to pull myself together. An hour’s drive is a luxury that I should be savoring; my calves have grown thick from bicycling to work. H-town’s skyline ahead of me is lovely under the blue summer sky. Of course, the Chase Tower’s top is still left ragged by an airliner’s crash; seeing its scarred bone-beams reminds me of 9/11 and a more innocent time. Back then we thought that three thousand Americans dying by terrorists’ hands was the most horrific thing we’d ever witnessed. We thought HIV and cancer and SARS were the big bogeymen in the closet. But now, with a planet missing nearly one-third of its population, our fears from the last decade seem glamorously bittersweet. When you’re alone, do you let go?
A yellow butterfly is perched on top of a bullet-dented road sign. Things seem almost back to normal—there is no smoke on the horizon, the barricades have been removed, and grass and bluebonnets grow on the side of the road. There are birds singing, red-tailed hawks catching the thermals, and the buzzards are only devouring roadkill. It’s just a possum. Everything is fine.
So I pull back into the near empty lanes as the song ends and a Britney Spears tune comes on—whatever happened to her? Did she make it?—and I know I can’t handle these voices from the past, my past, so soon. I still need baby steps with Benny Goodman. And I’m thinking that I must be the last person in the world who is still having a problem getting over it, but when I walk into the optometrist’s dingy waiting room there are two cases of hysterical blindness waiting patiently for their names to be called.
They now say that the first person who got sick was a sheep herder in Bhutan, which upends everyone’s theory of a terrorist’s biolab accidental release. The man got flu-like symptoms but still felt well enough to attend a national festival and grand opening of a new railway going over the Black Mountains. Later, hundreds of other people in Bhutan, Nepal, and India got sick with the same bug and recovered. It was what they then called the ovis flu, which was supposed to be just a weak cousin of the swine and bird flu. I remember reading about it in Newsweek’s science section while sipping coffee at the kitchen table . . . two years ago that feel like two thousand.
Then it mutated. Patient Zero was a grandmother in New Delhi whose lungs filled up with fluid from trying to fight the flu. She succumbed after forty-eight hours and was placed inside the hospital’s morgue, but the next day there was pounding from within the cooler. An unnerved hospital worker opened the door and there she was—naked, pale, blank-eyed, and blinking . . . and hungry. She had unzipped her body bag and was half out of it. Everyone remembers where they were when they first saw the YouTube video of her attacking the nurses. A security camera captured the grainy image of her staggering down the hospital hallway; one foot was still caught in the body bag and she dragged it behind her like a wrinkled cocoon. Her breasts were long and dangled like fleshy pendulums as she lunged for the first nurse. There were sprays of blood as she bit into the woman’s hospital scrubs, and when the second nurse—a man—tried to intervene, the old woman leaped and threw her whole body on him. She sat on his chest as he shouted in surprise and tried to flip her over. She actually ate half of his neck and one cheek—we could see her swallowing. Her face was devoid of expression.