Nora stifles a laugh. ‘Really?’
Julie shrugs. ‘Unbearably corny, but what the hell.’ She raises her glass and clinks it against mine. ‘To life, Mr Zombie.’
‘L’chaim!’ Nora bellows, and drains her glass.
Julie drains her glass.
I drain my glass.
The vodka slams into my brain like a round of buckshot. This time it’s no placebo. The drink is strong and I feel it. I am feeling it. How is that possible?
Julie orders another round of grapefruits, then promptly converts them into Greyhounds, and she is generous with the pours. I expect the girls to be as lightweight as I am, since alcohol is contraband here, but I realise it’s probably quite routine to visit the liquor store while out salvaging the city. They quickly outpace me as I sip my second drink, marvelling at the sensations that swirl through my body. The noise of the bar fades and I just watch Julie, the focal point in my blurry composition. She is laughing. A free, unreserved kind of laugh that I don’t think I’ve heard before, throwing her head back and letting it just cascade out of her. She and Nora are recounting some shared memory. She turns to me and says something, inviting me into the joke with a word and a flash of white teeth, but I don’t respond. I just look at her, resting my chin in my hand, my elbow on the bar, smiling.
Contentment. Is this what it might feel like?
After finishing my drink I feel a pressure in my lower regions, and I realise I have to piss. Since the Dead don’t drink, urination is a rare event. I hope I can remember how to do it.
I wobble into the bathroom and lean my forehead against the wall in front of the urinal. I unzip, and I look down, and there it is. That mythical instrument of life and death and first-date back-seat f**king. It hangs limp, useless now, silently judging me for all the ways I’ve misused it over the years. I think of my wife and her new lover, slapping their cold bodies together like poultry in a packing plant. I think of the anonymous blurs in my past life, probably all dead or Dead by now. Then I think of Julie curled next to me in that king-sized bed. I think of her body in that comically mismatched underwear, her breath against my eyes as I study every line in her face, wondering what mysteries lie in the glowing nuclei of her each and every cell.
There in the bathroom, surrounded by the stench of piss and shit, I wonder: Is it too late for me? Can I somehow snatch another chance from the skymouth’s grinding teeth? I want a new past, new memories, a new first-handshake with love. I want to start over, in every possible way.
When I come out of the bathroom the floor is spinning. Voices are muffled. Julie and Nora are deep in conversation, leaning close and laughing. A man in his early thirties approaches the bar and makes some kind of leering comment to Julie. Nora glares at him and says something that looks sarcastic, and Julie shoos him away. The man shrugs and retreats to the pool table where his friend is waiting. Julie calls out something insulting and the friend laughs, but the man just grins coldly and calls back a retort. Julie looks frozen for a moment, then she and Nora turn their backs to the pool table and Nora starts whispering in Julie’s ear.
‘What’s . . . wrong?’ I ask, approaching the bar. I can sense both men at the pool table watching me.
‘Nothing,’ Julie says, but she sounds shaken. ‘It’s fine.’
‘R, could you give us a quick minute?’ Nora asks.
I look back and forth between them. They wait. I turn and walk out of the bar, feeling too many things at once. On the patio I slump against the railing, the streets a dizzying seven floors down. Most of the city’s lights are out, but the street lamps flicker and pulse like bioluminescence. Julie’s mini-cassette recorder is an insistent weight in my shirt pocket. I pull it out and stare at it. I know I shouldn’t but I’m . . . I feel like I just need—
Closing my eyes, swaying gently with one arm on the railing, I rewind the tape for a moment and press play.
‘—really that crazy? Just because he’s . . . whatever he is? I
mean, isn’t “zombie” just a silly name we—’
I press rewind again and it occurs to me that the gap between the beginning of this entry and the end of the previous one comprises the entire time I’ve known Julie. Every meaningful moment of my life fits inside a few seconds of tape hiss.
I press stop, then play.
‘—thinks no one knows but everyone knows, they’re just afraid to do anything. He’s getting worse, too. He said he loved me tonight. Actually said those words. Said I was beautiful and I was everything he loved about Mom and if anything ever happened to me he’d lose his mind. And I know he meant it, I know all of that’s really there inside him . . . but the fact that he had to be raging shitfaced drunk to let any of it out . . . it just made the whole thing seem sick. I f**king hated it.’
There is a long pause on the tape. I glance over my shoulder at the bar door, feeling ashamed but desperate. I know these are confidences I should have to earn through months of slow intimacy, but I can’t help myself. I just want to listen to her.
‘I’ve thought about making a report,’ she continues. ‘March into the community centre and make Rosy go arrest him. I mean, I’m all for drinking, I love it, but with Dad it’s . . . different. It’s not a celebration for him, it seems like it’s painful and scary, like he’s numbing himself for some horrible medieval surgery. And yeah . . . I know why, and it’s not like I haven’t done worse stuff for the same reasons, but it’s just . . . it’s so . . .’ Her voice wavers and breaks off, and she sniffles hard like a self-rebuke. ‘God,’ she whispers. ‘Shit.’