Zombie Mashup Read online

  “. . . oh, and in case of emergency, I’ve put a signed medical form on the kitchen table. You know where to find us, and . . . oh shit, Marcie, I know it’s not a good time but it never seems to be a good time, please can’t we tell him now, it’s—”

  “Tomorrow. Now you two go and have a good time—”

  “Tell me what?” The air felt odd. Were they hiding a great gift, a bludgeon, what?

  “Take a hike, ya lousy swami-lovers,” said Marcie in her best tough-guy voice, hustling them toward the door, “or the baby buys it.” God she smelled great, her sweet strong face set off by her chop-cut red hair, new kind of tai-kwon-do affectation, but it looked great on her. And he loved being strong-armed by her; what a wrestler she’d be bare-naked, the full spread of her huge firm breasts a treat in teased evasion, her flexed oiled thighs coming up and about to encuntify his mouth, to force him to feast as she devoured him below, parting her labia nose-deep around his nasal wedge and—

  “Marcie and I are lovers.”

  With barely a hitch, Marcie freed him, veering Laura off to the right. “Now you’ve done it,” she said.

  His mind went umpteen ways, putting together dropped hints, unanswered phones, misinterpreted looks. Confusion passed. Elation lit and flared. “Oh, but that’s—!”

  “No!” Laura’s voice exploded through her sobs. “You don’t . . . he doesn’t . . .” She grabbed breath, riding its blast. “You’re out of it . . . it’s just Marcie and me . . . and the baby, I’m taking her with me.”

  Marcie seemed put off by Laura’s display, even as she put a protective, supportive arm about her. In the baby’s room, Jenny cried sharply as if a safety pin had opened to stab her out of sleep.

  *****

  “Take a hike, ya lousy swami-lovers,” said Marcie in her best George Raft, “or the baby buys it.”

  Laura blurted out, “Marcie’s pregnant.”

  Marcie veered Laura off, then with overblown disgust and genuine dismay: “Jeez, you had to tell him.”

  “Well I think it’s great,” his wife protested, “and I’m sorry—I won’t tell anyone else!—but I just couldn’t keep it from Travis one second longer.”

  “Marcie, that’s incredible,” he said, going after her to catch her in a hug. He was amazed at his thoughts. He wished the child were his, though his lovely neighbor had, God damn her eyes, rebuffed his one early advance and had never invited a return attempt; he wondered which ungodly creep it was, or whether—and he imagined that this would be worse for her—it had been Pierre, in one of his final dribble-shots into her; he saw instantly their households fusing, him as her Lamaze coach, loving her child, as she and Laura did likewise, and welcoming her inevitably into their marriage bed.

  Then, two feet shy of an embrace, the baby screamed. It was not a troubled whine ready to lapse as soon as it began, nor was it even a wide-awake startle and wail that required backpats and pacings-about and soothings before she could be replaced in her bassinet. No, these sounds meant sudden pain or upset, a slipped pin rolled over on, or something worse.

  Laura reached the door first but he was close behind and felt the blast of frigid air over the incessant whine of the space heater. He saw the window thrown wide and a lingering glove gripping the casing and then gone, flings of slush still flying through the air from a disappearing boot. Race to the sill, past the empty bassinet, Laura’s misgivings about a first-floor apartment replaying in his head, and there, through the diminishing squit-squit-squit of boots on snow and the wrenching wails of his child, he saw her kidnapper, her white-slaver, dwindling swiftly in the ill-lit alley, pools of light by backdoors, dumpsters lined along brick walls. “Catch him, catch him!” Laura’s hands were shoving him over the sill, almost throwing him off balance, but he kept his eye on the nightmare, so that just as he found his feet and felt the cold seep up inside his pantleg and was poised to run, he saw their ski-masked nemesis look back even as two shadows emerged from the dun of a dumpster and shudder-halted him so jarringly that his boots went awry and his bundle of baby flew into the hands of a slighter third figure. Saved, thought Travis, elated as Laura and Marcie joined him out the window. But then, instead of beating the man into submission, they appeared in the dim light to be pushing their heads against him so that he jittered and screamed as though electrified. And the third carried Jenny into the light, and he saw a meat-slung jawbone and a wandering eye and his daughter brought like some corncob to that mouth; and her sleepsuit bunched and reddened, her cries punched quiet from her, as, behind them, packed snow squeaked and Travis turned too late.

  *****

  Laura reached the door first but he was close behind and took in the overheated room, the space heater humming at full capacity as Laura lifted Jenny into her arms.

  “She okay?” Marcie asked.

  Laura nodded, arching her back and soothing the tiny face open wide in terror at her shoulder, features almost lost in the laced, peaked, buttoned sleepsuit-head.

  “Must’ve been gas pains,” he said.

  Laura replaced the baby in her bassinet, zip-slashing the zipper, reaching in to feel diaper, rezipping, kissing one mittened hand. Travis was starting to sweat, the room was so hot and his heavy coat was meant for fierce cold.

  “Diaper’s a smidge damp, but she’ll be fine.”

  The baby sneezed but her lid-heavy eyes did not open. Her lips parted for air, a soft pooch of pink budding. No more than two dark dots, her nostrils.

  “Poor baby has the sniffles,” Laura said and pointed them toward the door. The instant it closed behind them, Jenny’s face winced as if to scream again, but her bowels and bladder gave way then, emptying, and her face relaxed into sleep. Where Laura had felt for sop, a lip of cotton bridged between the freshly soaked diaper beneath plastic pants and the layers of cloth working outward to the soon-to-be-ammoniated sleepsuit.

  “Say,” said Marcie, “hadn’t you two better be on your way?”

  Travis checked his wrist. Quarter to eight. “We’re a brisk ten-minute walk away, so we’re cutting it close, I guess. One last hug, Marcie dear. Mmmmwah! What a woman you are.” Her kiss lingered like a warm slap on his lips.

  Laura began: “Now don’t forget to—”

  Marcie swept his compact woman up in a tremendous hug and stopped her frettings with a kiss, short, startling to them both, not wet. “Hmm,” she said, “what an interesting impulse.”

  “Hold that thought,” Travis said. “If Apadravya can no longer strut his stuff, we may be back quicker than we expect, ready to explore other paths to salvation.”

  Laura’s eyes still held shock. “Help yourself to the fridge. Nothing’s off-limits.” She brightened, kept back from saying something, then tugged him out the door. Try as he might, Travis couldn’t shake two contrary feelings: that something very wonderful awaited them at the end of a very wonderful evening; and that venturing out tonight was a terrible mistake, one they might not live long enough to regret.

  *****

  As she dressed her dead son, Aysha only kept herself from coming apart by holding Rajib’s eyes centrally before her. She had had to call him Swami Apadravya when others were about; but alone in the quiet calm of his room, dark hands sculpting her white flesh, he was her Rajib, loving her so totally it hurt. And when he entered her, his eyes a searing mirror of bliss, the world split open anew until she thinned and thickened into slow explosion.

  Vish lay cold under her fingers. As she joggled his body, she expected any moment he’d inhale suddenly out of sleep, find his thumb, offer a long protesting groan, and eye her archly. But the chill of his skin and its pallor, like an all-over faint, kept his death at her fingertips. Underwear, undershirt, tight white socks, futile nonsense, must be insane, long corduroy pants, a pullover shirt with dead arms atangle around a halfwit’s lolled head that made her break down weeping—until Rajib’s eyes, cased in quiet brown wrinkles and containing the wisdom and compassion of all the world, brought her out of it. Sweater played his
arms the same way, but by the time she rocked his coat on, it was like dressing a weighty ragdoll, both her and Vish more insulated from his death. But no. Had to experience it, had to keep it before her like a candleflame. Visions required faith, and faith could only function in the harsh light of the truth. She would carry her boy to his father and he would interrupt satsang—or rather, he would surely incorporate her arrival into what he was saying (no agenda that excluded the world’s surprises) and then Rajib would touch his son, re-blood his cream-tan skin, re-bellow his lungs, infuse through the eyes his resurrected boy. But no. She couldn’t count on that. “Make no appointments,” he had said, “receive no disappointments.” Why was that such hard advice to follow?

  Aysha zipped up her boots, then muffled her neck and double-buttoned her night-blue coat. She jammed the knit cap down on her flattened blond curls and, Vish’s pillow cold against her knuckles, worked his cap over his scalp and down around the tops of his ears. She blew out the oil-lamp and stagger-lifted her son until he was snugged on her left arm and his head rested against her shoulder. Would be a test of her will, this walk: five blocks west and nearly as distant south; no new snow for two days but brisk winds, and there’d be snowbanks and patches of snow between scraped sidewalks. She prayed she’d meet no one on the way out of her apartment building, and that proved true. A blast of air, caution on the icy concrete of her front steps, and she was on her way.

  *****

  The moment they cornered off Drummond and headed west on Maisonneuve, Travis sensed something wrong. They were still three blocks from Sir George Williams University, a mostly evening school in one several-story building where the talk was to be held. Couldn’t guess what it was as he and Laura crunched along, her enthusing about their baby’s precocity as he tuned her out—but it increasingly nagged at him and then turned to disappointment. Volumetrically speaking, pedestrian traffic was too light: a first sign. And when they crossed Crescent and had a clear view of the corner of Bishop and Maisonneuve ahead, Laura interrupted her parental ravings with an “Oh shoot!”

  Save for security lights on the central stairs and on the walkways left and right around them to the auditorium, the building was dark. “Look at this!” Laura said, and he joined her at the glass doors. Her hands were thrust into her coat pockets; she jiggled from the cold and her breath was dragon steam, comical from her Cupid’s-bow lips. Upon the door, taped askew on the inside, was a pasteboard sign in bold black: SATSANG POSTPONED UNTIL NEXT WEEKEND. SRI APADRAVYA IS THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD. NAMASTE.

  “Didn’t you check the paper?” she asked, accusing.

  “Yesterday’s.” He caressed the back of her coat with his thick gloved fingers. “Hey, no big deal. We’ll go to the Cafe Au Lait, have some steamy roasted coffee and that honey-drenched dessert you like.”

  “Baklava.”

  “Right.”

  “I had my heart set on a little spiritual well-being tonight, not to mention seeing old friends from the ashram and Apadravya himself.” Laura leaned her forehead against his shoulder-fur in mock sorrow.

  “Make no appointments—”

  “I know, you doofus, I know.”

  And that’s when, with a shadowed crowd of pedestrians penguining oddly toward them south on Bishop, twin snicks of metal sounded behind them and two burly men yanked them apart and brought sharp blades and faces impossibly close. “Your wallet in two seconds, sucker, or you’re dead,” and as much as Travis wanted to look after Laura and the other mugger, the hopped-up urgency in the man’s eyes went right to Travis’s nervous system, the arm, the hand, tearing off a glove to reach between the lower buttons of his coat, to lip the heavy fabric back, an inconsequential drag on his wrist as he gripped and drew out his black eelskin wallet, no shake in his hand, no time for fear, too much a luxury when faced with that much need.

  And then the smell of death stung him. His own? Had he been slashed? But his assailant’s eyes bulged as Laura screamed, and still he lived. His wallet fell. A purpled foot toed forward and Travis saw a matching hand jam down, like a receipt on a spindle, upon the switchblade, fingers closing on the mugger’s glove, a sharp snap of bone. Time enough to feel blooms of gratitude mixed with astonishment before the rescuer dropped his head upon Travis’s shoulder and bit, as easy as baklava, through the thick fur, thick leather, the multi-layered cloth beneath, into muscle and bone, a sudden frenzied cramp of pain there.

  *****

  The moment they cornered off Drummond and headed west on Maisonneuve, anticipation lit his soul. They quickened their pace, he and Laura, grinning like idiots. “Namaste, dollface,” he said, side-hugging her as they walked.

  Laura, laughing, scolded: “That’s not nice, making fun of spirituality.”

  “Get me started on Jesus sometime.”

  “I know, I know. My favorite blasphemer.”

  Inside, the crowd was lumbering along the guideropes, halfway vestibuled, halfway inside the auditorium: an odd mingle of young and old, his generation touching once more a thread which guided them to the gold of an earlier time, Laura’s coevals refreshingly glint-eyed in their twentyish claim upon the world’s possibilities. On their way to the line’s end, Laura exchanged joyous if hushed hellos with a number of young men and women he’d never met, scrubbed and more naive-looking than his wife, wearing yoga-whites some of them and holding coats, although, inching past the side door they’d come in, blasts of winter assaulted them every time anyone entered the building.

  At last the double doors. Travis let Laura unpurse a five-dollar bill for them and place it on a small mound of money in a box labeled DONATIONS. He took a flyer about a potluck, avoiding the fervid eyes of the redeemed druggie, or so he appeared, sitting, one knee pistoning, behind the table.

  “Let’s try close,” Laura said, ever one for ring-side seats at plays and concerts.

  “Right,” he said, but she was already on the way down the carpeted slope of the aisle. She tapped the sweatered arm of a petite Oriental woman, blowing a kiss to her wave and signaling later as she backwarded and then rightwarded herself toward the sparsely populated—because spiritually too presumptuous?—front rows.

  The air was redolent with incense, sandalwood mingled with a fruity vanilla scent. The stage, as he approached it, brought him back twenty years, the oriental rug at its lip, fringe hanging over, the cushions, the flowers, puffs of incense rising nearly straight up like Lionel trains in mid-chug from an ornately carved table—and out of context yet never somehow out of place, the angled mike on a squat stand so that the reputedly soft-spoken Apadravya could be heard throughout the auditorium and so that his talk could be preserved for those unlucky enough to be elsewhere.

  Laura draped her coat over her seatback in row two, a clack as a button brushed metal. He did the same, gazing back at the rising sweep of attendees, noting how animated their faces were, yet how subdued their chatter. This, he thought, was how church ought to be but never was.

  “You’re really going to like him, Travis.”

  Sweet woman, her face so vibrant and alive. “I like him already,” he said, and gave Laura a squeeze.

  *****

  Marcie hummed as she bumsteaded her sandwich, habits both she’d picked up from her father, a man chubby-not-fat who favored a puttering hum over silence in the car. Hand on meat drawer, drew it open, packaged sliced turkey ready for unsealing; salami, the same; tuppered ham on one shelf still looking worthy; lettuce head with a few hacks out of it, snatched up; jars of mayo and dill spears precariously balanced at her breasts. She brought her armful of prizes to the table, arrayed them, and dove in, rye slices peeled open waiting on the plate.

  As her hands worked, she wondered if she should check on baby Jenny. Time enough for that later. Laura, lovely pert-nosed Laura, was such a hoverer, it would probably do the kid good to suffer a little neglect. She and Travis’d moved in, going on two years now, and it had been a relief and a blessing after the beer-guzzling, once-overing, trio of scum-buddies w
ho’d lived here before. They’d been away at a hockey game in Toronto the weekend Pierre brought her here and had committed them to a lease.

  Pierre again. Bring him up, even fleetingly, and his residue lingered and spread, reviving the sweet and bitter ache of times buried and buried and buried again. Stopped over the table, knife in hand, kitchen clock relentless in its forward hurtle. Brought up Freya Cole, leggy sad-eyed sandy-haired first-chair violist she had found solace with for a while: a quiet, caressive time, very few words, two lives lived, one here in seeming isolation, one there idle and indolent on Freya’s bed, her Scandinavian fingers sure and angular and rich drawing tone from her viola, then dry and light and loving on Marcie’s freshly inflicted wounds. It died away. Trombonist dork Kyle Kinney pursued his pet violist with bizarre gifts, won her, took them both off to Chicago under Maestro Solti’s baton.

  Hey, what could you do? Heartache sucked, and there were plenty of people out there willing to leech off your grief. Go on, sniff the air, keep your bullshit detector in fresh batteries: That was the way to get by.

  Stupid lump stood in her throat. Wasn’t fair. If she were a drinking woman, she’d be drunk. Instead, she lifted the triple-decker to her lips, opened her mouth as wide as it would go, and chomped the biggest bite of meat and bread and bitter sorrow she could manage.

  *****

  He left-armed Laura’s coat-bulged seatback and craned about to scan the crowd. Odd how gatherings culled from a city this size a mini-population of like-minded souls. He felt (grand illusion, that) immediate kinship here; rebuke followed instantly, no call for cynicism, there could be a grand gathering of these same people, one massive handfast to bind them all, spark to spark—enduring fascination and interest here, if they wanted it enough. These people, he fancied, lived, like him at his best, aside and apart from the weary fray of illusion, not tangled up in the snags of samsara, or not often, or with sufficient awareness to put a spin of redemptive humor on the human predicament.