Джойс Оутс - Zombie

It was already arranged that the bill would be sent to Mom. No need for me to stop at the front desk. The receptionist called out surprised asking did I wish to make an appointment? & I mumbled no, I’d call sometime. & out of there, & that smell, fast. & in the van able to breathe & driving back to Church Street it came to me Fuckface Fish didn’t know the first fucking thing about BONES. Dentists are not doctors. Nor scientists of any kind. Probably didn’t know any more than Q__ P__.

A MEMENTO of the visit, though, in my pocket.

FUCKING SORRY to be missing so many classes at Dale Tech. I don’t know how it happens. Especially since I am determined to turn over a new leaf this time.

Except in Intro to Engineering I fucked up the first quiz, got a score of 34 (“F”). & missed the second. & when I got to the computer lab to do my assignments I’m behind in, there was a weird suspicious smell like formaldehyde that might’ve been a trick. (For the part of BIG GUY I’d saved, two-three years ago, I’d needed at least a quart of formaldehyde & got some from a biology lab at Mt. Vernon pretending I was a student, in my stick-on goatee & heavy glasses & carrying a briefcase I can pass for a grad student anywhere.) & the instructor is a young guy who looks right through me like there’s a blank space where I am.

Dad has paid my tuition & I have insisted I will pay him back out of my caretaker’s wages, as soon as things get settled. I still owe on my van & there are other expenses. Mom says I am careless with money spending on friends & making loans that will never be repaid, I’m like her with a generous heart she says & not many money-management skills . Since the trouble last year—the arrest & the hearing & the suspended sentence etc.—Dad looks at me differently I think, I’m not 100% sure because I am shy to raise my eyes to his but I think it’s like he is fearful of me as in the past he was impatient & always finding fault. Like Q__ his only son was a student failing a course of his. Yet I believe he is thinking we are all pretty lucky like my lawyer said. No matter the shame to the P__ family that Q__ is an “ admitted” sex offender at least Q__ is not incarcerated at Jackson State Prison. At least his twelve-year-old “victim” was not injured. Or worse. Dad saying again & again Think of it as an investment in our joint future, son! You can pay me back when you’re able . His jaw like he’s got lockjaw but he’s smiling with that wrinkly little pink-asshole mouth & his professor eyes watery inside his glasses.

Mom hugs me & stands on tiptoe to kiss my cheek. Her bones are like dried sticks I could break in my hands so I stand very straight & still not breathing to inhale her smell. What that smell is I do not know & do not name. Mom was a plump woman once with soft big breasts like balloons filled with warm liquid unless I am remembering her wrong. Dr. E__ says all mothers are big in memory because we were tiny infants nursing at the breast. Dr. E__ says there is the GOOD BREAST & the BAD BREAST. There is the GOOD MOTHER & the BAD MOTHER. You know we love you Quentin Mom says like a tape when a button is punched This time things will turn out well .

I say, That’s right, Mom .

I say, I’m sure going to see to that, Mom .

These past ten months or so I’ve been driving out to Dale Springs & taking Mom & Grandma to church, & I’m missing some Sundays now but I intend to get back on schedule soon. Mom says This time things will turn out well. With God’s will . & Grandma says, This time things will turn out well. With God’s will Amen .

EXCEPT: the old dreams starting again in this new bed in this very house I’d visited so much as a little boy, Junie & me the grandchildren Grandma & Grandpa loved. They never knew Q__ P__ but they said they loved him. These old dreams now I’ve stopped taking my medication, I’m waking with a HARD-ON big as a ROCKET & sizzling-exploding going off LIKE A COMET’S TAIL. My cum is thick & clotted & gluey-hot wiped on the bedsheets, on the curtains, on the cardboard pizza box & napkins from Enzio’s I folded to an inch square & placed in Akhil’s bed (which was not that neatly made, not what you might expect) one afternoon when the house was empty.

Waking up in my caretaker bed at the ground floor rear of 118 North Church Street & I’m shuddering-groaning as the ORGASM slams through me like a bolt of electricity. Dreaming I’m strapped in the dentist’s chair & lowered helpless & knives & picks in my mouth till I’m choking with my own blood. I’m feeling O.K. once I get up & turn the TV to “Good Morning America” & I boil some black coffee & take some uppers I pick up on the street when required. & I remember the computer class was the day before. Or I’m driving out to Dale Tech & it’s the wrong day, or the wrong time of the right day. Because Time is like a tapeworm jammed inside you in any direction. So I drive out anyway once the van is IN MOTION headed in that direction I’m superstitious about changing course just on impulse.

& if there’s a hitch-hiker along the route, often just off the expressway I’ll probably stop & give him a ride & I will observe him detached as a scientist calculating what kind of ZOMBIE he might make. But I am never tempted so close to home. & out at Dale Tech which is this crappy fifth-rate place everybody at the University including Professor R__ P__ looks down their asses at I will park my van in lot C I have a sticker for & cross “campus” (just concrete & scrubby strips of grass & stick-trees half of them dead over the winter) thinking O.K.! I’ll visit my profs to explain there’s an illness in the family, my Mom in a struggle with cancer, or Dad with a bad heart but I can’t find their offices or if I find the office it’s in the wrong building or the wrong wing of the right building & by the time I get to the right office it’s shut, door’s locked, the cocksucker is gone for the day. Or say I get sidetracked trailing some young guys from my engineering class into the student union where I’ll have cups of black coffee till my eyeballs spin like pinwheels sitting seeing who’s around ANYBODY KNOW ME? ANYBODY WANT TO SIT WITH ME? squinting seeing if I recognize anybody, if it’s O.K. to sit with some of them, maybe they’re in my engineering class or maybe computer or I look enough like somebody they know so it’s O.K. I’m carrying some textbooks, it looks like, & my hair cut & not in a ponytail or straggling down my shoulders since the arrest though I am wearing RAISINEYES’ funky leather slouch-brim hat & BUNNYGLOVES’ soft-bunny-fur-lined leather gloves are in the pocket of my $300 sheepskin jacket & my aviator-style amber prescription lenses are in BIG GUY’s frames so I look pretty fucking cool I think for a shy white guy on the downside of thirty, weak chin & hairline receding. & it’s weird how friendly the Tech students are, & how trusting. Like if you are enrolled & a student you are one of them & no questions asked. All of them commuters like me living in Mt. Vernon or the county & most with part-time jobs or even full-time, like me. Even sometimes a girl will pull out a chair to sit at my table if she knows somebody with me. Hi! she’ll say like a high school cheerleader. Like the girls at Dale Springs High who looked through Q__ P__ those years like he didn’t exist. Are you in my computer class?—you look familiar .

I should mention my handtooled kidskin boots just a little too big for me courtesy of Rooster. Last observed striding along the street in Greektown, Detroit, Thanksgiving weekend 1991.