Джойс Оутс - Zombie

Junie & her friends are talking about religion now I guess. & one of the men says religion is tyranny, & delusion. & responsible for much of the cruelty of mankind. & Lucille all huffy & excited saying no that is not religion, that is power, political power, & religion is spiritual, & inward . & Junie agrees & she’s excited too saying the struggle of our species is between outward & political, & inward & spiritual . & maybe the upcoming millennia will be the salvation of Homo sapiens. & I’m listening & watching them. Big Sis & Lucille. & the idea comes to me: if you sliced off a female’s breasts she would then be not much different than a man, say if you sliced off a man’s cock he would not be much different than a woman. The breasts are mainly fatty—no bones? & Lucille sees me looking at her & she’s blushing a little like women do. & seeing me turning my wristband round & round sort of compulsive like I do she asks what is it?—my memento of SQUIRREL which is part of his blond-brown hair from his little pigtail & some of my own hairs braided together with leather thongs & red yarn.

So I say, “It’s an Indian thing. Chippewa. I got it at the reservation upstate.”

& Lucille says, touching it, “It’s unusual . Does it have any symbolic meaning? Is it some Chippewa custom?”

& I say, “I guess so. I don’t know.”

& Junie butts in dry & teasing, Big Sis reaching over to lay a hand on me too, “Quen is some kind of hippie, you know? Born thirty years too late.”

& Lucille is smiling saying, “His hair is too short for a hippie’s.”

& Junie says, “It didn’t used to be, though.”

Mom called & left a message & the answering tape screwed up & erased most of it. Asking would I come for Christmas dinner probably.

Some of the material used in Chapter 13 is taken, in abbreviated form, from Neuro-: Life on the Frontlines of Brain Surgery and Neurological Medicine by David Noonan (Simon & Schuster, 1989), pp. 200-202.

Sections of Part I appeared, in different form, in The New Yorker , October 1994.

JOYCE CAROL OATESis a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde (a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize), and the New York Times bestsellers The Falls (winner of the 2005 Prix Femina Etranger) and The Gravedigger’s Daughter . She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. In 2003 she received the Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature and the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, and in 2006 she received the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award.

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Cover design by Alison Forner

Cover photograph © Captureworx/Millennium Images, UK

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ZOMBIE. Copyright © 1995 by The Ontario Review. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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