Triumph of the Spider Monkey by Joyce Carol Oates

Author:Joyce Carol Oates
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan

*Despite his often uncanny powers of prediction, Gotteson was mistaken here. Homonovus Paperbacks and not Antioch will handle the unexpurgated Confession. Fritzie Del Blanc will play the lead in the film, produced and directed by Vladimir Jastsky, for Mega World Studios. The film is scheduled for release December 26 at major movie houses across the continent.

20

The Redemption

Of the Maniac Gotteson

She was a long time dying.

No daring climb up the side of a building, no Spider Monkey illuminated by moonlight and cameras…not even any disciples, who leapt out of my head but grew dizzy and faded and failed and sank away as if into the floorboards of this shanty. I wrapped the cocoon around us. There were only two of us.

Jump-shots, athletic tricks of the camera, montage-freezings, no, nothing, only a cocoon for the two of us, for even my machete was lost—dropped on the stairway of that other building—and I had to use only a pair of scissors snatched up by chance, when the two of us knew all was lost. Except for the film or films the Prosecution will acquire and show in the courtroom, everything else is lost to the public, and the other films are on the black market, delivered by messenger hand-to-hand, and Bobbie Gotteson circulates underground without royalties or credit or public acclaim until someone, some night, shrieks with disgust and burns the expensive film while everyone else protests, that collector’s item! and then all will be truly lost. Because I came to think, I came somehow to know, that the screen-test Vlad J. gave me at The Studio in Hollywood was not a real test at all, there was no film, only a trick to quiet Bobbie down. Bobbie needed quieting down, then. Bobbie needed a fake film-test so that everyone could get out of town.*

She put up no fight. It was a sigh, an unsurprised clutching, a broken-off scream. I came at her while her back was turned. No screaming, no giggling. She wore a white slip. I thought of brides’-white in the movies, the costumes of girls seized and held aloft by Frankenstein or large apes and sometimes raised in the jaws of scaly monsters, a melodic screaming but no serious struggle.

I bundled her off to bed. I was not angry. I did not hate her. She was a long time dying and I did not know what to do, I had dropped the scissors and didn’t want to crawl around to find them again, I was very tired, the signals coming to me were faint, fading away. Nobody shouted in this room. It was a back room in a shanty. My heartbeat slowed down. Sweat began to dry on me, all over me, so that I could feel it like a crust—slowly drying. I had never noticed that before. I carried her to the bed and lay her down and decided to lie beside her, just for a while, to get calm again.

Was there space between you two, Bobbie?

I gave her

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