* * *

  The District Attorney throws down his wad of notes, pretending to be at his wits’ end and now embarks on spontaneous impromptu cross-examination, and even the front-row spectators look frightened and guilty, he is so angry, and he shouts in a terrible voice that echoes high in the ceiling of this 19th-century building, where airplane-propeller-sized fans rotate to stir the humid air: “Gotteson, just where did you come from? Just who are you?” (Someone at the back of the courtroom yells: “Out of the locker, you know where he came from!” and we all turn to see who it is, but the police have already ushered the girl out—she must be one of the “Liberate All Prisoners” pickets who are hanging around outside, complete strangers to me, and from what I have gathered the same rich kids who made my life miserable when I was begging for small change, seriously and desperately, while they were having fun putting their hands out to tourists—oh, what I could do to them all, what I’d surely do if I were liberated!)

  * * *

  In my cell I have thought about this. I “think” all the time, even when I am asleep. Or maybe it should be put differently—thoughts come to me, thoughts “think” me. Sometimes I am wrenched with spasms of thought-waves, running through me the way, in the old days, convulsions used to go through those I loved with my finest most meticulous style, during which time there was no “Bobbie Gotteson” any more than there was any human being there, the object of my love-power. On the Outside, concerned so much with my career and caught up in a frenzied rapid-living crowd of middle-aged people, mainly, except for the young girls whose sunken eyes were so middle-aged, I did not have time to notice all this. I thought that Bobbie Gotteson was doing the thinking. Now, I know better. Now, I know that thoughts are thinking Bobbie Gotteson; Bobbie Gotteson is a thought-spasm. Sometimes he is more than a thought, and sometimes a spasm.

  Gotteson, just where the hell did you come from?

  I couldn’t come from anything normal and good. No. Because if I came from anything normal and good I wouldn’t be the Maniac I am. But since if everything in the world comes from the world and is normal and good, I must be somehow normal and good…somehow or other. Lying beside that girl, the one I don’t like to think about, all these spasms passed through my brain, and I saw Bobbie Gotteson at each step of his life…like on a stairway with real steps…Bobbie at the age of nine, Bobbie at the age of twelve, and on and on and on to where it almost drove me mad, Bobbie my own age, Bobbie as myself! Can you imagine what that would be like—to see how Bobbie Gotteson is your own age, the shape of your own body, his face the same face as yours, all of it squeezed into you and pulsing with life? Oh sweet Jesus, I would almost rather be back on that bench with my pants wet and people sniffing and giggling at me, I’d almost rather be back in Boys’ Detention in New Jersey where some black kids dragged me into a stairwell and spread-eagled me and buggered me on our way out of the dining hall. I’d almost rather be gaping up into Melva’s ugly sobbing face and hearing those words she spat at me, when she had to admit to herself that her Spider Monkey had gone the way of her other lovers, just another puny floppy impotent white man! she had screamed. That sinking feeling, that feeling of black swirling sick horror, the floorboards fading, the earth opening up to you, the way I felt when I heard what turned out to be the second stewardess out there on the porch fitting her key to the lock, oh Jesus, now for some inspiration!…and having to crawl to the door because I was so weakened by all the blood around me, even though it wasn’t mine, and having to snatch at her ankles and yank her into the room, before she ran away, that incredible inexplicable feeling, that no song I could ever compose would get rid of. Because there are some things that go beyond music!

  So, no. I couldn’t come from anything normal, but everything is normal so I came from it and am normal. Unless I didn’t come from anything and am not really here, though I seem to be sitting in an ordinary cell (not a padded cell since I am sedated) and I seem to consume the three-meals-a-day plus ten o’clock snack, and after my death professors at the Medical Institute adjacent to the prison will certainly do an autopsy on me.…I am going to leave my brain to the Neuropsychiatric Department of the Medical Institute, and my kidneys and liver and heart and eye corneas to the transplant-experts there…and my life-story to Antioch Paperbacks* and Vanbrugh Studios, free of royalties or fees, I don’t give a damn any longer.

  But where did you come from, Bobbie, and who are you?

  Hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate pity.

  Pity pity pity pity pity pity pity pity hate.

  The girl with the fluffy red bangs—I know I’m skipping one of them, but that session was almost all blacked-out— made me hate her at once, the way she pursed her lips and crossed her slender ankles…the hate swelled into larger and larger balloons of hate, I could hardly hold myself back from her even before we were alone, and I knew how I had to rescue her out of that sluttish outfit of hers, I began to pity her so, the two of us wept together when we saw how hopeless it was. Then she somehow freaked out on me, maybe a long-delayed reaction to some bright peppy pills she had taken before I strolled by, and she giggled and laughed and began to rock in silent spasms of laughter, as if she’d done all this before and couldn’t take it seriously. She pushed past me and ran into her closet-sized bathroom and tried to get the door shut, but I shouldered it open, and she leaned against the sink and pressed her damp forehead against the mirror of the medicine cabinet, laughing helplessly, hiccuping with laughter. I shook her by the arm, I grabbed hold of her shoulders to shake her sober. Stop that! Stop that! But it was like one other time a girl had freaked out on me and almost ripped my left ear off with her baby teeth, nothing can bring them down, nothing except time, and Bobbie hadn’t time to wait for her. So I didn’t wait. What—what are you?—what are you doing? she giggled when I began but still she could not be serious, not even my pity could make her serious, not even dying made her serious, it was all screaming helpless laughter the way a fat woman shrieks when someone is tickling her though this girl was skinny and—

  Then I ran out of the building. Down the front stairs though there was also a back stairway. Right out front. Running, slipping, gasping for breath, not caring who might see me, anything to get away from her screams of laughter. They can’t even die serious! I remember how Danny Minx was always joking. I remember all the jokes and clowning around at El Portal, even when I asked them to quiet down so they could hear my serious ballads, but no, no, they wanted so desperately to laugh, the mechanism got going and couldn’t stop until they passed out. My mother, my original mother, did not laugh at anything. I know this. When she had me they sewed her up with coarse cheap black thread and there is nothing funny about that. I learned how to clown around and entertain, yes, but I never laughed much at my own jokes, and I could see how Mr. Vanbrugh was a serious man—he alone of the audience didn’t guffaw when I fell backward and nearly broke my spinal cord—he was a gentleman—in a sedation-heavy sleep each night I dream of him arriving at my trial and stepping forward to be a character witness— though they said he had never appeared in a courtroom in his life, had never been served with a subpoena and never would be— What are you? What are you doing?—are not questions Mr. Vanbrugh would ever ask.

  as the tiny fish float in the harbor

  belly-up and harmless

  so parts of our brains float

  in parts of others’ brains

  and no one is to blame

  for that single immense triumph

  in which we all float

  belly-up

  and harmless

  ESCAPE IN BROAD DAYLIGHT

  PASSERSBY DO NOTHING

  TO HALT FLEEING KILLER

  THE CURE FOR STAMMERING

  —and for any other obsession—

  MANIAC STRIKES AGAIN

  AND AGAIN

  —and again, though never with that daring reckless front-door busy-avenue escape, all of my disciples running and panting alongside me, bumping into me, Gotteson-as-a-boy colliding with a very surprised and angry black woman, last year’s Gotteson (in his three-inch elevated shoes and the embroidered snug-fitting shirt from Tangier someone gave him) out of breath after the first frantic minute or two, his hand pressed against his side, whimpering with terror. But I, Gotteson-who-is-now, kept my wits about me and ran through an alley, climbed over a fence, jumped down, and ran down another alley like a fleeing suspect in a movie or in one of the Sunset Boulevard advertisements for a movie up there in gigantic color—the fleeing suspect with his back to you and a gunsight fixed on his head, through a telescopic lens. No telescopic gun-sight was aimed at me. Passersby Do Nothing To Halt Fleeing Killer, the newspapers said angrily.

  WITNESSES DISAGREE

  KILLER’S DESCRIPTION UNCERTAIN

  I ended up in Hermosa Beach. I had some money: there was a woman’s billfold in my back pocket. I went to a TacoBurger place and sat alone in a booth and began to focus on the print in front of my eyes, someone’s discarded Los Angeles Times, and I tried to get the print to stop shimmering, but for a while had no luck. I ordered a double TacoBurger with chips on the side and a Coke, but had no appetite for any of it, and asked the little-girl waitress if they had any chocolate bars for sale, but she said no, she looked surprised and said no. She watched me from behind the counter, standing there with something held up against her chest—it must have been a big menu—and the two of us were alone in the restaurant for a long time, maybe twenty minutes, and once in a while I would glance over at her and there she stood!—eye-to-eye in contact, a smokey-faced sixteen-year-old, maybe a mulatto, and I never touch anything except white people, a taste I share with Danny Minx. She had thick wine-colored lips. She stared at me recognizing me and the air between us was pulsating with short sharp cries I could not interpret, and when I looked at the newspaper the print danced around to taunt me— illiterate I overheard someone say of me once, but that is a lie. I am not illiterate. I can read fairly well, if I am not being observed or crowded or jeered at. In the TacoBurger I seemed to be reading about a maniac-on-the-loose, the words jumped around, shivered, shimmered, then leapt into focus and were about an unknown young man in his late teens, thought by some witnesses to be black, by others to be Mexican, or Spanish, or Italian, or something familiar to the area but not familiarly-named, so there was disagreement and police were “baffled.” One man swore to police that the “young man” was not a man at all but a husky young girl, dressed as a man. She ran like a girl, he claimed.

  Except for my dizzy eyes I could take this without involvement. But my eyesight was failing. The girl came over to me silently and I felt her standing there, a little behind me, behind the booth I was sitting in. She asked me something. I couldn’t make myself turn around. “…wrong?” she whispered.

  *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 the one pillow on the bed and lay with my own head flat, I lay there not thinking or wondering, just the sweat drying on me, and if there was any pain to it, to all that bleeding, I did not feel it through her, she lay on her back and made only a whimpering sound, an oh…oh… oh.… My heartbeat slowed down. It slowed along with hers. My pulse subsided along with hers. Except for the blood there was nothing that had to do with a body. I lay flat beside her and turned my head to stare at her, quieted-down but afraid, and I asked her did she feel any pain…? But she didn’t answer. “Do you feel any pain?” I asked. “What is it like?” I asked.

  She was older than sixteen. It said later that she was twenty-four. She was small-boned, smaller than Bobbie. Dusky-skinned. Dark-haired. Her eyes were half-closed but I could see that they were dark, probably dark brown, like my own. “What’s your name?” I whispered. She did not answer. I could hear her breathing—quick short gasps— but both of us were slowing down, slowing, the signals that kept us in touch were fading. I raised myself on one trembling elbow to watch her. Her eyelids, her nostrils…her parted lips…and between us the soaking dark inkblot of her blood or maybe it was my blood, all my anger seeping out of me, fading, soaking into the mattress, pulsing out slowly heartbeat after heartbeat, helpless, coming to an end one ordinary weekday night, nobody watching, nobody filming, everything coming to an end. Lost.

  I tried to stay angry with her. But. But it faded. I couldn’t remember why I was here. I hated someone, but who…? I didn’t hate anyone. I hated them and then I pitied them, but now I couldn’t remember what that was—hate—or what that other thing was—pity. I began to be afraid. I said, “Why are we here…? What happened? What…what happened to us?” She seemed to hear me, she looked toward me. I saw her eyes shifting behind those dark lids.…She groaned. She tried to speak. I said eagerly, “What, what did you say…?” but I did not dare touch her, I didn’t want to hurt her. “Honey, I don’t know your name! I don’t even know your name!” I said. I could feel a heartbeat throbbing between us but it was not very loud. Oh sweet Jesus, what is happening…? What is happening to us…? I asked her what did it feel like, what was she feeling…? I asked her what was happening. Her eyelids fluttered. I could see her nostrils widening. She said something, I didn’t know if it was meant for me, I began to panic that she would die before she could explain, and I cried so loud that it must have frightened her. “Don’t! Don’t leave me! Wait! Wait— stop—wait—” But I could feel her going away. I could feel the heartbeat fading. If I had not been so afraid of her I would have grabbed her head to hold those eyelids open, I would have held them open with my thumbs, held them open, but I couldn’t touch her, I stared at her and began to cry, I said, What, what is it like, what is it…? What are you seeing…? Who is there, is anyone there with you, wait, oh God please wait, don’t leave me…don’t leave me.…

  “Don’t die yet, wait, don’t die,” I screamed, I begged, I got up from the bed and hung over it, wringing my hands like someone in a movie, even the smell of blood and the wet soaked bedding did not disgust me, I begged her to look at me, to tell me her name, to explain all this.…

  “Why did you let me come back here with you, why did you bring me here, if you’re going to die? If you’re going to bleed to death?” I shouted. But she jerked her head on the pillow, her hands moved by themselves, no fighting, no clawing at me, she whispered something I could not hear but I was terrified to get close to her. “Wait—stop— what are you seeing? What’s there? Where are you going?” I said.

  I leaned over her. She said, “I…I…I can…”

  “What?”

  “I can see into it.…”

  “What? What? What? What? Wait—”