Denis Johnson - Angels

She was greatly aware of the wide thirsty grounds of the place surrounding these slow interiors, but nothing of that outer world was available to the sight of inmates because the windows were so high. Their ties cast crisscross shadows along the floor this morning, so that as Jamie entered carrying newly issued toilet articles, her feet, in disposable paper slippers, passed through quadrangles of light.

Along opposite sides of the ward ran two rows of eight beds each, most wearing comfortable green or red plaid bedspreads. Lamp fixtures encased in wire mesh disrupted the walls of pale yellow, which were bare except for a small sign near the door that said:

TODAY IS

tues june 4

YOUR DAY

A couple of elderly women sat on a bed playing with cards and a board full of pegs, and another old woman with a leathery face walked up and down between the rows. These and the few others present wore wrinkled cotton gowns identical to Jamie’s. On the bare mattress of the bed the nurse pointed her to, there were two women seated side by side like passengers. They looked all right to Jamie, but they were smaller than your regular women, and one of them had a face caked white with make-up and made horrible by a thick smear of crimson lipstick — she looked like a voodoo doll — and as Jamie approached, the other one began making sounds no human should have been capable of. The doll-lady nodded and said, “She means the President.” The other kept making awful noises and the doll-lady said, “Too fast, Allie — slow down!” To Jamie she said, “The Department of Money, she means.”

Now Jamie saw that the woman held to the folds of skin around her throat one of those mechanical buzz-boxes for people without a voice. The matter being discussed excited her tremendously, and she gestured even with the hand that held the box, waving it around unawares so that it spewed noise inconsequentially. Her friend said, “That’s The Times We Live In. The Times We Live In, she’s saying.”

“Excuse me,” Jamie offered, “you got your fat ass on my bed.”

The nurse came out of the bath-and-shower room at the end of the row of beds, carrying a stack of bedding for Jamie. “Alice, is this your bed? Is this Bridget’s bed? Bridget — is this your bed?”

Alice placed the voice-box against her throat and said, “ Fungyoo. ”

“Alice,” the nurse said. She seemed about to smile.

“ Zlud. ”

“She means Slut,” her companion said to Jamie.

“Off the bed, please.” Throwing the bedding down beside them on the mattress, the nurse made shooing motions with her two hands.

The women got up simultaneously. “Nurses do it with all the doctors,” the doll-faced woman explained to Jamie.

“Nuns do it with priests,” Jamie agreed.

The two went one direction, and the nurse went the other, but she paused at the door two beds away. “You can have all the milk you want.”

“I what?”

“On account of your stomach, hon. Doctor Wrigley put it on the orders.”

She sat on the bed and put the toes of one foot on the instep of the other.

“Do you want some milk?”

“Sure — what are you so hot about this milk for? Something in it?”

“Okay, hon,” the nurse said. “We’ll talk about it later.”

She lay crossways on the bed, pillowing her head on the folded bedding and putting her feet out flat on the floor. An odor of honeysuckle came vividly to her nostrils, floating on the warm dark air of Wheeling, and a gust of the steel mills’ breath. Her entire childhood lay immediately outside this place of walls, if she could only get to it by changing into a thing of hours — because she was understanding things now, understanding about time, about its directions and how to change the way of it, and about the many things that were happening moment by moment unbeknownst to the forest of blind dead human shapes, the forest of wooden men—

“What are you supposed to be?”

Jamie sat up. On the edge of the adjacent bed sat a blond and emaciated woman no older than herself.

“We’re on the Marnie Eisenhower ward,” the woman told her. She wore the standard washed-grey cotton gown, but she’d covered the sleeves, and the front of it, with secret writing.

“I’m under observation,” Jamie said. But an understanding of what this meant temporarily eluded her. She rested her elbows on her knees, her head and hair drooping forward. The design of the floor was six-by-six inch square grey patches with a little copper crown in the dead center of each one.

The woman said nothing. She scratched herself between her legs with the obliviousness of a child. She was thinly beautiful, but her teeth were as yellow as her hair, and tiny blue veins showed around her temples. She appeared in need of fixing. She looked broken and thrown away. Jamie said. “So what’s your story? I mean, what are you supposed to be here for?”

“Me?” the woman said. “I’m nuts.” She began laughing; laughter that sounded like: ratatatata. Jamie liked her, but at the same time she wanted to slap the woman’s face.

She woke from a Thorazine unconsciousness because someone was yelling, “ Sergeant! ” The ceiling was far away, then inches above her face, and then properly positioned. “ Sergeant! ” She raised up in bed. It was daytime. The large woman with her hair all chopped off, who always wore a man’s blue boxer shorts instead of a gown, was talking to the nurse. Her face was crimson, her eyes pink. Two male orderlies in white stood a yard back, respectfully, at her either side. “I want to see the Sergeant!” the woman insisted. “Do you know where we are?” the nurse said. “The Sergeant’s not here. There isn’t any Sergeant here.” All the patients were quiet and shiny-eyed, watching this exchange. The big woman put her hands on her hips and began to huff uncontrollably, working her jaw as if trying desperately to dislodge something from her throat. One of the orderlies took her in a hammerlock from behind, and the woman lifted him clear off the floor, his legs dangling like a child’s. The other man wrapped his arms around the two of them, and they all three waltzed monstrously toward the Quiet Room, a chamber made completely of tiny tiles with a drain in the center of its floor.

The bed on her left was empty and silver in the darkness, its bedspread thrown back. Jamie was the only one awake to hear the cries. The old woman who slept there next to her was trudging heavily up and down the aisle between the two rows of beds, and at the far end she was silhouetted against the light from the bathroom, a bent figure of helplessness with her hair in a bun. Several afterimages trailed her in Jamie’s sight, and Jamie shook her head violently but they wouldn’t clear away. The old woman seemed to be carrying something close to her belly. “I lost my Catherine! I lost my Catherine,” she cried in a voice as unstopped and mournfully low as a foghorn’s. Jamie had to shut her eyes a minute, because the bathroom light made them burn. When she came awake again, there were curtains full of light drawn around the next bed, and moving human shapes silhouetted on the curtains. They muttered and conspired in there below the level of her hearing — a black form hurriedly approaching and entering said, “We’ve got to catheterize her,” and the other shapes said softly, “Catheterize, catheterize, catheterize.” Jamie began to shake uncontrollably. She couldn’t find her voice to scream. She turned to the right, as if to summon help from the lumps of unconscious and insane people in their beds. When she tried to blink the handfuls of warm sand from her vision, everything changed and it was morning. The old woman was sitting up in the next bed, looking at the pages of a magazine.