Denis Johnson - Angels

“Volleyball, you guys,” Nurse Helen said.

“Volleyball?” Jamie said, looking at Sally for confirmation.

Sally appeared too starved and weak for games. She lay back on her bed and pulled a fall of her blond hair over her blue-veined face, going into some kind of trance. Volleyball.

“Raphael!” Nurse Helen sang.

“Do I have to go and play volleyball?” Jamie asked her. Last night, until dawn, screams had come out of the tiled Quiet Room. She couldn’t put these screams together in her mind with volleyball.

“Doctor Wrigley doesn’t have you down for sports,” Helen said, and looked up at Raphael, the stocky Chicano orderly, who was just approaching. “She doesn’t like volleyball,” Nurse Helen said, gesturing at Sally on the bed. Together they took Sally — Raphael by the feet, Nurse Helen by the hands — and carried her like a sack from the ward. Sally began laughing, and they did, too.

In a minute the nurse was back, breathing hard. “Hey,” Jamie said, “are we supposed to be crazy, or what? How come people have to play volleyball when they’re supposed to be crazy?”

“Physical activity’s important, Jamie. And I don’t like the word crazy. You’re sick people trying to get well. This is a hospital, right?”

Jamie could feel the back of her neck getting tight again. She knew it was a hospital, for God’s sake.

“I think you should play volleyball, too. I’ll talk to the doctor about it Monday when he comes in.”

Jamie felt angry, because she didn’t want them to figure out that she wanted to play volleyball. She was flustered. She wanted to be out there right now. Why didn’t the nurse just tell her to play volleyball right now?

“Matter of fact,” Nurse Helen said, “if you want to, why don’t you go out there now? Always room for one more.”

“Are you shitting me?” Jamie cried. “Who told you to say that?” She was all pins and needles. She took hold of her own head with both hands. “They’re reading me! What did you do to me?” The enormity of her situation pressed in against her. She didn’t want to face it.

She stood on the bed, balancing with difficulty there, and pointed a finger at Nurse Helen. She wanted to explain something important, but the only word she could think of was, “Ya! Ya! Ya! Ya!”

Raphael came in. Some boy in a doctor’s smock came in. She was completely enraged that they thought it necessary to hold her down and give her a shot. Nerves popped in her skull, voices chanted incomprehensibly, and the event accelerated into a white smear.

The doctor sat on her bed with his legs crossed one over the other — a new doctor, one she hadn’t met before. “Just what are we talking about here?” she said.

“Well,” the doctor said, “essentially we’re talking about anything you want to talk about. Anything that concerns you, anything that bothers you right now. Do you want a cup of coffee?”

“Coffee?” she said. “Why are you trying to give me coffee? I’m coughing enough as it is. I have tuberculosis,” she told him, “that’s why I lost all this weight.”

“Okay then, let me ask you a few questions. Can you tell me the day and the date, Jamie?”

“It’s the fifteenth of whenever, nineteen hundred and fuck-all. You think I don’t see through that one?”

“Maybe you see through it, but I’m not trying to fool you. The date is right on the wall.” He pointed at a sign on the wall that said:

TODAY IS

thurs june 27

YOUR DAY

“My only reason for asking is to find out if you take an interest in what day it is. Can you tell me where we are today, Jamie?”

“We’re in the goddamn looney bin.”

“Can you tell me the name of the hospital?”

“Arizona State Hospital.”

“Great. Very good. Now — please don’t object to my asking you these very obvious questions, okay? Just trying to get our bearings. So how about telling me what wing of the hospital we’re in right now?”

“Wing? You mean, like of a bird? Of a dove? ‘The Wings of a Dove?’”

“No, that’s not quite what I mean. I’m asking you to tell me the name of this part of the hospital. All the parts are named after famous people.”

“The parts?” For a second — just a tick — she saw something breaking out of the doctor’s face. “I don’t know who you are, Mister,” she said, “but if you don’t get out of here you’re finished.” A weasel or something.

“I’m knocked up, is what I think,” Jamie kept telling them. Her stomach churned continually, and it was a rare moment when she came around to the true state of things long enough to appreciate that it was fear, a pure utter terror created by her thoughts, that took hold of her innards and squeezed until she was nauseated. “You’ve got to get yourself organized on a daily basis,” the nurse told her in confidential tones. “Well, fuck you,” Jamie said. She was sorry to talk this way, but it was necessary. You only had to listen to the news to see that the world was splitting apart. She had no idea what was going to break out of the middle of things when the time was finally at hand.

The temperature in the lock-up was uniform. Only by watching those who came and went could he believe the desert summer’s heat had arrived. It blazed in the faces of new arrivals and melted from the pores of the guards as they greeted him at the start of each shift — always the first of their duties, checking the prize defendant at the end of the cellblock. And as the temperature rose out in the world, Bill Houston felt the jaws of his captivity crushing him, and found reason, in the news that Fredericks brought him twice weekly, to count himself among the lost.

“We have a grave situation here,” the lawyer said. “I was misinformed earlier, and I misinformed you. This Crowell — the man who was killed in the hold-up — they’re calling him a cop. He wasn’t a cop. He was retired. But they’re just not looking at that fact. They want to get technical.

“I won’t sit here and quote every law for you, but I’ll get you Xeroxes of every statute they’re charging you under, and you can look at them, along with any other statute that applies, including death penalty statutes, William, because that’s what we’re looking at. These bastards want you. I’m not going to pretend they don’t want you, because they do.” He watched Bill Houston as if Houston might now offer some sign that none of it was true.

The defendant made a gesture of invitation with his hands: play on.

“What I’m saying is we’ve got a nice new judicially acceptable, constitutional, unbeatable death penalty statute, and there’s this huge groundswell all of a sudden — but I mean everybody, all the powers-that-be — I’m telling you they want to off the first killer who comes down the road, without any delays — that’s you, William — and they also intend to gas the oldest remaining denizen of Death Row out there in Florence, who happens to be Richard Clay Wilson, the child-murderer. I really can’t believe that they really believe they can bring all this about. But they’re like kids. They’ve got this new law and now somebody’s got to die.”

By June’s end it was clear that Burris, James, and Bill would all be tried — separately — according to the original schedule. Bill Houston had been identified unanimously in a line-up. And now the lawyer was helpless and nervous most of the time. Houston knew lawyers; he knew when a lawyer had lost. None of their motions for delay was granted. There was a fearsome, inexorable gist to the decisions. Always the Ninth Circuit ruled against Fredericks, his motions to quash evidence, to have witnesses impeached or testimony thrown out. Houston’s trial approached unimpeded, as if no defense whatever had been mounted against it. “We’re going to send you over to have your head checked,” Fredericks told his client. “But I guarantee you right now, they’re going to certify you sane.”