Denis Johnson - Angels

The new man across the catwalk, an Italian sort of guy who’d beaten his father-in-law mercilessly and broken a great many of his bones, asked Bill Houston how it was going. Bill told him the truth: “I’m going up the pipe.”

“Let’s walk Irene down to the Outpatient Area for her appointment,” the nurse would say — this nurse or that nurse, she really didn’t care which nurse.

“Let’s walk over to the commissary,” the nurse would say. “We can’t have you lying on that bed all day, thinking those thoughts of yours.”

“Do you know where you are?” the nurse would say. “It’s July Fourth. This is the Helen Keller ward.”

She was right about lying on the bed. When Jamie was up and doing, things were okay, but when she lay down and considered the way of the world, her picture of life came up shining impossibly, with a molten border around it, and she knew that things were not at all as they had seemed, that it wasn’t July Fourth, that the boiling slimy whores had a grip on the march of time and that everything was happening over and over. She heard the instructions coming out of the walls, affirming that she must kill herself in order to save the others, to get the days going again, and she experienced her own murder at every turn of her breath, repeatedly born into the blazing frame of a moment that never changed. Often she woke up in a place made entirely of green and white squares going away from her infinitely. For a moment, once, she had a handle on the whole situation: this was a small room of tiles with a drain in its floor, and she’d been asleep on a little pad almost like a quilt. But in a minute, it just wasn’t like that at all. It was much, much more horrible. Everything depended on the position of a single green square, and she didn’t know which one, but the certainty with which her heart seized this one, then this one, then another — it was driving her insane. Her mouth was chapped, and both arms were sore. When they opened the door to the little room and came in with the hypodermic — the nurse and the little monkey-man who told her what to do — she remembered about her arms.

“Well!” the nurse said, as if that said it all. ‘Did you remember that today you’re moving over to the Madame Curie wing?” She knew how to make the sheet of the bed float softly.

“What?” Jamie was watching her make the bed.

“Moving day! Oh—” the nurse was disappointed. “You don’t have your things together. Where’s your stuff, honey? Your toothbrush, and your little diary?”

“Here’s what I think,” Jamie said. “Everybody fuck everybody up the ass. I mean — oh, eat everything made of shit. You cunt whore suck.” She could feel her face getting hot.

“You’re going to have to watch that mouth,” the nurse said.

Jamie decided to say Cunt Whore Suck one thousand times, starting now.

“Okay, Sister,” the nurse said. “Over to the Curie wing for you. And if you don’t get straight you’ll end up over in the Mathilda wing.”

“The Middle of Things?” Jamie said. “I’ll kill you!”

“Lane! Raphael!” The orderlies appeared, and the nurse told Jarnie, “You’re going downhill. You’re on that slickety-slide.”

“I put a spell of a curse on you!” Jamie said.

The nurse said something that sounded like Voodoo Dissolve, and as Lane and Raphael carried Jamie along by her arms, she shouted, “Did you call me Voodoo Dissolve? Did you? Did you?”

She moved from the Curie wing down to the Joan of Arc ward toward the end of July. All the walls were made of tile here, and the floors, too, and there were drains in the floors at intervals the length of sixty-seven tiles. Two of the drains were sixty-eight tiles apart. But she could never be sure. Nothing was ever definite, and once she was done counting anything, if she wanted to know how many, she had to count again. And although the drains stayed the same and the main hall was always eight hundred twenty tiles long, she had to be sure, she couldn’t be sure, she had to count again. She knew the lie was inside of a number. At the very center of one of these numbers, where it was supposed to be nothing, where it was supposed to be only a thought, there was a speck of dirt in your eye.

Whenever they brought her back from the place where they attached her to the wires, she saw the same thing on the wall as they passed by, a picture of herself, a message about her fate, beseeching her to prepare: a bright poster, a whirling orange child-style stick figure on a maroon background under the inscription: If You Catch Fire, DROP AND ROLL… In the middle of the night they raped the woman in the bed next to hers. Jamie’s ears roared at the inside of her head as she watched them pull the dividers eagerly around her. People hurried to and fro in the night, carrying pieces of the woman into the bathroom and eating them; in the morning there was nothing left of her.

Scarlet light and white heat awoke her. She was in flames.

The bed rocked on a momentary ocean, and then came to rest in the dark hospital ward. It was not her clothing, but her flesh itself that was burning. The light that came from her splashed shadows on the walls and floor that shifted and changed their minds about what they were, as she leaped out of the bed, stood still a minute at the foot of it, and then was torn up the middle by the agony of her personal heat. “I’m on fire!” She dropped to the floor and began rolling and whirling. Everybody in the room burst into laughter. There were red lights, and sirens. She couldn’t breathe because of the smoke that filled her lungs like water. It was water, they were trying to put her out — but she was burning. It wasn’t water. They were urinating on her profusely. They all had huge floppy shoes. They were clowns, they threw her in a monstrous tub with a drain.

Beneath her the tiles rippled and breathed. The pulpy surfaces of the walls ripened uncontrollably under her observation, inhaling endlessly like lungs preparing to blast her face with a calling or a message. Stripes and pyramids fell across the air in nearly comprehensible organization, writing that changed just before she understood it, and the room itself became a vast insinuation, swollen with filthy significance. She wanted to catch her breath and wail, but realized that her own lungs were already full. When she exhaled, the room seem relieved of its tension momentarily: she was crushed to remember that this very same action of ballooning and diminishing had been linked to all her other breaths. This terrible, terrible thing that was happening was her breathing.

The beat of things, their steady direction, had dissolved into nothing — this room wasn’t happening then, it isn’t happening now; maybe it’s a dream of what’s going to happen or what will happen never. The sound of her own voice injures her like a shock of electricity through her ears, but screaming herself to hoarse exhaustion is the only reprieve from breathing.

She looked up out of her voice and saw the angel.

He will have ears like a cartoon of organic growth. He is yellow with light but covered with mobile shadows, animated tattoos. His face kept changing. His voice will come from far off, like a train’s. His body is steady and beautiful and hairless, the wings white, incinerating, and pure, but the head changes rapidly — the head of an eagle, a goat, an insect, a mouse, a sheep with spiraling horns that turn and lengthen almost imperceptibly — and the entire message had no words. The entire message will be only the beat and direction of time. Yes is Now.

The angel who says, “It’s time.”

“Is it time?” she asked. “Does it hurt?” He will have the most beautiful face she has ever seen.

“Oh, babe.” The angel starts to cry. “You can’t imagine,” he said.