Denis Johnson - Angels

Bill Houston was in the State Hospital having his sanity questioned. From his high-security room he looked out over fifty meters of parched grass to a low wall of stone topped by hacked and complicated wrought-iron, and beyond that to the intersection of two streets, something he hadn’t expected to have so prolonged an opportunity of examining ever in his life again.

He stood at the wire-mesh window with his arms crossed before his chest. He wanted to tear himself away from the view and think a minute about something important — about Jamie, who was here in this hospital somewhere, and he wished her peace; or about how to convince these people he was crazy, incapable of telling right from wrong — but he really only wanted to look down at the ordinary street seized by the dusk.

Each time he swallowed, he gulped down half a speech. Things to be said roiled in his belly, washed by acid, but he was silenced by his own confusion as it compared to the stately transactions of the casual street. He understood that he would be executed and deceased, that everything he saw would outlast him. Solitary now for weeks, he’d taken to speaking directly to the heart of the moment, fearing everything, repetitively and increasingly convinced that he would soon break apart and be revealed, be destroyed, be born. He recognized it as an old feeling that came and went, but now it came and stayed. He lived alone and thought alone. The nature of murder made him alone inside himself; he’d never been so alone.

I did it, he said to the gas station outside. I’m ready, let’s go. I can handle the pain, but I can’t hack the fear.

He watched Twenty-Fourth Street all night, all the doings there, the repair and refueling of cheap cars, the going and staying of prostitutes and citizens and strangers, a trickle of types up from Van Buren, people, if he could only have seen them, with motels in their eyes and a willingness to take any kind of comfort out of the dark heat. And while he paid no attention to what he feared, it happened. Slowly the time had been transformed, in the usual way that the passing of an evening transforms a street corner and a place of simple commerce there, like this gas station. And then abruptly but very gently something happened, and it was Now. The moment broke apart and he saw its face.

It was the Unmade. It was the Father. It was This Moment.

Then it ended, but it couldn’t end. Now there was a world in which a man got into his blue Volkswagen, thanking the attendant as he did so, and closed its door solidly. It was a world in which one fluorescent lamp arched out over the service station, and another lay flat on the pool of water and lubricant beneath it. It was a world he might be lifted out of by a wind, but never by anything evil or thoughtless or without meaning. It was a world he could go to the gas chamber in, and die forever and never die.

There was some daylight now. He looked through wire mesh, intended to withstand the heat of a blowtorch, at a world awash in a violet peace. He felt as if his feet had found the shore. This is your eternal life. This is for always. This happens once .

They had her by the elbows, one man on either side. The door opened. Her feet didn’t touch the ground. One of her slippers fell off. “End of the line, baby. Smack in the Middle of Things.”

“What the fuck’s fucking? Fuck you,” she said.

“That’s real pretty,” they said. “This is the center of the Search of Destruction where the Devil will eat you.”

“Going to eat your pussy. All bloody teeth,” another one said.

“Fat soul. Suck warts of the soul in death. This is Ground Zero,” they said.

“ Wait a minute,” Jamie said. “Wait a minute.” The answer was only a word away.

“Great!” they said. “Why don’t you do that? In the middle of the night.”

“As soon as the Search of Destruction eats it,” they said.

She felt her face getting hot. She could hardly keep a grip. “Is the bomb here?”

“You tell us,” the man said. “What do you think?”

They took him up to the eighth floor of the Maricopa County Court building in handcuffs and leg irons. “Not a chance,” Fredericks said as soon as he saw Bill Houston in chains. He took a breath to protest, and the prosecutor, a tall grey gentleman who appeared very wise — Bill Houston wished he were the defender — raised a friendly hand and nodded to the guards.

They unbound him amiably and he sat down in a pew beside his lawyer, but Fredericks wasn’t satisfied. It galled him that his client should have to appear before impressionable jurors wearing the denim garb of a prisoner. He was nearly apoplectic. Houston had never seen him so excited, so wronged and abused — but he appreciated that this was the show-style appropriate to the side that could hope to triumph only in a limited way and piecemeal, through a horizonless march of writs and appeals. In future appearances William H. Houston, Jr., would be permitted to wear a cheap suit; but it would go into his brief that on the trial’s opening day he’d been made to look like a criminal before the jurors who would decide his fate.

Now the jury wasn’t here, however. Now only a skeleton crew of local justice was present, the stenographer laying out his equipment, three prosecutors, two jailhouse guards and two courthouse guards, and a few spectators. Bill Houston couldn’t help feeling like an errant youngster when he spied his mother in the third row.

She looked small in these quarters, with their distant ceiling and ominous bulking judge’s bench, their originless fluorescent illumination, their austere and holy Modern Airport decor and the posh hush of carpets and central cooling. She wore a pink dress and a pink pillbox hat with a pin in it and a veil, which she removed when she saw her son to disclose her face looking healthy and alive, just as she’d looked at his trials in the past: because it was only on these occasions when her loved ones fought the law that anybody took any notice of her. Though her kind of people were generally ignored — or at best slightly mourned and slightly pitied — by those who built and staffed these magnificent rooms, everyone was forced to see now that it was really for her kind of people that these places had been built, after all — and now you are working for us. Now you’ll take reckoning of us in your sight. The last shall be first. It made her ashamed to take very much pride in all of this tragedy, and yet the day seemed electric — she had to admit it — because her boy was on page one.

He looked good. They had him dressed in work clothes, like a person of low degree, but he looked good. Obviously he’d been eating and exercising. It was the same as always. Left to his own devices, he was hopeless and dangerous both, but in custody he flourished. Her oldest son was at home in locked places.

At the very center of things they killed Jamie. It had a hold of her wrist at the very center of things, saying, “You damn doodad, you can’t do that, you damn doodad, you damn doodad.” There were two of it. “You smear shit on the wall, you’re going to clean it up every time,” it said. It took hold of her wrist and made her hand look huge. She threw her hand away and it picked her back up and attached her to her hand. She was choking. “Responsibility,” it said. “Terrification.”

It had a hold of her wrist and dipped her hand into the waters of the lake of poison.

The screaming of sirens came out of her two ears. Waters of the lake of the poisonous filthy death. You wanted everything. Well, I gave it to you. I’m nothing now.

“This is a clean establishment of walls,” it said. “We’re making you put fire on the things you’ve smeared on the walls.”