Denis Johnson - Angels

That’s me. That’s what you wanted.

“Responsibility and Terrification in the Lake of Fire and of Poison,” it said.

When they made her hand touch her secret writing formed from the filth of her bowels, she ceased. Greatness exploded in her face.

I have been washed away off these walls.

But this is me, she said. I’m still here.

What am I doing wrong?

Where the secret terrible word had been, there was fire running down the surface.

WHAT AM I DOING WRONG?

“That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said this month,” it said. There were two of them.

So that’s it, she said, and she felt the electricity running out of her brain. There’s no way out of here. This is it. I’m here forever. I had it all backwards.

Baby, they said, you are impressing the hell out of me. You see what you needed all this time? Responsibility. Self-respect. And do you know where you get that from?

Fire in the center of your name.

As the days unrolled and Bill Houston came to understand that he would never be called as a witness, he lost interest in these proceedings. He didn’t trust anybody to speak in his stead — he alone knew who he was. He only wanted to be allowed to share this person with the jury. He just wanted them to know the person they were condemning — and it angered him that he should be the cause of all this show, and his mother coming day after day to watch, and they had no intention of acknowledging him. He felt like a grownup in a room full of children playing with toy cars. To get them to see who he was involved tearing them out of a tiny exclusive world of their own creation.

In his bored reveries he came back again and again to the moment when he’d turned his weapon on the bank guard. The guard had been paralyzed by the chemistry of panic and excitement, and in the instant of time when Bill Houston had tightened his grip against the trigger, he had known there was a better way of dealing with the situation. It might have been possible to disarm the man somehow and leave him alive. That space between heartbeats had been big enough to accommodate any amount of contemplation of the act. It made him feel good, it made him know that life was real, to admit that right there inside that nick of time he’d seen a clear choice and been completely himself. He wanted to confess it to these people, because he sensed there was a chance they might never hit on a moment like that one. He just wanted to give away the most important thing he knew: I did it. It was me.

He watched his trial from behind a wall of magic, considering with amazement how pulling the trigger had been hardly different — only a jot of strength, a quarter second’s exertion — from not pulling the trigger. And yet it had unharnessed all of this, these men in their beautiful suits, their gold watches smoldering on their tanned wrists, speaking with great seriousness sometimes, joking with one another sometimes, gently cradling their sheafs of paper covered with all the reasons for what was going on here. And it had made a great space of nothing where Roger Crowell the bank guard had been expecting to have a life — a silence that took up most of Bill Houston’s hearing. It was a word that couldn’t be spoken, because nobody knew what it might have said. It was the vacuum no larger than a fist, no more spacious than the muscle of the heart, that drew things into it and unbalanced and set loose all the machinery Bill Houston saw moving around him now. They said things; they failed to say things. They stood up; they sat back down. They huddled at the judge’s bench, and they conferred in his chambers, and they passed among themselves expressions and slight gestures intelligible to no one else. Periodically Fredericks drew him close to explain what deal had been struck, or how the evidence was tilting. But what Bill Houston couldn’t shake was the remarkable power in the subtle difference between pulling and not pulling the trigger. A tiny movement of the finger, a closing it together of half an inch: and it caused these men and women to convene, to parade themselves mercilessly along the routes of their arguments and their laws, never omitting a proper station or taking a shorter way, as if they actually had it in their minds that they might have come here to accomplish anything but his death.

After Gate twenty, after the steel tunnel they passed through wordlessly, after the glass control booth with its computer-era panel of dials and switches and gauges, after the strip search, after the lecture, after the V-notch was cut into each boot-heel and the boots were returned to him, doors slid apart and slid shut, and he walked naked past cells accompanied by a single CB-6 guard in khaki, through the shouted conversations of men made invisible to one another by barriers. Each green door they passed was solid rather than barred, with a small window up high and left of its center. Here and there an irrelevant face peered out.

His things were on his bunk. To see that they’d been carried here and now awaited him made him feel special; they didn’t provide this service for the usual run of prisoners. He inspected his new belongings for defects: a pair of yellow leather work shoes shoes — how had they guessed his size? was it on record? — two blue cotton work shirts, two pairs of jeans — way too large, and he was glad they didn’t know everything about him — four pairs of white underwear, four white teeshirts, eight white socks, two white handkerchiefs, two white towels. Handkerchiefs. When had they started giving handkerchiefs? he lay on his bunk with a teeshirt thrown over his groin and listened to the talk around him — talk of women, drugs, money, and cars. Bill Houston wasn’t one to keep silent in these areas, but he couldn’t find an opening when he couldn’t see anybody’s face. And it was different, too, that in the pauses between remarks, you couldn’t say whether the conversation was over or not. Somebody might be about to speak or fallen fast asleep, and you couldn’t tell. It was like talking on the telephone, but no one ever said “Hello,” or “Goodbye.”

He was where he’d been heading for a long time. He was unconscious before they turned the lights out.

The sun was just high enough to get over the east wall. The small exercise yard of CB-6, which had been primarily in shadow, now showed a bright slash of glare in its westernmost corner. There were only seven or eight men out, and a couple of guards. Bill Houston recognized H. C. Sandover across the court, bending over something on the ground in the company of two other men.

Because the guard nearest them seemed edgy, watching a clump of murderers in which any plot imaginable might now be taking shape, Bill Houston stayed where he was, in the sun. In his third day here, he was still getting used to the high-resolution planes and angles. Something about the black of shadow, the tan of desert buildings, and the brutal whiteness of the light made Bill Houston think of Spanish missions, of Mexico, of things that were definite and clear. There was that quality to this place — light and silence; things that lasted slowly.

The guard was nearer the three prisoners now, almost among them, and they were all sharing a joke.

Bill Houston went over, and H.C. squinted up at him, taking his attention from a large toad he was fooling with. His blond hair had grown shoulder-length and grey. He wore small round glasses tinted bright blue, and a red bandana tied pirate-style over his scalp, almost like a hat, though hats were forbidden. “Got us a news service going here, Billy!” he said.

The guard said, “That frog isn’t about to go nowhere, friends.”

“What do you think, Billy?” H.C. said. “He had to get in, hadn’t he? My whole philosophy of life is hanging on this. I believe in a reality behind circumstantial evidence. If he knows a way in, he knows a way out.” H.C. turned the toad over, still squatting, something like a toad himself, on the ground. “Circumstantial evidence is what got me here.” The toad was bigger than a man’s fist and must have weighed half a pound. “We can attach a message for your Mom, Billy,” H.C. said, standing up, and he was as tall as Bill Houston. Somehow the other two men had disappeared. The guard had taken up a stance some few feet away.