Denis Johnson - Angels

Tears spilled from Stevie’s red eyes. “Well I just want to smell him. I can’t smell his fuckin’ soul.”

She cried for a minute while they all stood there waiting for her to stop. “I’m talking about James,” she told them.

“I know,” Mrs Houston said. “But at least he ain’t going up for the capital punishment. You’ll see him soon as he gets well. And you’ll smell him if you really want to.” She looked down at Miranda, who was tugging on her hand and saying, Mizz Houston, Mizz Houston? “We’re almost at the plane,” she told the child. “What do you want?”

“Does it say in the papers that my mother is dead?” Miranda asked.

The three women were silent. Jeanine finally said, “What?”

“Does it tell about that she died?” Miranda repeated.

“No, honey.” Jeanine was at a loss. “No — your Mom’s not dead. She’s just rest ing.”

“Resting means when you’re dead,” Miranda informed her.

“She’s resting in a hospital to get well, she’s not resting like she’s dead, or anything.”

Miranda bunched her new dress up between her legs. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

Jeanine took her into the bathroom just this side of the security area. While she waited for Miranda, she looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was starting to grow long again, and she’d just had it permed. Her dress was white on white. She wore red lipstick. Knowing a killer had taught her that she must live.

“Stevie?” Miranda called, her voice echoing out of the stall.

“I’m not Stevie, honey. I’m Jeanine.”

“Oh,” Miranda said. Then she said, “Jeanine?”

“What is it?”

“Um…” The moment seemed to take place under water. “I’m almost done, Jeanine.”

“Good,” Jeanine said.

When Miranda was ready to leave, Jeanine turned on a faucet and insisted she wash her hands. Standing on tiptoe, Miranda thrust the very tips of her fingers momentarily beneath the rush of water, then stood under the electric blower letting the hot air wash over her face.

The blower ceased, and she stood there. She was wearing a white dress almost exactly like Jeanine’s, and they were alone in the sudden tiled silence of an empty public place. She held out her arms to Jeanine. “Will you lift me up into the meer?”

For a beat she didn’t understand.

And then she understood, and lifted the child up before the wide glass. Above the row of identical porcelain sinks that seemed to diminish into a haze of tiles, Miranda saw herself. She studied herself carefully in the mirror, turning her face this way and that within its indefatigable duplication of everything. “That’s not me,” she told Jeanine.

She placed her hand on the white ruffles of her own breast. “This is me.”

Brian, the Death House three-to-eleven guard, wore the usual guard’s uniform of starched khaki. But as soon as Brian, Bill Houston, and the guards transferring the prisoner had entered the small red brick building that housed the condemned in their last two weeks of life, Brian took off his shirt and never wore it again except when leaving the Death House. He kept his fatigue-style cap on his head at all times, however, and also his mirrored Air Force sunglasses, which Bill Houston knew from experience were a hindrance to clear vision and could only be a punk affectation. Plainly, for Brian, the way he looked was the beginning of the way he wanted to be. He was only twenty-three or twenty-four.

“Well,” Bill Houston said, standing in the doorway of his new home with the three guards, “it ain’t exactly a dungeon or anything.”

“No,” Brian said. He was a serious man and a nervous one. “It’s dry in here.”

Bill Houston couldn’t think why the guard would speak of dryness, unless he meant to reassure him about a few spots of water here and there on the concrete floor, apparently remaining after a hosing down. On his right, through a doorway without a door, was the Waiting Room, consisting of two small cells side by side. To his left was a wide glass window through which he saw a small room like a radio station’s sound-booth. This was the room for the witnesses.

Directly before him was the gas chamber, looking like nothing so much as a shabby vehicle of transport. Its heavy air-lock door stood open wide, and he regarded with a dizzy incredulity the bulky metal chair with its leather straps, while Brian whistled and removed his khaki shirt, enjoying this.

“Have a seat,” Brian said. “Make yourself at home.”

Bill Houston tried to laugh. But he failed.

“No — seriously. Nobody would care. You want to try it on?”

Bill Houston saw that he made this offer not simply because it was in his power to make it, but because he really believed it might be accepted.

A group of men from the yard had gathered near the entrance — men who’d been going to the clinic to sell blood plasma under the supervision of a tall guard who now stood among them hatless under the hot sun, looking almost like their prisoner. Brian talked to them with true friendliness: “Anybody want to go for a little ride today?”

The men laughed — a burst of sound like the outcry of startled game birds. It carried out over the field and echoed off the walls that dwarfed them.

Through Bill Houston there raced an impulse, which he felt was not his alone, to say all right, sure, yes. But he said nothing. Swiftly on the heels of curiosity came the habitual yardbird fear and trembling, the knowledge that these people could get away with murder and the suspicion that they would like to try. It was the wholesale dream of these prisoners that they would be gassed to death while trapped in their cells. In their wild imaginings the borders of their confinement talked to them, and they were waiting for whatever would come, waiting for another name, waiting for giant times, waiting for the Search of Destruction. He knew a rush in his veins — he felt their need baked into these walls — and he wanted to make himself a sacrifice and his death a payment for something more than his stupid mistakes. If Brian could promise him he’d make the crucial difference for somebody, he would walk through the door and be slaughtered here and now.

He came within a yard of the opening and looked around inside the chamber. The seat of the chair rested on a cast-iron case perforated with holes to permit the escape of gas. Two straight two-inch pipes ran from directly beneath the witnesses’ window and into the base of perforated metal. He assumed these pipes fed the pellets of cyanide into their bath of acid beneath the chair. The thick leather straps for the arms and legs were plainly darkened by the sweat of those who had preceded him here.

He was wordless, and when it became obvious that he had nothing to report to them of what it was like to stand here condemned, the other prisoners moved on toward the clinic.

The guards waited patiently for Bill Houston, and Bill Houston stood waiting patiently to be terrified by the means of his death, which was after all just a little room like a diving bell, or a cheap amusement park submarine ride, with a large wheel on its door for screwing it tightly shut. He just felt obligated to experience more than mild interest. But the sight failed to move him until he saw the stethoscope — one with an unusually long tube — built into the door. He comprehended that the shiny flat end of this listening device would be attached to his chest after he was strapped in, and it just didn’t seem fair to him. It meant he wouldn’t be allowed to wear a shirt, he’d be half naked before strangers — and now it came over him vividly that his death would be attended, observed, and monitored by people who couldn’t appreciate how much he wanted to live. They would probably think, because he offered no resistance, that all of this was all right with him. But it wasn’t. They just didn’t know him. They were strangers.