Denis Johnson - Angels

“Does it hurt?” she said.

“Does it hurt?” he said. “You can’t imagine.”

He blew on his fingers and then shook them as if trying to get a bug off his hand. Then he held his hand in his other hand and pretended he wasn’t crying. Jamie took wadded pieces of Kleenex from her purse and tried to straighten them out and administer them to the wounded fingers, but the wind blew them away and they went scudding along the sidewalk. “This kind of shit just keeps happening until you’re dead,” Bill Houston told her. They took a cab to the nearest Emergency Room. Bill Houston took up the middle of the seat, chuckling now and then in disbelief, staring at the injured hand in his lap as if to find any kind of hand there at all was unexpected and portentous. Jamie leaned up against the left-hand window, snuffling and crying and looking out at the shut avenues hard, as if only a little while ago she had owned them.

Every time she did the laundry she threw away some of the clothes. One of everything: less to wash, less to carry, less to know about. She threw four pairs of socks into the trash. One of her bras didn’t look right: she threw it away. “Listen, you want this suitcase?” she told a man standing there. He looked like a bum who was on vacation from destitution. But he didn’t want her suitcase.

She was looking at her children and hating them when a black woman opened up one of the big driers and took out her child, a little boy about three. “More, Mama?” he said. “More? More?”

The woman sat him on the floor and he staggered about. Jamie couldn’t believe it. The woman tried to fold her clothes, but her little boy grabbed hold of the hem of her skirt as if he would climb right up her. “More, Mama? Mama? Mama? More.” Annoyed, the woman picked him up with one arm and put him back into the drier. She slugged in a dime and shut the door and went back to folding clothes.

Miranda approached her mother, wide-eyed, looking ready to speak, pointing to the driers. “Don’t even think about it,” Jamie told her. “I’ll let you know when it gets that bad.”

Jamie lay flat on her back on the green table. If she stared at the white acoustic tiles of the ceiling and kind of let her eyes go loose, the pattern would shift and the tiles would seem to draw down on her until she was inside of them. There was nothing else to do right about now.

She was the only woman in this row of tables. In the entire room, which was the size of a ballroom, there were four women and nearly fifty men, each stretched out on a green table with a green sheet, getting a good look at the ceiling. Out in the large anteroom, a couple of hundred others looked at the television or studied the floor, waiting to be attached to plastic bags and drained of five dollars’ worth of blood plasma.

Jamie didn’t like any of it. If she let her eyes go too loose, checking out the tiles above, she started crying.

A man in a white coat was going down her row, jabbing everybody with a needle and getting their blood to shoot through a tube into a quart-sized plastic bag that sat on a scales beside each table. He came to Jamie, smiling like a leopard. She shut her eyes and thought about the beach. “First time?” the man said, and Jamie said nothing. “Give your fist a squeeze about once per second,” the man said.

“Ow! You nailing my arm to the bed, or what?”

“Relax,” the man said, doing things with tubes and tape. Jamie thought of the beach, the water filled with surfers in wetsuits in the wintertime, all of them waiting for a great wave to lift and carry them toward the deserted Santa Cruz amusement park. In a minute she let one eye sneak open and watched the blood fill her plastic bag as once per second she relaxed her fist and then closed it tightly. The blood was bright red at first, but it grew darker, nearly black, as the bag fattened. The scales tipped when the bag held a pint. She heard others around her telling the nurses, “I’m full,” “I’m full,” and when another nurse, a woman, came near, Jamie said, “I’m full.”

The nurse smelled of alcohol and talcum as she bent over Jamie’s bag of blood. She put the bag on a smaller scales that she carried with her and said, “Not quite full. Pump a little more.” Jamie didn’t see how one set of scales knew more than another. She opened and closed her fist several times. “All… right,” the nurse said, and Jamie quit. The nurse removed Jamie’s tourniquet and adjusted stoppers and tubes. “You’re going to feel the saline solution coming into your arm now,” the nurse said. “That’s just to keep the vein open.” She clamped and cut the tube that led into the blood, and carried the bag away to another room, where the plasma would be removed somehow.

Jamie thought her blood looked like good earth, rich and full and wet. “Used to take goldfish home from the carnival in plastic bags like that,” she told the departing nurse, who didn’t hear. She began shivering all over as the cool saline mixed into her system.

The man on her left said, “Fuck goldfish. Fuck ’em.” He was a bearded old guy and he was shaking like a machine.

The man on her right said, “Did you know this? Frogs fuck goldfish. That’s true. No fooling, now.”

“Hey,” Jamie said. “I can’t use that talk. Be a gentleman, how about.”

“How about if I whip it out and piss on you?” the man said. “How’s that for a gentleman?”

Jamie didn’t say anything. She decided to stab him with her nail file later on, on the way out.

The bearded old man on her left said, “Don’t pay no attention to these guys.” He turned toward her onto his side, careful not to disturb the needle in his vein. “Most of them,” he said, “are just wooden people.” His face seemed to be rotting: away on him. His eyes were shiny as a blind man’s.

Jamie said nothing, but the man wanted to talk “Most of the people you see are just wooden men,” he told her, his voice quaking as if he’d cry in a minute. “They’re dead people, walking around like the living.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said. “I noticed that myself.”

“You have?” The man was excited. “Then you’re one of the living.” He licked his mouth convulsively. “There’s not too many of us. We haven’t got much time. Are you filled in on the whole story?”

“What whole story? Hey. You’re bothering me.”

“I’m not bothering you. I’m saving your life. Your life is the truth. Listen: The world was made in 1914. Before 1914 there was nothing. Eleven people are in charge of the world. They make up the news and the history books, they control everything you think you know. They wrote the Bible and all the other books. Most people are wooden people, controlled by remote control. There’s only a few of us who are real, and we’re getting fooled. ”

“I can’t use this,” Jamie said. “I mean, I’m just here trying to get some lunch money.”

“The world is flat. It’s two hundred and fifty-six square miles in area, sixteen by sixteen. When you go someplace on a plane, what they do is, they just use their powers inside your mind to make you think like the time is passing To make you think you’re getting somewhere.”

The nurse came back wheeling a cart piled high with plastic sacks of blood. She read the label on Jamie’s and said, “Name please?”

“They do things inside your mind, ” the man whispered to Jamie.

“My name is Jamie Mays,” she told the nurse.

The nurse showed her the name on the label— Jamie Mays— and Jamie nodded, and the old man whispered, “They’re putting new memories into us right now.”

The nurse hung the blood up next to the saline solution and adjusted the tubes and stoppers, and one tube turned bright crimson as it fed Jamie’s own blood, minus plasma, back into her. “New memories is what’s inside that bag,” the man announced calmly.