Denis Johnson

The moon swells and its yellow darkens nearer the horizon and soon all the aluminum rooftops shall appear, orange and distinct beside the orange sun, while the diamond flares in its vacuum within. It is simple to be with the shovel, thoughtless, inhabited by this divorce, it is good the luminous machinery, silenced, waits, nice that the conveyor belts choked with sand convey nothing. When I return home to coffee at 7:45 the lithe young girls will be going to high school, pulling to their mouths stark cigarettes through Arizona’s sunlight. These last few months have been awful, and when around five the roosters alone on neighboring small farms begin to scream like humans my heart just lies down, a stone.

sometimes you know things: once at a birthday party a little girl looked at her new party gloves and said she liked me, making suddenly the light much brighter so that the very small hairs shone above her lip. i felt stuffed, like a swimming pool, with words, like i knew something that was in a great tangled knot. and when we sat down i saw there were tiny glistenings on her legs, too. i knew something for sure then. but it was too big, or like the outside too everywhere, or maybe hiding inside, behind the bicycles where i later kissed her, not using my tongue. it was too giant and thin to squirm into, and be so well inside of, or too well hidden to punch, and feel. a few days later on the asphalt playground i tackled her. she skinned her elbow, and i even punched her and felt her, felt how soft the hairs were. i thought that i would make a fine football-playing poet, but now i know it is better to be an old, breathing man wrapped in a great coat in the stands, who remains standing after each play, who knows something, who rotates in his place rasping over and over the thing he knows: “whydidnhe pass? the other end was wide open! the end was wide open! the end was wide open . . .”

the woman whose face has just finished breaking with a joy so infinite and heavy that it might be grief has won a car on a giveaway show, for her family, for an expanse of souls that washes from a million picture tubes onto the blank reaches of the air. meanwhile, the screams are packing the air to a hardness: in the studio the audience will no longer move, will be caught slowly, like ancient, staring mammals, figuring out the double-cross within the terrible progress of a glacier. here, i am suddenly towering with loneliness, repeating to this woman's only face,this time, again, i have not won.

The towels rot and disgust me on this damp peninsula where they invented mist and drug abuse and taught the light to fade, where my top-quality and rock-bottom heart cried because I'll never get to kiss your famous knees again in a room made vague by throwing a scarf over a lamp. Things get pretty radical in the dark: the sailboats on the inlet sail away; the provinces of actuality crawl on the sea; the dusk now tenderly ministers to the fallen parking lots— the sunset instananeous on the fenders, memory and peace . . . the grip of chaos . . .

When the tide lay under the clouds of an afternoon and gave them back to themselves oilier a little and filled with anonymous boats, I used to sit and drink at the very edge of it, where light passed through the liquids in the glasses and threw itself on the white drapes of the tables, resting there like clarity itself, you might think, right where you could put a hand to it. As drink gave way to drink, the slow unfathomable voices of luncheon made a window of ultraviolet light in the mind, through which one at last saw the skeleton of everything, stripped of any sense or consequence, freed of geography and absolutely devoid of charm; and in this originating brightness you might see somebody putting a napkin against his lips or placing a blazing credit card on a plastic tray and you'd know. You would know goddamn it. And never be able to say.

You might as well take a razor to your pecker as let a woman in your heart. First they do the wash and then they kill you. They flash their lights and teach your wallet to puke. They bring it to you folded—if you see her stepping between the coin laundry and your building over the slushy street and watch the clothing steam, you can’t wait to open up the door when she puts the stairs behind her and catch that warmth between you. It changes into a baby. “Here’s to the little shitter, the little linoleum lizard.” Once he peed on me when I was changing him—that one got a laugh from the characters I wasted all my chances with at Popeye’s establishment when it was over by the Wonderland. But it’s destroyed now and I understand one of those shopping malls that are like great monuments of blindness and folly stands there. And next door, the grimy restaurants of men with movies where they used to wear human faces, the sad people from space. But that was never me, because everything in those days depended on my work. “Listen, I’m going to work,” was all I could say, and drunk or sober I would put on the uniform of Texaco and wade into my life. I felt like a man of honor and substance, but the situation was dancing underneath me— once I walked into the living room at my sister’s and saw that the two of them, her and my sister, had turned sometime behind my back not exactly fatter, but heavy, or squalid, with cartoons moving across the television in front of them, surrounded by laundry, and a couple of Coca-Colas standing up next to the iron on the board. I stepped out into the yard of bricks and trash and watched the light light up the blood inside each leaf, and I asked myself, Now what is the rpm on this mother? Where do you turn it on? I think you understand how I felt. I’m not saying everything changed in the space of one second of seeing two women, but I did start dragging her into the clubs with me. I insisted she be sexy. I just wanted to live. And I did: some nights were so sensory I felt the starlight landing on my back and I believed I could set fire to things with my fingers— but the strategies of others broke my promise. At closing time once, she kept talking to a man when I was trying to catch her attention to leave. It was a Negro man, and I thought of black limousines and black masses and black hydrants filled with black water. When the lights came on you could see all kinds of intentions in the air. I thought I might smack her face, or spill a glass, but instead I opened him up with my red fishing knife and I took out his guts and I said, “Here they are, motherfucker, nigger, here they are.” There were people frozen around us. The lights had just come on. At that moment I saw her reading me and reading me from the end of the world where I saw her standing, and the way the sacred light played across her face all I can tell you is I had to be a diamond of ice to manage. Right down the middle from beginning to end my life pours into one ocean: into this prison with its empty ballfield and its empty preparations for Never Happen. If she ever comes to visit me, to hell with her, I won’t talk to her, and my son can entertain himself. God kill them both. I’m sorry for nothing. I’m just an alien from another planet. I am not happy. Disappointment lights its stupid fire in my heart, but two days a week I staff the Max Security laundry above the world on the seventh level, looking at two long roads out there that go to a couple of towns. Young girls accelerating through the intersection make me want to live forever, they make me think of the grand things, of wars and extremely white, quiet light that never dies. Sometimes I stand against the window for hours tuned to every station at once, so loaded on crystal meth I believe I’ll drift out of my body. Jesus Christ, your doors close and open, you touch the maniac drifters, the fireaters, I could say a million things about you and never get that silence out of time that happens when the blank muscle hangs between its beats—that is what I mean by darkness, the place where I kiss your mouth, where nothing bad has happened. I’m not anyone but I wish I could be told when you will come to save us. I have written several poems and several hymns, and one has been performed on the religious ultrahigh frequency station. And it goes like this.

Close by the jerkwater rancheros tonight, the round gloom longs, a window in the gloom, an attitude in the window, a pleading in the attitude, an unwitnessed ravishment in the pleading. A man stands there in the window thinking about how naked the water looks, thinking the water looks like emptiness, it looks like nothing. His heart aches to think how many gamblers have broke down on this highway? How many princesses of ice? I know I'm suburban, I've got a shitty whiskey in my hand, I work a job like eating a knife . . . Everyone's sperm all over my life, the sad waiting. Here's to the simple and endless desperate person lifting this glass. •  •  • If you imagine you're at the base of a cross coming out of your chest, that its vertical beam is a café and its crossbeam a bar of inebriates running along the rear of the café, that you're in a soft booth in the vertical beam of the cross facing a blonde over whose shoulder you happen to glance at the instant the TV above the bar broadcasts the unmistakable image of fate, the Vietnamese man getting a bullet shot into his ear, then you understand that I had to stop eating my squid stew. I started to cry. Susan tried to make some gesture, baby playing in front of the cobra's den, and it was enough: I was lodged in the moment, we were the treasure. •  •  • Sweet heat each breath of air, sugar of fire, and yet Dark said she was my date. She told me Don't be late. I guess it is our fate here in the mental hospital of passion and forgetting to scream inside the dream, put back the suicide, stand upon the corner starkly lit by the beam of memory from the face of a friend amid the glass of a toast, and wait that wait. •  •  • But I always come back to the corner of feelings and the sponge of vinegar. What is made with the hands rises up to seize us and press every word to its service so that I can never look at anything that hasn't been talked about a thousand times already, but I saw him screw his face up like a child in suspense of some mischief, and they blew his brains out. Your homework is more important than Cub Scouts. His head jerks. There's a blue-and-white menu by Susan's left hand. He collapses as if full of sand. You'd better settle down and eat. At the next table before his mother the boy in the Cub Scout uniform settles down and eats.

1 nothing to drink in the refrigerator but juice from the pickles come back long dead, or thin catsup. i feel i am old now, though surely i am young enough? i feel that i have had winters, too many heaped cold and dry as reptiles into my slack skin. i am not the kind to win and win. no i am not that kind, i can hear my wife yelling, “goddamnit, quit running over,” talking to the stove, yelling, “i mean it, just stop,” and i am old and 2 i wonder about everything: birds clamber south, your car kaputs in a blazing, dusty nowhere, things happen, and constantly you wish for your slight home, for your wife’s rusted voice slamming around the kitchen. so few of us wonder why we crowded, as strange, monstrous bodies, blindly into one another till the bed choked, and our range of impossible maneuvers was gone, but isn’t it because by dissolving like so much dust into the sheets we are crowding south, into the kitchen, into nowhere?

for years the scenes bustled through him as he dreamed he was alive. then he felt real, and slammed awake in the wet sheets screaming too fast, everything moves too fast, and the edges of things are gone.

The world will burst like an intestine in the sun, the dark turn to granite and the granite to a name, but there will always be somebody riding the bus through these intersections strewn with broken glass among speechless women beating their little ones, always a slow alphabet of rain speaking of drifting and perishing to the air, always these definite jails of light in the sky at the wedding of this clarity and this storm and a woman's turning—her languid flight of hair traveling through frame after frame of memory where the past turns, its face sparking like emery, to open its grace and incredible harm over my life, and I will never die.