Denis Johnson

The sounds of traffic die over the back lawn to occur again in the low distance. The voices, risen, of the neighborhood cannot maintain that pitch and fail briefly, start up again. Similarly my breathing rises and falls while I look out the window of apartment number three in this slum, hoping for rage, or sorrow. They don’t come to me anymore. How can I lament anything? It is all so proper, so much as it should be, now the nearing cumulus clouds, ominous, shift, they are like the curtains, billowy, veering at the apex of their intrusion on the room. If I am alive now, it is only to be in all this making all possible. I am glad to be finally a part of such machinery. I was after all not so fond of living, and there comes into me, when I see how little I liked being a man, a great joy. Look out our astounding clear windows before evening. It is almost as if the world were blue with some lubricant, it shines so.

Here in the electric dusk your naked lover tips the glass high and the ice cubes fall against her teeth. It's beautiful Susan, her hair sticky with gin, Our Lady of Wet Glass-Rings on the Album Cover, streaming with hatred in the heat as the record falls and the snake-band chords begin to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones, and such a last light—full of spheres and zones. August, you're just an erotic hallucination, just so much feverishly produced kazoo music, are you serious?—this large oven impersonating night, this exhaustion mutilated to resemble passion, the bogus moon of tenderness and magic you hold out to each prisoner like a cup of light?

O UR P ATRON OF F ALLING S HORT , W HO B ECAME A P RAYER I used to sneak into the movies without paying. I watched the stories but I failed to see the dark. I went to college and drank everything they gave me, and I never paid for any of that water on which I drifted as if by grace until after the drownings, when in the diamond light of seven-something A.M., as the spring was tearing me up in Cartajena, only praying on my knees before the magnifying ark of the Seventh St. Hotel could possibly save me, until falling on my face before the daughter of money while the world poured from the till brought the moment’s length against the moment’s height, and paying was what I was earning and eating and wearing.