Jamie decided to say Cunt Whore Suck one thousand times, starting now.
“Okay, Sister,” the nurse said. “Over to the Curie wing for you. And if you don’t get straight you’ll end up over in the Mathilda wing.”
“The Middle of Things?” Jamie said. “I’ll kill you!”
“Lane! Raphael!” The orderlies appeared, and the nurse told Jarnie, “You’re going downhill. You’re on that slickety-slide.”
“I put a spell of a curse on you!” Jamie said.
The nurse said something that sounded like Voodoo Dissolve, and as Lane and Raphael carried Jamie along by her arms, she shouted, “Did you call me Voodoo Dissolve? Did you? Did you?”
She moved from the Curie wing down to the Joan of Arc ward toward the end of July. All the walls were made of tile here, and the floors, too, and there were drains in the floors at intervals the length of sixty-seven tiles. Two of the drains were sixty-eight tiles apart. But she could never be sure. Nothing was ever definite, and once she was done counting anything, if she wanted to know how many, she had to count again. And although the drains stayed the same and the main hall was always eight hundred twenty tiles long, she had to be sure, she couldn’t be sure, she had to count again. She knew the lie was inside of a number. At the very center of one of these numbers, where it was supposed to be nothing, where it was supposed to be only a thought, there was a speck of dirt in your eye.
Whenever they brought her back from the place where they attached her to the wires, she saw the same thing on the wall as they passed by, a picture of herself, a message about her fate, beseeching her to prepare: a bright poster, a whirling orange child-style stick figure on a maroon background under the inscription: If You Catch Fire, DROP AND ROLL… In the middle of the night they raped the woman in the bed next to hers. Jamie’s ears roared at the inside of her head as she watched them pull the dividers eagerly around her. People hurried to and fro in the night, carrying pieces of the woman into the bathroom and eating them; in the morning there was nothing left of her.
Scarlet light and white heat awoke her. She was in flames.
The bed rocked on a momentary ocean, and then came to rest in the dark hospital ward. It was not her clothing, but her flesh itself that was burning. The light that came from her splashed shadows on the walls and floor that shifted and changed their minds about what they were, as she leaped out of the bed, stood still a minute at the foot of it, and then was torn up the middle by the agony of her personal heat. “I’m on fire!” She dropped to the floor and began rolling and whirling. Everybody in the room burst into laughter. There were red lights, and sirens. She couldn’t breathe because of the smoke that filled her lungs like water. It was water, they were trying to put her out — but she was burning. It wasn’t water. They were urinating on her profusely. They all had huge floppy shoes. They were clowns, they threw her in a monstrous tub with a drain.
Beneath her the tiles rippled and breathed. The pulpy surfaces of the walls ripened uncontrollably under her observation, inhaling endlessly like lungs preparing to blast her face with a calling or a message. Stripes and pyramids fell across the air in nearly comprehensible organization, writing that changed just before she understood it, and the room itself became a vast insinuation, swollen with filthy significance. She wanted to catch her breath and wail, but realized that her own lungs were already full. When she exhaled, the room seem relieved of its tension momentarily: she was crushed to remember that this very same action of ballooning and diminishing had been linked to all her other breaths. This terrible, terrible thing that was happening was her breathing.
The beat of things, their steady direction, had dissolved into nothing — this room wasn’t happening then, it isn’t happening now; maybe it’s a dream of what’s going to happen or what will happen never. The sound of her own voice injures her like a shock of electricity through her ears, but screaming herself to hoarse exhaustion is the only reprieve from breathing.
She looked up out of her voice and saw the angel.
He will have ears like a cartoon of organic growth. He is yellow with light but covered with mobile shadows, animated tattoos. His face kept changing. His voice will come from far off, like a train’s. His body is steady and beautiful and hairless, the wings white, incinerating, and pure, but the head changes rapidly — the head of an eagle, a goat, an insect, a mouse, a sheep with spiraling horns that turn and lengthen almost imperceptibly — and the entire message had no words. The entire message will be only the beat and direction of time. Yes is Now.
The angel who says, “It’s time.”
“Is it time?” she asked. “Does it hurt?” He will have the most beautiful face she has ever seen.
“Oh, babe.” The angel starts to cry. “You can’t imagine,” he said.
Bill Houston was in the State Hospital having his sanity questioned. From his high-security room he looked out over fifty meters of parched grass to a low wall of stone topped by hacked and complicated wrought-iron, and beyond that to the intersection of two streets, something he hadn’t expected to have so prolonged an opportunity of examining ever in his life again.
He stood at the wire-mesh window with his arms crossed before his chest. He wanted to tear himself away from the view and think a minute about something important — about Jamie, who was here in this hospital somewhere, and he wished her peace; or about how to convince these people he was crazy, incapable of telling right from wrong — but he really only wanted to look down at the ordinary street seized by the dusk.
Each time he swallowed, he gulped down half a speech. Things to be said roiled in his belly, washed by acid, but he was silenced by his own confusion as it compared to the stately transactions of the casual street. He understood that he would be executed and deceased, that everything he saw would outlast him. Solitary now for weeks, he’d taken to speaking directly to the heart of the moment, fearing everything, repetitively and increasingly convinced that he would soon break apart and be revealed, be destroyed, be born. He recognized it as an old feeling that came and went, but now it came and stayed. He lived alone and thought alone. The nature of murder made him alone inside himself; he’d never been so alone.
I did it, he said to the gas station outside. I’m ready, let’s go. I can handle the pain, but I can’t hack the fear.
He watched Twenty-Fourth Street all night, all the doings there, the repair and refueling of cheap cars, the going and staying of prostitutes and citizens and strangers, a trickle of types up from Van Buren, people, if he could only have seen them, with motels in their eyes and a willingness to take any kind of comfort out of the dark heat. And while he paid no attention to what he feared, it happened. Slowly the time had been transformed, in the usual way that the passing of an evening transforms a street corner and a place of simple commerce there, like this gas station. And then abruptly but very gently something happened, and it was Now. The moment broke apart and he saw its face.
It was the Unmade. It was the Father. It was This Moment.
Then it ended, but it couldn’t end. Now there was a world in which a man got into his blue Volkswagen, thanking the attendant as he did so, and closed its door solidly. It was a world in which one fluorescent lamp arched out over the service station, and another lay flat on the pool of water and lubricant beneath it. It was a world he might be lifted out of by a wind, but never by anything evil or thoughtless or without meaning. It was a world he could go to the gas chamber in, and die forever and never die.