Jesus' Son

by Denis Johnson

I was certain I was here in this world because I couldn’t tolerate any other place.

I remember loneliness crushing first my lungs, then my heart, then my balls.

As nearly as I could tell, I’d wandered into some sort of dream that Wayne was having about his wife, and his house. But I didn’t say anything more about it.

He peeked into the trauma room and saw the situation: the clerk—that is, me—standing next to the orderly, Georgie, both of us on drugs, looking down at a patient with a knife sticking up out of his face.

“No, it’s not a snake,” Georgie said. “It’s a rabbit with babies inside it.”

This wasn’t about that. It wasn’t what the lawyers did. It wasn’t what the doctors did, it wasn’t what the woman did. It was what the mother and father did together.

It was his foreignness, inability to make himself accepted, essential loserness, that made him look away.

She seemed to be thinking about something far away, waiting patiently for somebody to destroy her.

They made God look like a senseless maniac.

But I was afraid to make love to her without the conversations and laughter from that false universe playing in our ears, because I didn’t want to get to know her very well, and didn’t want, to be bridging any silences with our eyes.

But I felt about the circular hallway of Beverly Home as about the place where, between our lives on this earth, we go back to mingle with other souls waiting to be born.

I had the same flutter in my heart that I got when I happened to stroll past a car parked off by itself somewhere, with a guitar or a suede jacket on the front seat, and I’d think: But anybody could steal this.

People just like us, but unluckier.

I was full of a sweet pity for them as we lay in the sunny little room, sad that they would never live again, drunk with sadness, I couldn’t get enough of it.