bill houston (2)

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.

There was some daylight now. He looked through wire mesh, intended to withstand the heat of a blowtorch, at a world awash in a violet peace. He felt as if his feet found the shore. This is your eternal life. This is for always. This happens once.

Denis Johnson, Angels