Angels

5

On the first day Bill Houston stayed on his back in the lower bunk and failed to know whether he was awake or sleeping. He became involved in his mind with red squares and triangles

On the second day he woke to a curious sensation and found that his left hand, trailing over the edge of his bunk, was adrift in water. Christ Jesus save me. They’re doing it to us. We’ll all be drowned.

The bars, tinted a pale institutional green, might not have been there at all. The spaces between them might have been colorless panels affixed to green air.

He gripped the upper bunk’s edge and hoisted upright. The queries and exclamations from neighboring cells gave him to understand there was trouble with the building’s pipes. He removed his socks — his shoes had been taken from him, and his shirt — and waded two steps through a three-inch tide to the combination toilet-and-sink. As he approached the wall there, and the mirror — a circle of polished metal welded above the sink at the end of his cell — he knew he travelled the last small distance of a journey he’d undertaken to complete a very long time ago. And now it was finished. And now another was beginning.

He was alone here, one of the special captives isolated because they were believed capable of great violence. His head ached from the back of the neck through the cranium and down the bridge of his nose: in the mirror he saw that both his eyes had been blackened. Bruises circled his belly below the ribs. More than anything at this juncture, more than innocence, liberty, or another chance, he wished for a drink of Seagram’s Seven and Seven-Up. Then he thought of drinking it with friendly strangers amid a place of calm: a barroom of polished oaken tables and imitation leather stools. The chest-fever of his need broke in his throat; before he could tell if he was crying tears, he turned on the faucet and splashed his face.

Crouching over the water, he looked before him at rivets studding the metal wall, their green heads flaking to bare primer the color of cherries. The sink was spilling over. Dizziness circled his vision, and he leaned on the basin and rested his knee on the metal toilet that jutted left from the same clogged pipe that served the sink.

The noise of heavy shoes and the cries of prisoners, the screech of buckets on the catwalk, the whanging of steel gates, the slosh of water against bulkheads — men swearing and ruining mops against iron bars — all of this was so like the atmosphere of a large seagoing vessel that the two experiences, penal and naval, blended for a moment in Bill Houston’s perception and he tried to cling to the idea that he might only be assigned temporarily below decks.

In Pearl Harbor he’d wandered once through a destroyer in drydock — the choked and baking Somerville, out of San Diego — and loose inside it, he’d been deeply alienated from its haunted stationary silence, its failure to live by moving. That afternoon he’d been a trespasser in a forbidden sepulchre, a sailor on a ship on dry land, helpless to travel or float or do anything but walk away on two legs, leaving whatever errand had brought him to that place unaccomplished. And now he felt the same, but he couldn’t depart. They had him this time. After this time there would be no other

When the guards came to make him presentable and bring him out temporarily among free people, he refused the razor they offered. “It’s your face,” the fat guard said, and handed him a shirt, and the other fat guard gave him back his boots. They were both fat. They flanked him enormously as the three of them proceeded along the gauntlet of cages to the control unit of A-wing of the Maricopa County Jail’s main building. The prisoners they passed were silent, casting their gazes to the right or left of Bill Houston, but all attended his passage with a frozen zeal that they could hardly disguise and that he had never witnessed in any men anywhere. “I stepped in some shit this time, didn’t I?” he told the guards. He was perspiring in the mechanically refrigerated air, and he wanted them to fool around a little, the way guards always fooled around. But they were alarmed, too, by the uniform ice-quiet of men who normally reacted with vocal interest and derision to their comings and goings, and so they kept quiet themselves.

They took him handcuffed through doors and corridors into a pre-war section of the building which smelled of fresh paint, and then down a hallway strewn with dropcloths and stepladders. The painters working there said hello and chatted with the guards as they passed. It eased Bill Houston’s mind to know that in some circles he remained anonymous. When they ushered him into a spacious conference room still in the midst of its remodeling, where two overhead fans revolved wearily in the ceiling and a workman’s radio played softly, he looked at his lawyer for the first time. It was the same lawyer Bill Houston had always been saddled with — about five-six, round glasses and mustache, western string tie, a public defender looking twelve or thirteen and clutching a plastic briefcase with probably nothing inside of it. Bill Houston sat down across the table from him and said, “I can’t get up no confidence in you.”

“If you could afford fancy counsel, you wouldn’t be here,” the lawyer said. “I’m assuming that. I’m assuming you’re a person who doesn’t like to kill people. I’m assuming you wanted money and that you didn’t want blood. I’m assuming you’re not homicidal.”

“I’m not,” Bill Houston said. “We didn’t mean it.”

“That’s what we’re going to convince the jury of. We’re going to convince them you’re stupid and tragic, but basically a nice guy.”

“How’s my brother?”

“Which one?”

“There ain’t but one involved here. James.”

“James is alive. He may need more surgery later. Burris is now involved. He’s in custody, too, over in the Annex, and so is a man named Dwight David Snow. Nobody wanted to talk to me, but my guess is probably James gave them up.”

“No way.” Bill Houston shut his jaw tightly against a sudden feeling he might cry in front of his lawyer.

“He was hurt pretty badly, William.”

“Can we cop a plea or something? What’s your name?”

The lawyer looked tired. “I’m Samuel Fredericks, known to everyone as Fred. Or, actually,” he admitted, “as Freddy.” He looked tired even of his name. “The prosecution is offering you this deal: You agree to plead guilty to first-degree murder, and they’ll agree to do everything they can to execute you The Assistant DA says it’s almost like going free.”

“Shit,” Bill Houston said. “Does it hurt?”

“What?”

“Does it hurt. The gas.” Bill Houston laid his head down on his arms and felt a misery descending that made him want to puke. “If it don’t hurt, I’ll do it.” With a tentative tongue he tasted the metal of the conference table. To hear himself say “the gas” was wrenching. He was living somebody else’s life, some murderer’s. “Does it hurt?”

“You can’t imagine,” Fred said.

Across the run was some fellow who stayed in his cell’s top bunk — though nobody occupied the lower one — with his right arm flung across his eyes and the fingers of the left examining, one by one and continually until he slept, the rivets in the ceiling above his face. Bill Houston spent a great amount of his own time leaning against the bars of his cell, his own arms hanging out into the catwalk area as though he breathed through them the air of relative freedom; and he watched this man. He didn’t want to lie down because on his back he was defenseless against his thoughts — the fear that he would confront a door opening onto a gallery of faces, the loved ones of the man he had killed. That he would walk amid a crowd of officials, normal people who knew how to live their lives. He would be made to look on the dead face of his victim. He had a feeling he was going to find out something terrible about himself, something even worse than that he was a murderer, something so essentially true as to be completely unbelievable. He dreamed of witnesses. The twisted relatives behind the glass — the more they tormented him, the more vividly they themselves were agonized, and he could never pay anybody the price. It wasn’t the punishment that hurt — it was the punishment’s failure to be enough. These visions and comprehensions were no less present when he stood embracing the vertical bars of his cell, but they seemed less actual then, less likely to happen, as if by butting up against what kept him from walking freely in the world, he came to know what kept him safe from the future.

The motionlessness of his defeated neighbor across the run drove Bill Houston to activity. He walked the cell and sometimes exploded into grunting bouts of calisthenics that left him exhausted and temporarily serene. He petitioned for a pen and pad, and when his thoughts turned to Jamie he let them burn a message — three or four words a day, he was no scholar — into the page:

Seperation is painfull. I still think of you everyday. There was a flood here it was on the 2nd day after they got me — Later everybody found out it was 2 cooks — they did it on purpose & screwed up the drains in the kitchen — Hey I hope you get a chance to tell everybody Im sorry. This is beng delivered by Freddy my lawyer. Im glad James didn’t die.

I have feelings for you you know its hard to say — Tell Burris no hard feelings, it could of been anybody.

Seperation is painfull. But who knows of hopes of tomorrow? Maybe we’ll meet again some sunny day Jamey.

Love

Wm Houston Jr

Tell Burris hell still be my brother

“I’ve been informed that, contrary to your request, you cannot be moved any closer to the television on A-wing,” Fredericks told him. “The TV is for men serving sentences. You haven’t been classified, you’re violent, etcetera etcetera. No TV.”

“Okay,” Bill Houston said. “Don’t make no never-mind to me. In the joint I’ll get enough TV to where it makes me sick.”

Fredericks held Bill Houston’s communication in the palm of his hand. “I’ll try and get this delivered. But I think you should know Jamie’s in the hospital.”

“What happened? She all right, or what?” Fredericks had brought him Camels, and he lit one casually. He didn’t want his true concerns identified by these people.

“She’s in the hospital,” Fredericks said. “I don’t know the details. She had a nervous breakdown of some kind.”

“Got a little frazzled, hey?”

Fredericks looked at him curiously until Houston said, “What about the kids?”

“I don’t know about the kids. I didn’t know there were any kids. I presume any kids would be taken care of.”

“Okay. Anyway,” he said, shoving the ashtray across the table toward Fredericks. “How’s James?” But Fredericks didn’t smoke.

“James is recuperating nicely. He’s doing just fine. And I think we’re going to get your trials separated after all, because Dwight Snow’s got some slick counsel with pull. He’s off on his own.”

“Off on his own?”

“He’s getting a change of venue. Separate trial in another county. He’s in a good position — no record, and he was in possession of an unfired weapon.”

“Bastard held off till I had to go in,” Bill Houston said.

“I did not hear you say that.”

“I got nothing to hide.” One he’d learned from Jamie.

“Anyway, James’s gun had been fired, but he claims he just hadn’t cleaned it and just hadn’t loaded it fully.”

“That’s true. I don’t remember him firing no rounds.”

“They may try you together, but they’re beginning to see how it could get messy. And Burris I can definitely separate — his position is already more clearly defined than Dwight Snow’s.”

Bill Houston said, “I don’t understand any of this. Just bring me comic books and cigarets. I give up.”

“Well, I’m talking strategy. And that strategy is designed to keep you alive. I wanted you all tried separately, but I don’t know now. We may want you and James to go in together. I really can’t pretend to have anything figured out till I get the prosecution to loosen up a little. The thing is,” he said, and stopped Bill Houston’s hand from fidgeting, covering it with his own, “everybody’s being very weird over at the DA’s. I’m just starting to suspect that whatever they want, our policy should be to want the opposite. No cooperation.”

Bill Houston stripped the paper from his cigaret butt. Both men observed the small movements of his thick fingers raptly, until he’d added its tobacco to the contents of his county-issued plastic bag of makings and dusted the last few grains from his fingertips. “Couldn’t you try again? I mean, you know, to get them to move me down closer to where the TV is at?”

Fredericks swept the ashtray and his briefcase from the table with a deft violent movement of his arm; the two guards — the same two who went everywhere with Houston outside his cell — came to attention, but did not draw near.

The expression on the lawyer’s face said nothing about how he might be feeling. His tone of voice was identical to the tone he always took with the defendant. “You’re miserable, William. You’re the complete twenty-five cent desert crook. You’re without any sense of personal responsibility, even for your own life. But I’m going to save your ass.”

“Hey, this intimidation shit — you don’t scare me.”

“That’s good,” the lawyer said, “because when your lungs turn red, I wouldn’t want you to be scared. I wouldn’t want you to be scared when your soul goes up the pipe.”

Bill Houston sat with his feet out and crossed, staring at his boots, and said it one more time out of a thousand. In his cell he said it silently to the walls, and in his sleep he cried it out loud and woke the others in neighboring chambers: “I killed him.”

She was greatly aware of the wide thirsty grounds of the place surrounding these slow interiors, but nothing of that outer world was available to the sight of inmates because the windows were so high. Their ties cast crisscross shadows along the floor this morning, so that as Jamie entered carrying newly issued toilet articles, her feet, in disposable paper slippers, passed through quadrangles of light.

Along opposite sides of the ward ran two rows of eight beds each, most wearing comfortable green or red plaid bedspreads. Lamp fixtures encased in wire mesh disrupted the walls of pale yellow, which were bare except for a small sign near the door that said:

TODAY IS

tues june 4

YOUR DAY

A couple of elderly women sat on a bed playing with cards and a board full of pegs, and another old woman with a leathery face walked up and down between the rows. These and the few others present wore wrinkled cotton gowns identical to Jamie’s. On the bare mattress of the bed the nurse pointed her to, there were two women seated side by side like passengers. They looked all right to Jamie, but they were smaller than your regular women, and one of them had a face caked white with make-up and made horrible by a thick smear of crimson lipstick — she looked like a voodoo doll — and as Jamie approached, the other one began making sounds no human should have been capable of. The doll-lady nodded and said, “She means the President.” The other kept making awful noises and the doll-lady said, “Too fast, Allie — slow down!” To Jamie she said, “The Department of Money, she means.”

Now Jamie saw that the woman held to the folds of skin around her throat one of those mechanical buzz-boxes for people without a voice. The matter being discussed excited her tremendously, and she gestured even with the hand that held the box, waving it around unawares so that it spewed noise inconsequentially. Her friend said, “That’s The Times We Live In. The Times We Live In, she’s saying.”

“Excuse me,” Jamie offered, “you got your fat ass on my bed.”

The nurse came out of the bath-and-shower room at the end of the row of beds, carrying a stack of bedding for Jamie. “Alice, is this your bed? Is this Bridget’s bed? Bridget — is this your bed?”

Alice placed the voice-box against her throat and said, “Fungyoo.”

“Alice,” the nurse said. She seemed about to smile.

“Zlud.”

“She means Slut,” her companion said to Jamie.

“Off the bed, please.” Throwing the bedding down beside them on the mattress, the nurse made shooing motions with her two hands.

The women got up simultaneously. “Nurses do it with all the doctors,” the doll-faced woman explained to Jamie.

“Nuns do it with priests,” Jamie agreed.

The two went one direction, and the nurse went the other, but she paused at the door two beds away. “You can have all the milk you want.”

“I what?”

“On account of your stomach, hon. Doctor Wrigley put it on the orders.”

She sat on the bed and put the toes of one foot on the instep of the other.

“Do you want some milk?”

“Sure — what are you so hot about this milk for? Something in it?”

“Okay, hon,” the nurse said. “We’ll talk about it later.”

She lay crossways on the bed, pillowing her head on the folded bedding and putting her feet out flat on the floor. An odor of honeysuckle came vividly to her nostrils, floating on the warm dark air of Wheeling, and a gust of the steel mills’ breath. Her entire childhood lay immediately outside this place of walls, if she could only get to it by changing into a thing of hours — because she was understanding things now, understanding about time, about its directions and how to change the way of it, and about the many things that were happening moment by moment unbeknownst to the forest of blind dead human shapes, the forest of wooden men—

“What are you supposed to be?”

Jamie sat up. On the edge of the adjacent bed sat a blond and emaciated woman no older than herself.

“We’re on the Marnie Eisenhower ward,” the woman told her. She wore the standard washed-grey cotton gown, but she’d covered the sleeves, and the front of it, with secret writing.

“I’m under observation,” Jamie said. But an understanding of what this meant temporarily eluded her. She rested her elbows on her knees, her head and hair drooping forward. The design of the floor was six-by-six inch square grey patches with a little copper crown in the dead center of each one.

The woman said nothing. She scratched herself between her legs with the obliviousness of a child. She was thinly beautiful, but her teeth were as yellow as her hair, and tiny blue veins showed around her temples. She appeared in need of fixing. She looked broken and thrown away. Jamie said. “So what’s your story? I mean, what are you supposed to be here for?”

“Me?” the woman said. “I’m nuts.” She began laughing; laughter that sounded like: ratatatata. Jamie liked her, but at the same time she wanted to slap the woman’s face.

She woke from a Thorazine unconsciousness because someone was yelling, “Sergeant!” The ceiling was far away, then inches above her face, and then properly positioned. “Sergeant!” She raised up in bed. It was daytime. The large woman with her hair all chopped off, who always wore a man’s blue boxer shorts instead of a gown, was talking to the nurse. Her face was crimson, her eyes pink. Two male orderlies in white stood a yard back, respectfully, at her either side. “I want to see the Sergeant!” the woman insisted. “Do you know where we are?” the nurse said. “The Sergeant’s not here. There isn’t any Sergeant here.” All the patients were quiet and shiny-eyed, watching this exchange. The big woman put her hands on her hips and began to huff uncontrollably, working her jaw as if trying desperately to dislodge something from her throat. One of the orderlies took her in a hammerlock from behind, and the woman lifted him clear off the floor, his legs dangling like a child’s. The other man wrapped his arms around the two of them, and they all three waltzed monstrously toward the Quiet Room, a chamber made completely of tiny tiles with a drain in the center of its floor.

The bed on her left was empty and silver in the darkness, its bedspread thrown back. Jamie was the only one awake to hear the cries. The old woman who slept there next to her was trudging heavily up and down the aisle between the two rows of beds, and at the far end she was silhouetted against the light from the bathroom, a bent figure of helplessness with her hair in a bun. Several afterimages trailed her in Jamie’s sight, and Jamie shook her head violently but they wouldn’t clear away. The old woman seemed to be carrying something close to her belly. “I lost my Catherine! I lost my Catherine,” she cried in a voice as unstopped and mournfully low as a foghorn’s. Jamie had to shut her eyes a minute, because the bathroom light made them burn. When she came awake again, there were curtains full of light drawn around the next bed, and moving human shapes silhouetted on the curtains. They muttered and conspired in there below the level of her hearing — a black form hurriedly approaching and entering said, “We’ve got to catheterize her,” and the other shapes said softly, “Catheterize, catheterize, catheterize.” Jamie began to shake uncontrollably. She couldn’t find her voice to scream. She turned to the right, as if to summon help from the lumps of unconscious and insane people in their beds. When she tried to blink the handfuls of warm sand from her vision, everything changed and it was morning. The old woman was sitting up in the next bed, looking at the pages of a magazine.

“Volleyball, you guys,” Nurse Helen said.

“Volleyball?” Jamie said, looking at Sally for confirmation.

Sally appeared too starved and weak for games. She lay back on her bed and pulled a fall of her blond hair over her blue-veined face, going into some kind of trance. Volleyball.

“Raphael!” Nurse Helen sang.

“Do I have to go and play volleyball?” Jamie asked her. Last night, until dawn, screams had come out of the tiled Quiet Room. She couldn’t put these screams together in her mind with volleyball.

“Doctor Wrigley doesn’t have you down for sports,” Helen said, and looked up at Raphael, the stocky Chicano orderly, who was just approaching. “She doesn’t like volleyball,” Nurse Helen said, gesturing at Sally on the bed. Together they took Sally — Raphael by the feet, Nurse Helen by the hands — and carried her like a sack from the ward. Sally began laughing, and they did, too.

In a minute the nurse was back, breathing hard. “Hey,” Jamie said, “are we supposed to be crazy, or what? How come people have to play volleyball when they’re supposed to be crazy?”

“Physical activity’s important, Jamie. And I don’t like the word crazy. You’re sick people trying to get well. This is a hospital, right?”

Jamie could feel the back of her neck getting tight again. She knew it was a hospital, for God’s sake.

“I think you should play volleyball, too. I’ll talk to the doctor about it Monday when he comes in.”

Jamie felt angry, because she didn’t want them to figure out that she wanted to play volleyball. She was flustered. She wanted to be out there right now. Why didn’t the nurse just tell her to play volleyball right now?

“Matter of fact,” Nurse Helen said, “if you want to, why don’t you go out there now? Always room for one more.”

“Are you shitting me?” Jamie cried. “Who told you to say that?” She was all pins and needles. She took hold of her own head with both hands. “They’re reading me! What did you do to me?” The enormity of her situation pressed in against her. She didn’t want to face it.

She stood on the bed, balancing with difficulty there, and pointed a finger at Nurse Helen. She wanted to explain something important, but the only word she could think of was, “Ya! Ya! Ya! Ya!”

Raphael came in. Some boy in a doctor’s smock came in. She was completely enraged that they thought it necessary to hold her down and give her a shot. Nerves popped in her skull, voices chanted incomprehensibly, and the event accelerated into a white smear.

The doctor sat on her bed with his legs crossed one over the other — a new doctor, one she hadn’t met before. “Just what are we talking about here?” she said.

“Well,” the doctor said, “essentially we’re talking about anything you want to talk about. Anything that concerns you, anything that bothers you right now. Do you want a cup of coffee?”

“Coffee?” she said. “Why are you trying to give me coffee? I’m coughing enough as it is. I have tuberculosis,” she told him, “that’s why I lost all this weight.”

“Okay then, let me ask you a few questions. Can you tell me the day and the date, Jamie?”

“It’s the fifteenth of whenever, nineteen hundred and fuck-all. You think I don’t see through that one?”

“Maybe you see through it, but I’m not trying to fool you. The date is right on the wall.” He pointed at a sign on the wall that said:

TODAY IS

thurs june 27

YOUR DAY

“My only reason for asking is to find out if you take an interest in what day it is. Can you tell me where we are today, Jamie?”

“We’re in the goddamn looney bin.”

“Can you tell me the name of the hospital?”

“Arizona State Hospital.”

“Great. Very good. Now — please don’t object to my asking you these very obvious questions, okay? Just trying to get our bearings. So how about telling me what wing of the hospital we’re in right now?”

“Wing? You mean, like of a bird? Of a dove? ‘The Wings of a Dove?’”

“No, that’s not quite what I mean. I’m asking you to tell me the name of this part of the hospital. All the parts are named after famous people.”

“The parts?” For a second — just a tick — she saw something breaking out of the doctor’s face. “I don’t know who you are, Mister,” she said, “but if you don’t get out of here you’re finished.” A weasel or something.

“I’m knocked up, is what I think,” Jamie kept telling them. Her stomach churned continually, and it was a rare moment when she came around to the true state of things long enough to appreciate that it was fear, a pure utter terror created by her thoughts, that took hold of her innards and squeezed until she was nauseated. “You’ve got to get yourself organized on a daily basis,” the nurse told her in confidential tones. “Well, fuck you,” Jamie said. She was sorry to talk this way, but it was necessary. You only had to listen to the news to see that the world was splitting apart. She had no idea what was going to break out of the middle of things when the time was finally at hand.

The temperature in the lock-up was uniform. Only by watching those who came and went could he believe the desert summer’s heat had arrived. It blazed in the faces of new arrivals and melted from the pores of the guards as they greeted him at the start of each shift — always the first of their duties, checking the prize defendant at the end of the cellblock. And as the temperature rose out in the world, Bill Houston felt the jaws of his captivity crushing him, and found reason, in the news that Fredericks brought him twice weekly, to count himself among the lost.

“We have a grave situation here,” the lawyer said. “I was misinformed earlier, and I misinformed you. This Crowell — the man who was killed in the hold-up — they’re calling him a cop. He wasn’t a cop. He was retired. But they’re just not looking at that fact. They want to get technical.

“I won’t sit here and quote every law for you, but I’ll get you Xeroxes of every statute they’re charging you under, and you can look at them, along with any other statute that applies, including death penalty statutes, William, because that’s what we’re looking at. These bastards want you. I’m not going to pretend they don’t want you, because they do.” He watched Bill Houston as if Houston might now offer some sign that none of it was true.

The defendant made a gesture of invitation with his hands: play on.

“What I’m saying is we’ve got a nice new judicially acceptable, constitutional, unbeatable death penalty statute, and there’s this huge groundswell all of a sudden — but I mean everybody, all the powers-that-be — I’m telling you they want to off the first killer who comes down the road, without any delays — that’s you, William — and they also intend to gas the oldest remaining denizen of Death Row out there in Florence, who happens to be Richard Clay Wilson, the child-murderer. I really can’t believe that they really believe they can bring all this about. But they’re like kids. They’ve got this new law and now somebody’s got to die.”

By June’s end it was clear that Burris, James, and Bill would all be tried — separately — according to the original schedule. Bill Houston had been identified unanimously in a line-up. And now the lawyer was helpless and nervous most of the time. Houston knew lawyers; he knew when a lawyer had lost. None of their motions for delay was granted. There was a fearsome, inexorable gist to the decisions. Always the Ninth Circuit ruled against Fredericks, his motions to quash evidence, to have witnesses impeached or testimony thrown out. Houston’s trial approached unimpeded, as if no defense whatever had been mounted against it. “We’re going to send you over to have your head checked,” Fredericks told his client. “But I guarantee you right now, they’re going to certify you sane.”

The new man across the catwalk, an Italian sort of guy who’d beaten his father-in-law mercilessly and broken a great many of his bones, asked Bill Houston how it was going. Bill told him the truth: “I’m going up the pipe.”

“Let’s walk Irene down to the Outpatient Area for her appointment,” the nurse would say — this nurse or that nurse, she really didn’t care which nurse.

“Let’s walk over to the commissary,” the nurse would say. “We can’t have you lying on that bed all day, thinking those thoughts of yours.”

“Do you know where you are?” the nurse would say. “It’s July Fourth. This is the Helen Keller ward.”

She was right about lying on the bed. When Jamie was up and doing, things were okay, but when she lay down and considered the way of the world, her picture of life came up shining impossibly, with a molten border around it, and she knew that things were not at all as they had seemed, that it wasn’t July Fourth, that the boiling slimy whores had a grip on the march of time and that everything was happening over and over. She heard the instructions coming out of the walls, affirming that she must kill herself in order to save the others, to get the days going again, and she experienced her own murder at every turn of her breath, repeatedly born into the blazing frame of a moment that never changed. Often she woke up in a place made entirely of green and white squares going away from her infinitely. For a moment, once, she had a handle on the whole situation: this was a small room of tiles with a drain in its floor, and she’d been asleep on a little pad almost like a quilt. But in a minute, it just wasn’t like that at all. It was much, much more horrible. Everything depended on the position of a single green square, and she didn’t know which one, but the certainty with which her heart seized this one, then this one, then another — it was driving her insane. Her mouth was chapped, and both arms were sore. When they opened the door to the little room and came in with the hypodermic — the nurse and the little monkey-man who told her what to do — she remembered about her arms.

“Well!” the nurse said, as if that said it all. ‘Did you remember that today you’re moving over to the Madame Curie wing?” She knew how to make the sheet of the bed float softly.

“What?” Jamie was watching her make the bed.

“Moving day! Oh—” the nurse was disappointed. “You don’t have your things together. Where’s your stuff, honey? Your toothbrush, and your little diary?”

“Here’s what I think,” Jamie said. “Everybody fuck everybody up the ass. I mean — oh, eat everything made of shit. You cunt whore suck.” She could feel her face getting hot.

“You’re going to have to watch that mouth,” the nurse said.

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.

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 had found the shore. This is your eternal life. This is for always. This happens once.

They had her by the elbows, one man on either side. The door opened. Her feet didn’t touch the ground. One of her slippers fell off. “End of the line, baby. Smack in the Middle of Things.”

“What the fuck’s fucking? Fuck you,” she said.

“That’s real pretty,” they said. “This is the center of the Search of Destruction where the Devil will eat you.”

“Going to eat your pussy. All bloody teeth,” another one said.

“Fat soul. Suck warts of the soul in death. This is Ground Zero,” they said.

“Wait a minute,” Jamie said. “Wait a minute.” The answer was only a word away.

“Great!” they said. “Why don’t you do that? In the middle of the night.”

“As soon as the Search of Destruction eats it,” they said.

She felt her face getting hot. She could hardly keep a grip. “Is the bomb here?”

“You tell us,” the man said. “What do you think?”

They took him up to the eighth floor of the Maricopa County Court building in handcuffs and leg irons. “Not a chance,” Fredericks said as soon as he saw Bill Houston in chains. He took a breath to protest, and the prosecutor, a tall grey gentleman who appeared very wise — Bill Houston wished he were the defender — raised a friendly hand and nodded to the guards.

They unbound him amiably and he sat down in a pew beside his lawyer, but Fredericks wasn’t satisfied. It galled him that his client should have to appear before impressionable jurors wearing the denim garb of a prisoner. He was nearly apoplectic. Houston had never seen him so excited, so wronged and abused — but he appreciated that this was the show-style appropriate to the side that could hope to triumph only in a limited way and piecemeal, through a horizonless march of writs and appeals. In future appearances William H. Houston, Jr., would be permitted to wear a cheap suit; but it would go into his brief that on the trial’s opening day he’d been made to look like a criminal before the jurors who would decide his fate.

Now the jury wasn’t here, however. Now only a skeleton crew of local justice was present, the stenographer laying out his equipment, three prosecutors, two jailhouse guards and two courthouse guards, and a few spectators. Bill Houston couldn’t help feeling like an errant youngster when he spied his mother in the third row.

She looked small in these quarters, with their distant ceiling and ominous bulking judge’s bench, their originless fluorescent illumination, their austere and holy Modern Airport decor and the posh hush of carpets and central cooling. She wore a pink dress and a pink pillbox hat with a pin in it and a veil, which she removed when she saw her son to disclose her face looking healthy and alive, just as she’d looked at his trials in the past: because it was only on these occasions when her loved ones fought the law that anybody took any notice of her. Though her kind of people were generally ignored — or at best slightly mourned and slightly pitied — by those who built and staffed these magnificent rooms, everyone was forced to see now that it was really for her kind of people that these places had been built, after all — and now you are working for us. Now you’ll take reckoning of us in your sight. The last shall be first. It made her ashamed to take very much pride in all of this tragedy, and yet the day seemed electric — she had to admit it — because her boy was on page one.

He looked good. They had him dressed in work clothes, like a person of low degree, but he looked good. Obviously he’d been eating and exercising. It was the same as always. Left to his own devices, he was hopeless and dangerous both, but in custody he flourished. Her oldest son was at home in locked places.

At the very center of things they killed Jamie. It had a hold of her wrist at the very center of things, saying, “You damn doodad, you can’t do that, you damn doodad, you damn doodad.” There were two of it. “You smear shit on the wall, you’re going to clean it up every time,” it said. It took hold of her wrist and made her hand look huge. She threw her hand away and it picked her back up and attached her to her hand. She was choking. “Responsibility,” it said. “Terrification.”

It had a hold of her wrist and dipped her hand into the waters of the lake of poison.

The screaming of sirens came out of her two ears. Waters of the lake of the poisonous filthy death. You wanted everything. Well, I gave it to you. I’m nothing now.

“This is a clean establishment of walls,” it said. “We’re making you put fire on the things you’ve smeared on the walls.”

That’s me. That’s what you wanted.

“Responsibility and Terrification in the Lake of Fire and of Poison,” it said.

When they made her hand touch her secret writing formed from the filth of her bowels, she ceased. Greatness exploded in her face.

I have been washed away off these walls.

But this is me, she said. I’m still here.

What am I doing wrong?

Where the secret terrible word had been, there was fire running down the surface.

WHAT AM I DOING WRONG?

“That’s the first sensible thing you’ve said this month,” it said. There were two of them.

So that’s it, she said, and she felt the electricity running out of her brain. There’s no way out of here. This is it. I’m here forever. I had it all backwards.

Baby, they said, you are impressing the hell out of me. You see what you needed all this time? Responsibility. Self-respect. And do you know where you get that from?

Fire in the center of your name.

As the days unrolled and Bill Houston came to understand that he would never be called as a witness, he lost interest in these proceedings. He didn’t trust anybody to speak in his stead — he alone knew who he was. He only wanted to be allowed to share this person with the jury. He just wanted them to know the person they were condemning — and it angered him that he should be the cause of all this show, and his mother coming day after day to watch, and they had no intention of acknowledging him. He felt like a grownup in a room full of children playing with toy cars. To get them to see who he was involved tearing them out of a tiny exclusive world of their own creation.

In his bored reveries he came back again and again to the moment when he’d turned his weapon on the bank guard. The guard had been paralyzed by the chemistry of panic and excitement, and in the instant of time when Bill Houston had tightened his grip against the trigger, he had known there was a better way of dealing with the situation. It might have been possible to disarm the man somehow and leave him alive. That space between heartbeats had been big enough to accommodate any amount of contemplation of the act. It made him feel good, it made him know that life was real, to admit that right there inside that nick of time he’d seen a clear choice and been completely himself. He wanted to confess it to these people, because he sensed there was a chance they might never hit on a moment like that one. He just wanted to give away the most important thing he knew: I did it. It was me.

He watched his trial from behind a wall of magic, considering with amazement how pulling the trigger had been hardly different — only a jot of strength, a quarter second’s exertion — from not pulling the trigger. And yet it had unharnessed all of this, these men in their beautiful suits, their gold watches smoldering on their tanned wrists, speaking with great seriousness sometimes, joking with one another sometimes, gently cradling their sheafs of paper covered with all the reasons for what was going on here. And it had made a great space of nothing where Roger Crowell the bank guard had been expecting to have a life — a silence that took up most of Bill Houston’s hearing. It was a word that couldn’t be spoken, because nobody knew what it might have said. It was the vacuum no larger than a fist, no more spacious than the muscle of the heart, that drew things into it and unbalanced and set loose all the machinery Bill Houston saw moving around him now. They said things; they failed to say things. They stood up; they sat back down. They huddled at the judge’s bench, and they conferred in his chambers, and they passed among themselves expressions and slight gestures intelligible to no one else. Periodically Fredericks drew him close to explain what deal had been struck, or how the evidence was tilting. But what Bill Houston couldn’t shake was the remarkable power in the subtle difference between pulling and not pulling the trigger. A tiny movement of the finger, a closing it together of half an inch: and it caused these men and women to convene, to parade themselves mercilessly along the routes of their arguments and their laws, never omitting a proper station or taking a shorter way, as if they actually had it in their minds that they might have come here to accomplish anything but his death.

After Gate twenty, after the steel tunnel they passed through wordlessly, after the glass control booth with its computer-era panel of dials and switches and gauges, after the strip search, after the lecture, after the V-notch was cut into each boot-heel and the boots were returned to him, doors slid apart and slid shut, and he walked naked past cells accompanied by a single CB-6 guard in khaki, through the shouted conversations of men made invisible to one another by barriers. Each green door they passed was solid rather than barred, with a small window up high and left of its center. Here and there an irrelevant face peered out.

His things were on his bunk. To see that they’d been carried here and now awaited him made him feel special; they didn’t provide this service for the usual run of prisoners. He inspected his new belongings for defects: a pair of yellow leather work shoes shoes — how had they guessed his size? was it on record? — two blue cotton work shirts, two pairs of jeans — way too large, and he was glad they didn’t know everything about him — four pairs of white underwear, four white teeshirts, eight white socks, two white handkerchiefs, two white towels. Handkerchiefs. When had they started giving handkerchiefs? he lay on his bunk with a teeshirt thrown over his groin and listened to the talk around him — talk of women, drugs, money, and cars. Bill Houston wasn’t one to keep silent in these areas, but he couldn’t find an opening when he couldn’t see anybody’s face. And it was different, too, that in the pauses between remarks, you couldn’t say whether the conversation was over or not. Somebody might be about to speak or fallen fast asleep, and you couldn’t tell. It was like talking on the telephone, but no one ever said “Hello,” or “Goodbye.”

He was where he’d been heading for a long time. He was unconscious before they turned the lights out.

The sun was just high enough to get over the east wall. The small exercise yard of CB-6, which had been primarily in shadow, now showed a bright slash of glare in its westernmost corner. There were only seven or eight men out, and a couple of guards. Bill Houston recognized H. C. Sandover across the court, bending over something on the ground in the company of two other men.

Because the guard nearest them seemed edgy, watching a clump of murderers in which any plot imaginable might now be taking shape, Bill Houston stayed where he was, in the sun. In his third day here, he was still getting used to the high-resolution planes and angles. Something about the black of shadow, the tan of desert buildings, and the brutal whiteness of the light made Bill Houston think of Spanish missions, of Mexico, of things that were definite and clear. There was that quality to this place — light and silence; things that lasted slowly.

The guard was nearer the three prisoners now, almost among them, and they were all sharing a joke.

Bill Houston went over, and H.C. squinted up at him, taking his attention from a large toad he was fooling with. His blond hair had grown shoulder-length and grey. He wore small round glasses tinted bright blue, and a red bandana tied pirate-style over his scalp, almost like a hat, though hats were forbidden. “Got us a news service going here, Billy!” he said.

The guard said, “That frog isn’t about to go nowhere, friends.”

“What do you think, Billy?” H.C. said. “He had to get in, hadn’t he? My whole philosophy of life is hanging on this. I believe in a reality behind circumstantial evidence. If he knows a way in, he knows a way out.” H.C. turned the toad over, still squatting, something like a toad himself, on the ground. “Circumstantial evidence is what got me here.” The toad was bigger than a man’s fist and must have weighed half a pound. “We can attach a message for your Mom, Billy,” H.C. said, standing up, and he was as tall as Bill Houston. Somehow the other two men had disappeared. The guard had taken up a stance some few feet away.

“Mom was real anxious for me to say Hi.”

“It’s been almost six years since I’ve seen the woman, Billy. Over half a decade.”

“Just the same,” Bill Houston said.

“That’s one twentieth of a century. Do I have to tell you that people get kind of blurry?”

“How come you never write her?”

“I don’t need to write her. She writes me.”

“I don’t mean nothing by it.” Bill Houston was trying to make peace. “I’m just, you know—”

“—just relaying the greeting whereby she puts a little guilt-ride down on my list for the day, right? Some things get blurry, Billy, and some things get real sharp, real clear.” Bill Houston could feel a heat greater than the day’s coming off his stepfather. They’d never shared much more than a dwelling, but now he wanted to say something about how much he’d always resented this man. Before he could find any words, H.C. said, “God, you stink.”

“What?”

“You make me sick just like poison. I smell cyanide gas all over you, Billy.”

“The last person to call me Billy was you.”

“I’m gone.” As if with great purpose, H.C. moved across the court to the weights area, where he gazed down upon a long-haired Indian who lay on his back on the bench in the sun, pressing nearly two hundred pounds above his face. When the Indian began to struggle and the weights to waver, H.C. put one finger under the bar and helped him to raise it the last go. Bill Houston wished, if somebody had to be murdered by him, it could have been H.C. You still got the fastest mouth in six states. You made my mother kiss your ass. He sensed, standing here in the court with the heat climbing over the walls as morning became noon, how all the circumstances had tangled themselves around his head and made him blind; how things were so confused he’d never even begun to think about them, never been able to see how, in general, his life made him feel terrible, and his mother’s life, and all the people he knew. But now it was plain to him, because suddenly he had a vision of everybody in this prison yard rising up out of the husk of himself, out of his life, and floating away. And what remained was trash.

Oh man, it must be a hundred and twenty degrees in this place. He could feel the heat against his eardrums, and behind his eyes. He shook his head to clear it, but things were already unbearably sharp and clear.

Just as she thought of hospitals as places of permanent death, Mrs. Houston was accustomed to equate the Phoenix Sky Harbor with blackness and tragedy — with the tearing apart of families, with the movement of stunned hearts through twisted worlds, with the last sight of the faces of people who would never return. And the Sky Harbor was like that now, nightmarish and alien — the plane to take Miranda and Baby Ellen away would leave at 3:45 AM — but it was also physically very different from the old Sky Harbor, which had been more like a bus station than a center of international flight. In the new Sky Harbor there were three separate terminals, and a huge multi-level parking lot that nobody would ever have found their way through but for the paths of green paint drawn across the shiny concrete, and arrows and signs that swore these many paths led to various elevators that would carry them to innumerable airlines; so that deciphering these messages and following these arrows and abandoning herself to this strange journey through incomprehensible structures with Miranda and the baby and Stevie and Jeanine began, for Mrs. Houston, to take on spiritual overtones.

When they found themselves delivered onto an escalator that was drawing them up some seventy or eighty feet toward a gigantic mosaic Phoenix bird rising up out of its ashes, she understood what it would be like to stand before the doors of Heaven, and knew how small a thing was an earthly life.

She held Miranda’s hand, and also carried the child’s brand new plaid suitcase. Miranda was silent for now, cowed by their surroundings and a little stupefied because she’d been sleeping in the truck during the ride over from Stevie’s. But a waxing alertness communicated itself through her tiny hand, as she sensed the nearness of toys and candy and doodads for sale to weary travellers. Mrs. Houston tightened her hold.

“Maybe tomorrow’s paper’s already out,” Stevie said. She held Baby Ellen against her belly in a Snugli, a kind of reverse knapsack for infants that Mrs. Houston had never seen the like of before. “There’s something new every day,” Stevie said, but she wasn’t talking about a Snugli, she was talking about the Houston Gang in the papers. Her eyes wore the pink and bruise of grief. Anyone could see she’d been destroyed by all this.

But it was happening for the third or fourth time to Mrs. Houston, and she bore it well. “It’d be today’s paper now,” she said. “It’s already three o’clock Thursday morning.” Turning to speak to her daughter-in-law, she fell to looking over Jeanine, the last of them in line on the slowly moving escalator. Jeanine looked like a young starlet heading for the cameras, very tanned and clear-eyed in her sleeveless white party dress. She did not carry the big blue Urantia Book tonight. She was about to become a Hertz Rent A Car girl in San Francisco.

As they stepped off the escalator and took their bearings, Stevie unzipped the baby’s travelling bag and made certain everything was inside it. “Just give her a bottle around four-thirty — or whenever she wants one, if she really starts bawling. There’s an extra one, too. And some Pampers, but you won’t have to change her, probably. There’s some Gerber’s beets in there.” She handed Jeanine the blue canvas bag. “She loves those beets.”

“You mean four-thirty our time, or four-thirty their time?” Jeanine said.

“It’s the same time, honey.”

“It’s California,” Jeanine said. “It’s a whole different zone.”

“Not in the summer,” Mrs. Houston said, “’cause we’re not on the Daylight time. We’re on God’s time.”

“How am I going to recognize their dad?” Jeanine asked.

“I guess he’ll recognize them, won’t he?” Stevie said.

They were approaching the entrance to the flight gates and security area — its conveyor belts and austere efficiency and X-ray eyes. Mrs. Houston ignored a wave of apprehension that she’d be tortured. “Here’s one,” Stevie said, and stepped over to an all-night gift shop and bought a newspaper. “There’s something new every day,” she explained to no one.

“It’s always on page one or page two of the local section,” Mrs. Houston said. Still holding Miranda’s hand, she maneuvered around behind her daughter-in-law, who held the paper out at arm’s length and tried to read over Baby Ellen’s head. Ellen was awake and alert, and appeared to be trying to strike Stevie across the cheek with a rubber pacifier she gripped stiffly in her left hand. “Transferred to the Death House,” Mrs. Houston read out loud. “I can’t believe it.” She turned to Jeanine. “1 won’t believe this is the will of God.”

“I don’t know. Nothing makes sense,” Jeanine told her.

“As of tomorrow, he won’t be in CB-6 no more,” Mrs. Houston said. “They’re going to have him in the Death House, in some kind of waiting room. Well,” she said, “it’s about time he learned to wait.”

Instantly Stevie was angry. She shoved the paper at her mother-in-law as if jettisoning everything connected with their misfortune. “Don’t you understand they intend to kill your son in two more weeks?”

Mrs. Houston was scornful of the idea. “The soul of a man don’t die.” She waved the newspaper around at the entire airport. “That’s what this is all about.”

Tears spilled from Stevie’s red eyes. “Well I just want to smell him. I can’t smell his fuckin’ soul.”

She cried for a minute while they all stood there waiting for her to stop. “I’m talking about James,” she told them.

“I know,” Mrs Houston said. “But at least he ain’t going up for the capital punishment. You’ll see him soon as he gets well. And you’ll smell him if you really want to.” She looked down at Miranda, who was tugging on her hand and saying, Mizz Houston, Mizz Houston? “We’re almost at the plane,” she told the child. “What do you want?”

“Does it say in the papers that my mother is dead?” Miranda asked.

The three women were silent. Jeanine finally said, “What?”

“Does it tell about that she died?” Miranda repeated.

“No, honey.” Jeanine was at a loss. “No — your Mom’s not dead. She’s just resting.”

“Resting means when you’re dead,” Miranda informed her.

“She’s resting in a hospital to get well, she’s not resting like she’s dead, or anything.”

Miranda bunched her new dress up between her legs. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

Jeanine took her into the bathroom just this side of the security area. While she waited for Miranda, she looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was starting to grow long again, and she’d just had it permed. Her dress was white on white. She wore red lipstick. Knowing a killer had taught her that she must live.

“Stevie?” Miranda called, her voice echoing out of the stall.

“I’m not Stevie, honey. I’m Jeanine.”

“Oh,” Miranda said. Then she said, “Jeanine?”

“What is it?”

“Um…” The moment seemed to take place under water. “I’m almost done, Jeanine.”

“Good,” Jeanine said.

When Miranda was ready to leave, Jeanine turned on a faucet and insisted she wash her hands. Standing on tiptoe, Miranda thrust the very tips of her fingers momentarily beneath the rush of water, then stood under the electric blower letting the hot air wash over her face.

The blower ceased, and she stood there. She was wearing a white dress almost exactly like Jeanine’s, and they were alone in the sudden tiled silence of an empty public place. She held out her arms to Jeanine. “Will you lift me up into the meer?”

For a beat she didn’t understand.

And then she understood, and lifted the child up before the wide glass. Above the row of identical porcelain sinks that seemed to diminish into a haze of tiles, Miranda saw herself. She studied herself carefully in the mirror, turning her face this way and that within its indefatigable duplication of everything. “That’s not me,” she told Jeanine.

She placed her hand on the white ruffles of her own breast. “This is me.”