Angels by Denis Johnson

their heads and the images moving on their television screens like things trapped under ice. The train was warm, the light was right.
    He realized that he was the greatest thief of all time.
    The knowledge seemed to rise unendurably and then break inside of him, and he sat by the train’s window inhabiting a calm open space in the night. He sat still while his heart slowed down, moving where the train moved, listening to it talk to the tracks, feeling all right, letting the love pour through him over the world.
    He opened his eyes.
    He was lying on his back, his bandaged left hand resting carefully on his chest, the right one wrapped around the neck of a bottle of gin. He didn’t need a map or a clock to tell him he was in the wrong place at the wrong time again. It was three AM , and he was now a resident of the senselessly named Dunes Hotel on Diversy, floor number three. When he sat up and put his feet on the cold floor, the darkness seemed to rush up suddenly against his face and stop there, palpitating rapidly like the wings of a moth. He went over by the window and sat in the wooden chair and took a look out into the street, putting the bottle’s mouth to his lips and letting the gin touch his tongue, overcome by an acute sensitivity to everything. The few colors visible on the street seemed to burn. He could feel even the ridges of his fingerprints on the lukewarm bottle. The street out there was a mess of things—trash and rust and grease—all holding still for a minute. In his mind he was wordless, knowing what the street was and who he was, the man with the fingerprints looking out at the street, one bare foot resting on a shoe and the other flat on the chilly linoleum, a drunk and deluded man without a chance. It was all right to be who he was, but others would probably think it was terrible. A couple of times in the past he’d reached this absolute zero of the truth, and without fear or bitterness he realized now that somewhere inside it there was a move he could make to change his life, to become another person, but he’d never be able to guess what it was. He found a cigaret and struck a match—for a moment there was nothing before him but the flame. When he shook it out and the world came back, it was the same place again where all his decisions had been made a long time ago.
    J amie could feel the muscles in her leg jerk, she wanted so badly to kick Miranda’s rear end and send her scooting under the wheels of, for instance, a truck. Clark Street at nine PM was a movie: five billion weirdos walking this way and that not looking at each other, and every third one had something for sale. Money-lickers; and black pimps dressed entirely in black, and a forest of red high heels. There were lots of lights—everyone had half a dozen shadows scurrying in different directions underneath them.
    Paced to Jamie’s exhaustion, the scene moved in slow motion. A black youth in a knit cap, long coat and white tennis shoes bopped by, smiling at: her and then looking away and singing, “Time for us to go get high, hmmmmmmmm?”—and moving on when Jamie said nothing. Baby Ellen was awake in her mother’s arms, protesting even a moment’s consignment to her infant seat, and the little black balls in the midst of her eyes tracked the youth’s passage serenely and mechanically. For a second Jamie was struck with the peculiar notion that this scene of downtown Chicago was the projection of her daughter’s infant mind.
    Jamie had her reasons for being here. She just couldn’t think what they were, at the moment. She had waved Bill Houston goodbye as he’d boarded his bus back to Chicago in a state of hopeless inebriation, suddenly convinced in his mind that something or other awaited him among these sorry strangers. Jamie, for her part, had still had possession of two tickets to Hershey, and she’d waited around a few days—first until a loan from