Jesus' Son: Stories by Denis Johnson

given him an eyepatch ---all for no reason, really.
    He stopped off at E.R. to say goodbye. "Well, those pills they gave me make everything taste terrible," he said.
    "It could have been worse," Nurse said. ^ "Even my tongue."
    "It's just a miracle you didn't end up sightless or at least dead," she reminded him.
    The patient recognized me. He acknowledged me with a smile. "I was peeping on the lady next door while she was out there sunbathing," he said. "My wife decided to blind me."
    He shook Georgia's hand. Georgie didn't know him. "Who are you supposed* to be?" he asked Terrence Weber.
     
    Some hours before that, Georgie had said something that had suddenly and completely explained the difference between us. We'd been driving back toward town, along the Old Highway, through the flatness. We picked up a hitchhiker, a boy I knew. We stopped the truck and the boy climbed slowly up out of the fields as out of the mouth of a volcano. His name was Hardee. He looked even worse than we probably did.
    "We got messed up and slept in the truck all night," I told Hardee.
    "I had a feeling," Hardee said. "Either that or, you know, driving a thousand miles."
    "That too," I said.
    "Or you're sick or diseased or something."
    "Who's this guy?" Georgie asked.
    "This is Hardee. He lived with me last summer. I found him on the doorstep. What happened to your dog?" I asked Hardee.
    "He's still down there."
    "Yeah, I heard you went to Texas."
    "I was working on a bee farm," Hardee said.
    "Wow. Do those things sting you?"
    "Not like you'd think," Hardee said. "You're part of their daily drill. It's all part of a harmony."
    Outside, the same identical stretch of ground repeatedly rolled past our faces. The day was cloudless, blinding. But Georgie said, "Look at that," pointing straight ahead of us.
    One star was so hot it showed, bright and blue, in the empty sky.
    "I recognized you right away," I told Hardee. "But what happened to your hair? Who chopped it off?"
    "I hate to say."
    "Don't tell me."
    "They drafted me."
    "Oh no."
    "Oh, that's terrible," I said to Hardee.
    "Don't worry," Georgie said. "We'll get you there."
    "How?"
    "Somehow. I think I know some people. Don't worry. You're on your way to Canada."
    That world! These days it's all been erased and they've rolled it up like a scroll and put it away somewhere. Yes, I can touch it with my fingers. But where is it?
    After a while Hardee asked Georgie, "What do you do for a job," and Georgie said, "I save lives."
     
    Dirty Wedding
     
    I liked to sit up front and ride the fast ones all day long, I liked it when they brushed right up against the buildings north of the Loop and I especially liked it when the buildings dropped away into that bombed-out squalor a little farther north in which people (through windows you'd see a person in his dirty naked kitchen spooning soup toward his face, or twelve children on their bellies on the floor, watching television, but instantly they were gone, wiped away by a movie billboard of a woman winking and touching her upper lip deftly with her tongue, and she in turn erased by a--- wham , the noise and dark dropped down around your head---tunnel) actually lived.
    I was twenty-five, twenty-six, something like that. My fingertips were all yellow from smoking. My girlfriend was with child.
    It cost fifty cents, ninety cents, a dollar to ride the train. I really don't remember.
     
    Out in front of the abortion building picketers shook drops of holy water at us and twisted their rosaries around their fingers. A man in dark glasses shadowed Michelle right up the big steps to the door, chanting softly in her ear. I guess he was praying. What were the words of his prayer? I wouldn't mind asking her that question. But it's winter, the mountains around me are tall and deep with snow, and I could never find her now.
    Michelle handed her appointment card to the nurse on the third floor. She and the nurse went through a curtain together.
    I wandered over across the