Jesus' Son: Stories by Denis Johnson Page A

hall where they were showing a short movie about vasectomies. Much later I told her that I'd actually gotten a vasectomy a long time ago, and somebody else must have made her pregnant. I also told her once that I had inoperable cancer and would soon be passed away and gone, eternally. But nothing I could think up, no matter how dramatic or completely horrible, ever made her repent or love me the way she had at first, before she really knew me.
    Anyway they showed the movie to two or three or four of us who were waiting for women across the hall. The scene was cloudy in my sight because I was frightened of whatever they were doing to Michelle and to the other women and of course to the little feuses. After the film I talked to a man about vasectomies. A man with a mustache. I didn't like him.
    "You have to be sure," he said. "I'm never getting anybody pregnant again. I know that much."
    "Would you like to make an appointment?"
    "Would you like to give me the money?"
    "It won't take long to save the money."
    "It would take me forever to save the money," I corrected him.
     
    Then I sat down in the waiting area across the hall. In forty-five minutes the nurse came out and said to me, "Michelle is comfortable now."
    "Is she dead?"
    "Of course not."
    "I kind of wish she was."
    She looked frightened. "I don't know what you mean."
    I went in through the curtain to see Michelle. She smelled bad.
    "How are you feeling?"
    "I feel fine."
    "What did they stick up you?"
    "What?" she said. " What ?"
    The nurse said, "Hey. Out of here. Out of here."
    She went through the curtain and came back with a big black guy wearing a starched white shirt and one of those phony gold badges. "I don't think this man needs to be in the building," she said to him, and then she said to me, "Would you like to wait outside, sir?" '
    "Yeah yeah yeah," I said, and all the way down the big stairs and out the front I said, "Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah."
    It was raining outdoors and most of the Catholics were squashed up under an awning next door with their signs held overhead against the weather. They splashed holy water on my cheek and on the back of my neck, and I didn't feel a thing. Not for many years.
    I didn't know what to do now except ride around on the elevated train.
     
    I stepped into one of the cars just as the doors closed; as though the train had waited just for me.
    What if there was just snow? Snow everywhere, cold and white, filling every distance? And I just follow my sense of things through this winter until I reach a grove of white trees. And she takes me in.
    The wheels, screamed, and all I saw suddenly was everybody's big ugly shoes. The sound stopped. We passed solitary, wrenching scenes.
    Through the neighborhoods and past the platforms, I felt the cancelled life dreaming after me. Yes, a ghost. A vestige. Something remaining.
     
    At one of the stops down the line there was a problem with the doors. We were delayed, those of us who had destinations, anyway. The train waited and waited in a troubling sleep. Then it hummed softly. You can tell it's going to move before it moves.
    A guy stepped in just as the doors closed. The train had waited for him all this time, not a second longer than his arrival, not even half a second, and then it broke the mysterious crystal of its inertia. We'd picked him up and now we were moving. He sat down near the front of the car, completely unaware of his importance. With what kind of miserable or happy fate did he have an appointment across the river?
    I decided to follow him.
    Several stops later he left the train and went down into a section of squat, repetitive brown-stone buildings.
    He walked with a bounce, his shoulders looped and his chin scooping forward rhythmically. He didn't look right or left. I supposed he'd walked this route twelve thousand times. He didn't sense or feel me following half a block behind him.
    It was a Polish neighborhood somewhere or other. The Polish neighborhoods have