Down the night world of his starved mind cool scarves of fishes went veering, winnowing the salt shot that rose columnar toward rifts in the ice overhead. Sinking in a cold jade sea where bubbles shuttled toward the polar sun. Shoals of char ribboned off brightly and the ocean swell heaved with the world’s turning and he could see the sun go bleared and fade beyond the windswept panes of ice. Under a waste more mute than the moon’s face, where alabaster seabears cruise the salt and icegreen deeps.
When he woke there were footsteps in the room. Shapes crossed between the light and his thin eyelids. He was going again in a corridor through rooms that never ceased, by formless walls unordered unadorned and slightly moist and warm and through soft doors with valved and dripping architraves and regions wet and bluish like the inward parts of some enormous living thing. A small soul’s going. By floodlight through the universe’s renal regions. Pale phagocytes drifting over, shadows and shapes through the tubes like the miscellany in a waterdrop. The eye at the end of the glass would be God’s.
Suttree saw the faces of the living bend. He closed his eyes. Gray geometric saurians lay snapping in a pit. Far away stood a gold pagoda with a little flutterblade that spun in the wind. He knew that he was not going there. He was awake for days. No one knew. He touched a hand attending him and smiled at its withdrawing. The freaks and phantoms skulked away beyond the cold white plaster of the ceiling. A tantric cat that loped forever in a funhouse corridor. He’d see them again on the day of his death.
One morning the priest came. The bed tilted. Suttree’s body ran on it saclike and invertebrate, his drained members cooling on the sheets.
Would you like to confess? said the priest.
I did it, said Suttree.
A quick smile.
I’d like some wine.
Oh you cant have any wine, said a nursevoice.
The priest bent and opened his little leather case and took out a cruet. You had a close call, he said.
All my life. I did.
He tipped winedrops from the birdtongue spout down Suttree’s throat. Suttree closed his eyes to savor it.
Do you have any more?
Just a drop. Not too much, I dont think.
That works, Suttree said.
Are you feeling better?
Yes.
God must have been watching over you. You very nearly died.
You would not believe what watches.
Oh?
He is not a thing. Nothing ever stops moving.
Is that what you learned?
I learned that there is one Suttree and one Suttree only.
I see, said the priest.
Suttree shook his head. No, he said. You dont.
The days were long and lonely, no one came.
He watched birds come and go in the tree beyond the window, like a memory from some childhood scene, dim its purpose.
He was given no food. A strange sour potion to drink. A nurse who came to catheterize him. He’d lain for hours with his cock hanging down the cool throat of a battered tin pitcher.
Catheterina, he said.
My name is Kathy.
We’ve got to stop meeting like this.
Hush now. Can you lift up some? Lift up some.
Try to control yourself. Damn.
You dont even have a temperature so I know this is all put on.
I hear water running.
Hush.
I never saw a lovelier ass.
I never knew anybody to get sexy being catheterized.
Will you marry me?
Sure.
One night as he lay there he felt suddenly strong enough to rise. He thought he’d dreamed of doing so. He eased his feet over the edge of the bed and stood. He tottered across the room and rested against the wall and came back. And again. He felt giddy.
The next night he went down the corridor. I feel like an angel, he told an old lady with a bucket whom he passed. There was no one about. A porter nodded at the desk. Suttree went out the door.
Down the street in his nightshirt till he came to a phone booth. No coins blocked away in there. He had a tag with the name Johnson on it pinned to the front of him and he took it off and laid it on the little metal shelf beneath the phone and he straightened out the pin and lifted the receiver from the hook. He worked the pin through the insulation of the cord and grounded the end of it against the metal of the coinslot. After a few tries he got a dial tone and he dialed 21505.
Carlights washed across this figure in nightwear crouched in his glass outhouse. He dropped to the floor of the booth. A reek of stale piss. The number was ringing. Suttree wondered what time it might be. It rang for some time.
Hello.
J-Bone.
Bud? That you?
Can you come and get me?
As they descended into McAnally Suttree let his head fall back on the musty plush of the old car seat.
You want some whiskey, Bud? We can get some.
No thanks.
You okay?
Yeah. I’d just like maybe a drink of water.
Mr Johnson like to left us didnt you Mr Johnson?
So they say. Who put the priest on me?