Denis Johnson

The two concluding stories in Denis Johnson's 1992 collection, Jesus's Son, form a great coda to this series of stories and nicely balance each other as well. The penultimate is yet another in this collection centered on a detox unit in a hospital (it's also the 3rd in a series of Seattle stories, stories about nearly suicidal binge drinking). This one told almost entirely in dialog as the narrator shaves a fellow patient and probes him about his life story in particular about bullet scars on his face. Unique in this collection the narrator self-identifies as a writer-poet and tells the man he's shaving that his words will someday be part of a story and pledges to quote him exactly. We can assume he does and that this story - save for a few beautiful observations about the feelings of drug-assuaged detox - has done so. It's like one of the so-called "found poems " popular in the 70s, the setting for all the stories in this collection, made famous in Michael casey's book of Vietnam poems, Obscenities. The final story, perhaps the longest in the book, is set in Phoenix and has the narrator again in detox and working in a hospital where he cares for some of the most ill and deformed patients. He develops an obsession w spying on a young woman and her husband hoping someday to witness them having sex - tho the closest he comes is to see them in a ritual ablution. The image is extremely powerful - the narrator on the outside lonely and sad watching a loving couple secure in their faith. In both of these stories and many others in this book the narrator is looking back from a seemingly healthier vantage of 20 years and hoping to find in his generally antisocial behavior some evidence of his caring for others. He is hardly their salvation- the hint from the title - but at least he is an attenuated version of grace, salvation once removed.

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