Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [461]
James T. Farrell
New York, 1978
Fragments from the unpublished death fantasy sequence of “Judgment Day”
I
. . . AND HIS CHEEKS BURNED, his legs were on fire, his chest was heavy, crossed by pains, warm, burning; all over him there was a fire consuming his skin and his nerves. His bones ached. In his backbone at the base of his spine there was pain. There was fire and weariness in the thin arms beneath the covers of his bed. There was pain and fire in his sunken cheeks. There was fever in his glazed half-opened eyes and in the lids that pressed them down. He tried to speak. . . . The strange white woman, her white soothing and . . . cool, bent toward him. In his mind, there formed the words:
I’m afraid.
They traveled to his tongue and issued as sounds that the strange white woman bent to hear.
The sick eyes closed. Blackness came . . . certain objects in the misty room bound . . . crossed in front of the blackness . . . through the colors, and a cool . . . surrounded by grass . . . large tree, and seemed to be propelled away from him fast, and faster and faster, and he suddenly broke into a run after the tree, and he felt that if he caught that tree, touched it, stood under it, climbed it, only caught up with it, he would not die, and he felt that he was dying. And the tree disappeared. . . .
Instead of finding himself dead, he found himself to be only a boy, and he could not understand it. He was a boy in short pants. He was walking down Indiana Avenue, and there were new houses on Indiana Avenue, and he couldn’t understand how there could be new houses on Indiana Avenue today when there had been only the old houses on Indiana . . . and he looked to glance into the window of the stone house where Lucy lived. And it was not there. In its place was a tall apartment building; out of it people walked, strangers—men and women whose faces were not clear . . . a woman he felt he must have seen somewhere . . . someplace before, and he could not remember what . . . Helen Shires came along and said. . . .
Helen was gone. Indiana Avenue was gone. He was riding in an airplane, regretful, thinking of Indiana Avenue and wondering why he had been carried away and where he was going. He looked down and thought that he recognized Washington Park. He kept asking himself why he had been carried away. He shouted to the driver:
Hey!
The driver did not answer him. A pain began to spread over him, a pain of regret, of . . . unsatisfied.
He was no longer in the airplane. He did not know where he was. He saw shapes that he . . . phallic shapes, twisted, gargoyles . . . similar objects, chairs and stoves, and buildings . . . twisted and torn, and he felt sorry and sick . . . felt that he was dying, and that he was . . . many things.
Behind them, the fires of Hell burning with terrific heat, and he stood facing them helplessly, a terrific heat parching his body, causing the perspiration to drip from him in large warm drops that caused small and prickling irritations . . . little fires among dried grass at his feet. And with the face of Weary Reilley the Devil bobbed up and down in the flames and shouted each time his face appeared.
You’re coming to me, you bastard!
Above the fires of Hell, the Sacred Heart of Jesus hung, blood dripping from it, sizzling in the flames.
“The wages of sin is death, you skunk,” the Pope of Rome said to him.
“Give me a nickel to save your soul . . . for the Church commands you to contribute to the . . . pastor,” Father Gilhooley said, extending his hand.
“. . . jazzed whores, and now you’re going to get . . . your life in Hell. Ha! Ha!” Father Shannon said.
“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,” the Pope of Rome said.
“In your life you spent three times as much on whores as you did on the salvation of your immortal soul,” said Father Gilhooley.
“Woe unto you, you who disregarded my word in my missions, you in whom I placed confidence,