Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

by Denis Johnson

  “If you took off your jacket, you’d be cooler.”

  “For some reason, I usually keep it on. I don’t know why.”

  “It’s your armor. You’re a knight, huh?”

  “I’m a knight of faith,” he confessed suddenly. He’d never said anything like this to anybody before.

  She looked at him. A frail light shone out of her, this he would have sworn. “I know you are,” she said. She sipped her tea, but he happened to know her cup was empty.

  “When straight people get together,” he said before they parted that day, “the man gets the woman’s phone number.”

  “Hey, what—doesn’t he have a phone book?”

  “At least the guy gets her last name.”

  “Sousa.”

  “Sousa?”

  “It’s Portuguese. I told you about that.”

  “Well, Sousa has never been my favorite name. In fact, the only one I ever heard of was this person who wrote ‘Be Kind to Your Web-Footed Friends.’”

  “That wasn’t me.”

  He stood up, laying down a dollar for the tip, and in a gesture of parting Leanna reached over and touched his hand. “Leonard.”

  He was so entranced, he was so charmed, so captivated—rolled out flat, dreamed into, shone upon—that when she said his name, English started to live.

  After one conversation he was ready to marry her. In fact, he’d been infatuated with Leanna since the night he’d seen her naked and putting her former lover’s hand to her lips, in a dim, warm bedroom, in consolation for their mutual failure. “We’ve got to let this door close,” she’d said to Marla Baker that night, “before any others can open for us.” He wanted to be naked like that with Leanna. He wanted Leanna to put his hand to her lips. He wanted Leanna to say something like that to him.

  During those first few weeks in Provincetown, English had only one other case. A boy ran away from home, and English went in his Volkswagen, now repaired but no longer the same as it used to be, to show the boy’s photograph around the Hyannis bus station. But when he walked into the small, crowded depot, the runaway was there himself, sitting on a bedroll and looking through a comic. English told the boy who he was, though he wasn’t supposed to, and asked the boy where he was aiming himself. The boy said he was going back home for Christmas. Figuring to save him the bus fare, English gave him a lift to his doorstep in Provincetown, but for this service Ray Sands charged his parents an extra twenty-two dollars.

  As for the radio station, WPRD: in that world he was a ghost, in and out in the darkest hours. Nobody knew him but the air shifter who left when English came, and the other one who arrived when English left, the first usually weathering a blitzkrieg of self-administered esoteric chemicals, and the second almost always hung over. Sometimes English worked in the production studio very early on Wednesday mornings, and so he was also indefinably acquainted with that day’s two-to-six air shifter, a white Rastafarian who played Jamaican reggae music and spilled things and never wiped them up. It was the kind of station, and nobody tried to disguise it, where self-respecting disc jockeys were never found. The floors were muck-stained and the trash accumulated perpetually in the corners, the equipment was very nearly Edison-era, the records were sloppily catalogued and put back on the shelves all wrong—which meant, in a collection of several thousand recordings, that they were lost forever—and there were low-rent signs and manifestations all over the walls: schedules, charts, useless maps, scrawlings of employees’ offspring, postcards from the listening public, most of them patronizing and some actually exuding pity, cartoons about radio life torn out of magazines, including one from The New Yorker sketched by the artist right there in WPRO’s announcer’s booth, which meant he thought this outfit was probably good for a laugh; also notes about idiosyncrasies that had suddenly cropped up in this or that machine, notes concerning car pools, babysitters, and things for sale, cryptic notes between DJs about, English guessed, drug transactions, anonymous notes of the character-assassination kind, generalized laments about the equipment, or the cataloguing, or the lack of team effort, or the floors, and breathless rules hastily developed thanks to the slovenly few: ALL MONITORS AND SPEAKERS ARE TO BE TURNED DOWN AFTER 10 P.M. NO GUESTS UNLESS THEY ARE ON THE SHOW, IE BEING INTERVIEWED WITH PRIOR PERMISSION!!!

  During his shift English stayed there alone, playing hour-long classical music tapes over the air. Most of his time he spent in the production studio with a mixing board, rerecording the conversations of Marla Baker, smoothing out the volume level of voices that had come and gone through the rooms of love. I’m quitting tomorrow—I’m quitting tomorrow—but he was hooked. For one thing, he admitted to himself, he was zapped by all the gadgetry, obsessed with the idea of clear audio. But more than that he felt, sometimes, that in hearing these most private revelations, these things lovers said to one another when they were alone, he’d found the source of a priestly serenity. Listen, he wanted to say, I don’t judge you. You comfort me, whatever you do, arguing, lying, making stupid jokes. However small you are, however selfish, I’m there, too. That’s me. I’m with you.

  He was fascinated with how Marla Baker and her lover Carol easily communicated in the most garbled sentences about little things that didn’t matter, and then failed, over and over again, to make themselves understood with the clearest statements whenever it came to the really important things.

  “Well, I’m just angry,” Marla would say.

  “But—I don’t understand. It doesn’t make sense,” Carol would say.

  “Please,” one or the other would say, “please, let me explain the whole thing again.”

  Backing the tapes up, starting them forward, pushing up the treble, filtering out the clinks: I’m not alone, I’m never alone, he told these voices of people who’d forgotten they’d ever said such things and were now fast asleep; I’m with you.

  Ray Sands invited English to his home for an early dinner on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve. English said no in his heart, but his mouth said, “Okay.” Which is about how those two generally operate together, he thought forlornly.

  He’d worked the Thursday two-to-six, and sleeplessness made him feel soggy and gritty behind the eyes and put a sorrowful taste of cigarettes and coffee in the back of his throat. He kept feeling, as he walked the block and a half from his rented room to his boss’s house, that he needed to wash his hands.

  It was a cold, bright day. A recent snow, partly melted, had frozen over again. The air smelled of refrigerated sea muck. This seaside dampness seemed to lurk, staler and halfway warm, in the hall behind the double doors of Ray Sands’s house as he let English in. The guest was embarrassed because Sands was all dressed up—that is, not much more than he usually was, but his suit was dark and he wore gold cuff links. With discomfort, as if shedding some part of himself, English took off his leather jacket. He wore a white shirt and a necktie.

  “Good of you to come, Lenny!”

  English had never seen Ray Sands even mildly cheerful before; it’s fair to say he’d never seen his employer even abysmally cheerful. But nothing was as usual today. Instead of going left through sliding doors into the messy office, where Sands generally lectured English on equipment, standing still before him while English sat on the stool for people being photographed, today Sands took his dinner guest through the sliding doors on the right, into his home, where everything was tinkly and rich. Intricate white lace draped the tables. The floorboards shone deeply. In the windows crystal prisms dangled so that faint rainbows stained the gauzy curtains. And on the dining-room table were silver goblets, and a big silver tureen in which reflections lay like brilliant postage stamps. English was surprised. He’d assumed that all retired police detectives were dead broke.

  “This is beautiful,” he told Sands.

  Too low to hear clearly, one of WPRD’s rich-voiced afternoon classical announcers spoke from a sound system on shelves against the wall. A mild spicy odor had found its way out of the kitchen, which lay to
ward the back of the house.

  “Thank you,” Sands said. He was still smiling, displaying a very plastic-looking set of false teeth. “Can we get you a drink, Lenny? We have apple juice and cranberry juice. Or maybe you’d like to join me in a beer?” He was already heading for the kitchen.

  “Sure, yes, I’d like a beer,” English said.

  The furniture was white and stuffed and printed with a pink-and-blue floral design. All of it looked brand new. Even as he was admiring it, Mrs. Sands revealed herself to be the robot caretaker of all this immaculateness, rattling and clucking through with a yellow square of cheesecloth, saying, “Hello. Hello. Hello.”

  English said, “Hi, Mrs. Sands.”

  The old woman ignored his greeting. She appeared to be searching for dust, fussing over square micrometers where maybe some of it had landed. She was still preparing the scene. She seemed to be under the impression more guests were coming, but nobody else ever came.

  Ray Sands poured beer from a can into a big frosted glass mug as he walked out of the kitchen. “Lenny, my wife, Grace. This is Lenny English, Grace.”

  At that instant Grace looked at English with narrowed eyes and said, “William.”

  “Leonard,” English corrected her. “Lenny.”

  His employer handed over the mug of beer, and English raised it in a kind of toast, but Sands hadn’t gotten one for himself after all. English smiled at him, and Sands nodded, and Grace, who seemed frozen now and terribly alert, said to English, “The lawn. And somebody they should fix the front screen. It should be fixed immediately.” She was apprising anyone within hailing distance.

  “The front screen?” English said.

  “Lenny, why don’t you sit down?” Sands asked.

  English hadn’t pegged it as the type of furniture you actually sat on. He put a very tiny portion of his rear end on the edge of the nearest overstuffed chair, resting his beer mug on his knee and holding it by its handle.

  “Wow,” he said, “it’s really a beautiful day, isn’t it?”

  He wanted to smoke, but there were no ashtrays in sight. While he was thinking of the next thing to say, he drank down his entire beer.

  Grace headed back to the kitchen. “Lint,” she said. “Marks on the walls. Fingerprints everywhere.” She walked sideways.

  “A lovely day,” her husband agreed.

  Then English was lost, and he wanted to go home. Not to his room with the unmade bed and the picture of John F. Kennedy on the wall, but to his family’s farmhouse in Prairie, Kansas, and to his childhood, and to his dead mother and father.

  Grace stayed in the kitchen with the food, which turned out to be roast beef, while Sands and English talked, fairly easily, about things having to do with WPRD. They named names, recalled episodes, chuckled over the mistakes of others. Sands gave English all the beer he wanted, and English found he wanted a lot. English asked Sands about the complicated business of getting a radio station started in a small town. How happy he was when Sands decided to lay out all the details for him, applications, permits, licenses, appearances before boards of idiots and commissions of dunderheads, so that for his part he only had to nod and go, “Oh, really?” or “Wow, fascinating,” or “Oh, I had no idea.”

  The hostess ran a race between the kitchen and her big dining table, faster and faster, moving a mountain of food one plateful at a time and continually talking to herself: “That’s not where you go. You go here, and you go here, and where do you supposed to go, where do you supposed to go?”

  She was a mystery to English. Throughout the dinner—which was very good, he thought, and she evidently had no trouble concocting things among burners and timers and bells that jangled a person’s mind—Grace would fog over and leave the world around her, but then suddenly grow sharp and decisive about issues that just weren’t real. When she said something crazy, Sands was deaf. When she talked sense, he responded as if absolutely charmed.

  “How is your place?” he asked English. “Your apartment.”

  “Oh,” English said, “it’s very nice. It’s not an apartment, exactly, more like a room. Everybody’s very nice.”

  “Who’s nice?” Grace said.

  “I mean the people around me, the other roomers.”

  “You get to know them?” She leaned forward with an interest that seemed quite false.

  “Well, you know—they come and go, I guess. But there’s two or three who’ve been there as long as I have. We say hello, we sit in the foyer down there and talk sometimes.” This was a lie.

  “You should get to know your neighbors,” Grace said. She was about to wipe her hands on her apron, and then, apparently just realizing that she was wearing it, she pushed her chair back, stood up, and reached around behind her back to untie it, clawing upward at the bow behind her neck with some small alarm. On the front of her apron was the slogan When It’s Smokin’ It’s Cookin’ and When It’s Black It’s Done.

  Ray Sands dabbed at his lips with his napkin and then said, “Grace. Here. Here.” He stood up and loosened the bow for her. They both sat back down. Grace was still wearing her apron, and now she wiped her hands across the breast of it.

  English said, “This is—wonderful stuff, Grace. Really. I didn’t expect to get a home-cooked meal any time soon.”

  “Thank you very, very much,” she said.

  “We knew you’d been on your own all month, so we thought we’d better have you over,” Sands told him. “I realize your schedule doesn’t give you much chance to get acquainted around town.”

  “Well, I just have to thank you,” English said, suddenly actually feeling grateful. “It’s a really nice gesture.”

  “Doesn’t Polly—what’s her name, now?”

  “Polly—I can’t remember her last name,” English said. Polly was one of the receptionists at WPRD.

  “Right, yes. Doesn’t she live in the same rooming house?”

  “I’ve never seen her around there.”

  “Maybe it’s another one,” Sands decided. He seemed unaware that his wife had stopped eating anything and was now staring at English with a kind of sinister, amused recognition—one thief to another.

  “A nice lady,” Grace said. “I like to know her.”

  “She’s really a very nice person,” Ray Sands agreed.

  “Right,” English said. “I’m sure she’s a very nice person.”

  “I mean take the time.” Grace was still looking at him with a smoky knowledge in her eyes. “I mean really know her,” she said. “Really.”

  “Well,” Ray Sands said. “And isn’t there some dessert?”

  This question pulled the rug right out from under her. “Dessert ?” she said.

  “I believe you’ve got some dessert for us?”

  “Dessert.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “I do,” she said. She seemed to be travelling through a long tunnel to reach this dinner conversation. “And I got something else!” She stood up and took off her apron without any trouble and went, taking the tiny steps of a bulky old woman, through the living room and out through the sliding doors. Her dress was gay and printed with flowers, like the upholstery she passed. English saw that she wore knee stockings rolled down to her ankles and huge black shoes that tied with laces. He heard her going up the stairs: clump, clump; clump, clump, getting both feet firmly on each stair step before trying the next one.

  Outdoors, the sunlight was leaving the world. Ray Sands walked through the living room and dining room, turning on the lamps.

  Now English had no more polite remarks to deliver. He watched the dregs of dinner grow cold while Sands went into the kitchen and came out with some ice cream in three tapered sundae dishes, and three long spoons, keeping pretty quiet himself.

  By the clumping of Grace’s big black shoes, she was just overhead; now she was coming down the stairs again, and now she was back in the living room, carrying a green gift-wrapped package just about the right size—English was trying to guess —for a
truly massive cigar, and in her other hand a color photograph in a gold frame. Grace set the picture on the table, right in front of a chair, as if its subject were joining them for dessert: a young man with a fat face, a mustache, and clear blue eyes. He wore a hunter’s red cap.

  She put the gift before her husband.

  “How wonderful!” Sands said. “And I’ve got something for you, Grace.”

  Hidden behind the couch he had a fair-sized package wrapped in alabaster gift paper with shiny red stripes on it and a green bow tied by a professional. He set it before her and they both opened these gifts with a thunderstorm of paper and appropriate small cries of thanks. Grace’s was an espresso coffeepot. Mr. Sands got an engine for an electric train.

  Now English was afraid he’d overlooked some custom of exchange. “I’m sorry I didn’t bring any presents for you guys. In Kansas we don’t give presents for New Year’s, not that I know of.”

  “It’s not a Massachusetts custom, either. But it happens to be our forty-second anniversary.”

  “Our son,” Grace said, pointing at the picture sitting across the table from English.

  “We give thanks to God,” Sands said, “by giving gifts to each other.”

  English couldn’t believe his ears.

  “We can’t give anything to God,” Grace explained, “so we give gifts to each other.”

  “That’s—really great,” he told them both, not sure to what the hell he himself was referring.

  “Bud got a personal friendship with Bishop Andrew.” It seemed she was talking to the photograph. “The Bishop!”

  “We’re not going to help you with the dishes,” Sands let her know. “I’m going to show Lenny my trains.”

  Grace said, “He gonna show you the trains.”

  “Oh, good. Good,” English said.