Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

by Denis Johnson

  “We’ll be back down in a minute.”

  “Oh,” Grace said, “good.”

  Sands didn’t give him a tour of the upstairs, which English didn’t want to see anyway. Instead, he took English directly to a tiny room filled with his electric train set and switched on a hooded lamp hanging, somewhat like an oppressive sun, over a landscape set on plywood and held up by sawhorses, with a little margin of space to walk around it in. The room smelled like wood.

  As Sands put his new engine on the track and sent it whirling around the circuit, a figure eight with an S in the middle of each circle, English got the notion that WPRD was really just an extension of his employer’s zeal for such contraptions. Sands didn’t treat his train set like a toy. He was calm and scientific, making sure everything worked, track switches and so forth, before he hooked a few other cars to the engine.

  “I’ve had this setup for twenty-five years,” Sands said.

  Now Sands let him turn the dial up and down on the transformer, making the train go fast and slow.

  “We’ve been in this house, I guess, oh, seven years,” Sands estimated for him.

  Rather than feeling the mild interest or mild boredom he usually experienced when faced with other people’s stupid passions, English felt his heart rising in his throat. Now that they were alone, he wanted to ask Sands what he thought they were doing, spying on innocent citizens.

  The only light in the room shone down on the train. The train hissed and clicked over the track past minuscule barnyards and brief main streets—church, post office, general store—bounded at either end by nothing. It went over a bridge where it was summer and through a blue-and-white mountain where it was winter. English found that if he kept his vision narrowed to clock nothing but this journey alongside little cows and tiny sheep and miniature frozen townspeople and farmers, it was almost as much fun as a ride on an actual train. The disappointing part was coming around again to find the figures always in the middle of the same drama, over and over. On the other hand, he saw how that might sometimes be a comfort to a person’s mind.

  Sands took over the controls and showed him how to back the train into a siding and under a water tank without any water in it. Then Sands put some water from a dropper into the engine’s smokestack, and plopped in a white pill from a bottle he kept in a leather box beneath the table. As he sent the train on its way now, it gave out puffs of white smoke; also, he pushed a button that made it whistle.

  Although English knew it was his sacred duty as Sands’s hireling to resent him, he saw that his boss was no monster. Just like his train, Sands checked through a set world, one circumscribed by the scratchy records of his radio station, and the dull shimmer of the backdrop curtain in his studio, and his demented wife’s dusting and polishing of totally false memories—“We don’t have any children,” he told English at one point. “That picture is one of my nephew. He lives in the Philippines”—and it was Sands’s job to step out of this zone now and then only to bear witness to adultery or to ascertain that missing persons were truly and forever lost. “Bishop Andrew,” he said, “has never visited me. I don’t know where she gets her ideas. I don’t know what’s wrong with her.”

  This was too intimate for English. The threat of a sudden unmasking, of revelations so embarrassing he couldn’t stand them, got him onto the subject he’d been afraid to raise. “Mr. Sands. Don’t you ever wonder about what we do?”

  Sands glanced at him and then was reabsorbed by his train.

  “I mean—I heard you talking about God, and”—English was nervous, couldn’t get his thoughts straight—“how does that tie in with the nature of our work, is what I’m asking about.”

  “It’s a tough job,” Sands said, turning off his train.

  “I feel bad about spying around on Marla Baker,” English said.

  “It’s a very difficult business.”

  These sideways answers made English feel weak. “Do you have any idea what kind of information I’m gathering here? I mean, for what purpose? Is it legal stuff? Is it a divorce thing, or what?”

  “Judgments as to the kinds of information are things we just don’t make. What use the client makes of it, whether these things are good or bad—well, your best bet is to stop following that line of thought. Stop thinking. Look at it this way. We deal in information. Any great involvement in what we’re passing along would be like the mailman opening your letters for his own amusement. Try and see yourself in a role like the mailman’s.”

  “This woman’s sexual preference is going to be used against her.”

  “That’s a fair assumption.”

  “You want to be a part of that?”

  “Things are occurring. You’re recording those things and listening to those things, and passing the information along.”

  “Well, the information I’m passing along to you right now is, I think this woman’s sex life is going to be used against her.”

  “I’ve already stated I’m cognizant of that.” To English he seemed so dry. He was like paper. His skin, everything.

  But Sands wasn’t just a case of personal emptiness, English could see that. He had some inner power to be mild, it showed in the way he dealt with Grace. He accepted her blandly and totally. English saw how you could love somebody like that. After a number of years none of the usual things would matter. It was hard to come up with a judgment against one or two activities of an electric train enthusiast who knew how to love without hope.

  And so his disappointment in himself, for abetting Sands in his spy life, couldn’t be too firm or entire. He didn’t know what to think.

  That night, after he’d said goodbye and gone home and done nothing for a while, English sat down in the overstuffed chair with a loose-leaf notebook and a pen. Opening the notebook to the middle, he wrote across the top line of the page

  You don’t know me

  and looked at those words for a while. He began to write again, stopped writing, leapt up, rifled his top drawers, and found an envelope and two aging, brittle stamps. Then he sat down and finished the note he’d started.

  You don’t know me, therefore I don’t feel a need to tell you my name. I just thought you should know that your husband is having you followed by a private investigator around town. He’s been getting information about your life.

  English wrote three more words—“Happy New Year”—but crossed them out. He read the note. As far as he could see, it delivered what he wanted to get across. He tore the page from the notebook. He folded it into its white envelope. He put a stamp on it and walked five blocks, thinking that he didn’t want to move people and change people, failing to think how they might be moving and changing him, to the post office, where he dropped the envelope in a box out front. It was his first use of this post office.

  1981

  Within a week his subject, Marla Baker, had moved away. English’s duties as a private eye were nil, but his boss, Ray Sands, found more work for him at WPRD.

  Essentially, on the production end of things, at WPRD he did just what he’d been doing in the cold midnights outside Marla Baker’s windows: he taped other people’s conversations. But now he was right in the room with them, they saw him, he was no spy. After they went away he edited out embarrassing slips of the tongue and overlong silences, dubbed themes and intros and outros onto either end, and tossed down the reels in the Special Programs in-basket. English found it all pretty dull stuff—half-hour chats between WPRD’s big-yawn personalities and their baldly uninteresting guests, who happened to be goofball artists, authors of books about birds and clams, or has-beens the listener would be surprised to learn were not yet dead. Sometimes English helped train new staff arrivals. These had to be frequent in order to keep up with the departures.

  One new arrival English worked with was a Portuguese man named Smith, not an unusual name among Portuguese fishing families, it turned out, because many of them had adopted the names of their British captains when they’d first jumped ship on
the Cape and taken up their lives here, far from home. All these name changes had happened in the murky past, but to English this gentleman sounded as if he’d just stepped onto the pier. Maybe he’d come here two days ago and only then adopted the name his American relatives had used for generations; English really couldn’t guess, and there was no finding out, either, because Smith had his own way of trying to communicate, and it didn’t work. Over the air this wasn’t a problem, as he broadcast in his native language.

  Around the records and equipment the new man had a hunched, respectful deliberateness of which English approved. Smith was portly. But he had a blubbery quality, too. English imagined they still called him by his childhood nickname around the house. English sympathized when sometimes Smith forgot and left the switch for the announcer’s mike in the wrong position—it was supposed to be On when he was talking and Off when he wasn’t, and it sounded simple enough, but everybody got it wrong sometimes at first, trying to do two or three things at once and very aware the whole time that people were out there listening and possibly considering you some kind of a geek, or worse. When Smith made this little error he invariably looked as if he was about to surrender all control. “Oh! I’m making, iss—diss wrong! Too wrong!” He had a bald head, doctorly reading glasses he was always donning out of nowhere, a fringe of hair more literally a fringe than English would have hoped to see anywhere outside a cartoon, and a checked golfing cap that he deeply cherished. “I’m wear a het on my had,” he told English, “because I’m don’t”—he rubbed his smooth head—“you see? Iss bowled.” He displayed his checked cap. “You see?” He wore his wristwatch on the outside of his sweater sleeve, set off like fireworks against the orange knit. “Issa new—brain you,” he liked to tell everyone. There was a digital clock on the announcer’s board and a wall clock on the wall, but when he wanted the correct time, Smith always went into a huddle with his watch.

  On his first delirious night at the controls, he opened his program with a 45 rpm recording of a Portuguese orchestra doing their country’s national anthem, after which they played the American national anthem, managing to make them both sound exactly the same. Next Smith read the intro to his show from a little yellow card he held before his face with a trembling hand, but his mike was still switched to Off. When he was done reading he turned it to On and desperately asked English a few incomprehensible questions that went out over the air.

  While Smith read his introduction to each song from one of his yellow cards, pushed the button that set it spinning, and then cued up the next record on the other turntable with the sweating vertigo of a person under fire, one of the newsmen—for English’s money there were too many newspeople around the place—taped a phone interview in the hall closet with a Vietnam veteran about Agent Orange. Acoustically the closet was the only place, because the phone company had refused to wire the production studio as long as the station was in arrears. “And why did they do that!” the newsman was saying. He felt he had to shout. “What was it exactly that they told you!” Smith liked to keep the speakers in the studio turned up high. The music of his homeland carried him away. He was moved to tears by a ballad, a typical one of tootly violins and a passion-wrung male voice begging violently in Portuguese, except when every now and then it sobbed in English, “Hoppy birthday—to you—my dolling …” “It sounds like you were getting the runaround here, am I right?” the newsman cried. Smith looked at his watch, at the wall clock, at the digital clock. He was getting alarmed. The timing on his play list must not have been working out. Time was his conqueror. When the song was done he talked in a choked, halting fashion to the audience, holding no yellow cards now, clutching the microphone by its neck. English sensed he was confessing his incompetence and apologizing for his whole life.

  Before too long, the interview in the closet was over. Berryman, the reporter, was leaning against the glass window of the announcer’s studio looking drained of blood. English motioned to him to come on into the studio, though there was hardly any room, if only to stop him breathing on the glass like a kid who needed a nickel. Berryman was tall and pale, with the look, to English’s eye, of a real juicer, just the kind of washout you’d expect to locate in one of the closets around here. Everyone at WPRD was either just starting out in the radio business or completely finished. There was nobody in between. “I just got fired,” Berryman said.

  “Bullshit.”

  “No. No. Ray Sands was just in here, and he fired me.”

  “You must’ve misheard him. He must’ve not recognized you and he must’ve said, ‘You’re hired.’”

  Smith turned and asked a question, but now he couldn’t say anything intelligible because his bald head was tuned to Portuguese. He might have been requesting permission to explode the station. English nodded and smiled, rather than make him feel misunderstood.

  “What’d he fire you for?” English asked Berryman.

  “He was standing in the fucking hallway,” the reporter said. “He was waiting for me when I came out of the fucking closet. He said the fucking interview was hogwash. He pronounced my fucking fate.”

  “Hogwash? What has he got against hogwash? I mean, hey”—English pointed at the day’s small stack of Special Programs tapes—“Baba Ram Dass. Check this out, Berryman—‘The Nicest People on Cape Cod.’ And anyway, when did Sands even get a chance to hear the tape?”

  “He didn’t hear this tape,” Berryman said. “This is part two. He heard part one. He heard it last week, on the air.” Berryman held out the tape, a cassette. “This is part two. He doesn’t want to hear part two.”

  Smith, trying to get one record stopped and another started, now developed the notion that he was being asked to play this tape. “No, no, no. I’m play music en rahdio—very”—he went through a bunch of gestures that got nothing across, picked up his play list, and ran his finger down along the titles—“I’m make diss, to will be—very nice.”

  “I don’t believe anybody ever got fired before at WPRD,” English told Berryman.

  “He said the whole report was hogwash. I mean, as if he actually gives two shits.”

  English was hardly paying this chat any mind—mainly he kept his eye on Smith, communicating wordlessly with the new arrival through nods of the head and the way he held his body, letting Smith know he was still there, still helping. And yet what passed between him and Berryman turned out to be important. Things were coming swiftly into his mind along various paths, like spears. But—Fired, tough luck for the unlucky, was all he thought at the time. “Well, Berryman, I’ll buy you a drink,” he told the ex-reporter.

  “I happen to be drunk already,” Berryman said, “but something like that might be arranged.”

  “Right when this shift is over. How about a cup of coffee?”

  “Fuck you,” Berryman said. “Hogwash.”

  They were sitting in a basement place on the East End, Berryman’s idea of a bar. English preferred a spot about a half block away that had brighter lights and a little chromium. But tonight it was Berryman’s party.

  Smith was with them and seemed to grasp that he and English were consoling Berryman for the negligible loss of his job. Smith’s face was expressive. English had never seen anybody before who actually “furrowed” his brow. Smith pushed his lips toward the rim of his glass like the bell of a honeysuckle, and what he did was, he quaffed.

  “So tell me about this tape,” English said, he hoped sympathetically, to Berryman.

  “But the point of it is that there’s nothing to tell, English. ’Nam vets, Agent Orange, it’s last year’s stuff. But a phone interview has a certain immediacy, so you do a phone interview. What does Sands want, a big scoop? We can’t even make a long-distance call, man, because his credit’s trashed.”

  English was ready to get going. It was a bar with dim lights and a faint stink, where the big mistake was a rug that harbored the damp. The customers drank resolutely. It wasn’t eleven yet, but he saw men and women already forming tender allian
ces of the kind that had to be hurried through before they rotted —his kind, as a matter of fact. After a while he couldn’t stop himself. “Let me tell you about this woman I got the hots for.” “Are you buying?” Berryman said.

  “Who’s been buying so far?”

  “Mr. English. One of the gainfully employed.”

  “Smith.” English waggled his empty glass.

  Smith caught the bartender’s eye with a raised finger, then stirred the finger around among the three of them.

  “Her name is Leanna Sousa,” English said. “Leanna Sousa, Leanna Sousa, Leanna Sousa.” He’d never been able to drink —two was his limit, maybe one.

  “I didn’t get the young lady’s name,” Berryman said.

  “Leanna Sousa?” Smith said. “Sousa?”

  “Right. Yeah. Sousa—Portuguese.”

  “Diss a lady that she have one hotel? Sousa Hotel?”

  “We didn’t get around to what she owns.”

  “You guys are so close. You go so deep,” Berryman said.

  “It wasn’t that kind of conversation.”

  “‘It?’ Are we talking about one fucking conversation with the dyke owner of a dykes-only hotel in one of the homosexual capitals of the world? What religion are you?”

  “Catholic.”

  “You’re about to suffer worse than a Jew.”

  “I’m crazy about her. Her hair is pure black.”

  “Oh,” Berryman said, “oh. Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

  “If I could get you to see what I see in her, then I wouldn’t feel so alone.”

  “You’re not alone, English. I’m right here. Buy me a drink.”

  “You’re right there with the snotty remarks. You’re above it all. But you know what they say? Empty people float upward.”

  “My glass is almost empty,” Berryman pointed out.

  “Diss woman,” Smith said. “Because she—the family feel terrible.”