Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

by Denis Johnson

  The trouble and ache of the last few minutes circled the center of his feeling and then dropped away. Later for that. Now was the time for other things—for the next thing—for figuring out what to do now, this instant. Oh this town, with its harbor glinting like a blowtorch at the end of every alley … He’d walked almost as far as Cutter Street, where Grace Sands might still be living. And where Ray Sands must have kept any material, any files, he may have had regarding Gerald Twinbrook.

  English turned up Cutter. Right away he felt the strands of a certain kind of nauseated pity touching him. He didn’t want to see Grace. On the other hand, he wanted those files. Maybe she wouldn’t remember him. Or maybe she would reach out and strangle his heart, pleading for an explanation of absolutely everything.

  Nobody home. His knock sounded the emptiness of the rooms behind the double doors. Standing tiptoe on the mushy lawn, he tapped on the windows and tried to peek in. The lace curtains seemed to have survived from obscurity, like the antique gown of a jilted bride. They were shut tight, without a crack to see through.

  From the next-door neighbor, a young woman carrying a baby and walking barefoot and coatless across narrow Cutter, going tiptoe among the frigid rivulets of snowmelt, he got the latest. Grace Sands had moved to the old folks’ home. “You know—Shirley Manor,” she said. The baby, peeking out of its blue blanket, regarded him with a powerful serenity.

  “Why are you barefoot?” English asked the woman.

  “I’m just going from my mom’s house back to my place,” she explained with a little embarrassment. She pointed one at a time at two houses facing each other across the lane. The house she’d been making for was next door to the Sands residence.

  “Who took Grace over there to Shirley Manor, I wonder,” he said.

  “It was the Bishop. Bishop Andrew,” the woman said.

  “Bishop Andrew?”

  “Yeah, weird, huh? He comes over sometimes when he’s on the Cape. He’s a relative or something. The first time I saw him I was surprised. I didn’t know he drove an El Camino,” she said.

  An El Camino? This irrelevancy irritated English unspeakably. He stood in the lane for a while after she’d left him, chewing viciously on the inside of his cheek.

  When he was alone on the street again, he moved quickly, willing himself not to think about it, around the side of the house to the kitchen door. English hadn’t been back here before. There was no yard to speak of, only a tall board fence three steps away from the glass-paneled back door. He broke a panel of the glass with his elbow, gouging a small tear in his jacket’s leather sleeve. It didn’t make much noise at all.

  He took a deep breath, standing quietly by the door, and then surprised himself by bursting into tears. Something must be getting to me, he thought, yanking out his shirttail and wiping at his eyes. The sobs doubled him over and shook him as if dislodging a strange, heavy obstruction from his throat. When he stood up straight again his heart was lighter, though his head hurt and his eyes felt wounded. He reached his right hand carefully through the shattered panel, opened the door, and went through the kitchen and the airless living room to Ray Sands’s work area.

  English had a cigarette while he puttered around in his dead boss’s studio, peering into the tripod camera’s lens, repositioning the two tungsten lamps, and blowing smoke into the somber darkroom. In the office itself he found the file drawer open and empty. It stood to reason that Sands’s executor would have been here, and maybe, thought English, there was cause to remove the files. But he couldn’t help it, the numberless fingerprints of a conspiracy blazed brightly on all the objects around him now.

  The telephone on Sands’s desk was working. English dialed the numbers he’d found in Gerald Twinbrook’s office, and had a couple of conversations. The first two were New York numbers, one no longer in service and the other belonging to an art gallery; but the person answering hadn’t heard of any Gerald Twinbrook.

  “So this isn’t his gallery? He doesn’t show paintings there?”

  “I know my artists,” the man said. “I don’t know Gerald Twinbrook.”

  The third number belonged to the Notch Lodge in Franconia, New Hampshire. A recorded message told him the lodge was closed from October 10 until the first of June.

  Franconia—the Truth Infantry—matters drifted together into secret shapes. His head said: What if this, what if that? What if it all ties together, what if somewhere a bad man sits making sense of it all, with my fate in his hands? This situation is adding up. I’ve got everything but the area code on this one. He picked up Ray Sands’s felt-tipped pen with the idea of writing down all the facts of the case—the people, the places, the connections—Provincetown, Marshfield, Franconia; Ray Sands and Grace Sands; Marla and Carol and Leanna; Twinbrook and the Cape light and John Skaggs, the unholy nineteenth-century Midwestern Lazarus; Twinbrook and the big corporations and the Truth Infantry and God and Jesus and the Bishop … But the pen was dry and he decided in favor of letting these things boil inside him until they produced a driving steam. He turned over the few papers on the desktop, a couple of errand lists in Ray Sands’s small, square hand, several bills with the payment vouchers torn away, and when he uncovered what he saw, for an instant, as a white card on which were penciled the words Kill the Bishop, but which he found under the lamp to be an envelope bearing, in Sands’s print, the name

  Leanna Sousa

  it was like walking past a phone booth just at the moment someone says “Hello?”—that one word corkscrewing out of a whole life.

  He put the envelope down and dialed the fourth telephone number, one in the 202 area. A woman answered and said, “Good afternoon, this is the White House.”

  “White House?”

  “This is the White House. You’ve reached the telephone number of the President.”

  “The real President? I mean,” English corrected himself, “the real phone number? Can I talk to him?”

  “If you’ll state your purpose,” she said, “we’ll connect you with a staff member who can help you.”

  English hung up on her.

  He picked up the envelope bearing Leanna’s name.

  It wasn’t addressed to Leanna, or to anybody. Her name ran across the upper left corner, just a notation. English held the envelope gently. He thought of steaming the flap loose or getting the thing X-rayed, and then he just tore it open with his thumb, remembering the owner of this communication was dead. The note was handwritten on yellow lined paper. He closed his eyes and willed himself to understand that it couldn’t possibly be an instruction to him from God to kill the Bishop of his diocese. And it wasn’t, he saw, from Sands to Leanna, which he’d also feared, but to Marla Baker from the lover who’d lost her that winter—from Carol.

  Dear Marla,

  This evening you called and before I recopy what I read to you on the phone I just want to say how important it is for me to express to you those thoughts. It’s very frightening for me to put my feelings on the line, without that edge of “control” or the notion of the “observer” lurking in the wings. So …

  just spent an agonizing evening thinking and feeling about possibly everything under the sun—wanting to write down and clarify that confusion—the confusion of wanting you, really desiring you—a desire that runs very deep and continues to cut deeper—I say cut because this kind of opening is at once pleasurable and painful—I’m in a dilemma—for me, some very important things are happening between you and me—and I want for you to have all that you want for yourself—but I also have “wants”—at issue for me now is whether I’m able to continue being sexually involved with you while you are involved sexually with another woman again—with Leanna again, I almost couldn’t write her name.—I know I’ve never felt the sexual and sensual highs I’ve experienced with you, but now I’m beginning to feel myself construct limits and barriers between you and me—in my mind and body. I realize that ideally this shouldn’t be so—that I should be able to be totally and fully
there with you—to leave mysel open to the experience of your love and affection—regardless of who is sleeping with you tonight or any other night—and I’ve been trying real hard to deal with that one in as open and rational a way as I possibly can—but I know that for now that is beyond me. I want you very much, I want to continue to grow and nurture my love for you, to allow it to unfold, recognizing our sexual selves as an essential part of that love’s core—I think you know I wouldn’t ask for this unless I felt what was happening now was pulling us apart—

  I guess there isn’t much more to say other than that you embrace the above as an expression of some really deep feelings that I felt compelled to share with you. It scares me when you talk about being “fucked unconscious.” That’s definitely not the Marla I know—let me know, please, how you’re feeling and what rages or anger you have for me. I hope what I’ve said won’t be resented—keep loving!!

  Loving you,

  English put his head down on the desk. Why did everything vibrate when he touched it?—strands of an indecipherable web, connections that shouldn’t be there. The coincidences of his life assailed him. The walls of the world were soft; wherever he bumped up against them he pushed through into inscrutable chaos and naked meaning and Heaven and Hell. But there was comfort in touching this letter. It gave him peace just holding it in his hand. It brought to mind the lonely safety of those nights he’d spent listening to Carol and Marla’s conversations, those nights when he, the only one awake in the world, had known all about them and had forgiven them.

  When he got outside, the sky had darkened. Within minutes a stiff wind was blowing over the harbor. Now what? Was it going to snow? Winter into spring into winter. Miss Leanna had turned into Mister. Wafer and wine into body and blood. And people dying—passing from life into meat. All these transformations. They were too much for him.

  English stopped in at the Yardarm Tavern because they’d recently gotten a videotape player, and from all the way out in the street he could see film credits wandering up over the big screen. Lawrence of Arabia.

  He sat down at the bar, and before anybody could get near him he said, “Nothing, thanks. Nothing. Nothing.” A guy on drugs clutching a teddy bear to his chest pulled up a chair two feet from the screen and got in everybody’s way, exclaiming about the music. His friend, an older man, said, “Daniel, I have a drink for you at the bar.”

  “The sound track is incredible! Unbelievable! I’m experiencing this!”

  “Daniel,” his friend said. “Please.”

  “Could you turn this up, please,” the man cried out, passing his bear back and forth before the screen.

  The older man led him out of the place by the hand. “I’m experiencing this!” the younger one repeated. His friend said, “Everybody’s experiencing it. I’m very embarrassed.”

  English said, “Okay if I use the phone?”

  The bartender snagged it and set it down in front of him with a negligent, easy grace. “Who cares?” he said.

  English watched the movie, vaguely following the course of events in the life of this great hero. In a while, tiny figures lay slanted against the swirling yellows of a desert sandstorm. He thought it must look very much like the inside of his own mind.

  He dialed the phone and when she answered didn’t identify himself, just started right in. “I have various things to say to you.”

  “I’ll have to cut this short,” Leanna said. “I’m in the middle of washing my hair.”

  “You’re not washing your hair.”

  “I’m washing my hair, Lenny.”

  “Let me hear the bubbles. Put your hair next to the phone. Let me hear the lather fizz.”

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  “You’re not really washing your hair,” he said.

  “I’m washing my hair, so now if you don’t mind—”

  “I do! Leanna, wait, I do mind—God, I wish I could look around on the other side of this jagged line, like they do in the comics.”

  “In the comics?”

  “Well, they do that sometimes. I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t make something like that up, Leanna. Because I would never snow you. I would never lie to you.”

  “Are you just going to hassle me? Is this going to be that kind of call?”

  “Okay. Okay. Okay. Sorry.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “No. I mean, you know. I’m sorry.” He sighed. “So how long has Marla been back in P-town, anyway?”

  “Since April first.”

  “Right. And I’m the April fool, right?” He winced to hear her sigh. “How come I haven’t seen her around?”

  “You haven’t seen anybody. You’ve been indoors for a month.”

  “Are you back together with her? Obviously you’re back together with her. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It didn’t come up.”

  “Jesus. It didn’t come up? Come on. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “We’ve been going together for weeks now,” he pointed out.

  “Is that what you call it? Going together?”

  “Man, I don’t get this,” he said. “Please, don’t back up on me like this!”

  “Why don’t you come over?”

  “Why? So I can watch you two get it on in the hot tub?”

  A silence. Then: “No. So I can dry my hair while you’re on the way.”

  “Is she there?”

  “No. Not—not when you get here.”

  “Christ. She’s standing right there.”

  He hung up.

  A crew-cut woman in dance tights and a big overcoat nodded off in the corner. There was celery sticking up out of her drink.

  A muscle boy in a sleeveless sweatshirt laid his cheek down on the bar and gazed at English, his eyes misted with a barbiturate vagueness.

  A small dapper gentleman two seats away knocked back a shot of something and exhaled an invisible sweet cloud. His smile broke in two and he quickly signaled for another.

  In the midst of these chemically happy patrons, English tasted a sadness. Knew its idiot exile. He took nothing stronger than the free popcorn placed in salad bowls around the place, but he felt as if his own machine was running on the wildest concoction, the adrenaline and sorrow of a broken love.

  He called her again within five minutes. “Is she there?”

  “No. I’m alone now.”

  “How’s your hair?”

  “It’s alone, too.”

  “Don’t do that. Don’t act like it’s funny. Listen, listen, something’s bothering me.”

  “Obviously.”

  “No, a question, one question, something’s bothering me. The night I came in, in the morning, and your hair was all cut off. She did it, right?”

  “No. I did it myself. I told you that.”

  “Okay. You’re not lying?”

  “She wasn’t even in town then, Lenny.”

  “You’re not lying?”

  “Everything’s right out in the open, isn’t it? What is there to lie about? I’m seeing Marla, Marla’s seeing me, we’re going to try again.”

  “Try again. What do you mean ‘try again’?”

  “It’s different now. Things were tense, we were tense, before. This stuff with her husband, all of that. Then she got involved with Carol, and then she got paranoid about this surveillance business. It was the circumstances. You don’t know what it’s like, feeling you’re being followed around. We think we can … I don’t know. We’re willing to try again.”

  Anger started behind his eyes as he heard her talk about surveillance, about paranoia. “Look,” he said, “you shouldn’t be messing with your own sex. You and me, it’s more natural. You and me—”

  “For me, it’s more natural to be a dyke,” Leanna said.

  “But you don’t even make love!”

  “We make love.”

  “But you can’t, you don’t, it isn’t like you fuck her.”

  “Fucking isn’t ev
erything. With you and me, it really wasn’t anything.”

  Though her words were direct, her tone was not unkind.

  “But we just got to that part. Give me a chance. Now is when it starts to get good, don’t you realize that?”

  “You can have all the chances you want, Lenny. Nothing’s changed.”

  “Nothing’s what? Nothing’s fucking changed? Are you back with her or not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then—”

  “—but nothing’s changed between you and me. I mean, not if you don’t want it to.”

  “I want you all to myself.”

  “But now Marla’s back in the picture.”

  “Are you saying you want to do a three-way?” A prurient thrill banished his anger for a second.

  “No,” Leanna said. “One-on-one with Marla, and one-on-one with you.”

  “What bullshit.”

  “We’re free in this life,” she said.

  “What an absolute motherfucking fantasy.”

  “Why don’t we figure out what we want and then make it work?”

  “At least,” he admitted, “you have the balls to ask for it.” A sudden envy of her stung him, and he banged down the receiver.

  He sat staring at the bartender, who opened a plastic bag and poured English’s bowl full of free popcorn without looking at him.

  Baby, we hated each other in another life, English declared inside himself as he left. Let that be the last word. Outside, the harbor was producing its effects, and again the weather was all different. Cancerous blossoms of fog undoing everything. Two blocks east he stopped at a wet pay phone and dialed Leanna’s number, but she didn’t answer.

  English forgot completely, as soon as he woke in the darkness that night, that he’d been dreaming of tumbling in a coffin down a flight of stairs. But he certainly felt like somebody who’d just done something like that, queasy and rattled, his ears ringing. He thought he’d better write this down. He got out of bed and sat in his underwear with a big loose-leaf notebook and a disposable pen. Generally he carried this notebook around in his car’s glove compartment. He’d meant to use it to keep track of all the cases he’d looked forward to solving here in this town, but the pages were white and unblemished. As if from outside the window, he looked at himself sitting in a blue chair stained with other people’s drinks.