Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

by Denis Johnson

  “Well, but Blue Cross. You could—”

  “Yeah, we did. They’re going to give us the information, but it just keeps getting snarled up in paperwork. This is the account number.” English handed him the letter from Blue Cross. “Can you talk to the data clerk?”

  “The programmer? Yeah. Okay,” Frank said. “I can.”

  “Now? Take a break?”

  Frank sighed uncomfortably.

  “How long would it take? A few minutes?”

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Frank told the orderly.

  The orderly was policing the waiting room now. She looked to be eight or nine months along, straightening slowly with a hand on her hip and standing that way a minute. She held a rolled-up copy of something like Good Housekeeping. She shook it at him like a warning finger. “I hate it when they tear the stuff out of our magazines.”

  Two janitors came down the hall, one with a mop and one with a running vacuum cleaner, talking under its noise:

  “Hah?”

  “Hah?”

  “Hah?”

  English went into Frank’s cubicle and poured himself a cup of coffee. He picked up the psychiatric nursing text and started reading all about himself.

  In a few minutes an obstetrician came downstairs from Ob-Gyn and wanted to show them the premature baby—no more than a foetus, at twenty weeks—he had just delivered.

  The orderly paid him no mind. She was balancing her checkbook.

  “This thing hasn’t drawn a breath,” he told English, “but the heart’s still beating. Forty-eight minutes. That old heart’s just ticking away.” The obstetrician’s hands and lips trembled, and tiny drops of blood flecked the front of his green surgical gown. His hair had been shellacked by sweat under his sterile cap, which he now used to wipe his nose. His eyes were large and morose, like a cow’s. “I’ve been a practicing physician for eleven years,” he said, staring at the foetus he was holding. It was in a plastic ice-cream cup.

  Frank came in. He was holding the printout.

  The obstetrician put the foetus down on the counter in front of him. “Dessert?” he said.

  Frank peered into the cup as over the edge of a cliff.

  “Is it alive?” English asked him.

  “Are you kidding?” the obstetrician said. “Would you call it living if you looked like that?”

  “But you said the heart was still beating.”

  “Well, you know, the heart’s a strange muscle. You can keep it going practically forever with a little electricity.”

  The orderly got up and left.

  “Where did you get those shoes, man?” English asked the doctor suddenly.

  “These are golfing shoes,” the doctor said. “I got them at a pro shop. I’m just waiting for this thing to die, okay?”

  Frank went over and sat down on the orderly’s stool. “Here you go,” he said, handing English the printout.

  English studied it but didn’t know how to read such a thing.

  “What is it now,” the obstetrician said, looking at the clock and sobbing and wiping the snot from his nose with his green surgical cap, “about fifty-three minutes?”

  “It’s dead,” English told him.

  “How do you know from way over there?” the doctor said. But he knew, too.

  Frank crossed his arms over his chest and looked at English. “The codes mean this person had a skin rash, sudden onset. The diagnosis code is for Chinese Restaurant Angioedema. Treated with Benadryl and released. Littleton Hospital, Littleton, New Hampshire.”

  “Where’s Littleton, New Hampshire?”

  “I wouldn’t know. Somewhere in New Hampshire, obviously.”

  The obstetrician stood up tall and opened his arms out wide. “All I can tell you is, I’m going to go the distance, and the sons of bitches can fight over my footprints.”

  “Everybody’s tired,” Frank agreed.

  “Chinese Restaurant Angioedema,” English said.

  “It’s an allergic reaction to that meat tenderizer,” Frank said, “that flavoring agent.” He slumped forward as a sigh went out of him, and ended with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands. “MSG,” he said sadly. “Chinese restaurants use a lot of that stuff.”

  On his way out of the building English used a pay phone to call the hospital in Littleton. He identified himself as a detective, and explained he was looking for a missing person who might have been a patient there. “Are you near Franconia, by any chance?”

  “About ten miles, yessir,” the admissions clerk said.

  “Well, that adds up, that adds up,” English said. “It all adds up, and it’s been adding up and adding up.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “His name was Gerald Twinbrook, came in on January 2. I need to know the address he gave when he was treated. His local, his Franconia address. Goddamn, I knew he was in Franconia,” English said.

  “But wait a minute,” the clerk said, “I can’t give that information out over the phone.”

  “Can you look that up for me, please? Immediately.”

  “What department did you say you worked for again? What was your department and badge number?”

  “Aaah, fuck you,” English said, hanging up.

  He considered calling the Notch Lodge in Franconia, whose number he’d dialed so many times he’d memorized it inadvertently. But he’d always gotten the same recorded insistence that the lodge wouldn’t open till June 1; he didn’t need to hear it again. He’d made up his mind to see them all personally up there anyway one of these days. Maybe, in fact, tomorrow.

  People seemed to be staying at Leanna’s hotel now; English saw lights in a couple of cabins as he cruised to a stop out in the street. Leanna’s living-room window, too, was bright. He often stopped here and looked up at her windows.

  He reached for the key to turn on the ignition, but the car was still running. He turned it off.

  Now was the time. Time to clear the air, to ease his mind about a few things, maybe—he saw in one lighted cabin a young woman with a bucket and a mop—maybe patch things up.

  He rang the front doorbell and Leanna raised the window above him. “Is it you?” she said.

  “I guess so,” he said.

  “Are you going to sing to me?”

  It seemed to imply he shouldn’t invite himself in. He turned and looked down the drive, between the two rows of cabins, at his little car. “I think I’m heading off to New Hampshire tomorrow.”

  “Are you moving?”

  “No.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “You want to go for a drive? The night’s beautiful.”

  “Sure, okay,” she said. “I’m glad you finally came by.”

  They drove to Herring Cove, a beach on the Cape’s east side, and sat in his car looking out over the Atlantic in the general direction of France. He liked being next to her; he felt all the possibilities returning when he touched her cheek with his finger. He felt the Atlantic tide going out, washing the hair of souls. “Would you mind if we spent some time together tonight?” he said.

  “We’re doing the last-minute cleanup till all hours,” she said. “We always open the first weekend in June. A lot of folks come up for the Blessing of the Fleet.”

  “Is that a major festival?”

  “Not really. But it’s fun if you have a boat.”

  “I’ll get one,” English said.

  “Really?”

  “No,” he said, surprised she’d taken him at all seriously. “I’m just bullshitting.”

  “Are you bullshitting about wanting to see me tonight?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “I wouldn’t mind seeing you,” she said.

  “What if I come over later?”

  “Sure. Real late. After midnight, like 2 a.m. maybe.”

  She took his hand, and they sat in the car kissing for a while, until the clouds thinned out and the sea took on a slanting strangeness under the moon, and in a spirit of reconcilia
tion, English tried to explain himself. “Last March,” he began, “I got kidnapped.” She was quiet while he told her about Gerald Twinbrook, about the look of Twinbrook’s paintings, the light he laid on the canvas, the unidentified mania that had taken him away missing. English told her about the men who’d come to his room and pistol-whipped him in the middle of the night, and he mentioned Ray Sands’s friendship with Bishop Andrew in a way that he felt sure communicated the suspicious nature of that relationship. But a sadness grew in him as he realized that there was a thin, obscene sediment between his tongue and the truth. He wasn’t telling her that Ray Sands had been an investigator, that he’d sent English to look for Gerald Twinbrook in the capacity of a hired detective—that he, English, had eavesdropped on Leanna and Marla Baker’s conversations, that he himself was the person who’d frightened Marla out of town. Talking around the facts made him feel deaf after a while. He stopped speaking and looked out at an ocean that seemed incapable of sound, though all around them the surf acted. Nothing was clean under the spiritless hygiene of the moon. “Look,” he finished as he’d started, “I got kidnapped.”

  “Hm” was all Leanna said.

  Immediately he felt like defending all this, felt like coming right out and saying what he suspected, although he hadn’t even come right out yet and said it to himself. Many times these last few days he’d told himself, This isn’t a hunch, it’s a psychotic delusion. Don’t tell anyone. Don’t tell anyone because—Joan of Arc, Simone Weil, they spoke of their delusions and were believed. And then? … martyred. It was big. It felt very big to him. “These guys were part of this Truth Infantry. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  “Those men aren’t part of a conspiracy. They probably really thought you stole some stuff,” Leanna said.

  “But the guy, their boss, he had a professional air about him.”

  “He was a nut, Lenny. A bizarre man in a bizarre hat doing strange stuff on chemicals. Same with his friends. They’re just too stupid-sounding for anybody to trust them in any kind of commando organization, or whatever you think it is. Which it probably isn’t. And Ray Sands wasn’t a fascist guerrilla. Everybody knew Ray Sands, more or less.”

  “Less, I think. Much less,” English insisted.

  “Lenny, Lenny,” she said, “Lenny.”

  Her tone irritated him now. “Don’t you see what happened? These guys kidnapped Gerald Twinbrook. Nobody would know about it if he hadn’t needed medical treatment at the nearest hospital to their headquarters in Franconia. Probably,” he said, “they still have the guy.”

  “And what was it you said he needed treatment for?”

  “Chinese Restaurant Angioedema,” English said.

  She blew a fart of laughter through pursed lips.

  “Damn,” English said, “sometimes you have no grace. None. You fry my blood.”

  “You’re kind of funny, is all. I’m sorry,” she said, still laughing.

  His chief hope had been that she’d debunk his ideas. He was surprised to find that now he wanted to defend them at all costs.

  “He’s still there! They have him. And Ray Sands ordered it.”

  “Why?”

  “He doesn’t know why. He was following orders.”

  “Orders? From who?”

  “There’s a web—a nest, man, with tentacles reaching out of it—and I swear to you, at the center of it is Andrew, our Bishop.”

  “Wo, wo, wo,” she said. “You’re scaring me.”

  “It is scary.”

  “Not it. You. You’re going beyond all sense. Really. Please,” she begged, “don’t think that kind of stuff.”

  “I’m just trying to go with what I feel,” he said. “Follow out my instincts.”

  “Yeah, and next thing you know, you’ll turn into an animal and they’ll lock you up.” She began doodling geometrical figures on the fogged front window with her finger.

  “Animals don’t make mistakes with their lives,” English told her, and began trying his hand at a few designs on the window himself. A hexagon, a cube; here comes a parallelogram. She did, he thought, seem a little frightened.

  “It isn’t like you think it is,” she said.

  “But everything is like we think it is, don’t you get it? Out of the million little things happening on this beach, you can only be aware of seven things at once, seven things at any given time. I heard that on a tape.”

  “A tape.”

  “Yeah, a tape, a cassette series on salesmanship.”

  “I can’t believe you were ever a salesman,” she said.

  “If I can only pick out seven things to be aware of, then I’m selecting just a tiny sliver of reality as my experience. We never really get the whole picture. Not even a microscopic part of it.”

  “So? So what? We have to go on it anyway.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. Our delusions are just as likely to be real as our most careful scientific observations. And we have to go on them.”

  “You’re defending a delusion, and calling it just that,” she said. “Are you aware of that?” She started laughing. “Is that one of the seven things you choose to be aware of?”

  “The Bishop is behind all this,” he said in order to shut her up.

  But she only laughed again, in a different manner. “Well anyway, I’ve got to go supervise the cleanup,” she said.

  “I wrote you a note. The day I came over and Marla was there, that night I—” He broke off, searching in the glove compartment for his notebook. “Here it is, listen. ‘Dear Leanna. Many of the feelings I’ve been having lately, breaking down crying when alone, the sense of a cloud between me and God, the intuition that now, behind the cloud, is the time of faith …’”

  “Go on,” she said.

  “That’s all. But I mean—”

  “Lenny. I asked you before not to go off following your faith too far.” She gripped his arm tightly with both hands. He liked it. “Just drop all this, okay? Don’t think about it anymore. Stay with us. Stay with me.”

  “I want to see you tonight,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “I want to sleep with you.”

  “We’re going to,” she said.

  “I feel like I’m willing to try. I mean, with you.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Even, you know, with Marla in the picture and all.”

  “I’m glad,” she said.

  English drove home and got his jacket and then walked, shivering, through the Provincetown night. People were saying that a cold spring meant an early heat wave in summer. Off the hill and nearer the water it was windless, and warm in a way that was accentuated by the many newly opened restaurants spilling their light into the street. There were plenty of people in town, with the bulk of them to come in the next two days to enjoy the first weekend of the season, the bargain gift shopping and the annual Blessing of the Fleet, when fishermen and pleasure boaters would glide past the town wharf under the slowly waving scepter of some clergyman or other. It was almost eleven now. Couples walked home from late dinners. Two women in high heels sounded just like a horse clip-clopping by. From down an alley came the sorrows of a trumpet letting out soft jazz. A man passed him walking an invisible dog—a novelty item, a stiffened leash and collar that bobbed along ahead of him, empty. English crossed the street to avoid a gang of meaty lesbians and screaming queens who bore down on him with their arms locked around each other’s shoulders, singing, “Faggots and fairies and dykes, oh my! Faggots and fairies and dykes, oh my!” He liked the look of things. The town was getting a woozy, criminal feeling that rather matched his own.

  He went into a basement tavern on Commercial. He remembered drinking here with Berryman and Smith, the overanxious Portuguese disc jockey. He didn’t much care for basements, but he thought it might be a place the tourists hadn’t yet located and filled.

  He heard Phil, the cabdriver, speaking loudly inside before he was halfway down the stairs. The jukebox was playing “Misty
Blue.”

  Phil sat at the bar between a thin gay man with the arching posture of a heavy-headed blossom and Nguyen Minh, the Vietnamese factory worker. Somebody was laughing at the words of a blond and cute but quite butch-voiced transvestite whom English had noticed on the streets several times this winter. English couldn’t hear what she was saying.

  Phil was telling Nguyen Minh: “And I asked myself: The way you are now, would your eight-year-old self approve of you? Would your eight-year-old self—that totally innocent child, with those ideals that are real, man, and human—would he approve?”

  The tall thin man got up and headed out the door.

  “No fucking way. I was betraying that kid,” Phil said, “my childhood self. I’m talking about the real feeling of like if you stuck a bayonet in your buddy’s back, not just ripping off a friend or something like that, but killing, death. You know what I’m saying, man?” Phil’s face was crushed under the pressure of his pain. “I don’t think you know the kind of treachery I’m talking about.”

  “Whatever’s on tap,” English said, and the bartender drew him a glass of beer.

  Phil’s troubled scrutiny had floated over and snagged on the cross-dresser. “You never tasted that kind of treachery, man.”

  The cross-dresser smiled and shrugged. Her eyes were very red.

  “But then, and then it was like,” Phil said, holding his hand out before him, gazing cross-eyed into his open palm as if this memory rested right there in it, “the ghost of John Lennon appeared to me. And he said, Fuck that, he can’t judge you, because an eight-year-old doesn’t have the knowledge, man. Those ideals of yesterday, even everything you believed two hours ago, man—fuck that. We don’t need to apologize to our past selves. They were the ones who turned into us. We are just who we are. You know?” he asked the cross-dresser.

  She sat in splendid isolation, putting her very red lips around the cherry from her Manhattan.

  “Mister Hey There,” Phil said, noticing English. “What the fuck. Right?”

  “Hi,” English said.