Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

by Denis Johnson

  “I just got back from New Hampshire,” Berryman said.

  “Oh. I was there, too.”

  “Not where I was. I was in Edge Hill.”

  “Edge Hill?” English said.

  “A treatment center. The paper’s insurance program covered it.”

  “You mean—for booze?”

  Berryman’s look was direct—not at all sheepish. “I lost the battle and won the war.”

  For an awkward moment, English didn’t know what to say. Berryman scratched an arm, pinched his nose vigorously.

  “I see you’re in costume today,” Berryman said at last.

  “Forget you saw me.”

  “I really don’t think I can do that.”

  “Okay. I don’t care. Obviously I just say, Fuck it.”

  Berryman seemed to be trying to glance down English’s bodice. “I’m familiar with that philosophy.”

  English thought of reaching into his purse and taking out his .44. Giving everybody a little jolt.

  “You look good,” Berryman said.

  “Thanks. Your three minutes is up.”

  “You look very, very eighties.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Take care, Lenny.”

  “Forget my name,” English said.

  To get to the church he had to double back to Bradford. He cut through the alley where the costumed roughs hung out around the A-House, a notorious leather bar, but nobody even whistled. He made himself out of breath going up the concrete flights cut into the embankment to Bradford. It was nearly ten o’clock of a Sunday morning, and that’s what had him hurrying; he wanted to get to the rectory before the priest was done; he wanted to make his confession.

  English heard voices in the sitting room, and so he waited by the door. He’d been in this room on his first day in Provincetown, the day he’d met Leanna. He stepped back for the person coming out, a teenage girl who couldn’t have had anything very interesting to be ashamed of.

  The priest, a young, angular man, was about to put on his garment for Mass. As English came in he stopped, and looked at his watch.

  Dressed in these clothes and feeling beautiful, English sat down in the chair. “Bless me, Father,” he said, “for I have sinned.”

  The priest set the garment aside and looked at English carefully, then at his watch again. “You’re my last confession,” he said.

  He sat down next to English and put his slender fingers on the makeshift partition. “Do we need this?”

  English shook his head. Father moved it aside.

  “Call me,” English said, “May—June.”

  “Ah well, I’m Father Michael.” Father put his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, and seemed to be thinking. “May—June. You are a transvestite?”

  “Yes.”

  “Doesn’t that confuse the issue of your sexuality somewhat?”

  “How can my sexuality be any more confused than it is? Give me a break.”

  “I speak as one who is also gay.”

  “I’m not gay.”

  “Oh.” Father was surprised. “Of course, it’s not always an expression of a gay attitude.”

  “Sometimes it’s just a disguise.”

  Father crossed his arms before his chest and looked at English across the chasm of God’s love. “Where on earth,” he said, “did you shop for those shoes?”

  English sighed.

  Father said, “Are you serious?”

  English couldn’t keep back the tears. He choked on them, sobbing. “You mean, are you serious. Telling me you’re gay, for Christ’s sake.”

  “A lot of people are gay. I’m sorry if I misjudged, but I thought it would help to share a truth about myself.”

  “I came here to confess.”

  “All right.”

  “Not to hear your confession!”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m serious!”

  “All right. Is it all right if I take your hand?”

  “Oh, God,” English said.

  “No,” Father said, a little flustered now, “only if it comforts you.”

  “This is getting bizarre,” English said.

  Openmouthed disbelief stopped the priest’s face for a beat. “Oh, is it?”

  “Bless me, Father,” English begged, “for I have sinned.”

  “All right, then, let’s do it. How long has it been since your last confession?”

  “Like maybe a couple of years, at least,” English said.

  “And what have you done to trouble your conscience in that time?”

  The room was a typically decorated vestry, or whatever the hell, English thought, you call these places. There were crucifixes all over the walls, and here and there an empty cross inviting the sinner to share in unimaginable sufferings. A long embroidered banner hung over the partition put there to hide the priest while he dressed for the service—just like the partitions they’d had in English’s grade school. LOVE BEFORE ME, the banner said, LOVE BEHIND ME, LOVE ABOVE ME, LOVE BELOW ME, LOVE AROUND ME, LOVE WITHIN ME.

  “Two years ago I tried to hang myself to death,” English said.

  “I’m listening,” the priest said.

  “The thing is—sometimes I think I succeeded. Sometimes I think I really died.”

  “Well, of course you did.”

  Stunned silence. The room was choked with orchids. At last somebody was telling him the truth. He was dead.

  “If you tried sincerely, then you succeeded in canceling your life. It was an act of perfect faithlessness. You’d reached the absolute end,” Father Michael said. “Maybe it was the only thing you could do.”

  “Is there absolution for such a thing?”

  “Your faith is making you whole,” Father said.

  “But if I succeeded?”

  “You did succeed. And your faith is making you whole.”

  They sat together in silence for a while.

  “Anything more?” the priest asked.

  English’s sadness moved in his chest when he shrugged.

  Father Michael said, “I’m going to give you my strongest absolution. The original Latin.” As he stood up, he said, “Bishop’s doing Mass today, I can’t be late. He’s in town to bless the fleet.”

  Father made the sign of the cross, and stooped and gave English a little kiss on the forehead. “Te absolvo.”

  English left feeling unsure—was he now cleansed, and if so, of what exactly? What crud had the winds of absolution carried off, why did he still feel such grime in the creases of him? An unspiritual explanation was that it was hot. Summer had arrived. Now it was past ten and everybody, even the most debauched, was awake and on the stroll. The crowds were of a size to menace civil authority. Was anybody left in Boston or New York? When you’re this completely naked, he thought, much more naked than you’d be without clothes, when you’re naked of all your signs and your moves, as naked, say, as the minute you were born, then these thousands of lives going by will rake you. Something like the permeable mask a fencer darkens his face with, that’s what his heart needed here.

  He put on a casual look: no, not at all, none of this was getting to him; but everything was getting to him—the birds of electricity beating their wings in the wires, the repertoires of ambulances, the thud of defectively muffled engines and the whacking, like rugs being wearily beaten, of stereos through the open windows of cars. The frosty pink was fading from his mouth and the sweat dripped down the inside of his thighs, although occasionally a small breeze reached under and disturbed the leaves and blossoms of his skirt’s tropical motif. Above all he was embarrassed to be wearing men’s Jockey shorts. It seemed an easily appreciated thing, all you had to do, for heaven’s sake, was watch him walk. He had to remind himself with every breath that he was invisible to these wraiths.

  At a family grocery they were putting out crates of fruit to tempt the thirsty strollers. What a miracle to see a produce truck, uncoupled, drive out from under the massive husk of its trailer. Let him tr
eat his burdens like that!

  From the end of Bradford he headed right, out toward Herring Cove. The sky was open now, he was in the National Seashore, a realm protected from civilization, and the road wasn’t so crowded. Rather than walk right through the parking lot, he left the pavement a quarter mile or so below the cove and cut across the dunes that rose and fell for quite a distance before they lay down in front of the sea. A few minutes and he’d lost sight of the road, of everything but the sand and the sky; it showed him how all things could fall away in an instant; now he crested a dune and came into a crater empty of everything but sand and the intersecting footprints of other people; the notations delved here by their journeys showed him how each life was one breathtakingly extended musical phrase, and he prayed that their crossings were harmonious.

  In some former existence he’d been hunted over sand like this, run down and eaten, turned to the predator’s flesh and bones. He felt his life extending backward into the conflagration of all other lives. And it reached out of him like a frond of smoke, touching the tender pink future. This sand presented itself as evidence that he’d someday father children and grandchildren on the earth. He could hear their feet knocking in the rubble as they scavenged in our dregs, stumbling around after some gigantic holocaust.

  As he cleared the last dune, he stood for a minute on the brink of the Atlantic and laid claim to it all. Here the Cape faced west, curving into Cape Cod Bay, and the noon sun raked the sand. English felt it piercing him as if he wasn’t here. He had absolutely no protection in this guise. Everything he was —a man, an American, an image patched together out of certain assumptions and beheld mostly by itself—was burned to ash by the fire of this new thing. And something was burned away from before his vision, the veil itself that kept his eyes from the agony of brightness.

  He saw a lot of people in bathing suits on the beach. Stripped down to swatches of cloth. Stripped of their disguises, stripped of any protection at all—everything about them and even about the moment itself was naked before his sight.

  He walked down among them. These were not ghosts. They were looking at him, many of them, because he was fully dressed and he was moving. And he was looking back at them.

  Each one was crucified and completely open, every thought, every desire floating out from their torn hearts.

  A springer spaniel came rocking through the surf, tongue out, toward some toy or infant or beckoning, aged hand. And a young woman, some kind of office help or assistant floor manager, reclined toward the sun with the incense of her secrets rising from her into the clear day.

  A man squatted, then knelt, before a sand castle, finally vomiting up the teeth of wolves broken off in his flesh in a previous life, and a woman who had insisted on wearing her pearls to the beach sat beneath her silver hair thinking, “I’m guilty, yes, but I deserve a trial.” “Do people,” a little girl ten yards away was thinking, “all see the same color when they call something green?” A white filament of tanning lotion. Her mother’s hand obliterated it on her mother’s skin. “No. Wait. The storm is only in my mind,” a man gripping a tennis shoe was persuading himself—“Anything’s possible. I could come home …” but a breeze woke him and crushed the sponge of grief, and he tasted another drop. A grandfather crouched behind his smile, clapping for a dog. “Others have done worse,” he pleaded inside himself; “is it so bad what I’ve done?” Meanwhile, a young man puffed at a fly on his cheek while congratulating himself. “Just one or two minor details,” he thought, “and then—” … and then the moment granted him a vision of his life dissolving away until there was nothing left in front of him but the sea, going on forever.

  The body surfers slid along the torched and crumbling waves. “I’m only human, I’ve only got two hands, I can’t do everything at once,” their souls protested. A woman patted the sweat from under her eyes, whisked the bits of sand from her suit, and lay back trembling under the kisses of a sexual angel …

  And the others, their chalky laughter and resonating wounds, and still others with murders swimming in their bellies, and people burned as dark and shiny as beetles, all waited at the edge of this immenseness muttering little truths. “I saw him, I sat right next to him, and you can’t even tell.” “It’s all my fault that memory is dark.” “Thank God, I’m out of that mess.” “I’m fat.” “I’m thirsty.” “When am I going to live?” … As English reached the end of the beach, he found other people ripping mussels loose from the breakwater, and men and women who were going after clams with buckets and rakes and seemed to be stepping on their own faces in the mirrors of the tide pools.

  This was the place where the lower Cape started to curl back around on itself in a way that got it generally compared to a scorpion’s tail. The breakwater English was standing on stretched a quarter mile across the harbor, cutting the corner, as it were, between the scorpion’s stinger and a point a few knuckles down the tail. A couple of boats, not much larger than rowboats, appeared to be anchored off the tip of the Cape. English crossed over on the breakwater with the idea of walking out to the very end and perhaps taking a ride in one of those boats. He had to clamber in many places across the casually piled boulders, of which the most were granite, and he got his feet wet coming off onto the beach at the other end. He saw nobody else up here. Two lighthouses warned the sailors of the Cape, one at the tip and one about a mile up, in the area of the tail’s last joint. Poison ivy grew everywhere between them.

  He tried walking on the beach at first, past a few car chassis beyond corrosion into decomposition, a ferric variety of putrefaction—a beach made not so much of sand as of the long seaside grass flooded by water and killed by water and heaped by the motion of water onto the shore and abandoned there, like a long, pointless rope, by water. It was slow going in this muck. Before him were the huge green flies and the stink that rose off a dead porpoise a half mile past the breakwater, and the hooting gulls that never seemed to mind the stink or eat any of the flies. Bits of light on the surge of the breakers took to the air and flew in the corners of his sight. He walked through the hordes of insects, their angry music burning in his head like something trying to wake him up. He skirted piles of garbage that hadn’t quite found their way back from picnics, mostly the rottings of bait and dribbling cans of beer.

  He took to the higher, sandier ground, which was covered with poison ivy. Gulls argued with him as he came too close to their nests in the sand. They rose in flocks, their shadows whirling all around him on the beach. Farther down the shore he saw them walking in little groups, ignoring each other, wise and smug, looking at nothing.

  A black wasp dropped a dead spider at his feet. The gulls spoke deeply in voices he thought couldn’t possibly belong to the same creatures he normally heard yodeling, and baby terns flew past above, chirping like crickets.

  Seagulls reminded him of coyotes. We like them, he thought, but if we were smaller than they—say sizable as monkeys—we’d be desperate under seagulls. They’d be like land-sea-air coyotes. Gulls: Let’s not forget they’re carnivorous. You know what? They all look like the Pope. Power lines ran between the two lighthouses, poles spaced every twenty yards—a gull, or two or three, perched on the outflung arms of every one like vultures on desert saguaros. As he neared each pole, they jumped off. Couldn’t they guess they were safe twenty feet overhead? He couldn’t think when they’d started getting to him. He’d started out liking gulls like everybody else.

  The gun was in his purse. It was getting heavier. He could hardly carry it. The raging molten irons at the center of the planet were dragging it toward themselves. He couldn’t believe that he was actually going to do it, and he couldn’t believe that he actually might not. This was the dilemma, that both ideas were absurd.

  He crossed the lighthouse’s fat shadow and checked on the boats. One was a wreck turned upside down, but the other had a motor and two oars and looked ready to sail just about anyplace.

  English pulled on the outboard’s starter rope unt
il he was winded. He didn’t know anything about these engines. He didn’t know anything about boats, or the sea—I’m from Kansas, he explained to the sky, I’ll have to row the thing.

  Right away he could see he’d be tired by the time he reached the town pier, where Andrew, our Bishop, was blessing the vessels of Provincetown. My craft keeps tacking in a fucked-up way, he told the waters. Keeping her steady as she goes takes practice. Which I am getting.

  Thank God the harbor was smooth. Beyond a little slapping to keep his boat awake, it didn’t do anything but carry him. This wasn’t the sea of the inexorable horizon and smashing waves, not the sea of distance and violence, but the sea of the eternally leveling patience and wetness of water. Whether it comes to you in a storm or in a cup, it owns you—we are more water than dust. It is our origin and destination. The hotels rolled out along the shore, the bed-and-breakfast places, were getting bigger. Between here and there, a few trawlers harassed by gulls.

  This is sunstroke, he thought, and what a time for it, just when I’m trying to think about my strategy. I’m trying to think what I’m thinking. What am I thinking? I think this about sums it up: A 1940s-style spike-heeled shoe ripping open a child’s abdomen while, in the background, Marlene Dietrich smokes a cigarette.

  He waved. Avast. Ahoy. Yes, I am a sailor. One of the fleet.

  There was something decimated and paltry about the Blessing of the Fleet ceremony that year. Leonard English attended, rowing a boat with a dead outboard engine, and he didn’t have any fun.

  It was cloudy, but the sun was still a menace. The sea was silver. English felt faint by the time he was in hailing distance of the pier. He could see somebody right at the end of the pier, higher than the rest of the crowd, the Bishop or the mayor. English’s shoulders and neck were completely numb. He made for a pier fifty meters down-cape of the municipal dock, heading for the cool dark beneath it.

  Two men were drinking wine under the pier. They were just laughing shadows, he couldn’t make out their words. He smacked an oar against one of the piles, stood up, and grasped one of the tires nailed to the pile. “Avast!”