The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

by Johnson, Denis

  English had become something of a specialist in the area of sterilization devices. He could talk antisepsis with the best of them. But, because his field had narrowed this way, he wasn’t like these other salespeople. They had all spent time in operating rooms and were not only accustomed to the sight of blood and at home with the idea of anybody else’s physical pain, but they’d even, a lot of them, taken part in surgical operations on living patients, had taken the instruments they were selling into their own hands and shown the doctors just how they worked. The idea of opening up these dumb, tearful animals didn’t faze these veterans, but English’s eyes burned and he sobbed deep in his throat, watching his own gloved hands tremble and stab limp-wristedly at gristle. Nobody talked much. Blood sprouted from arteries in brief, graceful ejaculations, like fronds of seaweed, and pattered to the floor or fell across their gowns. The ripped lungs flapped and wheezed, salesmen and saleswomen occasionally exclaimed over the unexpected force of a death rattle and made the kinds of jokes that medical people always made, and the staplers clicked, the scalpels clacked on the Formica, and once in a while, because they were slippery, a scalpel got away from somebody and went tinkling across the floor. English heard all these noises acutely, though his head hurt as much as if his eardrums had burst. The building pitched, humming, back and forth. The grasses outside no longer seemed to lie down in the wind, but cringed before the sexual approach of something ultimate. Like a long curse a jet’s sound passed close above the building toward the horizon. That an airport could go about its gigantic business in the same world as this laboratory seemed impossible, unless—and he didn’t think this so much as feel it as a self-evident fact—unless all things conspired consciously to do perfect evil.

  He couldn’t stop this. There was nothing he could do. It wasn’t his fault. This dachshund was finished, no matter what. The dog was already scarred down all four legs, and just above its tail and on top of its head two bald patches had been incised for the planting of electrodes. There was some undercurrent here that, even more than his job as a Minotaur salesperson, it was his nauseating privilege, his instinctive duty to do whatever the creatures who weren’t dogs were doing to the dogs.

  With the same blind gesture of childhood games like pin the tail on the donkey, he pushed his scalpel into what he hoped was the poor animal’s heart, and it expired like a balloon.

  The thing was, why had he submitted so mindlessly, why hadn’t it occurred to him at the time to stop, to object, to get away? The experience gave him, in a way he couldn’t explain, some slight appreciation of what rape might be like for the victim. And now, like a woman with a gun in her purse, he waited for somebody to try again. He wasn’t going to let it beat him twice. He would do whatever he had to do.

  When Marla and Leanna had fallen asleep, that first night, English climbed down from the tree with his bag of tricks and his fishing pole. He’d been aroused, even in the cold, by the sight of naked women.

  On the way home he threw the tape cassette in a dumpster, and later he told Sands, “I got nothing.” He told him, “I may be an idiot, but I’m not an acrobat.” He told Sands he wouldn’t work up that high, out on a limb. There was too much for him to juggle up there.

  He might have wished that he’d turned from the butter of moonlight on the harbor to see her standing there with the sea taste on her cheek, but as it happened she was in the drugstore on Commercial Street, buying something which she tried to hide from English when he said hello. Feminine protection evidently. She was dressed in a sweatsuit. She’d come from an exercise class. She smiled and seemed to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  Gusts of wind took their words away as soon as they’d stepped out the door:

  “Hello—”

  “Hello—”

  “Didn’t I—”

  “Yes—”

  “Right, a few weeks ago, at Mass—”

  “I told you we’d meet again—”

  “Let’s get a cup of java,” he said, private-eye-style, guiding her into a doorway out of the weather.

  He got the idea that she was laughing at him. “Java,” she said.

  “That’s right. Java. I thought you spoke Portuguese.”

  “Is that Portuguese?”

  “You tell me. I don’t speak Portuguese.”

  “What was your name again?”

  “Lenny English. And you’re Leanna, right?”

  “How did you know?” Had she forgotten she’d told him?

  “Things like that get around.” He liked that answer, but she seemed unimpressed. “I work over there at WPRD,” he said desperately.

  “Oh? Yeah? Have you got a show?”

  “Well, I do classical stuff from 2 to 6 a.m., Tuesdays and Thursdays. And also I’m a production engineer.”

  “Oh, 2 to 6 a.m., oh, I’m asleep by then.”

  Sometimes you are, he felt like telling her, and sometimes you’re not.

  Leanna insisted they go over to Fernando’s, a café and bar clotted with hanging plants, and everywhere you looked a sign that read THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING, a phrase that always seemed to resound in his head, like a dental tool. When they got there they went through a tangle of decision-making before taking a place by the window. English didn’t care where he sat; he hated the whole restaurant.

  He started right in. “I’ve changed addresses eighteen times in the last twelve years,” he told Leanna. “I lived in Lawrence, Kansas, that whole time. I’m a nice person, but I have a lot of inside trouble.”

  “Inside trouble. What is that? Inside trouble.”

  “Unsound thinking. Getting myself all worked up over nothing, you know what I mean.” If you told people these things right away, they discounted it all. Later you could say, I warned you. “I smoke cigarettes,” he told her.

  “That’s okay,” she said.

  “I eat meat.”

  “And you’re aggressive in conversations.”

  “That’s true. Yeah. Okay, I sometimes am.”

  “That way you don’t have to respond to anyone.”

  This happened to be the truth. He looked around. “They have any coffee in this place?”

  “When you’re on a bus, nobody sits near you because you look too lonely. I bet you’re lonely, but not because nobody wants to know you. It’s because, really, you don’t want to know anybody.”

  Her accent wasn’t New England; she spoke in the way of stewardesses: “Are fline time wull be wen are en fifteen men-nets.” He thought it made her sound unintelligent.

  “I’m not that lonely,” he said. “Really.”

  She seemed not to have heard him.

  “There’s a difference,” he insisted, “between solitude and loneliness.”

  Leanna raised her eyebrows. “You’re the loneliest person I know.”

  The waitress, a large woman dressed in jeans and flannel shirt like a lumberjack, was staring down at him as if in support of Leanna’s assertion.

  “I guess I’ll have whatever she’s having,” he told the waitress.

  He wasn’t getting any less irritated with this restaurant. These places felt underdecorated if they didn’t have all the accoutrements of a subtropical swamp, including fish from outer space in glass tanks of water and fat little palm trees in big clay pots full of dirt, and a menu on which every kind of item—even tea, even ice cream——was something he’d never heard of. And he was irritated with himself, too. Here was this beautiful woman giving him a little of her time, and he couldn’t think of anything very charming to say.

  In a minute he said, “You’re good at interpretations, so what about my love life? Can you interpret that whole mess for me?”

  “You tell women a lot of lies, but at the time you’re saying them, you think they’re true. Right? I can tell by your expression I’m right.”

  “Well,” he said, really embarrassed, really unhappy, “I can see we’re not going to hit it off.”

  “You think you’ve been involved a lot, but really th
e story on you is that you’ve just been into a lot of indiscriminate random fucking.”

  And she looked so sweet! Hadn’t he seen her at church? “Do you know a lady named Marla Baker?” he asked—because he wanted, in any way he could, to crack her smile.

  “You know I do,” she said, “or you wouldn’t be asking.”

  “No, no, it’s just a name—there was a call for her at the station. She’s not in the book.”

  “She moved across town.”

  He couldn’t think why he’d started this, or how to get out of it. Lamely he said, “Well, you’ve got my past all scoped out, don’t you?”

  “You’re a type,” she said.

  “A type. Am I your type?”

  “You’re predictable. Not overly funny.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Predictions. So what about the future? Are you kind of like gifted with that knowledge, too?”

  “Oh, you’ll probably doodle along just like you are now, until you set yourself on fire because you’re smoking one of those cigarettes of yours in bed,” she said, “and then you’ll die.”

  A bad prophecy. He himself had imagined something similar. “I mean, I was talking about the future of my love life. Not if I’m going to burn myself up in bed.”

  “You mean you were trying to flirt?”

  English sweated a lot. He sweated at parties where he was lost, at interviews for jobs he didn’t want, at those times when he met strangers who used to be his friends. “I’m sweating.”

  “Do you take honey?” She started doing businesslike things with their two pots of tea, which had just arrived, giving out a fragrance like detergent, while he mopped his face with his napkin. He thought it was very gracious of her.

  Her manner was straightforward, but she was physically quite languid and—modest, English believed. She talked low, she kept her left hand in her lap and gestured delicately with the right one, or lifted her cup, which she didn’t bend down to, but raised up to her lips, and she had this quality he’d seen in many young girls, and a few women, and which had always made him feel he was being tortured invisibly, this quality of seeming not to weigh even one ounce. And she was having a great time, she was delighted. He burned to be responsible for that. But he knew he wasn’t.

  “What,” she said when she saw him watching her and failing to drink his camomile tea.

  “I was trying to think what I want to say.”

  “And what is that?”

  He was sure the tea wasn’t all that bad. It was only that his stomach was in knots.

  “My fear level is pretty high,” he said.

  “I’ll bet it’s pretty high all the time,” she said.

  “This isn’t my usual kind of conversation at all,” he said.

  “If it’s all too new to cope with, then don’t talk.” She took a sip of tea. “Drink tea.”

  “Am I so funny?”

  She drank her tea.

  “Am I such a fucking joke?”

  She put down her cup. “Now you’re pissed.”

  “I was trying to get someplace with you.”

  “I got that.”

  “But I’m a joke, it’s a fucking joke that I come on to you, just because I’m not a woman? Because if it is—I mean …”

  “You don’t know what you mean.”

  “Yeah. No. I mean, it’s wrong”—he sensed his own biases were showing—“wrong to be so prejudiced, is what I’m getting at.”

  “I’m not prejudiced, I’m gay. I told you I was gay.”

  “Then how come you’re having coffee with me? Tea, I mean. Tea.”

  “Because I’m thirsty.”

  With his napkin English blotted his forehead. “You’re stepping all over me in this little talk. You’ve had practice. You’ve said all this before, and I haven’t.” This silenced her. “I never have.” He pushed his tea away, and his spoon. “The one who’s playing games here is you, and I’m being honest for a change.” The place before him was clear. “And anyway, why have I been sitting here pretending I like camomile tea? In other countries,” he told Leanna, “they soak their feet in camomile tea.”

  She smiled at everything, like a person at the circus. “Lenny? Or Leonard?”

  “Two people meet,” he said. “They each have three or four qualities they can show each other, you know the ones I’m talking about, the ones that always get them by. For the woman it could be that she makes jokes all the time, or she could be kind of self-effacing. The man could be scientific and easygoing. He could show her he likes her jokes because he has a good sense of humor, and he could deliver some compliments. That shows he’s not going to beat her up, like the other guys did. They tell each other things like, how old, what are your hobbies, I work at the hardware store, I’m going to be manager someday …”

  “Are you telling me about a movie? Have I lost my place?”

  “What I mean—this is just another one of those conversations, if you ask me.”

  She looked hurt. “I don’t—”

  “What you are, and what I am, and who’s who at the zoo. What you are is a dyke. And I’m a failed pimp.”

  “I wish you success.” She toasted him with her cup of tea.

  “Then what?” she asked him after they’d sat through a minute of uncomfortable silence.

  “What? What then what?”

  “After they reveal all this stuff,” she said, “then what?”

  “Then—nothing, I guess. I guess the first conversation is over.”

  “And so what about the second conversation?”

  “What do you mean? It’s the same.”

  “But how do they get close? How do they decide they want to make love?”

  “That stuff, all that goes on sort of behind the scenes. That goes on in their hearts.”

  “And what are the conversations like after that?”

  “When? After what?” he said.

  “After they make love, after they’re lovers.”

  He saw she wasn’t fooling. She really had no idea.

  “Have you ever been to bed with a man?” he said with great fear.

  For a beat he didn’t think she would answer, but only gaze at him until he simply—ceased. “Not in the way we’re talking about,” she said.

  Now he was speechless. He groped for the thread … Something about what lovers said. “After they’re lovers, the conversations are the same,” he managed to tell her, “but there’s something sort of different about them.”

  She wasn’t talking now. English felt toyed with. “Come on,” he said. “You knew all this.”

  She laughed. “Have you ever been to bed with a man?”

  “What? No! Me?”

  “Then I guess I know as much about it as you.”

  True. But he only said, “Can’t we talk about something else?”

  “We met in church. There’s that whole side of things.”

  “As long as I’m being honest, the stuff that starts happening after that subject gets raised mostly bores me.”

  “Then what were you doing there that day?”

  “Slumming.”

  But she wasn’t having any. “What were you doing there? Are you so scrupulous? You don’t look like a compulsive Catholic.”

  “I’m not.” What was the point in hiding? “It means everything to me.”

  “The Church? Or church attendance?”

  “Not that. Not even the Church. That’s what I mean by boring stuff. I don’t care about infallibility. I’m not really interested in abortion. It confuses me, all that shit. The Pope confuses me. I just—” He thought he might as well. “There’s really only one question.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Did God really kill Himself?”

  Leanna wasn’t smiling now. She was staring at him, but softly. “Who are you?” she asked him.