The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

by Johnson, Denis

  The clerk ignored him. “Yeah!” he said into the telephone. “Page it now!” He examined the intercom again, but seemed to have forgotten how it worked. He began yelling, “Helen! Helen!”

  “That’s Ray Sands,” English said through the hole. “He’s a detective, and I’m his assistant.”

  “Okay. Okay,” the clerk told him.

  A nurse, tall and heavy, came out of the trauma room across the hall, walking crab-footed and seeming in no hurry. “What are you screaming about?” she asked the clerk. But at that moment a voice came over the public address: “Dr. Heart, emergency room. Dr. Heart, emergency room.”

  “You’re kidding!” the nurse said. “I got seven patients in the goddamn trauma room. Get in here,” she ordered the clerk.

  “There’s coffee under the desk, Officer,” the clerk said to English. “Keep it a secret.”

  English stepped from the waiting room and through the door of the cubicle by way of the hall, as the young clerk elbowed past him saying, “Help yourself,” and followed the nurse into the trauma room. Together the clerk and the nurse began wheeling startled patients on their gurneys out of one of its doors and into the hallway, down near the fire exit, where they left them.

  Leanna was back now, standing in the waiting room on the other side of the glass. “Did they put you to work?”

  “The guy thinks I’m a cop,” English said.

  But he was so dazed by this emergency that he couldn’t hear himself. Under the clerk’s desk was a coffeepot and white Styrofoam cups, one of which he filled, bending over and, as he did so, feeling that his back was vulnerable to some vague hostile thrust.

  People from another part of the hospital swiftly hauled past his cubicle a portable EKG machine on buzzing plastic wheels.

  In the midst of movement, English felt required to move. He stepped from the cubicle and saw, far down the long hallway, a flock of doctors and nurses running toward him, covering their breast pockets with their hands as they ran.

  “I’ll be over here,” Leanna said, and disappeared from view, passing deeper into the waiting room’s stunned turmoil.

  English was breathing hard and witnessing events in small, frozen frames, as from the window of a journey. He was drinking his coffee. It was still hot. He’d just taken a sip and put down the cup, and the fingers of that hand were still warm, and he still tasted the artificial creamer on the tip of his tongue as the ambulance pulled up outside, its dying siren lacerating the air. He smelled medicine and heard a dozen conversations at once. As he moved toward the sliding doors of the emergency entrance, he felt himself tearing away from these details and felt the strands of them being burned from his person. The doors slid open, cold air blew over him, and he ducked aside to make way for the ambulance men rolling the wheeled stretcher into the hospital, moving as fast as they could run. One pushed the stretcher, one covered the patient’s mouth with his own mouth, the third pressed on the patient’s chest with both hands. Ray Sands, dressed in his pajamas, the shirt of them torn open, was the patient. English followed along into the trauma room, where the man performing mouth-to-mouth turned to vomit in a sink along the wall while a nurse put a respirator mask over the patient’s blue face, and half a dozen medical people, like the fingers of a fist, closed in on the stretcher.

  English stood and watched for several minutes, seeing nothing, while people in white smocks went to and fro around the stretcher and came and went from the trauma room, speaking in low, urgent voices. When he felt the strength returning to his arms and legs, English left and went back to the clerk’s cubicle, nodding absently to an ambulance attendant—the one just pushing the stretcher—who loitered in the hallway now, holding a cup of coffee in one hand and in the other Ray Sands’s set of false teeth.

  The clerk had his intercom working. He talked into it and the telephone both at once. “Anybody you need?” he asked the intercom, and the intercom answered, “Anesthesia!” “Anesthesiologist,” he said into the telephone.

  By this time there were medical people all over the place, many of them without a purpose, it seemed. They spilled out of the trauma room and into the hallway, where confused patients tried to sit up in their mislocated gurneys and demand an explanation. A nurse rushed out of the trauma room just as a priest was rushing into it, his black garb billowing behind him. They banged into each other. The girl was thrown against the wall. She recovered, started off again, abruptly halted, wheeled, and hurried back through the doors behind the priest. English and the clerk, leaning together close to the intercom, listened to the clunking sounds of a machine giving Ray Sands’s heart stiff electric jolts; and then they heard the steady whine the EKG emitted when it was taking a flat reading. There were so many similar sounds, the dentist’s drill, vacuum cleaners, the high test tones of radio stations; and in his weightlessness and complete openness to all sensation English understood deeply, for an instant, that this was music. Over the intercom came a girl’s breathless voice asking, “What medication? I forgot, I forgot—” “Couple of aspirin, and call me in the morning,” one of the doctors said, and those gathered around the corpse broke into laughter over the priest’s rapid monotone and the music of the EKG. The clerk shut down the intercom. “All over,” he said into the phone, and put away the receiver.

  Looking up, English saw Grace Sands standing on the other side of the glass, next to a policeman. She was crying out, and her face was as she’d described her husband’s: like a beet, swollen and shiny. She seemed not to have heard the clerk’s pronouncement. She’d mistaken him for a doctor. “He gotta make it, please, he gotta—Doctor, do something!” She broke loose of the comforting and restraining hand of the policeman, who stood behind her with the flaps of his winter cap turned up and flopping like a mongrel’s ears and making him look even more at a loss, in the face of a widow’s torment, than he probably already was. “Make him well, please, you gotta, you gotta!” Her features were so changed by panic that English wouldn’t have known her except by the mist of white hair around her head, and also by her apron, which he recognized from their New Year’s Eve dinner together, the back-yard barbecuer’s smock with lettering on it: When It’s Smokin’ It’s Cookin’ and When It’s Black It’s Done. The clerk seemed to read this slogan carefully, and then slid aside the glass between them and offered her a box of Kleenex. “Oh, thank you, Doctor,” she whispered, “thank you, thank you,” staring at the Kleenex and never touching it.

  A real doctor, a tired old man, came into the waiting room. Grace saw him and clamped her lips together over her sobs. Wordlessly, he took her elbow with one hand while giving the policeman’s shoulder a friendly squeeze with the other, and he guided her from the room and into the hallway to talk to the priest. The clerk opened and closed one file drawer after another. “Where are those death certificates?” he said.

  The phone rang and the clerk stopped his search to answer. “They’re all done,” he said. “They’ll be coming back in a minute.” English felt thirsty, and then suddenly saliva flooded his mouth and he thought he’d be sick. “Deceased,” the clerk said, and hung up the phone. Out in the hallway, the new widow started screaming at the priest and the doctor.

  English caught sight of a beautiful woman with long black hair. Then he saw it was Leanna, looking as if she belonged right here in the middle of all this. She seemed to know exactly what she was doing, but she wasn’t doing anything except standing by the water cooler with her arms crossed before her.

  The nurse called Helen came in and sat down heavily in the chair beside the clerk’s desk, sticking her rubber-soled shoes out in front of her and chewing viciously on a lollipop. “Got rid of half our patients,” she said, and English noticed for the first time that many of the injured, even untreated ones, were gone or were leaving, no longer impressed, maybe, with their own contusions and abrasions. The clerk, standing beside the filing cabinet, began to tremble. English could see it plainly. Helen was also shaking as she showed the clerk where to find a dea
th certificate, and English noticed that she chewed up and swallowed her lollipop stick. English lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. When he turned to rest it in the ashtray, he found two others, both his, already burning there. The widow sobbed loudly in the hallway, while the priest spoke reassuring phrases. Helen went back into the trauma room to cope with the patients whose ordeals had been interrupted. The hospital was quiet again. English wondered if a human soul drifted along these corridors now, but he found—much to his alarm, to his great anguish—that he doubted it.

  The clerk’s tiny office seemed to be the crossing point of any number of paths in this hospital. Within the space of a few minutes, doctors, custodians, orderlies on break appeared one by one and asked, “How’d it go?” and were told, “Deceased,” and wandered off. Leanna slept softly in one of the waiting room’s cheap plastic chairs. English stayed around, thinking he should talk to Grace Sands, but all he was able to say was “Grace—” as she passed by, flanked by the policeman and the priest, and then she was gone.

  The automatic breath and rattle and thump of the entrance’s sliding doors repeated at intervals, letting out the people who’d been a part of this death, until the clerk’s cubicle and the rooms around it were as still as the moment before a concert. But English stayed where he was, half sitting on the clerk’s desk, because he knew he couldn’t handle a car. “Taking a break?” the clerk asked him.

  English nodded.

  “That guy looked old for a detective,” the clerk said. He glanced at what must have been Sands’s chart. “Born 1915.”

  “He’s retired,” English said. “Was. Was retired.”

  Helen came and leaned in the doorway, looking jolly. “Had enough excitement tonight, Frank?” she asked the clerk.

  The clerk looked at the clock on the wall. “Wow. Only thirty-two minutes to go.”

  The phone rang. The sound echoed all over the building, it seemed. It woke Leanna, the only person left in the waiting room. English was going to say something to her, anything, but she looked around and then closed her eyes again.

  “Everything went real smooth,” Helen was saying on the phone. “Deceased,” she said. “Deceased. I think he was basically DOA.” She was looking at Sands’s chart. “It was his fourth coronary.” English was more than surprised to hear this: he felt betrayed.

  “The mortuary people oughta be around any time now,” Helen told the clerk. “Help me get this man’s clothes off, would you?”

  “Me?” Frank said.

  “Everybody’s gone. Sue’s at the snack bar. Andy’s down at CIC. Come on, it goes with the territory.”

  But the sliding doors sounded again as soon as they’d gone into the trauma room, where Sands lay, and Helen had to come out and greet two new arrivals—one of whom English recognized, a Vietnamese man from Provincetown. “What seems to be the trouble!” Helen asked, stooping down to this foreigner and enunciating loudly.

  Frank came out of the trauma room. “I’ll take this man’s chart,” Helen told him. “You get back to work.” She was getting a kick out of Frank’s discomfort.

  “Could you give me a hand, Officer?” Frank asked English, indicating the trauma room.

  “Actually—” English said.

  “The morgue’ll be here any minute. I’ve got to get his belongings together.”

  English followed him into the trauma room.

  Except for the body, it was empty of people—a space full of white examining tables, machinery, and high cloth partitions left at incidental angles.

  The body was dead, it was not alive in any sense at all, and the face was other than any living person’s, the eyelids pinched into sockets that looked empty and the toothless jaws wide open and the lips forming an astonished “Oh!”—but the flesh was heavy when English lifted the legs so the clerk could pull off Sands’s pajama bottoms, and the flesh was warmer than his own when he raised the bare legs so the clerk could remove Sands’s shit-stained boxer shorts. “I guess you’ve seen a lot of dead bodies,” the clerk said to English, “but this absolutely spooks me. It really does. It’s not in the job description.”

  Resolutely, as if charged with this office among men, English began dragging the left arm from its pajama sleeve. “I’m glad to be alive,” he said. Together, because it was very heavy, much heavier than it should have been, they reached behind Sands’s neck and raised the torso, and the clerk pulled the shirt out from under it. Ray Sands lay naked and grey and large between them. English felt an unbearable thrill in his chest, as if it were empty of everything but a clear light.

  Helen appeared at Sands’s feet. “Get some dividers around him, you guys,” she said. “I have to bring this man in.”

  “What’s his trouble? A fight?” Frank asked.

  “No. His foreman drove him over from the factory. Foreign body, left eye,” she said. “I’ll call his doctor.” She left Frank and English to roll three cloth partitions into place around the body.

  The Vietnamese man came in, escorted and then politely abandoned by Helen, and sat on the next gurney. English said hello to him. They were hardly acquainted, but the man was something of a personality, Provincetown’s sole Asian refugee, Nguyen Minh—“Fwooy-en,” it was pronounced. He’d been a pilot for the South Vietnamese Air Force and had flown hundreds of missions, though he looked even now not much older than a boy. In the war’s last days he’d stolen an American helicopter and guided it out over the China Sea toward some destination he’d believed worth reaching, taking along as many others as it would carry. But the helicopter had been shot down, or its fuel had run out, or its engine had given up, and all these people had gone down in the water to sink or swim. A few stayed afloat, for two days, and were rescued by the U.S. Navy. Now Nguyen Minh sat on the edge of the high gurney, his hands between his knees and his black tennis shoes dangling down, and stared at the cloth partition protecting him from the sight of death. The skin around his left eye was puffy, and the eye had turned pink. English was comforted by the presence of this small, patient man, because he himself had never touched, or even seen, a human corpse before. “How long have you been working at the factory?” he asked Nguyen Minh.

  “About tree yers,” Minh said. He formed his words carefully, as if he had a peach pit in his mouth.

  “Do you like your job there?”

  “I have a machine,” Minh said. He smiled. “Die cast.”

  “You got something in your eye?”

  “Some piece of metal.” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “You’ll be okay,” English said.

  “Maybe so.”

  “Do you ever wish you could go back to Vietnam?” English was nervous asking the question; it felt like prying.

  “They’re all dead there. My parents, and my brother, too, and all relatives. It’s no good there.”

  “Was your brother a pilot?”

  “He was a monk.”

  “A Catholic?” English was astonished.

  “No. Buddhist.” He smiled. “My brother did the self-immolation.”

  “Jesus Christ,” English said.

  “No,” Minh said. “Buddha.”

  “Do you know that guy Nguyen Minh?” English asked Leanna as he drove the last mile into Provincetown. “Do you know that his brother was a monk, a Buddhist monk back there in Vietnam, and he burned himself up?”

  Leanna reached her fingers to the back of his neck and stroked the locks of hair and eased his muscles, for a few minutes, until he turned off the highway and into Provincetown. “Let’s go to the Beginner’s,” he said. “I want to get a couple of beers and dance with my shirt off.”

  He felt easy in the atmosphere of Provincetown now, its boarded-up windows and its silence of waiting post-something. English himself was still dizzy, and the Beginner’s was the outward image of him, the dance floor shiny under changing discotheque illumination and pounded by gigantic speakers, but occupied by only five or six people who swayed, out of their minds with drink, in stationary cir
cles; a place frantic and lonely both at once, eddying pointlessly in the wake of last summer. English didn’t take his shirt off, but he threw his jacket aside and drank a Cuba Libre in three swallows.

  “Suddenly the trouble is,” he told Leanna, “I’m not too sure about life after death.”

  “What?” she said.

  He couldn’t hear her for the rising insanity of “Cruisin’ the Streets,” but being heard wasn’t the issue, not at all. “The Resurrection of the Body seems like a crock. That guy was so dead.” Impatiently he signaled for another drink, scooping the air over his empty glass.

  He danced with a woman, and then Leanna danced with the same woman; and then the three of them danced together, he and Leanna sandwiching the woman between them and smiling at one another over her left shoulder. “Who is she?” Leanna asked him when they were done—the song didn’t end, one blended into the next relentlessly, all at the same relentless beat; they just stopped dancing when they were tired.

  “I don’t know her,” English said, “but let’s take her for a ride in your hot tub.”

  “I don’t operate that way.”

  “You’re operating that way right now.”

  “I’m dancing.”

  “Let’s all sleep together. I’m lonely,” English said.

  “I have to know the person first.”

  The woman was from Michigan, but looked European. She was overweight in a bouncy way, and didn’t like interrupting the smooth flight of her evening, or even opening her eyes, to answer English’s questions. “’Bye, baby, see you around,” she mouthed as the stereo speakers blasted the room with these words, and she danced away and danced back toward them with a face peaceful and bathed in moving colors and sang, “Remember me as a pink balloon …”

  “This music leads to violence,” English said to her. “You want to go sleep in a hot tub with us?”

  The huge female voice of the record spoke: her love was alive, it was like the sea …