The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

by Johnson, Denis

  Catching the handle of a drawer with the toe of his shoe, he opened a space of visibility into which he peeked as he might have down a shaft of darkness, or under a shroud: more paper, more folders, more books, all stacked in a pile that stair-stepped into collapse at the back of the drawer, which he closed as soon as he’d fully opened it.

  In the other double drawer he found Twinbrook’s typewriter, an antique Royal table model that didn’t need hiding to protect it from theft.

  He checked the heating conduit along the office’s baseboard and found it cold; but the room was sunny, and he took off his jacket.

  On the floor beneath the window was Twinbrook’s white telephone. English picked up the receiver, listened to the dial tone, and hung it up again. For a while he looked out the window at the trees beneath him, stubby evergreens addressed, almost dwarfed, by the great blade of a Caterpillar tractor beyond them, a looming brown shadow backed by the sun in a cleared lot of yellow dirt. High above the earth he’d scraped clean, the tractor’s operator sat in the open cab, drinking from a thermos and looking at the trees in front of him.

  English stood still while the typist in the upper office walked across the ceiling, shut the door overhead, and descended the stairs. When the door downstairs banged and the person was gone, English looked around the room at the mounds of papers and zigzagging columns of books with real irritation, as if the typist had intentionally left him here to do all this reading and thinking without anybody’s comfort.

  Now he stood behind the desk and examined Twinbrook’s maps—two large ones, of New England and of metropolitan Boston, stuck full of red-, blue-, and yellow-headed pins and annotated with symbols he couldn’t make out.

  Suddenly English turned, gripped a stack of books and papers on the desk, arranged them before himself like a meal, and sat down.

  At page 173 Twinbrook had left off reading a book by Stephen King, and marked his place with a shred of typing paper. He’d spilled coffee all over one called Life After Life by a man named Moody; the leaves were wrinkled and suddenly antique. A fresh-looking paperback copy of Tarantula by Bob Dylan appeared never to have been opened. There was a schedule of buses passing through Marshfield; nothing was marked or underlined. But signs and marks and annotations crowded the pages of Encyclopedia of Card Tricks by somebody named Hugard and another called The Greatest Power on Earth, which appeared to be about atomic weapons. There were in-house phone directories for several corporations, including IBM and AT&T, but none of the names in these directories was marked or underscored. It occurred to English now to shake out the copy of Tarantula in the hope a slip of paper, something bearing a name or a number, might float from among its pages.

  At this point a plan for coping with the major part of this mess—the part that weighed the most anyway—came to him, and he went around the room stooped over, collecting stacks of books and leaving any other kind of paper to lie where it fell. He piled the desk with volumes and began shaking out the pages—a paperback Tibetan Book of the Dead, a dictionary, novels by Georges Simenon and Graham Greene, three James Bond books, a fat one called The Fourth Way, a Bible, another Bible, and then he ignored the tides—collecting every bookmark and looking at it.

  On one he found four telephone numbers with out-of-state area codes. He pocketed it. Every other bookmark was a blank shred of typing paper.

  Outside, the Caterpillar started up with a gigantic clearing of its throat, and English went to the window to watch it flounder, roaring, in the storm of dust it had raised. As the operator measured a sapling with its blade, it seemed to recover its mind; as it came against the tree, its bawling became steady and thoughtful for a few seconds, and then outraged as the rollers shrieked across the treads and the blade unstrung the plant from the ground. It was sweet to hear the noise.

  Coming in through the glass window, the sun’s mild warmth burned the air. English pulled his sweater over his head and sat down at the desk. For a moment he considered these questions: Twinbrook, are you missing or are you hiding? Have you left a clue or have you covered your tracks? He was chain-smoking, mashing his cigarettes out on the floor. Do you mind, Twinbrook? Come in and tell me to stop.

  He began on the sheets of paper—hundreds, maybe thousands of them. Many were ballpoint sketches and doodles, some were handwritten lists of names, all of them brand names or the names of political groups or business corporations.

  He found two carbon copies of such a list, neatly typed. The listed corporations included IBM, AT&T, all the big outfits English had ever heard of. There were about three dozen of them. The Daughters of the American Revolution, the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan. There was a circle around “Truth Infantry.”

  English stood up, greatly excited. Circled! But had Twinbrook circled it, or had he, English? He was holding a pen in his hand. He put the page on the desk and drew a circle on it. The ink looked identical.

  Twinbrook, is this a collection or something? What do you want with these names? I’m not going to read the typed stuff. I don’t like reading.

  By the time he’d separated the blanker, less intimidating handwritten sheets from those crowded with small print, the sun had passed by the window, and now he realized he’d have a harder time reading unless he turned on the overhead fluorescent.

  In fact, most of the typed sheets weren’t typed but photocopied articles from newspapers and magazines. Some of them described freeway accidents or the weather. Others showed beaming brides and grooms, looking, thanks to the copying process, like black-faced riverboat minstrels.

  None of these reports seemed connected with any other. But the corporations turned up again. He found two lists of boards of directors, apparently copied from a magazine article. Twinbrook, Twinbrook, Twinbrook. Are you nuts?

  English was out of cigarettes, his eyes felt dry and sleepy, and he’d decided, at what point he wasn’t aware, not to turn on the overhead light for fear of attracting attention. He wasn’t used to this kind of labor, this rowing through a sea of letters and words, and he’d satisfied himself already that he’d made a fair try at getting it done. But he stayed a little longer because, to tell the truth, he wanted to satisfy Ray Sands. Sands was dead, but English still felt his power to approve or disapprove. He was still working for Sands. He was carrying out Sands’s instructions. After all, people didn’t die instantly. Their images lingered, and they had to fade away before you could ignore them.

  He carried a folder to the window for a little more light. Across the face of it Twinbrook had scrawled the name SKAGGS. English opened it and was shocked and irritated to read, in Twinbrook’s handwriting:

  Brain Death II Veith, FJ

  Brain Death I

  JAMA 238 (15) : 1651—5

  10 OCT 77

  238 (16) : 1744–8

  17 OCT 77

  life after death:

  J Nerv Ment Dis SEP 77

  (Stevensn) 165 (3) 152—70

  What he could read of these notes seemed to consist mainly of names and numbers and dates; but the dates were old, the names weren’t full names, the numbers weren’t phone numbers.

  —1975 attitudes

  British physician

  —dead body

  —saving life

  death—heart lung death

  but DRS say should be brain

  Twinbrook, you sick bastard, what are you thinking? Are you aware you don’t make any sense?

  NYTimes

  call wwwwww what is guy’s name?

  call people on panel

  —get address of wwwwww; where can I get

  copies?

  later, interview people by phone

  The folder held a thick photocopied article: “BRAIN DEATH: I. A Status Report of Medical and Ethical Considerations.” English was terribly thirsty and wanted a smoke. There was a page evidently typed by Twinbrook:

  what you are holding in your hands is a book about … etc. And I think it is always a book about the verge in conscoiiouslness,
the splitting apart of the world, and the end of time. I’m not a writer of essays. I write first of all because ETC. talk about the headless man or bodiless head in Brazil what a visitor to this country might think of as a pre-funeral ceremony: strangers who won’t be invited to the funeral driving slowly in single file alongside an accident

  Yeah, I get it. People driving past an accident. I get that. Right, brain death, I get that.

  I know more about you than your own mother.

  How did panel operate?

  Was agreement the general rule?

  Did opposing views find compromise

  in final report? Or did

  some views go down to defeat

  while others formed basis for report

  findings?

  Who does all the work?

  Me. I do all the work. You go crazy, and I do all the work.

  He must have been missing for years before anybody missed him. English was frightened for this man.

  Among the pages, most of them flecked with words in Twinbrook’s tiny, nearly illegible hand, English found the photocopied columns of an old newspaper—The New York Times, a heading revealed, of September 1, 1870; and others from September 4 of the same year. They explained the name SKAGGS on the folder’s cover: in Bloomfield, Missouri, sometime in August of 1870, according to these articles, a man called John H. Skaggs had been hanged for murder. His executioners had marched him up to the front of the scaffold so that he wouldn’t have to look at the noose just at that moment, and asked him if he wanted to talk to the crowd of people who’d come to watch him die. The killer had obliged everyone with a long speech. “I would like for you all to have some sympathy for me,” he told them; and, talking specifically to the young boys: “In the first place avoid drinking of whiskey; and in the next place avoid the love of money better than you do your God; and in the next place whatever you do avoid lewd women. I want every little boy that hears me to remember that until he lies on his death-bed; then when he is on his death-bed he cannot foller after these things, and never forget it whatever you do.” His sentimental sermon rushed down the column and the printed words seemed to shrink on the paper. “I don’t know but what there is some here on this ground that looks upon me probably as a tyrant, as an outrageous—a tremendous man, but then that is not for you to judge, for you know not. I hope, therefore, that no lady nor no gentleman will look upon me with any contempt as disgraced in my name. I would be glad how well you may all do; I hope to meet you in the better world than this troublesome world is. This world is nothing but sinfui—nothing else; one sin will lead to another. I hope this may be a warning to every one of you, that when you go home, and after you eat your supper and lie down in your bed I hope this may run through your hearts, not only one time, but as long as you live. I think that I know that it is a mighty horrible thing to be brought up right at death’s door and stared in the face. There is none of you like me; you have no idea …” Maybe this incident was long past and everybody involved in it was dead, but English was filled with embarrassment. The guy should have spat on the onlookers.

  English wondered how the townsfolk must have felt watching the finish of a person’s life. Death wasn’t such a stranger to them, probably. The people of Bloomfield in 1870 had probably, every one of them, strangled chickens with their bare hands and shortly afterward eaten them, and seen close relatives languish in their final illnesses at home, and one or two might even have had a loved one dying in an upstairs bedroom while they attended John Skaggs’s execution. To watch a public hanging might have been a fascinating and exciting, probably a troubling, possibly even a terrifying and humbling experience. But it wouldn’t have altered the shape of the soul of a Bloomfield resident.

  English thought of those days, the mornings, afternoons, and evenings before the First World War, as a time when everything made sense. Everybody shared a philosophy of life as basic as the soil and as obvious as the sky. You couldn’t go sixty or sixty-five down a turnpike and end your journey in a city of thunder and smoke. He envied the people of Bloomfield their assumptions, even though he couldn’t have said, exactly, what their assumptions had been. He just knew that in those days the world had been founded on things everybody understood.

  According to this article, however, there were two men present at this hanging who, while they also lived in the town of Bloomfield, had already found their footing in the twentieth century, this region of the blind where there was no telling the difference between up and down, wrong and right, between sex and love, men and women, even between the living and the dead. These were J. H. Jackson and Joseph F. MacDonald, doctors of medicine who were officiating at this ceremony. They carried with them galvanic batteries of a type generally used for feats of entertainment at carnivals. By the power of electricity they meant to revive John H. Skaggs after he was hanged.

  English turned on Twinbrook’s light and spread the article before him on the desk.

  At the time the Sheriff cut the rope of the trap a violent shudder was manifested on his countenance; he leaped back and jumped down the steps at two bounds; subdued exclamations came from the crowd, the children screamed, and the women hid their faces in their handkerchiefs and sobbed as if their hearts would break.

  A gang of deputies carried the murderer’s body into a room in the courthouse and laid it out on a bench. The two doctors bared its chest and ran wires from the battery to the bone above the heart. When MacDonald turned the battery’s crank, John Skaggs, though he was dead, flailed and moaned.

  The sheriff and the reverend tried to stop them, but the doctors couldn’t be distracted now. The sheriff took away their wires, and the doctors ran the current through their own bodies, placing a hand on the battery and a hand on the victim’s chest. Was Skaggs still a perpetrator, English wondered, or was he now the victim?

  It was getting cold in the room. He needed Leanna. In the space of two months he’d been broken out of a loneliness like ice, in which he’d felt nothing, and warmed in a way that charged every nerve and made two hours’ solitude a torment.

  The Times reporter closely followed the resuscitation attempt. At five past three the right leg moves; eight minutes later the left arm flails out at nothing, the mouth froths, and the face twitches; at three-twenty Skaggs’s pupil responds to light, and the doctors draw some blood from his arm; ten minutes pass, and they turn him on his side and the reporter says he “now presents an appearance only to be described, perhaps, by the word slaughtered.”

  Leanna came back to his mind. She liked to put her head on his chest and listen to his heart. “How could one person ever hurt another after doing this?” she’d asked him the first time. “But we do.”

  By twenty after four the body of Skaggs is sweating and his feet are no longer cold; in five minutes his pulse is seventy-five. But he doesn’t open his eyes or speak.

  By nine o’clock the experiment is over. Skaggs is dead again.

  The collapsed quality of Ray Sands’s lifelessness came back to English’s mind—the sense, as he’d stood and watched his dead employer, that every bone in the man’s body had been ground down to powder.

  When he got back to Leanna’s, he could smell the camomile-scented steam rising from the hot tub before he rounded the stone steps onto her back patio. He heard someone laughing, and a splash. He wouldn’t be joining her there. He hadn’t been in the hot tub since the debauched night of Ray Sands’s last coronary.

  As he came around the building’s corner onto the patio, he found her half out of the water, leaning over a woman he didn’t recognize at first. They were kissing.

  “Leanna?” he said.

  She looked up at him. A casual greeting started from her, he could see it moving on her lips. But she couldn’t quite pull it off. After a couple of seconds she said, “This is Marla.”

  English saluted mutely.

  Leanna said, “Marla Baker.”

  Marla smiled. “Hi. How do you do?” she said.

  Marla had gon
e under and come up, so that her hair was slicked back and her eyelashes glistened. She seemed very summery. English suddenly felt how warm it was today, and even a little humid.

  “Well,” he replied, “I’m feeling very weird.”

  “Lenny,” Leanna said.

  “Weird?” Marla said.

  “Like—weird and kind of sick.” He sat down on one of the iron lawn chairs. The seat was wet, and he stood back up.

  “Lenny,” Leanna said, standing up, too—naked, the water streaming off her—“maybe we should go inside a minute.”

  “I’ve got to get some air,” English said.

  “Okay,” Leanna said after a long pause.

  “I’ll take a walk. I’ll call you later or something. Nice meeting you,” he said to Marla. “I remember you. I’ve seen you around.”

  The spot of wet on the seat of his pants bothered him as he walked down Bradford and then over to Commercial. And the warm and sweetened breath of the day bothered him, too. The springtime. Buds on the tips of rosebushes outside the town hall, buds like dewdrops shimmering on the shrubs, a frail green trembling in the tips of twigs. The demented crocuses were hauling themselves up out of the earth. He moved faster, trying to get away from the signs of this grisly miracle, looking in all the windows instead of at the world. There were merchants inside the shops now along Commercial, cleaning, painting, tearing loose the signboards of bankrupt businesses and raising up the bright names of new ones.