The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

by Johnson, Denis

  Holding the notebook in his lap, his ankle crossed over his knee, he started a letter to 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—

  But a shock of inspiration passed through him, and he turned to the next blank sheet and began a letter to his dead parents:

  Dear Mom. Dear Dad.

  I never knew how to talk to you. We made up a way of being together in the same room, and once we’d established that, we never deviated. Nothing ever got said. It was like some of the rote Masses I’ve been to. I know the priest isn’t home, I know he’s

  He turned that page aside. It was all coming out now. He knew who he was. On the next sheet he started an open letter to the tattooed ghost that was stalking him, the dead GI in Vietnam, the one who’d been drafted in Lenny’s place, sent overseas in Lenny’s place, marched over swamps and shot at and killed instead of Lenny:

  There are worlds, whole worlds too small to see, in these tears. Maybe one of them is at peace. I wish I could bring you there.

  —Now he knew who he was writing to. It was the invisible one, the missing man, the ghost who could put real daylight into false landscapes; it was Twinbrook, Gerald Twinbrook, Jr.—

  If you like the fields we’d walk away from the road into the fields, or we’d go fishing, if that’s what you like to do. The sun would set and we’d build a fire. The trees and rocks would shrink and their shadows would grow. People don’t have eyes by the light of a fire. No, that’s glib and pointless. It’s all glib and pointless. In the worlds that live in these tears just as much as in the real world, I’d stare at you and have no idea who you were, for hours. One word after another would get choked in my heart. I wouldn’t be able to ask your name. You wouldn’t be able to see my face. After a while the fire would go out, you’d be lost in the dark, and I would cry these tears.

  MAY—JUNE

  It was more summer than spring now. Still, the evenings were cool, and the heavens at night had a wintry clarity that sometimes made him cry.

  He was a citizen of a country north of Mexico that made no sense; he was an inmate of romance and a denizen of that terrainless geography, a lot more real than the geography on maps, that drifted down from these dark blue oceans to the Keys, passing over the Eastern megalopolis like a cloud over a desert but catching on the invisible peaks of Atlantic City and Cape May and Ocean City and the Southern beach resorts, a geography of heated sand and greased-back hair and surf glowing under a full moon. It was the off-season, but the off-season had no jurisdiction—the place was like a closed carnival—nothing counted but the thrilled ghosts.

  It was no secret at the radio station that English was going nuts. Twice he appealed directly to Leanna over the airwaves, though he was aware she never listened to the radio. In the middle of reading the Arts Calendar he switched the mike off to scream and curse. He couldn’t eat; he’d be ravenous and then suddenly nauseated after one bite of a sandwich. It got clear how a person could die for love just by going undernourished for too long. Also he was the victim of bizarre thoughts. He considered hiring a billboard or a hot-air balloon or a blimp and imagined depicting the extremity of his love in other ways, getting on TV somehow, perhaps by crawling on his hands and knees to the Vatican or impersonating the President. He wanted to do something melodramatic and endearing, but how could he be charming to somebody whose face he wanted to smash? He dreamed of shooting her—Didn’t think I’d do it, did you, didn’t know I loved you enough to kill you, no, baby, don’t do it, yes, yes, I have to—he prayed, God save me from being angry, and he prayed, God help me track down an unregistered gun. Some helpful person left in his WPRD message slot a lapel button for him to wear that said I’m a Mess.

  In less unreasonable moments he was disgusted with this mooning over Leanna. He couldn’t understand why he hadn’t just left town by now. He feared he might be living out some myth of seeking the goddess beyond the pale, entering the realm, being changed into one of its denizens, every footstep forward changing the shape of his soul, and every form of her dissolving as he approached.

  He hadn’t left town, but he’d left Bradford Street. Down by the water the rents had gone up as the landlords and shopowners readied their nets for another kind of fish. English had taken himself up the hill to a duplex next door to Shirley Manor, the old folks’ home, which was situated, possibly with the ease of access in mind, just across the road from the town’s biggest cemetery.

  He hadn’t liked it anyway, living in sight of the sea. He’d felt implicated somehow in the ruthlessness of its tides.

  He liked the cemetery better. Although generally the light was kind to this place, sometimes giving to the grass and stones the hardy colors of a Surrey countryside, and making the markets blush sometimes in the sunset, it was not unknown for the fog to roll over the whole business swiftly, canceling everything, even the hope of anything, beyond the few nearest blurred gravesites and the brown bones under them. English had no trouble feeling, really feeling, the presence of those whaling families with their arms straight down at their sides, only a bit more rigid in death than they’d been beforehand. He’d been reading Reflections on the Psalms lately, and he began to see in the defeated stoicism of these Pilgrim descendants the other side, the dark side, of the prissy smugness with which C. S. Lewis had been managing to nauseate him. For these people, as for Lewis, God had probably been an Englishman, but a less and less familiar one, passing beyond dotty eccentricity into madness and vomiting up whales and storms. On some nights English saw them trolling the fog for forgiveness and seeking for Jesus among the dewy stones. Little truths continually came into his mind. Whispers from the center of his heart. All are martyred. Kill the Bishop.

  He knew that something big was going to happen, that he was at the slurring start of some grand opportunity or injury, like a person who’s just lost control of the car on an empty street and entered the dreamy beginnings of an accident.

  A rainy day calmed him, the tears of God dripping down the markers and trickling through the names of the dead. The next day was windy and sunny, and he stood around in the kitchen while his radio talked like a skull—a theological discussion on WPRD. He couldn’t help listening to such things.

  He walked into the living room, holding a cup of tea, to find Grace Sands standing just inside his home, and the open door shaking in the wind behind her.

  Although she wore a pink robe and matching house slippers with fuzzy blue balls on the toes, she’d managed to get away from Shirley Manor with a tiny black pillbox hat and a veil sprinkled with black diamond shapes, from behind which she gazed with the cynical look of a mistreated child, saying, “The floors. The carpet. Look.” She stooped over. “Use your eyes.” Stooping must have hurt her back; her voice was full of pain. She stood up holding a piece of something between thumb and finger. “Wood!”

  He didn’t want this. He had things to do. Besides, he was waiting for this big thing, this opportunity to be snatched, this yes-no point dividing his wasted life from a future that was going to make sense. He wanted to wait in solitude.

  “I don’t know what to say,” he admitted to her.

  “Whatever happened to clean? Remember clean?”

  “My vacuum cleaner’s broken,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Broken,” Grace said. “Vacuum cleaners were broken before they made the first one. You bend, that’s how.” She stooped over. “You pick up, that’s what.” She started picking bits of lint from the carpet. “Time passes,” she said. Her face went dull with torment. She was eight feet into the living room. “It takes time. It takes effort.” She stood up straight, wiped at her face and seemed alarmed to find it veiled. She flicked the lint from her hand and it fell to the carpet.

  English set his tea down on the windowsill. Grace let out a long, shaking sigh.

  “I’d better find whoever’s sup
posed to be taking care of you,” English told her. Grabbing the phone book, he leafed through, looking for the number of the nursing home. He was glad to have a chance to use the telephone. It was new in his life, and nobody ever called him except the station.

  Grace wandered toward the back room while he dialed. “I’m about twenty yards down the road here,” he told the receptionist when she answered. “Grace Sands is lost over here—do you know Grace?”

  “Oh, my goodness. I’ll send somebody right over. Which house?”

  He told her and went back to steer Grace away from harm. She was standing in his bedroom looking down at his mussed sheets. The blankets had gotten onto the floor in the night.

  “So this is the bed,” Grace said sadly.

  “I guess I’d have to agree, all right.”

  “The famous bed,” Grace said.

  “The what?”

  She raised her gaze to him, lifting her veil carefully with both hands. “What?” she said. Then she lowered her veil.

  English went to the living-room window and looked out. The cemetery and the world itself held still, burning in the sunlight. Then a young fellow with a beard came pushing a wheelchair up the walk, leaving the contraption by the door, where English now stood, looking at him.

  “Grace here?” he asked.

  English pointed inside.

  Good health and good cheer emanated from the young man as he came inside saying, “Grace. We don’t want you off the grounds. That’s a rule.”

  His happiness seemed to make her suspicious. “My leg is broken.” She lifted her veil with both hands and looked out the window.

  “Then it’s a good thing I have a wheelchair,” the man said. When speaking, he looked only at English.

  “I used to work for her husband,” English said, “before he died.”

  “The Catholic cemetery in Hyannis is where they buried him,” Grace said brightly.

  “Grace: in the wheelchair,” the man said, not unkindly.

  She seemed in perfect possession of her mind as she told them,

  “They threw a shovel of dirt right down onto him with a”—she clapped her hands while looking for a word—“noise. Like that.”

  The man helped her by her elbow out the door, and then together he and Grace lowered her bulk down into the seat of the wheelchair. “Where are we going?” English heard her asking in the sunlight as the man pushed her down the walk.

  He heard somebody on the radio referring to God as “the infinite accent falling on the self.” Infinite, yes. The accent—the stress—the falling, yes, English felt he felt that.

  He thought, They’ll all know me when it’s over; and he thought, Who will find me when it’s over?

  He thought, You start to know these things. You make out just the shape of it, the incredible size, on the horizon.

  Zealots. Martyrs. These guys are right. Nothing but faith makes it so.

  In this state he walked out of the house, got in his Volkswagen, and took up the search for Gerald Twinbrook again, heading up the Cape toward the missing artist’s abandoned office, going as fast as the car would go, which wasn’t quite fast enough to get him even a warning ticket. It eased him tremendously to be doing something. He took the back roads through Truro, South Truro, Wellfleet, through the sparse shade of new leaves and the shadows of large hills. On the maps of the Cape these hills were named individually and called “islands,” owing, perhaps, to the mapmakers’ premonition—whose accuracy English trusted, if vaguely—of a great flood that would someday submerge almost everything.

  When he reached Twinbrook’s office, he found that somebody had been at work there. The door had been repaired. He broke it again.

  Inside, too, the place had changed. The chair and wastebasket were stacked on the desk, the electrician’s cord was coiled neatly between them, the knee-deep litter of papers and books had been arranged in two large stacks beside the chair. Someone had mopped the floor. The telephone was gone. A manila envelope was taped to the front of the desk: GERALD TWINBROOK. Inside was a handwritten note lamenting Twinbrook’s disregard for previous letters and informing him that his property would be tossed or sold as soon as a new renter was found. It wasn’t signed.

  Also in the envelope were a communication from a dry cleaners, which turned out to be a bill, and a letter from Blue Cross. In all-caps, telegrammatic format, the letter asked Gerald Twinbrook to provide information about the amount paid for prescription drugs following his emergency treatment on the second of January.

  Twinbrook had been missing since before Christmas, if English remembered right. This was the first evidence that he’d been alive and functioning since then. And if he’d been treated, if he was ill—he might be incapacitated somewhere, in a rest home, for instance, with amnesia, or in a coma in a strange city, with a tag reading JOHN DOE taped to his bedrail.

  English’s fingers trembled as he folded the letter and put it in his pocket. He swore to himself that he wouldn’t jump up and run from the room, that he’d peruse these stacks of paper, that he’d stay calm and analytical. On top of the nearest one was the carbon copy of a letter Twinbrook had addressed to “The Secret President of the United States.” Dear Sir or Madam, he raved, Under the Freedom of Information Act I demand that you comply with my request of August 13, which I have repeated twice monthly since then. I am asking for all the records on the corporations listed below. I will be satisfied with nothing less than all the records in the world.

  English dropped the page onto the floor and walked immediately out of the office without looking back. It had suddenly occurred to him where he might turn up some information about Twinbrook’s Blue Cross record. English wanted all the records in the world on Twinbrook.

  In the antiseptic corridors of the Cape Cod Hospital, English felt a soothing influence. He was an institutional man. He knew the hospitals, the cops, the universities. On a daily basis English had lived this scene, the waiting room with the glacier of afternoon light crashing mutely through the windows and the clerk yawning wide and the pregnant orderly knitting a small stocking. It was four-thirty. There was nothing much to do in the emergency room, because all the minor injuries and sudden headaches could be taken to family doctors’ offices. Soon things would get lively, when the offices closed and the children, exhausted by an afternoon of play, would tend to fall from the trees or split each other’s heads open with baseballs. Making their way home from the public parks, the children would be struck down by automobiles. At home their mothers would lay their thumbs bare to the bone while slicing up salads before supper, and then after supper they’d lacerate their wrists on broken wineglasses in the cloudy dishwater while Father, tinkering with the car, would be getting the bib of his overalls caught in the fan belt and destroying his manhood out in the garage …

  “I’m off duty. I was just passing by,” English said. “Do you remember me?”

  The clerk glanced up.

  “Detective English. You’re Frank, right?”

  “Oh. Hey. Hi,” Frank said.

  “I suddenly thought of stopping in and asking you about something. I wanted your help, maybe.”

  “Oh.”

  “Nothing urgent. It has to do with an old case.”

  Frank looked unsure. “Sure.”

  “I was wondering about insurance records, and suddenly I thought, Hey, Frank, at the hospital.”

  “That’s me,” Frank said.

  “You deal a little with insurance records, don’t you?”

  “Sometimes. My job mainly consists of writing down the information necessary to have somebody billed. Anybody. Usually an insurance company.”

  “So, after a patient’s been dealt with here, somebody sends a report to the insurance company, right?”

  “Yeah, for some of the larger companies. Blue Cross, Travelers, State Farm. Not exactly a report,” Frank said. “Just a series of code numbers.”

  “Who does that job?”

  “The overnight clerk puts t
he codes and account numbers on file cards. Then a programmer puts all that in the computer and transmits it to the company.”

  “What do they do? The programmer, I mean, does the programmer just access—what do they access? Where do they put the information?”

  “They access the insured’s account number.”

  “Do they have access to all the data in that file?”

  “Yeah. It’s just a series of code numbers. I mean, you know, it goes back to the first of the year.”

  “Date of incident, hospital code, doctor code, injury or diagnosis code, that stuff, right?” English said.

  The clerk showed signs of backing off. To an official person, English had long ago learned, a citizen gave four successive answers and then required an interlude. English examined the cover of a book, a psychiatric nursing text, lying on Frank’s desk. In a minute he said, “Can I talk to you out here?”

  Frank joined him by the water cooler in the waiting room. “Is this—a big crime thing you’re working on, or something?”

  “It’s an unclosed case. You know—can’t let it go. What I’m thinking, see—if I give you the account number, can you get the data on a Blue Cross subscriber and decode it for me?”

  “Wow,” Frank said, “I don’t know, I wouldn’t think the hospital—”

  “A missing person,” English said. “If I could track him down to a hospital somewhere, oh, man, what a wonderful thing, to find him and ease his family’s worries—Give us a hand, huh?”