Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

by Denis Johnson

  “You’ve had a bad night,” Leanna told him.

  “Aaaaah-ah-ah-aah-oh!” the great sound sang.

  “I just want to, I don’t know, blow it,” English said. The woman danced, short and squat, alone behind her closed eyes. Disco trumpets rose, choral voices rose, it was like Heaven; silence opened and a rivulet of chimes fell over the steady beating of a great heart … Ah shit, ah shit, English thought, not you.

  In the overheated lyrics of rock and roll he often heard the sorrows and pronouncements of a jilted, effeminate Jehovah, and this song made even grander, more awful claims than most, suggesting that Her love was profoundly uncontrollable and maybe not actually friendly—

  Not you, I don’t know you—

  —as inexorable as the ocean eating the sands of the Cape from under his feet, willing to take forever, if necessary, to drown him. Nothing would lift him from the waters: “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” it was called.

  Infinite disco love boomed, a wounded woman calling forth these bits of light to swarm over the walls. Her love was alive? It was monstrous. “I’m not here,” English said out loud. “So shut the fuck up.”

  Not you, not you, not you—Crackling dance-hall lumens circled these headless idiots in a whirlwind. Voices—angels—saints—“Fuck it,” English announced, “let’s just blow it.”

  The bartender was pointing him to the door. Leanna was crying. The woman was laughing, glass lay in shards across the puddles of the bar and changed colors. Not you, not you. “Not you, goddamnit, not you …”

  Leanna and one of the bartender’s friends helped him out into the knives of winter. “Time for Disco Inferno,” English said. “Let’s get serious.”

  She was having a hard time getting his clothes off as he tilted in the kitchen’s doorway and tried to kick away one of his shoes. His sight was still twisted and the rhythm still beat against his head. “Endless disco,” he told her.

  She was crying. She punched his chest. “Goddamn you,” she said. “Where did you get that leather jacket, anyway?”

  “It was given to me,” he said.

  They stepped, both of them naked and English feeling incredibly white, into the small yard behind her apartment. There was old snow beneath his feet. “My feet know,” he told her, “but my head isn’t getting the message.”

  “Here’s the message.” She swept a bulky black cover from the hot tub, stepped delicately in, and pulled him by the arm in after her. “I don’t want to fool around. I don’t want to touch you.” They sat naked across from each other in the wooden vat, attended by hardened drifts of snow, while warm camomile-scented waters churned around them, around her breasts, and the vapors of his mind revolved and dervishes of steam passed between them and the stars froze in the untroubled night above.

  English woke the next morning while it was still dark. His hands felt of grease, and the hair on his forearms was matted with it. Groping for his pants and cigarettes he knocked over a bottle on the floor by the bed, the action of whose water-filled mattress made him feel queasier than even he had a right to. He cut on the lamp. Filippo Berio olive oil. She’d given him a massage. He got a Marlboro lit. He wasn’t sure that smoking was approved of here, but Leanna was still sleeping and he assumed, because he’d spent the evening in a hospital and looked down into the face of a corpse, that everything was permitted. She was under the sheet and blanket in a lump, all but her sleep-softened face and dark tangles. They hadn’t made love last night, or any sense. He watched her long enough to make certain she was breathing.

  In the kitchen he found yesterday’s Boston Globe on the counter and yesterday’s coffee in a glass pot. He washed his face, hands, and arms at the sink, but got into his pants with his legs and buttocks still oily. In the papers he read about a murdered nun, a woman killed by unknowns in Brazil, and it started to seem to him, as he smoked cigarettes and drank cold coffee and imagined and imagined her last moments, that if what he imagined was true, then the earth was uninhabitable. This fear passed through him slowly, as though he’d eaten of it, and he cried. By the time the sunless daylight had come, the feeling had rarefied into a spacious hatred attended by the stink of brimming ashtrays.

  There was no sense waiting for Leanna to wake up, no use wondering how she felt about him, in a place like this.

  After dressing he went downstairs into the hour when paperboys might be delivering, but the street outside was empty. The seats of his Volkswagen were chilly and brittle. He shut the car door softly. There wasn’t any place open where he’d find breakfast, and so he told himself he’d go without it as a respectful fasting before Mass. It was the first he knew he was going. But he didn’t mean to go to St. Peter’s here in Provincetown and confront the figure in the mural beckoning from its rock in the storm. He’d been back there once, on an afternoon when the pews stood naked, and had discovered that the figure wasn’t Christ at all but somebody completely different, St. Peter it would stand to reason. In that case, he was just beckoning you into the folds of the Church, not into the storm. But please, don’t beckon me at all, not this early in the morning. English started the car and drove out to the highway and moved off down the Cape.

  He didn’t see the name of the town he entered some miles later. On an unreal Main Street like the one in Ray Sands’s electric train’s landscape he found a Catholic church, Our Lady of the Waves, and also a café that was open, where he decided to have breakfast after all and wait for Mass.

  At five to eight he stood before the heavy doors of the church feeling no hunger. The wooden entrance offered a Southwestern-style bas-relief severally and gaily colored and depicting Christ, looking quite a bit seedier these days, unshaven rather than bearded, his hair not flowing but unkempt, stalled beside some wooden flowers and keeping out of the way of orange slats of wooden sunshine. The crowds in the summery Cape atmosphere he’d never seen might move easily through this doorway, but English, with his mind on Ray Sands and murdered nuns, could hardly put his fingers on the handle: Jesus sheds His heat like tin upon you, spreads His tropic love, His Florida, on the army smashing in the faces of His brides. If we were truly as alone as that. He pushed through the doors to take Communion. There was never any explanation, never any consolation, but everything could be laminated by a terrible endorsement.

  The interior was cozy but unheated. A blue sponge of Holy Water in its receptacle just inside the door was frozen solid. But he heard people talking in a room off to the side, and then it occurred to him that, of course, they often had the poorly attended dailies in some smaller room. He probably could have saved gas by going to St. Peter’s and still have evaded the call of its patron saint. He headed toward the voices.

  In the tiny room he took a seat among old ladies in a row of folding chairs. The priest was just donning his vestment by the makeshift altar, and his head, round-faced and middle-aged, came up through the neck. “Yes,” he told them in tones faintly Irish, “he attended church regular.”

  One of the women said, “It’s a shame.”

  “Was there an evening service last week?” another said with worry. “I missed it, I didn’t know—”

  “A meeting of the choir,” the priest said. “And he dropped dead right there by the door.”

  The others clucked and ohed.

  “He turned to his wife,” the priest said, “turned to his wife and told her, ‘Martha, this is it.’”

  One of the women was also a witness, and said, “And then he keeled over, just like that. I feel so sorry for his son—you know, the son lost his own son last summer, and here, six months later, his father. What a world.”

  The priest was lighting the candles. “Doesn’t he have something to do with basketball? The son?”

  “He coaches. He coaches down South. They were in Albuquerque for the championship.”

  “That’s right.” It was coming back to him now. “He couldn’t be reached to tell him all day.”

  The others all shook their heads.

 
“That was a close game,” Father said. “North Carolina won it at the last buzzer.” He took his place behind the altar and lifted his hands above the chalice. “The ball,” he said, “was still in motion.”

  But a late arrival, another old woman, was just coming through the door. “Did you see Pavarotti on Channel 9 last night?” the priest asked the others, politely waiting a minute to begin.

  At the homily, Father said, “I don’t usually give a homily at the morning service, but I should say about Simone Weil, because I was in a discussion … You know Father Daniel, he’s here from Lynn for a while, he mentioned Simone Weil, and it’s very interesting, she never joined the Church. But you could say she was very much in the Church, very concerned about suffering. She was a little like Joan of Arc, you know, she got an idea in her head and that was it: she wouldn’t give it up, starved herself to death. She said she wasn’t going to eat any more food than the people in Hitler’s concentration camps, and this is the thing about faith, or about conviction. She died. For what it’s worth,” he said. “Just something to think about. We’re blessed with plenty to eat in this country. We read about famines in the Bible,” he said, “but …” He paused to show he’d finished with the homily and began the Eucharist.

  Hung over and unsorted and fatigued, English couldn’t pay attention to the Eucharist and heard only the most disquieting phrases, “This is the cup of my blood” and “We eat your body and drink your blood.”

  Afterward, as he turned his car onto the highway, English met a cloud of rain that must have been pouring water down for some time, because the police directing traffic around some roadwork were dressed in bright orange Day-Glo slickers.

  Simone Weil. He’d heard of her, didn’t know much about her, wasn’t particularly interested. Who would be? Hitler had killed millions, and by her gesture of starvation she’d managed to raise the count by one, that was about all you could say for her. Still, if the message arrived, and you believed it came from God … Vague hints beyond the periphery. An aroma opens onto an avenue. Messages issue from the toast, Kill your captain …

  A storm was a bad thing, because English’s windshield wipers didn’t work. The cops’ raincoats looked like blowsy neon through the strings of rain. TOWN OF WELLFLEET, their car insignia read.

  It was the hometown of Phil, the cabdriver. English turned around up the road and drove back to the town’s café to wait out the rain and call him.

  “You’re right around the corner,” Phil told him on the phone. “Look, man, I can’t talk—you wanna drop around here? You play cards, man? Poker?”

  “I’m flat-ass broke anyway,” English said.

  “Good, good, then you don’t have to spend ten hours with these guys, and what happens is, you end up that way anyway, right?”

  Phil was upstairs in an old yellow house not four blocks north of the church where English had just tasted God’s flesh. The apartment door was already standing open and the hallway smelled of stale smoke. Phil had been up all night, too. He met English at the door, burned-out, giddy, and hoarse.

  “I am so far ahead, man,” he told English, “so far ahead.” Impatient voices called him from the kitchen, and he led English in to where several men, easily pictured eating pigs’ feet in a barroom, sat around a table covered with cards and cash.

  English drew himself two glasses of water in quick succession from the faucet, standing at the sink and looking at small-town back yards out the window.

  “I hate to gloat, you guys,” Phil said. “I hate to gloat. I hate—to gloat. So what brings you around here, Lenny?”

  “I was at church,” English said.

  “Excellent,” Phil said. “Good for you.”

  “Third Street,” the dealer said. “Ace, never hurts. No help. Nuthin. Possible flush, hearts. Two sixes. No help. Sixes bet.”

  “You want a beer, man? Church is over, right?”

  “I don’t drink in the morning unless I’m hung over,” English said.

  “Your bet, sixes,” the dealer said.

  “You hung over?”

  “Yes,” English said.

  “Hey. Hey,” the dealer said.

  “O-kay,” Phil told him. “Two.”

  “Call.”

  “I’m out.”

  “Fold.”

  “Call.”

  “Four.”

  “Flush, my ass,” Phil said. “Six.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah, ditto.”

  “I call.”

  “Fourth Street,” the dealer said, giving Phil and the other man their fourth cards. “Bust the flush. No apparent for the sixes.”

  “What’d you wanna see me about?” Phil asked English.

  The dealer rapped the table. “Come on. Sixes.”

  “These for the taking?” English indicated a forest of bottled beer beside the sink.

  “Help yourself. What’d you wanna see me about?”

  “Can I tell you something without you getting a terrific resentment?” the man dealing asked English. “We’re trying to have a poker game here.”

  “Remember I was asking you about something called the Truth Infantry?”

  “Those guys are mostly in New Hampshire,” one of the other men said.

  “The winners want to talk, and the losers say, Let’s deal,” the man in the seat next to that man said.

  “Listen: bet or check,” the dealer said.

  “They’re like—paramilitary,” Phil said. “Two dollars.”

  “They’re all up around Franconia. I gotta see one more. I call.”

  “See what? You only get five cards, man. Your flush is busted.”

  “New Hampshire?” English said.

  “Yeah,” Phil said, “all except your boss. Know what? He’s the head of it. The Generalissimo of Jive.”

  “Fifth Street,” the dealer said. “Another heart, too late. No help for the sixes.”

  “You mean—Ray Sands?”

  “Oh yeah,” Phil said. “Stewart, Stewart, Stewart,” he said, shaking his head sadly at his opponent. “Two dollars. Yes, yes, yes,” he said to English, “Raymond Sands. Which means that you,” and English hoped he meant the other man, “are gonna get fucked in both ears at once.”

  English drove back into a town fallen on by drizzle, but the town might as well have been in flames. If he was the assistant to the deceased head of a paramilitary squadron, in what sense, he couldn’t help wondering, would he now be viewed as the head of it? Phil had lost his hand of poker to a pair of nines, much to the satisfaction of his friends. “Kicked in the head by Karma,” he had announced. The sight of a police car in the A&P parking lot thrilled English like a drop through the dark.

  His eyes were full of sleep. The shine of rain on the asphalt blurred abnormally, looking less liquid than electric. His strength for the day was spent, yet it wasn’t noon. He had appointments at the station’s production studio, but he imagined he’d just skip them, go home, and leave this world for one of dreams he wouldn’t quite recall when he woke again.

  But first he stopped to look in on Grace Sands.

  Grace came to the door red-eyed and generally disarranged, wearing the same clothes she’d been wearing last night at the hospital. “The operator,” she said. Her lips quivered wildly and she gestured behind her at nothing.

  He put his hands into his pockets. “Grace.”

  “The operator is rude.”

  “Grace,” English said. “Do you know who I am?”

  She looked past him, over his shoulder, and then turned to peer into the living room she’d just come out of. “I’ll make some tea,” she said.

  “Very good.”

  “Sit down!” she cried as she left him standing in the hall. “What you call it—the couch. I make some …” At the far end of the house, where her voice had faded, he heard a faucet going on.

  He went to the desk in Sands’s office and took the three blue passports from their drawer, and then stood still in the middle of the ro
om, not a pocket anywhere in his clothing big enough to hide them.

  With a pencil he started a rent in the lining of his jacket, ripped it wider with his fingers, and stuffed the three documents out of sight; then walked, his elbow jammed awkwardly against their bulk because he’d torn a hole large enough for them to fall out of, across the hallway and into the parlor.

  Sitting back on the flowery divan, English closed his eyes and listened to a singing along his taut wires while Grace disturbed the kitchenware. Now that his eyes were shut, his vision was acute: across a curtain of phosphenes he watched primitive, shrunken heads devolve into faceless splashes.

  “So. So. So,” Grace said, coming back with a tea service held out before her.

  “Oh. Here.” He took hold of the coffee table with both hands and moved it three inches to the left, pointlessly.

  “And you going on a trip,” she said, setting down the tray.

  He studied the two small cups, the unadorned white teapot, the bowl of sugar and pitcher of milk, the plate of lemon slices. “Not to my knowledge.”

  She took her place across from him and poured him out some tea. “Bud gonna be along real soon.” Some sort of unpleasant thought crossed her face. She put her hands in her lap and looked at them.

  “Very tasty.” English sipped his tea.

  “I don’t remember all the numbers, and she’s rude,” she said. “So rude I’m not gonna talk to her, that kind of person.”

  After a moment she looked at him in fear. “Are you waiting for your photograph while it’s developing?”

  English sighed. He felt his lower lip trembling as he touched it to the rim of the cup.

  “Bud got a personal friendship with our Bishop, Bishop Andrew.”

  English said, “I’m glad.”

  “The Bishop, our Bishop, you know Bishop Andrew? He visit my Bud personal last week. Lenny,” she asked him now, “where’s Bud?”

  “I beg your pardon,” he begged her.

  “Do you think Bishop Andrew gonna come?”