Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

by Denis Johnson

  “I’ll lend you all you want. But if you want to feel like a person, you’d better get a job.”

  “I have a job.”

  “Really?” she said. “When was the last time you showed up around there?”

  “I called yesterday. I’ve got a production date tomorrow. Big bucks.” But he wasn’t thinking about his work at WPRD. He was thinking instead of Gerald Twinbrook, Jr., the missing person, and his detective’s vocation.

  “I need to make a couple of calls right now, too,” he said. “Long distance.”

  “Dial away,” she said, and left him with the phone.

  For a minute he watched her at work out back, sweeping twigs from the iron lawn furniture.

  It was spring, and he was making a fresh start. He got Mrs. Gerald Twinbrook, Sr., on the phone.

  She’d forgotten who he was. Then, when he reminded her, she said, “We’ve got another agency on it, Mr. English.”

  “He’s still missing, then.”

  “It’s been four months. We’re resigned to the worst.”

  He cleared his throat needlessly. “Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I called almost every day for a week. I talked to … to Mrs. Sands several times, but she was very …”

  “Right, right,” he said.

  “Anyway, a lady from her church finally answered one day last month and explained to me that poor Mr. Sands had had a heart attack.”

  “Yeah, it was—it was weird,” he said, thinking it was the wrong word.

  “If only I’d heard from you a little sooner.”

  “Yeah, yeah. So you took it to another outfit?”

  “In Boston, yes. Carter Investigations.”

  “I’m fired.”

  “Well, I don’t know if I would say fired. Perhaps you can work with the Carter people. I wouldn’t go so far as to speak for them, you understand, but I would certainly insist they consult with you to begin with. And that’s just what I’ve already told them. Any progress you’ve made, and so on.”

  “I haven’t heard from anyone.”

  “It’s not for lack of trying on their part, Mr. English. They’ve been phoning your office without any luck. They tell me—”

  “I wasn’t around. This whole thing—I mean, Mr. Sands dying, that whole business—what a thing, really. I’ve been beside myself.”

  “I understand, Mr. English, truly I understand, and believe me, I’d like to help in any way I can, but our concern, of course, is with—”

  “Pay me if I find him.”

  Mrs. Twinbrook emitted a number of syllables, I, uh, we, well—“Certainly, uh, Mr. English. Yes, you see, but we already have the Carter agency—”

  “Only if I find him. Only if I get results. Is that fair? That’s fair, isn’t it? In fact, it’s totally unprofessional. I mean—”

  “Well now, Mr. English, if you find my son, you will most certainly be paid.”

  “I just want an excuse to find him.” An inexplicable rush of sentiment dizzied him and wet his eyes. “Don’t ask me why. This whole thing has got me—I have to do something.”

  “You were Mr. Sands’s assistant. Are you actually a licensed detective yourself?”

  “Of course I am,” he said. “Should I bring my license with me next time I see you?”

  “Don’t you carry it with you anyway?”

  “It’s kind of big. It hangs on the wall,” he guessed, never having seen one.

  “All right. Please understand you are not working for us, Mr. English. It’s just that I don’t want to discourage you if—if you should be successful—”

  “If I should be successful in the efforts I am not making for you.”

  “I’d have to let that be the final word.”

  “I’m fired but I’m not fired.”

  “Now you’re speaking past the final word, aren’t you.”

  “Okay. Okay. You’ll be hearing from me, Mrs. Twinbrook.”

  “I’d rather you communicated with the Carter people. All right?”

  “Because I’m not giving up. It’s that simple.”

  “Goodbye.” She hung up. He didn’t know whether to characterize that as actually hanging up on him, in the rude sense, or what. He decided it was just a decisive end to an indecisive talk, and promised himself he’d be more decisive in the future. Which was now.

  He dialed Jerry Twinbrook’s realtor in the hope of getting Twinbrook’s office address.

  Before he could change his mind, someone answered. “Phil-Hack Realty: Bob Edwards.”

  “Hi, listen, excuse me, my name’s Leonard English, from Provincetown.”

  “Provincetown! How are things up that way? You getting some of this warm front across the Bay there?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. We’ve hit a thaw. I’m convinced it’s spring.”

  “Well,” Bob Edwards warned him, “wait till you hear it from the ducks. The ponds are still frozen down here.”

  False laughter tore itself from English’s throat. He rubbed away his sweaty palm print from the desktop.

  “So what can I do you for, Mr. English?”

  “Well, Bob, I’m kind of interested in the Twinbrook property over there. Jerry Twinbrook? He says it’s right on the water and he wants to sell. Can I get a look at it maybe? Sometime soon?”

  “Twinbrook.”

  “Jerry Twinbrook. Gerald. Junior. I believe he’s a junior.”

  “Hang on. Right with you.”

  While English waited he pictured Bob Edwards, a youthful man with perhaps his tie loosened and his shirtsleeves rolled up, dialing the police on another line.

  “Hi. Mr. English.”

  “Lenny. Lenny.”

  “Lenny, yeah, listen. I’m afraid he’s given you the wrong realtor. We rent him some office space, but we don’t handle any property for him. Gerald Twinbrook, Jr.? I get that right?”

  “Right.” Speak. Tell me where it is. Tell me where the office is.

  “Still with me?”

  “Sure, but—you think he was pulling my leg? Office space.”

  “No, no, no, of course not. He’s probably handling the sale through another realtor. Got us confused.”

  “Yeah,” English said, his hands tingling. “That makes sense. Listen, can I get his office address from you? He doesn’t have a phone there. I’ll run down tomorrow and get it straightened out, and take a look at what he’s selling.”

  “He doesn’t have a phone in his office?”

  “Not—not under his name, anyway.”

  “Gee,” Bob Edwards said. “That’s a long drive on a slim chance. What if he’s not around?”

  Goddamn it. Goddamn it. “I’m going to Boston anyway,” English succeeded in telling him.

  “Well then, stop off at the Thomas Building and see him. It’s a converted Victorian just off Route 3 on your way into Marshfield. Got a big sign out front, little parking lot. Can’t miss it.”

  “Good deal. Listen, you’ve been a big help.”

  “Sure I have. What a guy, huh? Give us a call if we can assist in any way. Will you do that?”

  “Okay. Definitely. Yeah.”

  “If you pass the Amoco station on the road into Marshfield, you went too far.”

  “The Amoco. Thanks.” Too far? He’d be passing an Amoco on the way out of town. “Thanks a million.”

  “Hey. What a guy.”

  On the outer door of WPRD’s building someone had tacked a poster of a bound, silhouetted figure. Its caption read AS LONG AS AFRICA IS IN CHAINS YOU WILL NOT BE FREE.

  As he read it, the probable truth of this idea lowered itself down immensely onto English’s heart.

  Suddenly he changed his reason for coming. He’d set out with the idea of quitting his job, but now he thought he’d just beg off working this afternoon. This world was no place to be unemployed in.

  Inside, he was greeted solemnly by the program manager, a man named Haney, a small New Yorker with very dark skin and large, sentimental eyes. Haney stirred a cup of te
a while he stood in English’s way, and then he sucked loudly at the liquid’s surface. Lately Haney’s eyes had gotten tighter, and shiny. “I wanted to talk to you about that,” he said when English told him he’d have to miss that afternoon’s production date.

  “I know you did. I’ve been missing a lot.”

  “Not a lot,” Haney said. “Not a lot. But I wanted to talk to you about it.”

  “I was doing some secretarial work for Ray Sands,” English said. “Did you know that? There are some things, some loose ends, some things to be cleared up.”

  “I understand.” Haney sipped at his tea and began watching his desk, two meters across the room, as if something were happening there. “We’ll struggle along for a time.” But the struggle was going out of him. “I’m lost. I don’t know where to begin, without Ray.”

  English would have thought that Sands had taken no hand in the management of this station; that his passing wouldn’t have produced a ripple. He felt sorry for Haney. “I’ll make it up to you. Sometime.”

  “As a matter of fact, now is just such a time. I’m about to engineer a show you’d be able to do much, much better. Will you give Alice a hand? Alice,” Haney called, cradling his teacup as if it were a trophy for the type of managerial snooker he’d just accomplished, “Lenny’s going to help, I think.”

  English turned around and found Alice Pratt standing behind him smiling a wide, sweet smile he couldn’t quite have sworn was bogus. Alice was, to his way of thinking, a fat, discarded hippie, dragged down by two monstrous happy-face earrings.

  Today Alice was interviewing Charles Porter, a young man to whom English thought the word “decent” would be well applied, the head perhaps of an infant family and a small business, a tenor in the choir—but Alice had invited this man onto her show because he was, it turned out, mixed up in the occult, and was supposedly a reader of invisible personal emanations he called “auras.” In calm, assured tones, keeping his lips close to the microphone, Porter explained how the cones and rods in the average eyeball kept these things hidden from the sight of most of us, and blessed the good fate that had made his own eyes a little different. It was a live show, and English’s job was to stay in the announcer’s room with them—there was no separate engineer’s booth—keeping track of program time and steadying the volume meter by dialing the “pots” up or down. He couldn’t let go of his notion of Porter as papa to a wife and preschoolers, and English wondered how he liked eating breakfast with them and seeing them surrounded by colorful force fields like alien creatures while they drank apple juice in their pajamas. English noticed, and not for the first time, that Alice Pratt’s dizzy overresponding irked him a lot, in particular because he couldn’t decide if it was desperately false or only camped, as it were, on the borders of insincerity. As he wore earphones, they were talking right into his head, but English was busy enough that he didn’t listen. He heard no words, only Alice’s voice as it scratched at the edge of a plea, wanting what everyone wanted, whatever that was; listening to her, he wanted it himself suddenly, aching as if he’d downed a shot of fuel and chased it with a flame. What hid behind her smile wasn’t bitchiness or malice but the trembling of the lost. This wasn’t the way to be engineering right now, how unprofessional—I’m a mess, he thought. What is it we all want? Whatever it was, he wanted Leanna to bestow it on him, and he denied automatically and viciously the fact that he probably couldn’t get it from her. Everything was so clear when it came through the earphones! Something was filtered out, some obscuring, personal static. It was his own presence. His reactions to people, their reactions in turn—all the fog of himself was lifted, leaving only the others.

  After the show, he found himself standing out in front of the building with Porter, only because the two of them happened to be leaving at the same time.

  “Okay,” English said, zipping his jacket against the wind, “what do you see?”

  “Your aura is green.”

  “I’m envious?”

  “Green denotes empathy. In the case of auras anyway.”

  English thought, He reminds me of a dentist.

  As if dealing in something embraced as universally as oral hygiene, Porter explained that English’s greatest asset—and greatest defect—lay in his ability to feel what others felt. “It’s a talent, a gift, but it can be a real hazard for you. It’s easy to take it too far. You can end up suffering needlessly just because you can’t stop suffering along with someone else.”

  “I hadn’t noticed anything like that, to tell you the truth.”

  Charles Porter shrugged and smiled. “Then I’m wrong.”

  English was impressed by that. “And does every person get only one aura? Is there anything else you see?”

  “There’s a yellow, or golden, corona there. You have a creative streak—very dangerous when coupled with empathy. You can easily begin empathizing with situations you only imagine. Find yourself getting stirred around by things that aren’t really—real.”

  Finding an affable, unapologetic citizen who believed this stuff was unnerving. English would have felt less uncomfortable if the man had tried to sell him something, or asked for a donation.

  He pointed at the building door and at the poster that said AS LONG AS AFRICA IS IN CHAINS YOU WILL NOT BE FREE. “You mean I’m the person who feels like that poster.”

  “Or the opposite,” Porter said. “The opposite danger is that in trying to protect yourself, you build up a calloused attitude. You cut yourself off from other people and from your true feelings. The thing to do,” he said, “is to concentrate on seeing that golden light coming out of you, right from your heart. If you concentrate on the gold, you counteract the tendency to get too empathetic. The gold energizes your creativity.”

  “Excuse me, but this sounds like bullshit,” English said, lighting a cigarette.

  “Well, it’s not stamped in bronze. I’m just an educated guesser, pretty much like everybody else. But I have the same tendency to empathize, and that’s what I do, I try to visualize a golden light around me.”

  “I didn’t mean to insult you.”

  “No, no.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No. Don’t be.” Porter smiled.

  English blew his cigarette smoke sideways. Just the same, the cloud ended up in Porter’s face. English waved it away, deciding to let that serve as a parting gesture. This whole business embarrassed him, and he walked off suddenly in search of Gerald Twinbrook.

  The wind sang mindlessly along his VW’s broken antenna as English passed over the Sagamore Bridge. This was the first time he’d left the Cape since the night he’d arrived.

  To English it was ridiculous that anyone would go around imagining a golden light shining out of his chest. But he knew he’d probably start doing it. One of the things he liked least about his nature, and something the aura viewer had failed to touch on, was a way he had of falling instant prey to the power of suggestion. “I’ll try anything twice,” he’d sometimes joked, and the few people in his life who’d known him very well hadn’t laughed.

  He passed the Amoco station on Route 3 and turned around, having already missed the turnoff to Route 93, and also the left turn onto 3—every turn required of him, in fact.

  The Thomas Building wasn’t active today. The parking lot served only a small yellow bulldozer and a third-hand Ford with a flat tire, and now his own VW. A sign on the building’s door said NO MONEY KEPT ON THESE PREMISES. A typewriter clicked faintly in an upper office, but the place felt empty, and despite its aging exterior, the inside of it smelled new, a hint of sawdust, a ghost of hammering. The walls and floor were thin and vibrated with his steps, while the staircase, evidently untouched by the remodeling that had broken the old house’s spaces into offices, was solid. There weren’t any lights on anywhere inside. The afternoon sun lit up the streaks and eddies of dirt on the window he climbed toward up the stairs.

  On the second floor English found empty offices, their doors ajar,
and one with TWINBROOK written across its wood with an indelible pen. The door was locked.

  The confusion of wrong turns that had marked his route here now overwhelmed his mind—for some reason English hadn’t thought of having to get in. He was no burglar. Yet certainly he lacked a key.

  He’d been turning around and going back too much today, but he had to go back to his car for a screwdriver and climb with considerable self-consciousness back up the stairs to confront Twinbrook’s door. He knew nothing of locks, but the door was flimsy and gave sideways easily when he pried between door and frame with the screwdriver. In the pauses of the typewriter upstairs, he held his breath. He might have pried the bolt from its housing in one try, but it took him a minute to work up that much boldness. It made a noise, just a squawk, coming open; he closed it silently behind him. The light switch did nothing, but soon he found a light, an overhead fluorescent that must have been provided by the tenant. Its cord hung down before the desk and lay across the floor in loops, a thick red extension cord that made English think of carpenters at work.

  When he let loose the light chain, he located himself in a scattering of white papers. Stacks of books and typesheets covered the floor, spilling from Gerald Twinbrook’s desk and chair: old wooden things from the era of steam heat and big iron radiators.

  Sands had said it would be here, in this room, under a book; penciled in the margin of a letter, doodled absently on a pad—a name, an address, a phone number: the answer. And English believed him. It only needed finding.

  He judged it was around noon. No one had been here in months, and they wouldn’t be coming back today. He had all the time he could use. Then why did he feel rushed? In a daze of reluctance he walked in small circles around the office, skimming the surface of all this data, glancing at the typesheets and file folders on the desk, reading the title of the top book on a pile of books beside the chair, failing to find significance or purpose in two dotted maps and a ragged list of names taped to the wall behind the desk.

  The light hummed overhead. It made him nervous. He turned it off.

  He sat in the wooden chair before the desk and lit a cigarette. There wasn’t any ashtray around, however, and in fact not even a wastepaper basket—crumpled white sheets of typing paper, which English understood weakly he’d have to uncrumple and peruse, filled a corner like a drift of snowballs.