The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (14 page)

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Authors: Denis Johnson

BOOK: The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man
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“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 circles; 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 …
“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.
 
 
 
E
nglish 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.

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