The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (19 page)
Read The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man Online
Authors: Denis Johnson
“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 tea 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.”
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.
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.
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