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Authors: Denis Johnson

BOOK: The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man
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The priest, a small, preoccupied man, made the sign of the cross and awaited the rote utterances, praying to himself in a rapid whisper.
But English had only one thing to confess. “I’m new in town—excuse me …” Violently he cleared his throat. Now he noticed the room was full of flowers.
The priest stopped praying. “Yes. Well, young friend. New in town.”
“I wonder if—Father, can we dispense with the … ?” English waved his hand around, and was embarrassed to find that this gesture included the confessional and the cross. He’d meant only the formalities, the ritual. What he wanted was plain absolution.
“It’s a nice quiet time of year to come,” Father said in a puzzled tone.
English waited a minute. The flowers smelled terrible. “I just went crazy,” he said. “I committed—I killed myself.”
“Uh, you …” The priest looked up through the partition’s screen as if only now beginning to see he wasn’t by himself. “In what sense,” he began, and didn’t finish.
“What I mean is,” English said, “not
killed. Tried,
I mean. I tried to hang myself.”
“I see,” Father said, meaning, perhaps, that he didn’t see.
After a few seconds Father said, “Well then. You say you’ve tried to … Is there something you’ve done about this? Have you sought help?”
“I am. I’m—I’m confessing.”
“But …” The priest stalled again.
English wondered how much time before Mass. Nobody else was behind him. “I mean …” he said.
“Okay,” the priest said. “Go on.”
“The thing is, I’m starting out here, starting over here.” English had come too far. He wanted to find himself standing, without having moved, in the fresh air on the green lawn outside. It was December, but the lawns were still green. There were still flowers around town. He felt cut off from them and from all living things. “This suicide attempt is basically—that’s the one thing I’m confessing,” he said.
“Well then,” Father said.
“I wanted to take Communion,” English explained.
The priest seemed weighted down with sadness, but it might only have been shyness. “I don’t sense much commitment,” he said.
“Can’t I just—”
“But I think, do you see, given your—lack—”
“I wanted to confess. I wanted to take Communion.”
“Of course,” Father said. “But—”
“I’ll try again,” English said. “I’ll try later.”
He left the place quickly, embarrassment crawling up his neck as he found his way to the door. Somehow he’d succeeded in confessing his greatest sin, yet had failed to find absolution. He felt hurt by this failure, really wounded. He couldn’t hold himself up straight. It was hard for him to walk.
But his spirits lifted as he breathed the chilly air outside, where his fellow Christians ambled, most of them ignoring the paved walkway, across the lawn and through the church’s double doors. He watched them awhile, and then, temporarily, he granted his own absolution. Self-absolution was allowed, he reasoned, in various emergencies. Wetting his fingers at the tiny font by the entrance and genuflecting once, he walked in among the aisles and pews with the touch of holy water drying on his forehead.
It was larger, more vaulting, than the church he’d gone to in Lawrence. At the front, behind the altar, the middle of the huge wall telescoped outward away from the congregation, making for the altar not just a great chamber that had nothing to do with the rest of the place but almost another world, because its three walls were given over completely to a gigantic mural depicting the wild ocean in a storm. In the middle of this storm a bigger-than-life-size Jesus stood on a black, sea-dashed rock in his milky garment. The amount of blue in this intimidating scene, sky blues and aquas and frothy blues and cobalts and indigos and azures, taking up about half of the congregation’s sight, lent to their prayers a soft benedictive illumination like a public aquarium’s. The wooden pews were as solid as concrete abutments on the highway, the whispers of those about to worship rocketed from wall to wall, and English’s awareness of these things, along with his irritated awareness of the several babies in the place who would probably start their screams of torment soon, and all the boxes and slots for seat donations and alms for the distant poor, and the long-handled baskets that would be poked under his nose, possibly more than once during the service, by two elderly men with small eyes whom he thought of against his will as God’s goons, let him know that his attitude was all wrong today for church. But he was a Catholic. Having been here, he would forget all about it. But if he missed it, he would remember.
There were as many as fifty people scattered throughout a space that would have seated four hundred. All around him were persons he thought of as “Eastern,” dark, European-looking persons. An attractive woman with black bangs and scarlet fingernails was sitting behind him, and English couldn’t stop thinking about her all through the service. To get her legs out of his mind he swore to himself he’d talk to her on the way out and make her acquaintance. Then he started wondering if he would keep his promise, which wonder took him to the wonder of her legs again, and in this way he assembled himself to make a Holy Communion with his creator.
The tiny priest was a revolutionary: “I have been asked, the diocese has instructed us—all the parishes have received a letter that they are not to go out among the pews to pass the sign of peace.” He seemed to get smaller and smaller. “But I’m going to have to just disregard that.” A nervous murmuring in the congregation indicated they didn’t know if they should applaud, or what. A couple of isolated claps served to express everyone’s approval. “‘I give you peace; my peace I give you.’” Were they already at that part? The priest came among the pews and passed out a few handshakes, and the congregation all turned and shook hands with those nearest them.
It never seemed likely, it was never expected, but for English there sometimes came a moment, a time-out in the electric, a rushing movement of what he took to be his soul. “A death He freely accepted,” the Silly Mister Nobody intoned, and raising up the wafer above the cup, he turned into a priest rising before Leonard English like the drowned, the robes dripping off him in the sun. Now English didn’t have to quarrel, now he didn’t have to ask why all these people expected to live forever. And then the feeling was gone. He’d lost it again. His mind wasn’t focusing on anything. He’d had the best of intentions, but he was here in line for the wafer, the body of Christ burning purely out of time, standing up through two thousand years, not really here again … He was back on his knees in the pews with the body of Our Lord melting in his mouth, not really here again. Our Father, although I came here in faith, you gave me a brain where everything fizzes and nothing connects. I’ll start meditating. I’m going to discipline my mind …
Everyone was standing up. It was over.
He went out the front way with the other pedestrians, not because he was one, although he was, but because he was trailing the woman who’d been sitting behind him. She was easy to keep in sight, but she walked fast.
She was halfway to the corner by the time he caught up. “My name’s English,” he told her.
“My name’s Portuguese,” she said.
“No, I mean, that’s really my name, Lenny English.” He couldn’t get her to slow down. “What’s your name?”
“Leanna.”
“I was thinking we could have dinner, Leanna. I was thinking and hoping that.”
“Not me,” she said. “I’m strictly P-town.”
“Strictly P-town. What does that mean?” he said.
“It means I’m gay,” she said.
Had he been riding a bicycle, he’d have fallen off. He felt as if his startled expression must be ruining everything.
She walked on.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” English said. “You don’t look gay. Isn’t that against the law? It’d be easier if you gave some indication.”
She was amused, but not to the point of slowing down. “I must’ve been out of town when they passed out the little badges,” she said.
“Couldn’t we just have dinner anyway? I don’t have anything against women who like women. I like women myself.”
“I can’t. I’ve got some other stuff to do.” She smiled at him. “Do you know what?” she said. “You left your wallet in the church.”
“My wallet?” He’d taken out his wallet to make a donation. Now it was gone from his pocket.
“It’s sitting on the bench,” she said. “I noticed when we all stood up.”
“Oh, shit. Oh, great. How come you didn’t tell me?”
“I just told you,” Leanna said.
English wanted to talk more, but his anxiety was already carrying him back inside, against the tide of people flowing toward Bradford Street. He swiveled left and right, slipping through them sideways and apologizing convulsively, with an energy he’d lacked in the confessional: “Pardon me. Excuse me. Pardon me. Pardon me …”
 
 
 
M
onday was the day to become presentable, look alive, and appear at his place of employment. Last night’s precipitation had been only somebody’s idea of a joke about snow; the streets were dry and the air was sunny and fraught with health and the water in the harbor was blue.
Anybody taking a minute to size up Leonard English, as he passed shop windows and occasionally glanced at his reflection in them on the way to his new job, might have guessed he was no good at sports and lived in a room alone. On each quick examination of his image he changed the way he walked, or adjusted his shoulders, or wiped his hands on his pants.
Maybe he was about to fail to impress his new boss. He was worried. The truth was that he hardly knew Ray Sands, who ran a private investigation agency and who also owned Provincetown’s radio station.
English was at a loss to trace his own path here to the very end of the earth and this new career. It was beginning to seem that the big mistake of his adult life had been giving up his work as a medical equipment salesman over a year ago. He’d drawn a fair salary for a single person, and above that a generous commission. He’d had unbelievably good health insurance—Minotaur Systems couldn’t have afforded not to give its workers the best in coverage—and a big pension down the line, and plenty of variety in his workday, wandering all around the city of Lawrence and talking with doctors, university people, and hospital administrators.
He’d enjoyed selling. He’d been treated fine. That hadn’t been the problem. It was the equipment itself: gleaming, precise, expensive tools that seemed more like implements of torture than agents of healing.
These incomprehensible gizmos had made him tired. They’d seemed to involve him—implicate him—more and more deeply in the world of the flesh. He’d started going to church again, maybe not too regularly, but at least sincerely, on his thirty-first birthday. That was the other world. The two were in conflict. The conflict sapped his strength. He’d found himself irritable, depressed; and then he’d made the decision that had married him to perpetual financial insecurity. Actually it hadn’t been a decision. He’d taken a vacation, extended it with medical leave after his silly attempt at hanging himself, and then been let go.
The try at self-murder he classified as an embarrassing phase of development, that is, nothing really serious.
Somehow the spiritual things, questions like what was really wanted of a person and just how far God would go in being God—he couldn’t have said what exactly, but he guessed it was the depth of these conundrums, the way he could spend an afternoon thinking about them and never get anywhere but feel he’d made great strides—
something,
anyway, had dizzied him, and for a while he couldn’t function. Stepping off a chair with a rope around his neck and hanging there for a minute had broken the spell.
The same mesmerization had overcome him yesterday in the empty church when he’d gone back after his wallet. He’d found it undisturbed on the bench where he’d been sitting, but instead of leaving right away, he stood among the pews like a solitary farmer in a big, plowed field, holding it in his hand. The mural taking up three whole walls was scary now. From inside His blue storm, Christ called out to the believer to sail up against His rock and be shattered like a dish. What concerned English, night and day, was whether somebody would actually do that.
Wondering about Heaven all the time made him drag his feet. After the medical instruments business, and then even life itself, had paled for him so dramatically, finding some new occupation he could settle down to wasn’t easy. A stint with one of the temporary clerical services led him eventually to the Lawrence police station, where he worked for nearly eight months, interviewing the victims of crimes. Most of the victims of crimes were friends or neighbors or relatives of the perpetrators, and they ended up just the same, friendly or neighborly once again, still related and exchanging sheepish looks at sentimental family gatherings. But in the meantime, they wanted to be heard. He took down their statements, keeping them to the subject and boiling away the murky waters of personal history until what remained was stuff actually covered by criminal statutes. It was hard work, and thankless. Everybody went away shocked because justice was never done.

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