The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (31 page)

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Authors: Denis Johnson

BOOK: The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man
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None of the blouses would fit him. He had to tear the sleeves off his shirt and settle for that.
He walked downstairs and out the door and past the cabins and took several tentative steps along the sidewalk. A few people he couldn’t bring himself to look at passed him as he walked toward Commercial, but nobody said anything.
On Commercial Street all the shops were open, broadcasting tears and fragrances and songs delivering their knives, the aromas of spun candy and suntan oil and incense and perfume. He immersed himself in it all for ten seconds, made an alley not half a block east, and ducked into it. Three women passed him on roller skates, wearing headphones and holding hands.
Giving up his forward progress and seeking shelter in this alley had been a mistake. For a few seconds he didn’t think he was going any farther dressed like this. His imposture felt obvious. Anybody could see he was a woman who couldn’t even fasten a bra. But nobody was looking at him.
He stepped onto a street filled with people in short shorts and big roller skates and earphones, a street of headgear and desperation jammed with people walking their invisible dogs, exploding with people wearing huge blue velvet novelty hats. Not even a glance from these citizens. On this avenue he was just another case of the hot-and-lonelies, another attempter working on a firestorm. There were cops on extra corners today directing traffic. They never glanced at him. Cars nudged through the throng that covered the pavement from wall to wall, cars with their tapedecks blazing stereophonically as they passed, but for the most part it seemed to be a parade consisting of children who had to go to the bathroom now, and parents who wished to go in two different directions—like life—and young, electric, vividly sexual men staring at one another through a drugged haze and couples thinking about leaving one another because the sea’s erotic whisper was making them crazy. English could feel what they were thinking. And he could see plainly that this was the real and permanent Provincetown, the mad seaside hamlet that had been here since the day of his arrival, and it hadn’t been disguised or overlaid by the empty winter season, it had simply drained away into the corners, and the people had turned invisible because they, like Gerald Twinbrook, were ghosts. And they, as Twinbrook had, had now turned visible and fleshly again. But only he, Leonard English, was alive. These wraiths couldn’t see him.
He walked among them. He was getting used to this. Exhaust fumes on my pulse points, he thought.
The humanified forest. Nobody familiar around. Where are the people who knew me when I was knowable?
And then he encountered Berryman on the teeming street. Berryman, the drunken reporter English had shared two drinks with, and probably, when he thought about it, one of the very few people who knew him in this world. “Hey, hey, hey,” Berryman said. “Uh—Leonard English?”
Fuck you, he thought. I do not know you. So please stop addressing me and touching me.
“I can give you about three minutes,” he told Berryman. “I don’t want to be late for Mass.”
The reporter took him by the hand and pulled him close to a wall. “It’s good to see a friendly face,” he told English. “I’ve been away.”
English said nothing. Somehow Berryman, by ignoring his appearance, made him feel more uncomfortable than he might have done by shouting out loud about it.
“I just got back from New Hampshire,” Berryman said.
“Oh. I was there, too.”
“Not where I was. I was in Edge Hill.”
“Edge Hill?” English said.
“A treatment center. The paper’s insurance program covered it.”
“You mean—for booze?”
Berryman’s look was direct—not at all sheepish. “I lost the battle and won the war.”
For an awkward moment, English didn’t know what to say. Berryman scratched an arm, pinched his nose vigorously.
“I see you’re in costume today,” Berryman said at last.
“Forget you saw me.”
“I really don’t think I can do that.”
“Okay. I don’t care. Obviously I just say, Fuck it.”
Berryman seemed to be trying to glance down English’s bodice. “I’m familiar with that philosophy.”
English thought of reaching into his purse and taking out his .44. Giving everybody a little jolt.
“You look good,” Berryman said.
“Thanks. Your three minutes is up.”
“You look very, very eighties.”
“Thanks.”
“Take care, Lenny.”
“Forget my name,” English said.
To get to the church he had to double back to Bradford. He cut through the alley where the costumed roughs hung out around the A-House, a notorious leather bar, but nobody even whistled. He made himself out of breath going up the concrete flights cut into the embankment to Bradford. It was nearly ten o’clock of a Sunday morning, and that’s what had him hurrying; he wanted to get to the rectory before the priest was done; he wanted to make his confession.
 
English heard voices in the sitting room, and so he waited by the door. He’d been in this room on his first day in Provincetown, the day he’d met Leanna. He stepped back for the person coming out, a teenage girl who couldn’t have had anything very interesting to be ashamed of.
The priest, a young, angular man, was about to put on his garment for Mass. As English came in he stopped, and looked at his watch.
Dressed in these clothes and feeling beautiful, English sat down in the chair. “Bless me, Father,” he said, “for I have sinned.”
The priest set the garment aside and looked at English carefully, then at his watch again. “You’re my last confession,” he said.
He sat down next to English and put his slender fingers on the makeshift partition. “Do we need this?”
English shook his head. Father moved it aside.
“Call me,” English said, “May—June.”
“Ah well, I’m Father Michael.” Father put his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, and seemed to be thinking. “May—June. You are a transvestite?”
“Yes.”
“Doesn’t that confuse the issue of your sexuality somewhat?”
“How can my sexuality be any more confused than it is? Give me a break.”
“I speak as one who is also gay.”
“I’m not gay.”
“Oh.” Father was surprised. “Of course, it’s not always an expression of a gay attitude.”
“Sometimes it’s just a disguise.”
Father crossed his arms before his chest and looked at English across the chasm of God’s love. “Where on earth,” he said, “did you shop for those shoes?”
English sighed.
Father said, “Are you serious?”
English couldn’t keep back the tears. He choked on them, sobbing. “You mean, are
you
serious. Telling me you’re gay, for Christ’s sake.”
“A lot of people are gay. I’m sorry if I misjudged, but I thought it would help to share a truth about myself.”
“I came here to confess.”
“All right.”
“Not to hear your confession!”
“Yes.”
“I’m serious!”
“All right. Is it all right if I take your hand?”
“Oh, God,” English said.
“No,” Father said, a little flustered now, “only if it comforts you.”
“This is getting bizarre,” English said.
Openmouthed disbelief stopped the priest’s face for a beat. “Oh, is it?”
“Bless me, Father,” English begged, “for I have sinned.”
“All right, then, let’s do it. How long has it been since your last confession?”
“Like maybe a couple of years, at least,” English said.
“And what have you done to trouble your conscience in that time?”
The room was a typically decorated vestry, or whatever the hell, English thought, you call these places. There were crucifixes all over the walls, and here and there an empty cross inviting the sinner to share in unimaginable sufferings. A long embroidered banner hung over the partition put there to hide the priest while he dressed for the service—just like the partitions they’d had in English’s grade school. LOVE BEFORE ME, the banner said, LOVE BEHIND ME, LOVE ABOVE ME, LOVE BELOW ME, LOVE AROUND ME, LOVE WITHIN ME.
“Two years ago I tried to hang myself to death,” English said.
“I’m listening,” the priest said.
“The thing is—sometimes I think I succeeded. Sometimes I think I really died.”
“Well, of course you did.”
Stunned silence. The room was choked with orchids. At last somebody was telling him the truth. He was dead.
“If you tried sincerely, then you succeeded in canceling your life. It was an act of perfect faithlessness. You’d reached the absolute end,” Father Michael said. “Maybe it was the only thing you could do.”
“Is there absolution for such a thing?”
“Your faith is making you whole,” Father said.
“But if I succeeded?”
“You did succeed. And your faith is making you whole.”
They sat together in silence for a while.
“Anything more?” the priest asked.
English’s sadness moved in his chest when he shrugged.
Father Michael said, “I’m going to give you my strongest absolution. The original Latin.” As he stood up, he said, “Bishop’s doing Mass today, I can’t be late. He’s in town to bless the fleet.”
Father made the sign of the cross, and stooped and gave English a little kiss on the forehead.
“Te absolvo.”
 
English left feeling unsure—was he now cleansed, and if so, of what exactly? What crud had the winds of absolution carried off, why did he still feel such grime in the creases of him? An unspiritual explanation was that it was hot. Summer had arrived. Now it was past ten and everybody, even the most debauched, was awake and on the stroll. The crowds were of a size to menace civil authority. Was anybody left in Boston or New York? When you’re this completely naked, he thought, much more naked than you’d be without clothes, when you’re naked of all your signs and your moves, as naked, say, as the minute you were born, then these thousands of lives going by
will
rake you. Something like the permeable mask a fencer darkens his face with, that’s what his heart needed here.
He put on a casual look: no, not at all, none of this was getting to him; but everything was getting to him—the birds of electricity beating their wings in the wires, the repertoires of ambulances, the thud of defectively muffled engines and the whacking, like rugs being wearily beaten, of stereos through the open windows of cars. The frosty pink was fading from his mouth and the sweat dripped down the inside of his thighs, although occasionally a small breeze reached under and disturbed the leaves and blossoms of his skirt’s tropical motif. Above all he was embarrassed to be wearing men’s Jockey shorts. It seemed an easily appreciated thing, all you had to do, for heaven’s sake, was watch him walk. He had to remind himself with every breath that he was invisible to these wraiths.
At a family grocery they were putting out crates of fruit to tempt the thirsty strollers. What a miracle to see a produce truck, uncoupled, drive out from under the massive husk of its trailer. Let him treat his burdens like that!
From the end of Bradford he headed right, out toward Herring Cove. The sky was open now, he was in the National Seashore, a realm protected from civilization, and the road wasn’t so crowded. Rather than walk right through the parking lot, he left the pavement a quarter mile or so below the cove and cut across the dunes that rose and fell for quite a distance before they lay down in front of the sea. A few minutes and he’d lost sight of the road, of everything but the sand and the sky; it showed him how all things could fall away in an instant; now he crested a dune and came into a crater empty of everything but sand and the intersecting footprints of other people; the notations delved here by their journeys showed him how each life was one breathtakingly extended musical phrase, and he prayed that their crossings were harmonious.
In some former existence he’d been hunted over sand like this, run down and eaten, turned to the predator’s flesh and bones. He felt his life extending backward into the conflagration of all other lives. And it reached out of him like a frond of smoke, touching the tender pink future. This sand presented itself as evidence that he’d someday father children and grandchildren on the earth. He could hear their feet knocking in the rubble as they scavenged in our dregs, stumbling around after some gigantic holocaust.
As he cleared the last dune, he stood for a minute on the brink of the Atlantic and laid claim to it all. Here the Cape faced west, curving into Cape Cod Bay, and the noon sun raked the sand. English felt it piercing him as if he wasn’t here. He had absolutely no protection in this guise. Everything he was —a man, an American, an image patched together out of certain assumptions and beheld mostly by itself—was burned to ash by the fire of this new thing. And something was burned away from before his vision, the veil itself that kept his eyes from the agony of brightness.

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