Denis Johnson - The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

He was fascinated with how Marla Baker and her lover Carol easily communicated in the most garbled sentences about little things that didn’t matter, and then failed, over and over again, to make themselves understood with the clearest statements whenever it came to the really important things.

“Well, I’m just angry, ” Marla would say.

“But — I don’t understand. It doesn’t make sense,” Carol would say.

“Please,” one or the other would say, “please, let me explain the whole thing again.”

Backing the tapes up, starting them forward, pushing up the treble, filtering out the clinks: I’m not alone, I’m never alone, he told these voices of people who’d forgotten they’d ever said such things and were now fast asleep; I’m with you.

Ray Sands invited English to his home for an early dinner on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve. English said no in his heart, but his mouth said, “Okay.” Which is about how those two generally operate together, he thought forlornly.

He’d worked the Thursday two-to-six, and sleeplessness made him feel soggy and gritty behind the eyes and put a sorrowful taste of cigarettes and coffee in the back of his throat. He kept feeling, as he walked the block and a half from his rented room to his boss’s house, that he needed to wash his hands.

It was a cold, bright day. A recent snow, partly melted, had frozen over again. The air smelled of refrigerated sea muck. This seaside dampness seemed to lurk, staler and halfway warm, in the hall behind the double doors of Ray Sands’s house as he let English in. The guest was embarrassed because Sands was all dressed up — that is, not much more than he usually was, but his suit was dark and he wore gold cuff links. With discomfort, as if shedding some part of himself, English took off his leather jacket. He wore a white shirt and a necktie.

“Good of you to come, Lenny!”

English had never seen Ray Sands even mildly cheerful before; it’s fair to say he’d never seen his employer even abysmally cheerful. But nothing was as usual today. Instead of going left through sliding doors into the messy office, where Sands generally lectured English on equipment, standing still before him while English sat on the stool for people being photographed, today Sands took his dinner guest through the sliding doors on the right, into his home, where everything was tinkly and rich. Intricate white lace draped the tables. The floorboards shone deeply. In the windows crystal prisms dangled so that faint rainbows stained the gauzy curtains. And on the dining-room table were silver goblets, and a big silver tureen in which reflections lay like brilliant postage stamps. English was surprised. He’d assumed that all retired police detectives were dead broke.

“This is beautiful,” he told Sands.

Too low to hear clearly, one of WPRD’s rich-voiced afternoon classical announcers spoke from a sound system on shelves against the wall. A mild spicy odor had found its way out of the kitchen, which lay toward the back of the house.

“Thank you,” Sands said. He was still smiling, displaying a very plastic-looking set of false teeth. “Can we get you a drink, Lenny? We have apple juice and cranberry juice. Or maybe you’d like to join me in a beer?” He was already heading for the kitchen.

“Sure, yes, I’d like a beer,” English said.

The furniture was white and stuffed and printed with a pink-and-blue floral design. All of it looked brand new. Even as he was admiring it, Mrs. Sands revealed herself to be the robot caretaker of all this immaculateness, rattling and clucking through with a yellow square of cheesecloth, saying, “Hello. Hello. Hello.”

English said, “Hi, Mrs. Sands.”

The old woman ignored his greeting. She appeared to be searching for dust, fussing over square micrometers where maybe some of it had landed. She was still preparing the scene. She seemed to be under the impression more guests were coming, but nobody else ever came.

Ray Sands poured beer from a can into a big frosted glass mug as he walked out of the kitchen. “Lenny, my wife, Grace. This is Lenny English, Grace.”

At that instant Grace looked at English with narrowed eyes and said, “William.”

“Leonard,” English corrected her. “Lenny.”

His employer handed over the mug of beer, and English raised it in a kind of toast, but Sands hadn’t gotten one for himself after all. English smiled at him, and Sands nodded, and Grace, who seemed frozen now and terribly alert, said to English, “The lawn. And somebody they should fix the front screen. It should be fixed immediately.” She was apprising anyone within hailing distance.

“The front screen?” English said.

“Lenny, why don’t you sit down?” Sands asked.

English hadn’t pegged it as the type of furniture you actually sat on. He put a very tiny portion of his rear end on the edge of the nearest overstuffed chair, resting his beer mug on his knee and holding it by its handle.

“Wow,” he said, “it’s really a beautiful day, isn’t it?”

He wanted to smoke, but there were no ashtrays in sight. While he was thinking of the next thing to say, he drank down his entire beer.

Grace headed back to the kitchen. “Lint,” she said. “Marks on the walls. Fingerprints everywhere.” She walked sideways.

“A lovely day,” her husband agreed.

Then English was lost, and he wanted to go home. Not to his room with the unmade bed and the picture of John F. Kennedy on the wall, but to his family’s farmhouse in Prairie, Kansas, and to his childhood, and to his dead mother and father.

Grace stayed in the kitchen with the food, which turned out to be roast beef, while Sands and English talked, fairly easily, about things having to do with WPRD. They named names, recalled episodes, chuckled over the mistakes of others. Sands gave English all the beer he wanted, and English found he wanted a lot. English asked Sands about the complicated business of getting a radio station started in a small town. How happy he was when Sands decided to lay out all the details for him, applications, permits, licenses, appearances before boards of idiots and commissions of dunderheads, so that for his part he only had to nod and go, “Oh, really?” or “Wow, fascinating,” or “Oh, I had no idea.”

The hostess ran a race between the kitchen and her big dining table, faster and faster, moving a mountain of food one plateful at a time and continually talking to herself: “ That’s not where you go. You go here, and you go here, and where do you supposed to go, where do you supposed to go?”

She was a mystery to English. Throughout the dinner — which was very good, he thought, and she evidently had no trouble concocting things among burners and timers and bells that jangled a person’s mind — Grace would fog over and leave the world around her, but then suddenly grow sharp and decisive about issues that just weren’t real. When she said something crazy, Sands was deaf. When she talked sense, he responded as if absolutely charmed.

“How is your place?” he asked English. “Your apartment.”

“Oh,” English said, “it’s very nice. It’s not an apartment, exactly, more like a room. Everybody’s very nice.”

“Who’s nice?” Grace said.

“I mean the people around me, the other roomers.”

“You get to know them?” She leaned forward with an interest that seemed quite false.

“Well, you know — they come and go, I guess. But there’s two or three who’ve been there as long as I have. We say hello, we sit in the foyer down there and talk sometimes.” This was a lie.

“You should get to know your neighbors,” Grace said. She was about to wipe her hands on her apron, and then, apparently just realizing that she was wearing it, she pushed her chair back, stood up, and reached around behind her back to untie it, clawing upward at the bow behind her neck with some small alarm. On the front of her apron was the slogan When It’s Smokin’ It’s Cookin’ and When It’s Black It’s Done .