Denis Johnson - The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

This was too intimate for English. The threat of a sudden unmasking, of revelations so embarrassing he couldn’t stand them, got him onto the subject he’d been afraid to raise. “Mr. Sands. Don’t you ever wonder about what we do?”

Sands glanced at him and then was reabsorbed by his train.

“I mean — I heard you talking about God, and”—English was nervous, couldn’t get his thoughts straight—“how does that tie in with the nature of our work, is what I’m asking about.”

“It’s a tough job,” Sands said, turning off his train.

“I feel bad about spying around on Marla Baker,” English said.

“It’s a very difficult business.”

These sideways answers made English feel weak. “Do you have any idea what kind of information I’m gathering here? I mean, for what purpose? Is it legal stuff? Is it a divorce thing, or what?”

“Judgments as to the kinds of information are things we just don’t make. What use the client makes of it, whether these things are good or bad — well, your best bet is to stop following that line of thought. Stop thinking. Look at it this way. We deal in information. Any great involvement in what we’re passing along would be like the mailman opening your letters for his own amusement. Try and see yourself in a role like the mailman’s.”

“This woman’s sexual preference is going to be used against her.”

“That’s a fair assumption.”

“You want to be a part of that?”

“Things are occurring. You’re recording those things and listening to those things, and passing the information along.”

“Well, the information I’m passing along to you right now is, I think this woman’s sex life is going to be used against her.”

“I’ve already stated I’m cognizant of that.” To English he seemed so dry. He was like paper. His skin, everything.

But Sands wasn’t just a case of personal emptiness, English could see that. He had some inner power to be mild, it showed in the way he dealt with Grace. He accepted her blandly and totally. English saw how you could love somebody like that. After a number of years none of the usual things would matter. It was hard to come up with a judgment against one or two activities of an electric train enthusiast who knew how to love without hope.

And so his disappointment in himself, for abetting Sands in his spy life, couldn’t be too firm or entire. He didn’t know what to think.

That night, after he’d said goodbye and gone home and done nothing for a while, English sat down in the overstuffed chair with a loose-leaf notebook and a pen. Opening the notebook to the middle, he wrote across the top line of the page

You don’t know me

and looked at those words for a while. He began to write again, stopped writing, leapt up, rifled his top drawers, and found an envelope and two aging, brittle stamps. Then he sat down and finished the note he’d started.

You don’t know me, therefore I don’t feel a need to tell you my name. I just thought you should know that your husband is having you followed by a private investigator around town. He’s been getting information about your life.

English wrote three more words—“Happy New Year”—but crossed them out. He read the note. As far as he could see, it delivered what he wanted to get across. He tore the page from the notebook. He folded it into its white envelope. He put a stamp on it and walked five blocks, thinking that he didn’t want to move people and change people, failing to think how they might be moving and changing him, to the post office, where he dropped the envelope in a box out front. It was his first use of this post office.

Within a week his subject, Marla Baker, had moved away. English’s duties as a private eye were nil, but his boss, Ray Sands, found more work for him at WPRD.

Essentially, on the production end of things, at WPRD he did just what he’d been doing in the cold midnights outside Marla Baker’s windows: he taped other people’s conversations. But now he was right in the room with them, they saw him, he was no spy. After they went away he edited out embarrassing slips of the tongue and overlong silences, dubbed themes and intros and outros onto either end, and tossed down the reels in the Special Programs in-basket. English found it all pretty dull stuff — half-hour chats between WPRD’s big-yawn personalities and their baldly uninteresting guests, who happened to be goofball artists, authors of books about birds and clams, or has-beens the listener would be surprised to learn were not yet dead. Sometimes English helped train new staff arrivals. These had to be frequent in order to keep up with the departures.

One new arrival English worked with was a Portuguese man named Smith, not an unusual name among Portuguese fishing families, it turned out, because many of them had adopted the names of their British captains when they’d first jumped ship on the Cape and taken up their lives here, far from home. All these name changes had happened in the murky past, but to English this gentleman sounded as if he’d just stepped onto the pier. Maybe he’d come here two days ago and only then adopted the name his American relatives had used for generations; English really couldn’t guess, and there was no finding out, either, because Smith had his own way of trying to communicate, and it didn’t work. Over the air this wasn’t a problem, as he broadcast in his native language.

Around the records and equipment the new man had a hunched, respectful deliberateness of which English approved. Smith was portly. But he had a blubbery quality, too. English imagined they still called him by his childhood nickname around the house. English sympathized when sometimes Smith forgot and left the switch for the announcer’s mike in the wrong position — it was supposed to be On when he was talking and Off when he wasn’t, and it sounded simple enough, but everybody got it wrong sometimes at first, trying to do two or three things at once and very aware the whole time that people were out there listening and possibly considering you some kind of a geek, or worse. When Smith made this little error he invariably looked as if he was about to surrender all control. “Oh! I’m making, iss — diss wrong! Too wrong!” He had a bald head, doctorly reading glasses he was always donning out of nowhere, a fringe of hair more literally a fringe than English would have hoped to see anywhere outside a cartoon, and a checked golfing cap that he deeply cherished. “I’m wear a het on my had,” he told English, “because I’m don’t”—he rubbed his smooth head—“you see? Iss bowled.” He displayed his checked cap. “You see?” He wore his wristwatch on the outside of his sweater sleeve, set off like fireworks against the orange knit. “Issa new — brain you,” he liked to tell everyone. There was a digital clock on the announcer’s board and a wall clock on the wall, but when he wanted the correct time, Smith always went into a huddle with his watch.

On his first delirious night at the controls, he opened his program with a 45 rpm recording of a Portuguese orchestra doing their country’s national anthem, after which they played the American national anthem, managing to make them both sound exactly the same. Next Smith read the intro to his show from a little yellow card he held before his face with a trembling hand, but his mike was still switched to Off. When he was done reading he turned it to On and desperately asked English a few incomprehensible questions that went out over the air.

While Smith read his introduction to each song from one of his yellow cards, pushed the button that set it spinning, and then cued up the next record on the other turntable with the sweating vertigo of a person under fire, one of the newsmen — for English’s money there were too many newspeople around the place — taped a phone interview in the hall closet with a Vietnam veteran about Agent Orange. Acoustically the closet was the only place, because the phone company had refused to wire the production studio as long as the station was in arrears. “And why did they do that!” the newsman was saying. He felt he had to shout. “What was it exactly that they told you!” Smith liked to keep the speakers in the studio turned up high. The music of his homeland carried him away. He was moved to tears by a ballad, a typical one of tootly violins and a passion-wrung male voice begging violently in Portuguese, except when every now and then it sobbed in English, “Hoppy birthday — to you — my dolling …” “It sounds like you were getting the runaround here, am I right?” the newsman cried. Smith looked at his watch, at the wall clock, at the digital clock. He was getting alarmed. The timing on his play list must not have been working out. Time was his conqueror. When the song was done he talked in a choked, halting fashion to the audience, holding no yellow cards now, clutching the microphone by its neck. English sensed he was confessing his incompetence and apologizing for his whole life.