Denis Johnson - The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

They followed the road into town and lost sight of the harbor as they came down the main street of shops. Now there were pedestrians moving alongside them in the chilly sunshine. The traffic crawled. “This crowd is nothing compared to summer,” Phil told him. Half the shops appeared closed, and English had a sense of people walking around here where they didn’t belong, in an area that might have been abandoned after a panic. Three ungainly women — were they men, in bright skirts? — danced a parody of a chorus line by a tavern’s door, arms around one another’s shoulders. Passing along the walks and ambling down the middle of the street were people in Bermuda shorts and children eating ice-cream cones as if it weren’t under 60 Fahrenheit today. On the lawn of the town hall, surrounded by grey pigeons and scattering crusts of bread out of a white paper bag, stood a woman who was very clearly not a woman but a man: as if a woman wore football shoulder pads and other bulky protection beneath her very modestly tailored dress. Another man in a dress was mailing a letter at the blue mailbox just six feet away. And a cross-dresser on roller skates loomed above two others sitting on a bench, patting his brittle wig lightly with one hand, the other hand on his hip, while laughter that couldn’t be heard passed among them. A very tall woman, who might have been a man, talked with a bunch of grade-school children out in front of a bakery. English cleared his throat. He had a chance to look at everyone until he was sick of their faces, because the car wasn’t getting anywhere.

Phil smacked the horn, but nothing happened. “Horn don’t work. This is making me apeshit. I’m gonna run some bastards over.”

They found the source of the traffic jam four blocks down, where a huge-bottomed transvestite comedian on the balcony of a cabaret-and-hotel delivered his Mae West impersonation for free. “Move over, honey!” he shouted down to a woman in a halted convertible. The woman ducked her head in embarrassment and put her hand on the arm of the man driving. Around them the shoppers and tourists, variously shocked and mesmerized, or curious and entertained, laughed at the comedian with his cascading platinum wig and his stupendous, unexplainable breasts. Later that night English would see someone being carried on a stretcher out of the side doors of this building and through the wet, falling snow to an ambulance. And he would think of this man on the balcony in his evening gown making jokes about his potbelly, gripping it with a hand that glittered with rings while flapping his huge false eyelashes, and English wouldn’t feel equipped, he wouldn’t feel grown-up enough, to be told the whole story about this town.

Phil knew any number of people in Provincetown. He was connected all up and down the Cape. Long before the Pilgrims, English gathered, long before the Indians, way back past the time of cataclysms, even before the golden age of the extraterrestrial star-wanderers who had mated with monkeys to produce us all, members of Phil’s family had arrived here and opened small dark restaurants with steamy walls and radios chattering and yowling in the kitchen, and had applied for liquor licenses which to this day they were denied because the grudges against them, though small ones, were eternal. What all this meant was that English wouldn’t have to go to a motel. Phil had a cousin who ran a rooming house, freshly painted white and spilling winter roses over a knee-high picket fence, where English could stay cheaply.

Phil insisted on carrying English’s suitcase up the long stairs through an atmosphere of mingled disinfectant and air-freshening spray into a room that was small but not cheerless. There were big orange ladybugs printed on the white curtains. A faintly discolored portrait of John F. Kennedy hung on the wall above the desk. The bathroom looked harmless — blue sink, blue toilet, blue tub scoured nearly white. “All right, hey, not bad,” English assured Phil, but it had every quality of the end of the line.

Now that they’d travelled together and English was one of the family, with his very own room in Phil’s illustrious cousin’s house, Phil wouldn’t accept a fare. English had to follow him down the stairs and out to his half-disintegrated yellow station wagon, insisting. Then he accepted the twenty-dollar bill that English pressed on him, and gripped the new tenant’s hand with his, the money caught between their palms. His eyes were moist. They were two of the same sort, men past thirty without a lot to recommend them; but this happened to English every day. He had a feeling they’d stay strangers.

After Phil was gone, English lay on the bed awhile, but he couldn’t sleep because it was daytime and also a little too quiet. He wondered if everybody was at work. Then he remembered that it was Sunday. They’d passed a church, he and Phil, as they’d inched in Phil’s vehicle down to the end of Commercial Street, the street of shops, and then in the other direction down Bradford, now his street, the street of his home. English hadn’t really noticed, but he thought it might have been a Catholic church. He thought he would go to Mass.

In his first few hours on this dismal Cape, before he’d even seen the daylight here, he’d managed to smash his car and put himself in debt to a strange and probably larcenous auto body shop. The idea of a fresh start took on value and weight as he splashed water on his face and, lacking any kind of towel, dried it with the corner of his bedspread, uncovering in the process a bare mattress. If Mass hadn’t started at ten, it would be starting soon, at eleven.

It took English only a few minutes to walk there — St. Peter’s, a Catholic institution. He hadn’t missed the service. Under a sky the color of iron, people were lugging themselves like laundry toward the big doors of the church. A black arrow outlined in silver directed English toward a side door if he wanted to confess his sins.

In a small room next door to the administrative offices, he found a priest bidding goodbye to an old woman and cleaning his spectacles on the hem of his cassock. English backed away as she passed out of the place, and now it was his turn to sit in the wooden chair, separated from his confessor by a partition with little metal wheels.

This moment seemed to have swooped down on him from nowhere. He’d tried several times recently to make a good confession, but he’d failed. The problem was that about a year ago he’d more or less attempted to take his own life, to kill himself, and couldn’t get started telling why.

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.