Denis Johnson - The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

For two minutes he tried to settle into the movie, but it was like watching a film within a film. He was very much aware that the people on the screen were larger than the people in the theater, and that their statements came out of loudspeakers and echoed from the wall behind him. Someone was dancing and people were applauding. “Weird things are happening,” he whispered to Leanna. “I gotta make another call.”

“Are you a drug dealer?” she whispered. “Because you sure spend some time on the phone.”

This time there was somebody to answer at Ray Sands’s house, a policeman who identified himself quickly and English didn’t get his name. “I called about an ambulance earlier,” he told the officer. “I wanted to find out if Ray Sands is okay.”

“Who is this?” the policeman’s voice said.

“I’m his assistant, Leonard English.”

“Your boss is pretty sick, Mr. English. He’s on his way to Cape Cod Hospital right now.”

“Cape Cod Hospital? What’s wrong with him?”

“It looks like a heart,” the policeman’s voice said, “but I wouldn’t diagnose.”

“What’d the ambulance people say?”

“That’s what they thought — a heart. You’re his assistant? You pretty close to him?”

“No,” English said. “I’m not.”

“They were doing CPR on him, the whole routine.” Now he heard the excitement in the policeman’s voice. “I’d say he wasn’t too alive when he left here.”

“Well,” English said, “okay. Thank you.”

“You’re entirely welcome,” the policeman’s voice said.

He stood in the aisle, bending down to speak to Leanna. “Listen, I’m all fucked up. There’s an emergency.”

She looked at him and turned back to the screen and then looked at him again. “You mean urgent business, or a real emergency?” She looked at the screen.

“My boss is having some kind of heart attack. Where’s Cape Cod Hospital?”

“It’s here, in Hyannis. Near the airport. Don’t you know where Cape Cod Hospital is?”

“Show me, would you? I’m completely lost.”

English couldn’t get the attention of the emergency room’s clerk, a well-kept young man doing twenty things at once, gesturing to an orderly and searching through a cream-colored filing cabinet while holding the telephone receiver between his shoulder and his jaw and saying, “Yeah — right — yeah,” into the mouthpiece. Surrounding the clerk in his office, which was nothing more than an oversized cubicle, what appeared to be patients’ charts cluttered every surface. There were charts on the floor covered with the prints of shoe soles. The waiting room English stood in was glutted with patients and their relatives and friends, all of whom seemed to be holding bloody rags against their faces. English tapped on the cubicle’s wired-glass window again, this time more forcefully. Behind him a burly man in a bloodstained down-filled vest was explaining to the others there how his wife had been injured. “First I kind of pinned her with this arm,” he told them, “and then I went to work on her face with my elbow.” When he dropped his red soft-drink can in the midst of gesturing with it, he started to cry, saying, “Now I spilled my fucking Coke. I just plain lost my head !” He marched across the hall into the trauma room and English saw him in there examining the features of his wife, an immense woman sitting on one of the high, narrow gurneys with her legs dangling. The man looked into her eyes, now blackened, and into her sutured face. He fell to his knees before her. Meanwhile, “You’re going to be all right,” the clerk said into the telephone. “You’re going to live forever.” Children were screaming, men and women wept, and Coca-Cola spread out over the floor and under the plastic chairs. One man, sitting stock-still in the middle of all this, gripped a hunter’s arrow in his fist and stared at it. English felt this was no place to come for help. He wanted Leanna, but she was in the ladies’ room.

The radio on the clerk’s desk started beeping. The clerk answered. A kazoo-like voice lost in spitting static spoke to him. English couldn’t make out a word, but the clerk was astonished by the message. “What’s your ten-twenty? What’s your ETA?” The radio’s voice crackled back at him. “Shit,” the clerk said. He seemed to notice only now that he was still holding the phone receiver in his hand. He hung it up and then immediately lifted it again, looking at the intercom on his desk and surveying its buttons helplessly. He dialed a number on the phone and said, “This is ER. We got a heart arriving in about — less than ten minutes.”

“I think I know that patient,” English said to him through the hole in the glass.

The clerk ignored him. “Yeah!” he said into the telephone. “Page it now!” He examined the intercom again, but seemed to have forgotten how it worked. He began yelling, “Helen! Helen!”

“That’s Ray Sands,” English said through the hole. “He’s a detective, and I’m his assistant.”

“Okay. Okay,” the clerk told him.

A nurse, tall and heavy, came out of the trauma room across the hall, walking crab-footed and seeming in no hurry. “What are you screaming about?” she asked the clerk. But at that moment a voice came over the public address: “Dr. Heart, emergency room. Dr. Heart, emergency room.”

“You’re kidding!” the nurse said. “I got seven patients in the goddamn trauma room. Get in here,” she ordered the clerk.

“There’s coffee under the desk, Officer,” the clerk said to English. “Keep it a secret.”

English stepped from the waiting room and through the door of the cubicle by way of the hall, as the young clerk elbowed past him saying, “Help yourself,” and followed the nurse into the trauma room. Together the clerk and the nurse began wheeling startled patients on their gurneys out of one of its doors and into the hallway, down near the fire exit, where they left them.

Leanna was back now, standing in the waiting room on the other side of the glass. “Did they put you to work?”

“The guy thinks I’m a cop,” English said.

But he was so dazed by this emergency that he couldn’t hear himself. Under the clerk’s desk was a coffeepot and white Styrofoam cups, one of which he filled, bending over and, as he did so, feeling that his back was vulnerable to some vague hostile thrust.

People from another part of the hospital swiftly hauled past his cubicle a portable EKG machine on buzzing plastic wheels.

In the midst of movement, English felt required to move. He stepped from the cubicle and saw, far down the long hallway, a flock of doctors and nurses running toward him, covering their breast pockets with their hands as they ran.

“I’ll be over here,” Leanna said, and disappeared from view, passing deeper into the waiting room’s stunned turmoil.

English was breathing hard and witnessing events in small, frozen frames, as from the window of a journey. He was drinking his coffee. It was still hot. He’d just taken a sip and put down the cup, and the fingers of that hand were still warm, and he still tasted the artificial creamer on the tip of his tongue as the ambulance pulled up outside, its dying siren lacerating the air. He smelled medicine and heard a dozen conversations at once. As he moved toward the sliding doors of the emergency entrance, he felt himself tearing away from these details and felt the strands of them being burned from his person. The doors slid open, cold air blew over him, and he ducked aside to make way for the ambulance men rolling the wheeled stretcher into the hospital, moving as fast as they could run. One pushed the stretcher, one covered the patient’s mouth with his own mouth, the third pressed on the patient’s chest with both hands. Ray Sands, dressed in his pajamas, the shirt of them torn open, was the patient. English followed along into the trauma room, where the man performing mouth-to-mouth turned to vomit in a sink along the wall while a nurse put a respirator mask over the patient’s blue face, and half a dozen medical people, like the fingers of a fist, closed in on the stretcher.