Denis Johnson - The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

But the sliding doors sounded again as soon as they’d gone into the trauma room, where Sands lay, and Helen had to come out and greet two new arrivals — one of whom English recognized, a Vietnamese man from Provincetown. “What seems to be the trouble!” Helen asked, stooping down to this foreigner and enunciating loudly.

Frank came out of the trauma room. “I’ll take this man’s chart,” Helen told him. “You get back to work.” She was getting a kick out of Frank’s discomfort.

“Could you give me a hand, Officer?” Frank asked English, indicating the trauma room.

“Actually—” English said.

“The morgue’ll be here any minute. I’ve got to get his belongings together.”

English followed him into the trauma room.

Except for the body, it was empty of people — a space full of white examining tables, machinery, and high cloth partitions left at incidental angles.

The body was dead, it was not alive in any sense at all, and the face was other than any living person’s, the eyelids pinched into sockets that looked empty and the toothless jaws wide open and the lips forming an astonished “Oh!”—but the flesh was heavy when English lifted the legs so the clerk could pull off Sands’s pajama bottoms, and the flesh was warmer than his own when he raised the bare legs so the clerk could remove Sands’s shit-stained boxer shorts. “I guess you’ve seen a lot of dead bodies,” the clerk said to English, “but this absolutely spooks me. It really does. It’s not in the job description.”

Resolutely, as if charged with this office among men, English began dragging the left arm from its pajama sleeve. “I’m glad to be alive,” he said. Together, because it was very heavy, much heavier than it should have been, they reached behind Sands’s neck and raised the torso, and the clerk pulled the shirt out from under it. Ray Sands lay naked and grey and large between them. English felt an unbearable thrill in his chest, as if it were empty of everything but a clear light.

Helen appeared at Sands’s feet. “Get some dividers around him, you guys,” she said. “I have to bring this man in.”

“What’s his trouble? A fight?” Frank asked.

“No. His foreman drove him over from the factory. Foreign body, left eye,” she said. “I’ll call his doctor.” She left Frank and English to roll three cloth partitions into place around the body.

The Vietnamese man came in, escorted and then politely abandoned by Helen, and sat on the next gurney. English said hello to him. They were hardly acquainted, but the man was something of a personality, Provincetown’s sole Asian refugee, Nguyen Minh—“Fwooy-en,” it was pronounced. He’d been a pilot for the South Vietnamese Air Force and had flown hundreds of missions, though he looked even now not much older than a boy. In the war’s last days he’d stolen an American helicopter and guided it out over the China Sea toward some destination he’d believed worth reaching, taking along as many others as it would carry. But the helicopter had been shot down, or its fuel had run out, or its engine had given up, and all these people had gone down in the water to sink or swim. A few stayed afloat, for two days, and were rescued by the U.S. Navy. Now Nguyen Minh sat on the edge of the high gurney, his hands between his knees and his black tennis shoes dangling down, and stared at the cloth partition protecting him from the sight of death. The skin around his left eye was puffy, and the eye had turned pink. English was comforted by the presence of this small, patient man, because he himself had never touched, or even seen, a human corpse before. “How long have you been working at the factory?” he asked Nguyen Minh.

“About tree yers,” Minh said. He formed his words carefully, as if he had a peach pit in his mouth.

“Do you like your job there?”

“I have a machine,” Minh said. He smiled. “Die cast.”

“You got something in your eye?”

“Some piece of metal.” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“You’ll be okay,” English said.

“Maybe so.”

“Do you ever wish you could go back to Vietnam?” English was nervous asking the question; it felt like prying.

“They’re all dead there. My parents, and my brother, too, and all relatives. It’s no good there.”

“Was your brother a pilot?”

“He was a monk.”

“A Catholic?” English was astonished.

“No. Buddhist.” He smiled. “My brother did the self-immolation.”

“Jesus Christ,” English said.

“No,” Minh said. “Buddha.”

“Do you know that guy Nguyen Minh?” English asked Leanna as he drove the last mile into Provincetown. “Do you know that his brother was a monk, a Buddhist monk back there in Vietnam, and he burned himself up?”

Leanna reached her fingers to the back of his neck and stroked the locks of hair and eased his muscles, for a few minutes, until he turned off the highway and into Provincetown. “Let’s go to the Beginner’s,” he said. “I want to get a couple of beers and dance with my shirt off.”

He felt easy in the atmosphere of Provincetown now, its boarded-up windows and its silence of waiting post-something. English himself was still dizzy, and the Beginner’s was the outward image of him, the dance floor shiny under changing discotheque illumination and pounded by gigantic speakers, but occupied by only five or six people who swayed, out of their minds with drink, in stationary circles; a place frantic and lonely both at once, eddying pointlessly in the wake of last summer. English didn’t take his shirt off, but he threw his jacket aside and drank a Cuba Libre in three swallows.

“Suddenly the trouble is,” he told Leanna, “I’m not too sure about life after death.”

“What?” she said.

He couldn’t hear her for the rising insanity of “Cruisin’ the Streets,” but being heard wasn’t the issue, not at all. “The Resurrection of the Body seems like a crock. That guy was so dead.” Impatiently he signaled for another drink, scooping the air over his empty glass.

He danced with a woman, and then Leanna danced with the same woman; and then the three of them danced together, he and Leanna sandwiching the woman between them and smiling at one another over her left shoulder. “Who is she?” Leanna asked him when they were done — the song didn’t end, one blended into the next relentlessly, all at the same relentless beat; they just stopped dancing when they were tired.

“I don’t know her,” English said, “but let’s take her for a ride in your hot tub.”

“I don’t operate that way.”

“You’re operating that way right now.”

“I’m dancing.”

“Let’s all sleep together. I’m lonely,” English said.

“I have to know the person first.”

The woman was from Michigan, but looked European. She was overweight in a bouncy way, and didn’t like interrupting the smooth flight of her evening, or even opening her eyes, to answer English’s questions. “ ’Bye, baby, see you around,” she mouthed as the stereo speakers blasted the room with these words, and she danced away and danced back toward them with a face peaceful and bathed in moving colors and sang, “Remember me as a pink balloon …”

“This music leads to violence,” English said to her. “You want to go sleep in a hot tub with us?”

The huge female voice of the record spoke: her love was alive, it was like the sea …

“You’ve had a bad night,” Leanna told him.

“Aaaaah-ah-ah-aah-oh!” the great sound sang.

“I just want to, I don’t know, blow it,” English said. The woman danced, short and squat, alone behind her closed eyes. Disco trumpets rose, choral voices rose, it was like Heaven; silence opened and a rivulet of chimes fell over the steady beating of a great heart … Ah shit, ah shit, English thought, not you.