Denis Johnson - The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

In the overheated lyrics of rock and roll he often heard the sorrows and pronouncements of a jilted, effeminate Jehovah, and this song made even grander, more awful claims than most, suggesting that Her love was profoundly uncontrollable and maybe not actually friendly—

Not you, I don’t know you—

— as inexorable as the ocean eating the sands of the Cape from under his feet, willing to take forever, if necessary, to drown him. Nothing would lift him from the waters: “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” it was called.

Infinite disco love boomed, a wounded woman calling forth these bits of light to swarm over the walls. Her love was alive? It was monstrous. “I’m not here,” English said out loud. “So shut the fuck up.”

Not you, not you, not you —Crackling dance-hall lumens circled these headless idiots in a whirlwind. Voices — angels — saints—“Fuck it,” English announced, “let’s just blow it.”

The bartender was pointing him to the door. Leanna was crying. The woman was laughing, glass lay in shards across the puddles of the bar and changed colors. Not you, not you. “Not you, goddamnit, not you …”

Leanna and one of the bartender’s friends helped him out into the knives of winter. “Time for Disco Inferno,” English said. “Let’s get serious.”

She was having a hard time getting his clothes off as he tilted in the kitchen’s doorway and tried to kick away one of his shoes. His sight was still twisted and the rhythm still beat against his head. “Endless disco,” he told her.

She was crying. She punched his chest. “Goddamn you,” she said. “Where did you get that leather jacket, anyway?”

“It was given to me,” he said.

They stepped, both of them naked and English feeling incredibly white, into the small yard behind her apartment. There was old snow beneath his feet. “My feet know,” he told her, “but my head isn’t getting the message.”

“Here’s the message.” She swept a bulky black cover from the hot tub, stepped delicately in, and pulled him by the arm in after her. “I don’t want to fool around. I don’t want to touch you.” They sat naked across from each other in the wooden vat, attended by hardened drifts of snow, while warm camomile-scented waters churned around them, around her breasts, and the vapors of his mind revolved and dervishes of steam passed between them and the stars froze in the untroubled night above.

English woke the next morning while it was still dark. His hands felt of grease, and the hair on his forearms was matted with it. Groping for his pants and cigarettes he knocked over a bottle on the floor by the bed, the action of whose water-filled mattress made him feel queasier than even he had a right to. He cut on the lamp. Filippo Berio olive oil. She’d given him a massage. He got a Marlboro lit. He wasn’t sure that smoking was approved of here, but Leanna was still sleeping and he assumed, because he’d spent the evening in a hospital and looked down into the face of a corpse, that everything was permitted. She was under the sheet and blanket in a lump, all but her sleep-softened face and dark tangles. They hadn’t made love last night, or any sense. He watched her long enough to make certain she was breathing.

In the kitchen he found yesterday’s Boston Globe on the counter and yesterday’s coffee in a glass pot. He washed his face, hands, and arms at the sink, but got into his pants with his legs and buttocks still oily. In the papers he read about a murdered nun, a woman killed by unknowns in Brazil, and it started to seem to him, as he smoked cigarettes and drank cold coffee and imagined and imagined her last moments, that if what he imagined was true, then the earth was uninhabitable. This fear passed through him slowly, as though he’d eaten of it, and he cried. By the time the sunless daylight had come, the feeling had rarefied into a spacious hatred attended by the stink of brimming ashtrays.

There was no sense waiting for Leanna to wake up, no use wondering how she felt about him, in a place like this.

After dressing he went downstairs into the hour when paperboys might be delivering, but the street outside was empty. The seats of his Volkswagen were chilly and brittle. He shut the car door softly. There wasn’t any place open where he’d find breakfast, and so he told himself he’d go without it as a respectful fasting before Mass. It was the first he knew he was going. But he didn’t mean to go to St. Peter’s here in Provincetown and confront the figure in the mural beckoning from its rock in the storm. He’d been back there once, on an afternoon when the pews stood naked, and had discovered that the figure wasn’t Christ at all but somebody completely different, St. Peter it would stand to reason. In that case, he was just beckoning you into the folds of the Church, not into the storm. But please, don’t beckon me at all, not this early in the morning. English started the car and drove out to the highway and moved off down the Cape.

He didn’t see the name of the town he entered some miles later. On an unreal Main Street like the one in Ray Sands’s electric train’s landscape he found a Catholic church, Our Lady of the Waves, and also a café that was open, where he decided to have breakfast after all and wait for Mass.

At five to eight he stood before the heavy doors of the church feeling no hunger. The wooden entrance offered a Southwestern-style bas-relief severally and gaily colored and depicting Christ, looking quite a bit seedier these days, unshaven rather than bearded, his hair not flowing but unkempt, stalled beside some wooden flowers and keeping out of the way of orange slats of wooden sunshine. The crowds in the summery Cape atmosphere he’d never seen might move easily through this doorway, but English, with his mind on Ray Sands and murdered nuns, could hardly put his fingers on the handle: Jesus sheds His heat like tin upon you, spreads His tropic love, His Florida, on the army smashing in the faces of His brides. If we were truly as alone as that. He pushed through the doors to take Communion. There was never any explanation, never any consolation, but everything could be laminated by a terrible endorsement.

The interior was cozy but unheated. A blue sponge of Holy Water in its receptacle just inside the door was frozen solid. But he heard people talking in a room off to the side, and then it occurred to him that, of course, they often had the poorly attended dailies in some smaller room. He probably could have saved gas by going to St. Peter’s and still have evaded the call of its patron saint. He headed toward the voices.

In the tiny room he took a seat among old ladies in a row of folding chairs. The priest was just donning his vestment by the makeshift altar, and his head, round-faced and middle-aged, came up through the neck. “Yes,” he told them in tones faintly Irish, “he attended church regular.”

One of the women said, “It’s a shame.”

“Was there an evening service last week?” another said with worry. “I missed it, I didn’t know—”

“A meeting of the choir,” the priest said. “And he dropped dead right there by the door.”

The others clucked and ohed.

“He turned to his wife,” the priest said, “turned to his wife and told her, ‘Martha, this is it.’”

One of the women was also a witness, and said, “And then he keeled over, just like that. I feel so sorry for his son — you know, the son lost his own son last summer, and here, six months later, his father. What a world.”

The priest was lighting the candles. “Doesn’t he have something to do with basketball? The son?”

“He coaches. He coaches down South. They were in Albuquerque for the championship.”