Denis Johnson - The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

“Very good.”

“Sit down!” she cried as she left him standing in the hall. “What you call it — the couch. I make some …” At the far end of the house, where her voice had faded, he heard a faucet going on.

He went to the desk in Sands’s office and took the three blue passports from their drawer, and then stood still in the middle of the room, not a pocket anywhere in his clothing big enough to hide them.

With a pencil he started a rent in the lining of his jacket, ripped it wider with his fingers, and stuffed the three documents out of sight; then walked, his elbow jammed awkwardly against their bulk because he’d torn a hole large enough for them to fall out of, across the hallway and into the parlor.

Sitting back on the flowery divan, English closed his eyes and listened to a singing along his taut wires while Grace disturbed the kitchenware. Now that his eyes were shut, his vision was acute: across a curtain of phosphenes he watched primitive, shrunken heads devolve into faceless splashes.

“So. So. So,” Grace said, coming back with a tea service held out before her.

“Oh. Here.” He took hold of the coffee table with both hands and moved it three inches to the left, pointlessly.

“And you going on a trip,” she said, setting down the tray.

He studied the two small cups, the unadorned white teapot, the bowl of sugar and pitcher of milk, the plate of lemon slices. “Not to my knowledge.”

She took her place across from him and poured him out some tea. “Bud gonna be along real soon.” Some sort of unpleasant thought crossed her face. She put her hands in her lap and looked at them.

“Very tasty.” English sipped his tea.

“I don’t remember all the numbers, and she’s rude,” she said. “So rude I’m not gonna talk to her, that kind of person.”

After a moment she looked at him in fear. “Are you waiting for your photograph while it’s developing?”

English sighed. He felt his lower lip trembling as he touched it to the rim of the cup.

“Bud got a personal friendship with our Bishop, Bishop Andrew.”

English said, “I’m glad.”

“The Bishop, our Bishop, you know Bishop Andrew? He visit my Bud personal last week. Lenny,” she asked him now, “where’s Bud?”

“I beg your pardon,” he begged her.

“Do you think Bishop Andrew gonna come?”

English set down his cup. “I don’t know, Grace.” He put his hands on his knees.

“I hope so. The Bishop himself, I be very honored to have him at the funeral.”

She wiped her nose on the hem of her apron. “To speak at Bud’s funeral.”

He closed his eyes on the idea of people standing around a grave and this poor woman trying to fathom it all. What kind of funeral was that? “I don’t have to go, do I?”

It simply came out. He wondered if he’d actually said it.

“Oh no, no, no. You go ahead, you finish your tea,” Grace told him. “You stay till your picture develops.”

Lovemaking was a rare, shy, false thing between them. They never did much more than kiss sweetly while naked. “I don’t know,” he said, “why I can’t get it up.” Naked and sitting Indian-style amid the bedclothes, Leanna asked him, “If you’re not worried about your sex conduct, and nothing else is wrong, then what’s bothering you?”

“What sex conduct?” English said.

Leanna wasn’t a virgin after all. She and Marla Baker had wanted a baby once, and they’d hired a man to make love to both of them. Neither had gotten pregnant, and so all Leanna had bought for fifty dollars was her deflowering in an airport motel.

“Yeah, I paid for it, too, the first time,” English admitted. “Twenty dollars.” He ran a finger from the crook of Leanna’s elbow down to the frail bones of her wrist. “It was a black lady with needle marks.”

“We almost got back together,” Leanna said. “But Marla went to New York because her husband was having her followed.”

Suddenly English wanted to leave his life. “Who was following her?”

“Marla’s a tough lady. She’s older. It was a father thing. She’s too old for me.”

“Just one, okay?”—English was lighting a cigarette. “You almost got back together?”

“Blow it out the window,” Leanna said. “Open the window, baby.”

He crouched naked by the window he’d opened and blew smoke through the screen out over the empty parking spaces of the empty hotel. It must have been past 3 a.m. They slept together all the time and didn’t sleep. They were lovers, and they didn’t make love. It was one of the strangest things that had ever happened to him, and in a couple of senses it wasn’t happening. “What was her husband having her followed for?” he said.

“Oh, it’s a whole complex thing. They’ll never get divorced. He keeps compiling evidence against her, and she keeps letting it fuck her mind all around. Marla reacts. She was in P-town as a reaction, and she’s in New York right now just as a reaction to his moves. We practically lived together the last three summers, and she wanted to hide it from him. Deep down she thought it was sick to be gay. But,” she said, “you’re only as sick as your secrets.”

He watched the street, dipping his ashes into his hand. “I never heard that one before,” he said. “As sick as your secrets.”

“It must’ve been a private eye from Boston. Marla wanted to catch him. She went crazy, looking over her shoulder all the time. She put on a black raincoat and snuck around outside her building one night. It got so weird,” she said, “it got so scary.”

By the open window he dangled his cigarette from his lips, and put his arms around himself against the draft.

“Last summer she finally decided not to go home. We were going to — I don’t know. Then she met Carol; then …” Her thoughts drifted off on a sigh. “You start to think, Who is this guy? If it was a guy. It could’ve been a woman. They have women detectives now.”

“The truth is—” English began.

“We’ll never know the truth.”

“Maybe that’s right,” English said in despair, “maybe that’s best.”

“What’s bothering you?”

“Do I look like something’s bothering me?”

“You look like you’re hiding and peeking out the window. You’re an uptight, late-night DJ.”

“There’s something I’m supposed to do. But I’m not doing it.”

“You’re guilty before God. You should go to Confession.”

“No,” he insisted. “I should go to the police.”

“The who,” Leanna said.

“Sands was into some kind of passport thing, phony passports, and I was like — his secretary, part-time. But I didn’t know anything about it. It looks bad. It just looks bad.”

“If you haven’t done anything, why go to the police? Let them come to you if they want.”

“Right, that’s just it. But somehow it won’t sound so logical if it turns out I did do something. Like, I’m an accessory. Then I say, Well, I didn’t know, and they say, What didn’t you know? I mean what, exactly, didn’t you know? You know?”

“I know you’re only as sick as your secrets.”

A phrase came back to him from somewhere. “Sick unto death.”

The sheets whispered and Leanna came across the bedroom to embrace him from behind where he squatted with his chin on the windowsill. She ran her hands along his shoulders and arms and cupped his buttocks in her hands. “I wouldn’t worry about it, honey man,” she said into his ear. “A smoker’s Karma is to die from cancer, not from secrets.”

“Kicked in the head by Karma,” he said.

“Where are you going?”

“I gotta go. I’m going home,” he said. “I need some sleep before I go to work.”