Denis Johnson - The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

That night, he prayed. He threw off the blankets in the small, sleepless hours and put himself on the floor by the bed.

English didn’t kneel in prayer each night out of habit, but fell to his knees on rare occasions and in a darkness of dread, as if he were letting go of a branch. To his mind, God was a rushing river, God was an alligator, God was to be chosen over self-murder and over nothing else. He thanked God he had two arms and two legs, he thanked God he had two jobs and some variety in his life, he prayed to God to let him make love to Leanna. Satisfy these yearnings, he prayed, or take them the hell away. He didn’t pray anymore for faith, because he’d found that a growing certainty of the Presence was accompanied by a terrifying absence of any sign or feeling or manifestation of it. He was afraid that what he prayed to was nothing, only this limitless absence. I’ll grow until I’ve found you, and you won’t be there.

Whenever he found himself praying, he knew he was at the very least jammed up inside, probably crazy. He got up off his knees and put his clothes on, and his shoes, and he sat in the room’s only chair with the room’s only book, Best Loved Poems, reading the index of first lines in the back. Nothing grabbed him. Tell me what to do. He spun the pages out under his thumb, but the poem he turned up had nothing to do with his situation, and anyway, he wanted guidance, not literature. Tennyson, Lord Byron, you had to be in the mood. Somebody cleared his throat in another room, somebody downstairs dropped a shoe, somebody wrenched a spigot somewhere and the pipes cried out, but for five seconds, ten seconds, English couldn’t believe in these people. A familiar thought came to him, one he didn’t like: What if there’s really nothing? Suppose I’m all there is? What if there’s only a child telling himself a story, and the story is the child, and the child is me? I’ve got to stop living in these rooms alone. I’ve got to pray because I can’t stop thinking these thoughts. Prayer is my home. God is inside it. Coleridge is also there. Walt Whitman. The end of the world. And the deep, dark secret of my life. It’s a case of answering the door and being entered.

Outside his door, some men argued loudly over nonessentials as they stumbled up the staircase. Checking his watch, he discovered that it was I a.m. as they hurled themselves, from the sound of it, against the door across the hall.

He was an hour late for his shift at WPRD. He was in trouble. In his mind he pictured his attendance record at the station, discounting absences during the day following his employer’s death, and tried to convince himself it wasn’t a bad record.

It appeared to him, as he got into his pants, that the men outside were backing up violently against his door in order to get momentum for their forays against the one across the hall. In a minute they’d break down the wrong one. And in fact it was happening. He watched in disbelief as his lock tore through the door frame. A fist shoved a pistol in English’s face, and a man said, “You ripped off my TV, my stereo, and my bag, man, and you put it in the yard and got your car, and my sister was home, man, she saw you. I recognize you. You’re the same fuck I chased outta the yard Tuesday, man, Tuesday night. You rip-off bastid. You came back.”

English said, “I …”

“You’re coming with us.”

“I didn’t,” English said.

“Come on, thief. You’re coming, or I swear to fuck I pull this trigger.”

“You’re wrong,” English said as the man shoved him down the stairs by use of the gun. “Just look at me.” There was another man behind them, he noticed now. “Look, in the light,” English insisted. “I’m not the guy. I’m not.” His feet kept slipping out from under him on the stairs. “Look at me.” His feet were bare. He didn’t have a shirt on.

“Louis,” the man said when they were standing by the car.

“What?” the man behind them said.

“Goddamn it, come around me!” the man said. “Open the fucking door, man. Get in the back,” he told English. “Get in the back, get in the back. Louis, goddamn it, get in the back! I’m standing on the street here!”

English sat in back, the gun no longer trained on his flesh. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” the man said, starting the car and trying to steer with the pistol gripped in one hand. English hunched forward with his elbows between his knees. The man next to him was breathing hard.

They were already passing the A&P on the way out of town. In a second they’d be on Route 6. At this point, to English, shivering in back without a shirt, Route 6 stood for the end of everything.

“Listen, please, there’s a mistake,” English said.

“One word.” The driver whirled around as he accelerated onto the highway, bringing the pistol’s mouth right up against English’s scalp. “One word and I promise I’m gonna do it.”

Louis, the man in the back seat next to English, said, “I like your style.”

“You think I wouldn’t? I’ll do it right now, you want me to show you?”

“Yeah, right,” Louis said.

“Okay.” The tires cried as the driver slammed on the brakes, and grated as they bit the gravel shoulder. “Okay. Right now.” But the car regained the highway without stopping.

“Shit. Jambo,” Louis said.

“Fuck I wouldn’t.”

“Just drive right.”

“You think I don’t know how to drive?”

“Okay.”

“No. No. I’m asking you.”

“Okay. Okay.”

“Hang on, man. I know how to drive. See this?” Jambo wiggled the steering wheel. “That’s how you drive, brother.”

“That ain’t how I drive,” Louis said. “I do it much different.”

“Hey, listen, man,” Jambo said. “Okay. What about the time I took you to the fucking Zone to cop and you said you were gonna turn me on because it was my wheels, man, and I skipped work, man—”

“Okay. Jesus Christ.”

“I risked my parole for you, man, because you said you were so fucking sick—”

“I told you, I appreciate it,” Louis said.

“And then, hey, listen”—he seemed to be talking to English—“I’m sitting there in the car and the place is hotter than shit, which nobody mentioned, this fucker here never told me the Man’s cruising by every two seconds, I’m on parole, not even supposed to leave Newton: two! hours I’m fucking sitting there pissing my pants. And then so this cocksucker comes out finally, this cock sucker, he comes staggering out with his eyes pinned and like fucking puke all down his shirt, man, and says”—Jambo affected deep, moronic tones—“ Hey, man, like Jesus the fuckers fried me, man, but I did you a big fucking favor, man — tell this guy what you gave me, Louis. Come on, you think you’re such a fucking saint.”

“Oh, shit, never mind. I told you—”

“This tiny little fucking glassine envelope with fucking dust, you know little bits of dust stuck in the corners, man — I mean he shoulda throwed it in the trash, right? Dust, man. Two hours and he brings me the garb age after he shoots his arm full. You gave me dust. I risked pa role.”

“Hey, Jambo —listen to yourself.”

“And now you wanna pull this fucking bullshit, telling me you done me big fucking favors, man.”

“Do you hear yourself?” Louis said. “That’s all I have to say: Do you hear yourself.”

“Yeah, I hear myself.”

“Then that’s all I have to say,” Louis said.

Jambo turned around in English’s direction. His face was a darkness. But English had the impression that he was trying to communicate something out of his eyes.