Denis Johnson - The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

After a few seconds Father said, “Well then. You say you’ve tried to … Is there something you’ve done about this? Have you sought help?”

“I am. I’m — I’m confessing.”

“But …” The priest stalled again.

English wondered how much time before Mass. Nobody else was behind him. “I mean …” he said.

“Okay,” the priest said. “Go on.”

“The thing is, I’m starting out here, starting over here.” English had come too far. He wanted to find himself standing, without having moved, in the fresh air on the green lawn outside. It was December, but the lawns were still green. There were still flowers around town. He felt cut off from them and from all living things. “This suicide attempt is basically — that’s the one thing I’m confessing,” he said.

“Well then,” Father said.

“I wanted to take Communion,” English explained.

The priest seemed weighted down with sadness, but it might only have been shyness. “I don’t sense much commitment,” he said.

“Can’t I just—”

“But I think, do you see, given your — lack—”

“I wanted to confess. I wanted to take Communion.”

“Of course,” Father said. “But—”

“I’ll try again,” English said. “I’ll try later.”

He left the place quickly, embarrassment crawling up his neck as he found his way to the door. Somehow he’d succeeded in confessing his greatest sin, yet had failed to find absolution. He felt hurt by this failure, really wounded. He couldn’t hold himself up straight. It was hard for him to walk.

But his spirits lifted as he breathed the chilly air outside, where his fellow Christians ambled, most of them ignoring the paved walkway, across the lawn and through the church’s double doors. He watched them awhile, and then, temporarily, he granted his own absolution. Self-absolution was allowed, he reasoned, in various emergencies. Wetting his fingers at the tiny font by the entrance and genuflecting once, he walked in among the aisles and pews with the touch of holy water drying on his forehead.

It was larger, more vaulting, than the church he’d gone to in Lawrence. At the front, behind the altar, the middle of the huge wall telescoped outward away from the congregation, making for the altar not just a great chamber that had nothing to do with the rest of the place but almost another world, because its three walls were given over completely to a gigantic mural depicting the wild ocean in a storm. In the middle of this storm a bigger-than-life-size Jesus stood on a black, sea-dashed rock in his milky garment. The amount of blue in this intimidating scene, sky blues and aquas and frothy blues and cobalts and indigos and azures, taking up about half of the congregation’s sight, lent to their prayers a soft benedictive illumination like a public aquarium’s. The wooden pews were as solid as concrete abutments on the highway, the whispers of those about to worship rocketed from wall to wall, and English’s awareness of these things, along with his irritated awareness of the several babies in the place who would probably start their screams of torment soon, and all the boxes and slots for seat donations and alms for the distant poor, and the long-handled baskets that would be poked under his nose, possibly more than once during the service, by two elderly men with small eyes whom he thought of against his will as God’s goons, let him know that his attitude was all wrong today for church. But he was a Catholic. Having been here, he would forget all about it. But if he missed it, he would remember.

There were as many as fifty people scattered throughout a space that would have seated four hundred. All around him were persons he thought of as “Eastern,” dark, European-looking persons. An attractive woman with black bangs and scarlet fingernails was sitting behind him, and English couldn’t stop thinking about her all through the service. To get her legs out of his mind he swore to himself he’d talk to her on the way out and make her acquaintance. Then he started wondering if he would keep his promise, which wonder took him to the wonder of her legs again, and in this way he assembled himself to make a Holy Communion with his creator.

The tiny priest was a revolutionary: “I have been asked, the diocese has instructed us — all the parishes have received a letter that they are not to go out among the pews to pass the sign of peace.” He seemed to get smaller and smaller. “But I’m going to have to just disregard that.” A nervous murmuring in the congregation indicated they didn’t know if they should applaud, or what. A couple of isolated claps served to express everyone’s approval. “‘I give you peace; my peace I give you.’” Were they already at that part? The priest came among the pews and passed out a few handshakes, and the congregation all turned and shook hands with those nearest them.

It never seemed likely, it was never expected, but for English there sometimes came a moment, a time-out in the electric, a rushing movement of what he took to be his soul. “A death He freely accepted,” the Silly Mister Nobody intoned, and raising up the wafer above the cup, he turned into a priest rising before Leonard English like the drowned, the robes dripping off him in the sun. Now English didn’t have to quarrel, now he didn’t have to ask why all these people expected to live forever. And then the feeling was gone. He’d lost it again. His mind wasn’t focusing on anything. He’d had the best of intentions, but he was here in line for the wafer, the body of Christ burning purely out of time, standing up through two thousand years, not really here again … He was back on his knees in the pews with the body of Our Lord melting in his mouth, not really here again. Our Father, although I came here in faith, you gave me a brain where everything fizzes and nothing connects. I’ll start meditating. I’m going to discipline my mind …

Everyone was standing up. It was over.

He went out the front way with the other pedestrians, not because he was one, although he was, but because he was trailing the woman who’d been sitting behind him. She was easy to keep in sight, but she walked fast.

She was halfway to the corner by the time he caught up. “My name’s English,” he told her.

“My name’s Portuguese,” she said.

“No, I mean, that’s really my name, Lenny English.” He couldn’t get her to slow down. “What’s your name?”

“Leanna.”

“I was thinking we could have dinner, Leanna. I was thinking and hoping that.”

“Not me,” she said. “I’m strictly P-town.”

“Strictly P-town. What does that mean?” he said.

“It means I’m gay,” she said.

Had he been riding a bicycle, he’d have fallen off. He felt as if his startled expression must be ruining everything.

She walked on.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” English said. “You don’t look gay. Isn’t that against the law? It’d be easier if you gave some indication.”

She was amused, but not to the point of slowing down. “I must’ve been out of town when they passed out the little badges,” she said.

“Couldn’t we just have dinner anyway? I don’t have anything against women who like women. I like women myself.”

“I can’t. I’ve got some other stuff to do.” She smiled at him. “Do you know what?” she said. “You left your wallet in the church.”

“My wallet?” He’d taken out his wallet to make a donation. Now it was gone from his pocket.

“It’s sitting on the bench,” she said. “I noticed when we all stood up.”

“Oh, shit. Oh, great. How come you didn’t tell me?”

“I just told you,” Leanna said.

English wanted to talk more, but his anxiety was already carrying him back inside, against the tide of people flowing toward Bradford Street. He swiveled left and right, slipping through them sideways and apologizing convulsively, with an energy he’d lacked in the confessional: “Pardon me. Excuse me. Pardon me. Pardon me …”