Denis Johnson - The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

He didn’t know which of them was the maiden and which the seducer. He thrust more deeply, all the way in, and it didn’t actually matter.

“But why is it you?” she asked him. “Why isn’t it somebody else?”—and he knew what she meant, he understood that nobody mattered, that love was just making love, calling to itself out of the void, and they might be kissing, they might be touching, they might be lying face to face and staring at each other in wonder, but there was nobody home — nobody but love, so why is it you? Couldn’t it be anybody? Only you, Leanna, only your lips of fever and moss, and don’t ever let it stop. Only you. You’re the only nobody for this nothing in the world.

He stopped, breathing hard, his life roaring. He’d killed himself, gone blank, and wakened: here, now.

The saxophone ceased. The needle left the record, abandoning them to a silence

— which he broke finally by saying:

“Yeah.”

— which he shattered completely by saying:

“I did. I did come.”

She pulled him to her again, and he kissed her. She reached down between her legs, where he was, and put him inside her again. They watched each other, staring each other down. He felt ashamed and alive, he felt seen . On her parted lips a mysterious, an unspeakable question trembled. Or was it an answer? He kissed it away. Rising up into the window’s view, he let a little daylight touch his closed eyelids.

He opened them. Leanna was his lover. The morning burned his eyes. It was getting on April, but no April he’d ever seen. Colder and harder than March.

Since Sands’s death two months ago, English had been staying at Leanna’s hotel. What he liked about it was that he wasn’t on display here. Far from it. He was practically in hiding. As long he was around the place, he had to keep entirely out of sight of Leanna’s friends. “Suppose,” she explained to him, “some of your straight friends found you in bed with a man?” He didn’t bother telling her he had no friends, straight or otherwise, except for her.

He didn’t explain where the marks on his face had actually come from, or why he wouldn’t go home. And he knew she didn’t ask him about these things because there was something, despite their animal closeness in the bed, that separated them, something like a jagged line down the comic-strip panel showing that they weren’t there for each other but only talking on the phone. Then why was he convinced that hiding beside her was the only thing keeping him alive?

He saw each working day dawn and stayed in bed. He smoked cigarettes and watched the light move down the sides of buildings. Eventually it got dark outside, and Leanna came back to bed.

Sometimes he felt they’d been there together among the mussed sheets so long he didn’t know what season it was — he thought it was summer, that he’d met her on an afternoon sapped and lulled by sunburn. Sometimes he stood in the kitchen after they made love and stared out at the rotten leaves on the black vinyl cover of the hot tub, and at the snow patches disfigured by blue shadows, and the things he saw seemed to change and simultaneously stay the same, as if clouds passed swiftly over whatever he saw, even the walls and blankets.

The weather kept him in, too — the wind and the rain, the howls and tears of the world. A week into April it snowed deeply, half-thawed, and froze in a cold snap. A second winter hardened around their slow island. But the edges of this island were frayed.

Leanna said one morning, “I have to talk to a cop. My gun is missing. I think Tucker took it. Did you ever meet Tucker? He stole it.”

English turned down the radio and stood naked beside it. “I,” he said, “I didn’t exactly know you had a gun.”

“Well, I do have a gun, but it’s missing. That’s why this cop, Eddie, is coming over.”

“What do you mean? What kind of gun is it? You mean you have a handgun?”

“A.32.”

“Jesus. I didn’t know you had a gun.”

“Well, I have a gun. This is a hotel, and I’m the only one around.”

“You have a license and all that? What do you need in Massachusetts, anyway? A license or something?”

“It’s registered. It’s legal.”

“Except it’s missing?”

“I’m pretty sure Tucker took it.”

Lately anything to do with violence, even sirens on the television in another room, caused dread to congeal in globules in the back of his throat. “Is this person, this guy Tucker, is he a Vietnam vet, do you happen to know?”

“I don’t think Tucker’s a veteran of anything, except reform school or someplace like that.”

“And so what is his connection with you?”

“He was working around here. He was staying right over there,” she said, pointing out the window at the little cabins named for famous ladies, “but now he’s gone and my gun’s gone. The money’s all here, though.” She was sitting at her desk with the telephone, the message-recording device, the bunch of slots for keys, the drawers, the cash box. It was eerie to see her among these things and to know that some of them hadn’t been used or even touched for months. It made the hotel seem all the more closed.

He was satisfied that this stolen gun and this thief Tucker had nothing to do with the people who had injured him. But when you thought about it, in the general flow of events nothing could be viewed as separate from anything else, and this pointless theft was another wave of evil dragging him out over his head.

English considered these things on his first day outdoors, when the sun, which had burned away most of the snow on the streets, came over the roof and started on the footprints he’d left in the frost covering the shoveled walk. He was sitting on the wooden lip of the hot tub. Under the black vinyl the waters burbled and hiccuped. The air smelled of woodsmoke and a mix of things that had been trapped for a while under the snow. Leanna put her head out the back door. “Flush the drugs,” she said.

She was followed out onto the patio by a fresh-faced, uniformed policeman.

The sun struck English’s skin at that moment, raising gooseflesh. The air stirred the crumbled leaves in his hand. Through an open window came the tinny sound of Boston’s only country-Western station. All of a sudden it was spring.

“It works, but it’s not paid for,” Leanna was telling the officer. She meant the hot tub.

English felt uncomfortable around the authorities. He supposed it showed right now in his lack of anything to say.

Leanna was talking about the thief who’d stolen her gun. “He was an unhappy person. I talked to his mother on the phone once.”

Though nobody had asked, English said, “I never met him.”

“What about the.44 I sold you?” Leanna asked the officer.

“I’ve got a Browning that shoots better, but otherwise, it’s my best one,” the officer said, as he wrote down notes on a pad.

Later, after the officer had written it all down and gone away, and some clouds had blown in from the sea and the light had withered, English went inside and started washing the dishes. “Are you in the firearms business?” he called out.

She came in from the living room, where she’d been doing her accounts. “In my whole life I’ve owned two guns, and I’ve sold one.”

“I was just wondering.”

“Will you relax?”

“Sure thing. Yes, I will.”

“Why don’t you go out?”

“I will. It’s spring.”

“Go.”

“Lend me some money. A few dollars.”

“I’ll lend you all you want. But if you want to feel like a person, you’d better get a job.”

“I have a job.”

“Really?” she said. “When was the last time you showed up around there?”