Denis Johnson - The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

“I know you did. I’ve been missing a lot.”

“Not a lot,” Haney said. “Not a lot. But I wanted to talk to you about it.”

“I was doing some secretarial work for Ray Sands,” English said. “Did you know that? There are some things, some loose ends, some things to be cleared up.”

“I understand.” Haney sipped at his tea and began watching his desk, two meters across the room, as if something were happening there. “We’ll struggle along for a time.” But the struggle was going out of him. “I’m lost. I don’t know where to begin, without Ray.”

English would have thought that Sands had taken no hand in the management of this station; that his passing wouldn’t have produced a ripple. He felt sorry for Haney. “I’ll make it up to you. Sometime.”

“As a matter of fact, now is just such a time. I’m about to engineer a show you’d be able to do much, much better. Will you give Alice a hand? Alice,” Haney called, cradling his teacup as if it were a trophy for the type of managerial snooker he’d just accomplished, “Lenny’s going to help, I think.”

English turned around and found Alice Pratt standing behind him smiling a wide, sweet smile he couldn’t quite have sworn was bogus. Alice was, to his way of thinking, a fat, discarded hippie, dragged down by two monstrous happy-face earrings.

Today Alice was interviewing Charles Porter, a young man to whom English thought the word “decent” would be well applied, the head perhaps of an infant family and a small business, a tenor in the choir — but Alice had invited this man onto her show because he was, it turned out, mixed up in the occult, and was supposedly a reader of invisible personal emanations he called “auras.” In calm, assured tones, keeping his lips close to the microphone, Porter explained how the cones and rods in the average eyeball kept these things hidden from the sight of most of us, and blessed the good fate that had made his own eyes a little different. It was a live show, and English’s job was to stay in the announcer’s room with them — there was no separate engineer’s booth — keeping track of program time and steadying the volume meter by dialing the “pots” up or down. He couldn’t let go of his notion of Porter as papa to a wife and preschoolers, and English wondered how he liked eating breakfast with them and seeing them surrounded by colorful force fields like alien creatures while they drank apple juice in their pajamas. English noticed, and not for the first time, that Alice Pratt’s dizzy overresponding irked him a lot, in particular because he couldn’t decide if it was desperately false or only camped, as it were, on the borders of insincerity. As he wore earphones, they were talking right into his head, but English was busy enough that he didn’t listen. He heard no words, only Alice’s voice as it scratched at the edge of a plea, wanting what everyone wanted, whatever that was; listening to her, he wanted it himself suddenly, aching as if he’d downed a shot of fuel and chased it with a flame. What hid behind her smile wasn’t bitchiness or malice but the trembling of the lost. This wasn’t the way to be engineering right now, how unprofessional — I’m a mess, he thought. What is it we all want? Whatever it was, he wanted Leanna to bestow it on him, and he denied automatically and viciously the fact that he probably couldn’t get it from her. Everything was so clear when it came through the earphones! Something was filtered out, some obscuring, personal static. It was his own presence. His reactions to people, their reactions in turn — all the fog of himself was lifted, leaving only the others.

After the show, he found himself standing out in front of the building with Porter, only because the two of them happened to be leaving at the same time.

“Okay,” English said, zipping his jacket against the wind, “what do you see?”

“Your aura is green.”

“I’m envious?”

“Green denotes empathy. In the case of auras anyway.”

English thought, He reminds me of a dentist.

As if dealing in something embraced as universally as oral hygiene, Porter explained that English’s greatest asset — and greatest defect — lay in his ability to feel what others felt. “It’s a talent, a gift, but it can be a real hazard for you. It’s easy to take it too far. You can end up suffering needlessly just because you can’t stop suffering along with someone else.”

“I hadn’t noticed anything like that, to tell you the truth.”

Charles Porter shrugged and smiled. “Then I’m wrong.”

English was impressed by that. “And does every person get only one aura? Is there anything else you see?”

“There’s a yellow, or golden, corona there. You have a creative streak — very dangerous when coupled with empathy. You can easily begin empathizing with situations you only imagine. Find yourself getting stirred around by things that aren’t really— real.”

Finding an affable, unapologetic citizen who believed this stuff was unnerving. English would have felt less uncomfortable if the man had tried to sell him something, or asked for a donation.

He pointed at the building door and at the poster that said AS LONG AS AFRICA IS IN CHAINS YOU WILL NOT BE FREE. “You mean I’m the person who feels like that poster.”

“Or the opposite,” Porter said. “The opposite danger is that in trying to protect yourself, you build up a calloused attitude. You cut yourself off from other people and from your true feelings. The thing to do,” he said, “is to concentrate on seeing that golden light coming out of you, right from your heart. If you concentrate on the gold, you counteract the tendency to get too empathetic. The gold energizes your creativity.”

“Excuse me, but this sounds like bullshit,” English said, lighting a cigarette.

“Well, it’s not stamped in bronze. I’m just an educated guesser, pretty much like everybody else. But I have the same tendency to empathize, and that’s what I do, I try to visualize a golden light around me.”

“I didn’t mean to insult you.”

“No, no.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No. Don’t be.” Porter smiled.

English blew his cigarette smoke sideways. Just the same, the cloud ended up in Porter’s face. English waved it away, deciding to let that serve as a parting gesture. This whole business embarrassed him, and he walked off suddenly in search of Gerald Twinbrook.

The wind sang mindlessly along his VW’s broken antenna as English passed over the Sagamore Bridge. This was the first time he’d left the Cape since the night he’d arrived.

To English it was ridiculous that anyone would go around imagining a golden light shining out of his chest. But he knew he’d probably start doing it. One of the things he liked least about his nature, and something the aura viewer had failed to touch on, was a way he had of falling instant prey to the power of suggestion. “I’ll try anything twice,” he’d sometimes joked, and the few people in his life who’d known him very well hadn’t laughed.

He passed the Amoco station on Route 3 and turned around, having already missed the turnoff to Route 93, and also the left turn onto 3—every turn required of him, in fact.

The Thomas Building wasn’t active today. The parking lot served only a small yellow bulldozer and a third-hand Ford with a flat tire, and now his own VW. A sign on the building’s door said NO MONEY KEPT ON THESE PREMISES. A typewriter clicked faintly in an upper office, but the place felt empty, and despite its aging exterior, the inside of it smelled new, a hint of sawdust, a ghost of hammering. The walls and floor were thin and vibrated with his steps, while the staircase, evidently untouched by the remodeling that had broken the old house’s spaces into offices, was solid. There weren’t any lights on anywhere inside. The afternoon sun lit up the streaks and eddies of dirt on the window he climbed toward up the stairs.