Denis Johnson - The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

Holding the notebook in his lap, his ankle crossed over his knee, he started a letter to Leanna:

Many of the feelings I’ve been having lately, breaking down crying when alone, the sense of a cloud between me and God, the intuition that now, behind the cloud, is the time of faith—

But a shock of inspiration passed through him, and he turned to the next blank sheet and began a letter to his dead parents:

Dear Mom. Dear Dad.

I never knew how to talk to you. We made up a way of being together in the same room, and once we’d established that, we never deviated. Nothing ever got said. It was like some of the rote Masses I’ve been to. I know the priest isn’t home, I know he’s

He turned that page aside. It was all coming out now. He knew who he was. On the next sheet he started an open letter to the tattooed ghost that was stalking him, the dead GI in Vietnam, the one who’d been drafted in Lenny’s place, sent overseas in Lenny’s place, marched over swamps and shot at and killed instead of Lenny:

There are worlds, whole worlds too small to see, in these tears. Maybe one of them is at peace. I wish I could bring you there.

— Now he knew who he was writing to. It was the invisible one, the missing man, the ghost who could put real daylight into false landscapes; it was Twinbrook, Gerald Twinbrook, Jr.—

If you like the fields we’d walk away from the road into the fields, or we’d go fishing, if that’s what you like to do. The sun would set and we’d build a fire. The trees and rocks would shrink and their shadows would grow. People don’t have eyes by the light of a fire. No, that’s glib and pointless. It’s all glib and pointless. In the worlds that live in these tears just as much as in the real world, I’d stare at you and have no idea who you were, for hours. One word after another would get choked in my heart. I wouldn’t be able to ask your name. You wouldn’t be able to see my face. After a while the fire would go out, you’d be lost in the dark, and I would cry these tears.

It was more summer than spring now. Still, the evenings were cool, and the heavens at night had a wintry clarity that sometimes made him cry.

He was a citizen of a country north of Mexico that made no sense; he was an inmate of romance and a denizen of that terrainless geography, a lot more real than the geography on maps, that drifted down from these dark blue oceans to the Keys, passing over the Eastern megalopolis like a cloud over a desert but catching on the invisible peaks of Atlantic City and Cape May and Ocean City and the Southern beach resorts, a geography of heated sand and greased-back hair and surf glowing under a full moon. It was the off-season, but the off-season had no jurisdiction — the place was like a closed carnival — nothing counted but the thrilled ghosts.

It was no secret at the radio station that English was going nuts. Twice he appealed directly to Leanna over the airwaves, though he was aware she never listened to the radio. In the middle of reading the Arts Calendar he switched the mike off to scream and curse. He couldn’t eat; he’d be ravenous and then suddenly nauseated after one bite of a sandwich. It got clear how a person could die for love just by going undernourished for too long. Also he was the victim of bizarre thoughts. He considered hiring a billboard or a hot-air balloon or a blimp and imagined depicting the extremity of his love in other ways, getting on TV somehow, perhaps by crawling on his hands and knees to the Vatican or impersonating the President. He wanted to do something melodramatic and endearing, but how could he be charming to somebody whose face he wanted to smash? He dreamed of shooting her — Didn’t think I’d do it, did you, didn’t know I loved you enough to kill you, no, baby, don’t do it, yes, yes, I have to — he prayed, God save me from being angry, and he prayed, God help me track down an unregistered gun. Some helpful person left in his WPRD message slot a lapel button for him to wear that said I’m a Mess .

In less unreasonable moments he was disgusted with this mooning over Leanna. He couldn’t understand why he hadn’t just left town by now. He feared he might be living out some myth of seeking the goddess beyond the pale, entering the realm, being changed into one of its denizens, every footstep forward changing the shape of his soul, and every form of her dissolving as he approached.

He hadn’t left town, but he’d left Bradford Street. Down by the water the rents had gone up as the landlords and shopowners readied their nets for another kind of fish. English had taken himself up the hill to a duplex next door to Shirley Manor, the old folks’ home, which was situated, possibly with the ease of access in mind, just across the road from the town’s biggest cemetery.

He hadn’t liked it anyway, living in sight of the sea. He’d felt implicated somehow in the ruthlessness of its tides.

He liked the cemetery better. Although generally the light was kind to this place, sometimes giving to the grass and stones the hardy colors of a Surrey countryside, and making the markets blush sometimes in the sunset, it was not unknown for the fog to roll over the whole business swiftly, canceling everything, even the hope of anything, beyond the few nearest blurred gravesites and the brown bones under them. English had no trouble feeling, really feeling, the presence of those whaling families with their arms straight down at their sides, only a bit more rigid in death than they’d been beforehand. He’d been reading Reflections on the Psalms lately, and he began to see in the defeated stoicism of these Pilgrim descendants the other side, the dark side, of the prissy smugness with which C. S. Lewis had been managing to nauseate him. For these people, as for Lewis, God had probably been an Englishman, but a less and less familiar one, passing beyond dotty eccentricity into madness and vomiting up whales and storms. On some nights English saw them trolling the fog for forgiveness and seeking for Jesus among the dewy stones. Little truths continually came into his mind. Whispers from the center of his heart. All are martyred. Kill the Bishop.

He knew that something big was going to happen, that he was at the slurring start of some grand opportunity or injury, like a person who’s just lost control of the car on an empty street and entered the dreamy beginnings of an accident.

A rainy day calmed him, the tears of God dripping down the markers and trickling through the names of the dead. The next day was windy and sunny, and he stood around in the kitchen while his radio talked like a skull — a theological discussion on WPRD. He couldn’t help listening to such things.

He walked into the living room, holding a cup of tea, to find Grace Sands standing just inside his home, and the open door shaking in the wind behind her.

Although she wore a pink robe and matching house slippers with fuzzy blue balls on the toes, she’d managed to get away from Shirley Manor with a tiny black pillbox hat and a veil sprinkled with black diamond shapes, from behind which she gazed with the cynical look of a mistreated child, saying, “The floors. The carpet. Look.” She stooped over. “Use your eyes.” Stooping must have hurt her back; her voice was full of pain. She stood up holding a piece of something between thumb and finger. “Wood!”

He didn’t want this. He had things to do. Besides, he was waiting for this big thing, this opportunity to be snatched, this yes-no point dividing his wasted life from a future that was going to make sense. He wanted to wait in solitude.

“I don’t know what to say,” he admitted to her.