Denis Johnson - The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

“Whatever happened to clean? Remember clean?”

“My vacuum cleaner’s broken,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Broken,” Grace said. “Vacuum cleaners were broken before they made the first one. You bend, that’s how.” She stooped over. “You pick up, that’s what.” She started picking bits of lint from the carpet. “Time passes,” she said. Her face went dull with torment. She was eight feet into the living room. “It takes time. It takes effort.” She stood up straight, wiped at her face and seemed alarmed to find it veiled. She flicked the lint from her hand and it fell to the carpet.

English set his tea down on the windowsill. Grace let out a long, shaking sigh.

“I’d better find whoever’s supposed to be taking care of you,” English told her. Grabbing the phone book, he leafed through, looking for the number of the nursing home. He was glad to have a chance to use the telephone. It was new in his life, and nobody ever called him except the station.

Grace wandered toward the back room while he dialed. “I’m about twenty yards down the road here,” he told the receptionist when she answered. “Grace Sands is lost over here — do you know Grace?”

“Oh, my goodness. I’ll send somebody right over. Which house?”

He told her and went back to steer Grace away from harm. She was standing in his bedroom looking down at his mussed sheets. The blankets had gotten onto the floor in the night.

“So this is the bed,” Grace said sadly.

“I guess I’d have to agree, all right.”

“The famous bed,” Grace said.

“The what?”

She raised her gaze to him, lifting her veil carefully with both hands. “What?” she said. Then she lowered her veil.

English went to the living-room window and looked out. The cemetery and the world itself held still, burning in the sunlight. Then a young fellow with a beard came pushing a wheelchair up the walk, leaving the contraption by the door, where English now stood, looking at him.

“Grace here?” he asked.

English pointed inside.

Good health and good cheer emanated from the young man as he came inside saying, “Grace. We don’t want you off the grounds. That’s a rule.”

His happiness seemed to make her suspicious. “My leg is broken.” She lifted her veil with both hands and looked out the window.

“Then it’s a good thing I have a wheelchair,” the man said. When speaking, he looked only at English.

“I used to work for her husband,” English said, “before he died.”

“The Catholic cemetery in Hyannis is where they buried him,” Grace said brightly.

“Grace: in the wheelchair,” the man said, not unkindly.

She seemed in perfect possession of her mind as she told them,

“They threw a shovel of dirt right down onto him with a”—she clapped her hands while looking for a word—“noise. Like that.”

The man helped her by her elbow out the door, and then together he and Grace lowered her bulk down into the seat of the wheelchair. “Where are we going?” English heard her asking in the sunlight as the man pushed her down the walk.

He heard somebody on the radio referring to God as “the infinite accent falling on the self.” Infinite, yes. The accent — the stress — the falling, yes, English felt he felt that.

He thought, They’ll all know me when it’s over; and he thought, Who will find me when it’s over?

He thought, You start to know these things. You make out just the shape of it, the incredible size, on the horizon.

Zealots. Martyrs. These guys are right. Nothing but faith makes it so.

In this state he walked out of the house, got in his Volkswagen, and took up the search for Gerald Twinbrook again, heading up the Cape toward the missing artist’s abandoned office, going as fast as the car would go, which wasn’t quite fast enough to get him even a warning ticket. It eased him tremendously to be doing something. He took the back roads through Truro, South Truro, Wellfleet, through the sparse shade of new leaves and the shadows of large hills. On the maps of the Cape these hills were named individually and called “islands,” owing, perhaps, to the mapmakers’ premonition — whose accuracy English trusted, if vaguely — of a great flood that would someday submerge almost everything.

When he reached Twinbrook’s office, he found that somebody had been at work there. The door had been repaired. He broke it again.

Inside, too, the place had changed. The chair and wastebasket were stacked on the desk, the electrician’s cord was coiled neatly between them, the knee-deep litter of papers and books had been arranged in two large stacks beside the chair. Someone had mopped the floor. The telephone was gone. A manila envelope was taped to the front of the desk: GERALD TWINBROOK. Inside was a handwritten note lamenting Twinbrook’s disregard for previous letters and informing him that his property would be tossed or sold as soon as a new renter was found. It wasn’t signed.

Also in the envelope were a communication from a dry cleaners, which turned out to be a bill, and a letter from Blue Cross. In all-caps, telegrammatic format, the letter asked Gerald Twinbrook to provide information about the amount paid for prescription drugs following his emergency treatment on the second of January.

Twinbrook had been missing since before Christmas, if English remembered right. This was the first evidence that he’d been alive and functioning since then. And if he’d been treated, if he was ill — he might be incapacitated somewhere, in a rest home, for instance, with amnesia, or in a coma in a strange city, with a tag reading JOHN DOE taped to his bedrail.

English’s fingers trembled as he folded the letter and put it in his pocket. He swore to himself that he wouldn’t jump up and run from the room, that he’d peruse these stacks of paper, that he’d stay calm and analytical. On top of the nearest one was the carbon copy of a letter Twinbrook had addressed to “The Secret President of the United States.” Dear Sir or Madam , he raved, Under the Freedom of Information Act I demand that you comply with my request of August 13, which I have repeated twice monthly since then. I am asking for all the records on the corporations listed below. I will be satisfied with nothing less than all the records in the world.

English dropped the page onto the floor and walked immediately out of the office without looking back. It had suddenly occurred to him where he might turn up some information about Twinbrook’s Blue Cross record. English wanted all the records in the world on Twinbrook.

In the antiseptic corridors of the Cape Cod Hospital, English felt a soothing influence. He was an institutional man. He knew the hospitals, the cops, the universities. On a daily basis English had lived this scene, the waiting room with the glacier of afternoon light crashing mutely through the windows and the clerk yawning wide and the pregnant orderly knitting a small stocking. It was four-thirty. There was nothing much to do in the emergency room, because all the minor injuries and sudden headaches could be taken to family doctors’ offices. Soon things would get lively, when the offices closed and the children, exhausted by an afternoon of play, would tend to fall from the trees or split each other’s heads open with baseballs. Making their way home from the public parks, the children would be struck down by automobiles. At home their mothers would lay their thumbs bare to the bone while slicing up salads before supper, and then after supper they’d lacerate their wrists on broken wineglasses in the cloudy dishwater while Father, tinkering with the car, would be getting the bib of his overalls caught in the fan belt and destroying his manhood out in the garage …