Denis Johnson - The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

“I’m off duty. I was just passing by,” English said. “Do you remember me?”

The clerk glanced up.

“Detective English. You’re Frank, right?”

“Oh. Hey. Hi,” Frank said.

“I suddenly thought of stopping in and asking you about something. I wanted your help, maybe.”

“Oh.”

“Nothing urgent. It has to do with an old case.”

Frank looked unsure. “Sure.”

“I was wondering about insurance records, and suddenly I thought, Hey, Frank, at the hospital.”

“That’s me,” Frank said.

“You deal a little with insurance records, don’t you?”

“Sometimes. My job mainly consists of writing down the information necessary to have somebody billed. Anybody. Usually an insurance company.”

“So, after a patient’s been dealt with here, somebody sends a report to the insurance company, right?”

“Yeah, for some of the larger companies. Blue Cross, Travelers, State Farm. Not exactly a report,” Frank said. “Just a series of code numbers.”

“Who does that job?”

“The overnight clerk puts the codes and account numbers on file cards. Then a programmer puts all that in the computer and transmits it to the company.”

“What do they do? The programmer, I mean, does the programmer just access — what do they access? Where do they put the information?”

“They access the insured’s account number.”

“Do they have access to all the data in that file?”

“Yeah. It’s just a series of code numbers. I mean, you know, it goes back to the first of the year.”

“Date of incident, hospital code, doctor code, injury or diagnosis code, that stuff, right?” English said.

The clerk showed signs of backing off. To an official person, English had long ago learned, a citizen gave four successive answers and then required an interlude. English examined the cover of a book, a psychiatric nursing text, lying on Frank’s desk. In a minute he said, “Can I talk to you out here?”

Frank joined him by the water cooler in the waiting room. “Is this — a big crime thing you’re working on, or something?”

“It’s an unclosed case. You know — can’t let it go. What I’m thinking, see — if I give you the account number, can you get the data on a Blue Cross subscriber and decode it for me?”

“Wow,” Frank said, “I don’t know, I wouldn’t think the hospital—”

“A missing person,” English said. “If I could track him down to a hospital somewhere, oh, man, what a wonderful thing, to find him and ease his family’s worries — Give us a hand, huh?”

“Well, but Blue Cross. You could—”

“Yeah, we did. They’re going to give us the information, but it just keeps getting snarled up in paperwork. This is the account number.” English handed him the letter from Blue Cross. “Can you talk to the data clerk?”

“The programmer? Yeah. Okay,” Frank said. “I can.”

“Now? Take a break?”

Frank sighed uncomfortably.

“How long would it take? A few minutes?”

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Frank told the orderly.

The orderly was policing the waiting room now. She looked to be eight or nine months along, straightening slowly with a hand on her hip and standing that way a minute. She held a rolled-up copy of something like Good Housekeeping . She shook it at him like a warning finger. “I hate it when they tear the stuff out of our magazines.”

Two janitors came down the hall, one with a mop and one with a running vacuum cleaner, talking under its noise:

“Hah?”

“Hah?”

“Hah?”

English went into Frank’s cubicle and poured himself a cup of coffee. He picked up the psychiatric nursing text and started reading all about himself.

In a few minutes an obstetrician came downstairs from Ob-Gyn and wanted to show them the premature baby — no more than a foetus, at twenty weeks — he had just delivered.

The orderly paid him no mind. She was balancing her checkbook.

“This thing hasn’t drawn a breath,” he told English, “but the heart’s still beating. Forty-eight minutes. That old heart’s just ticking away.” The obstetrician’s hands and lips trembled, and tiny drops of blood flecked the front of his green surgical gown. His hair had been shellacked by sweat under his sterile cap, which he now used to wipe his nose. His eyes were large and morose, like a cow’s. “I’ve been a practicing physician for eleven years,” he said, staring at the foetus he was holding. It was in a plastic ice-cream cup.

Frank came in. He was holding the printout.

The obstetrician put the foetus down on the counter in front of him. “Dessert?” he said.

Frank peered into the cup as over the edge of a cliff.

“Is it alive?” English asked him.

“Are you kidding?” the obstetrician said. “Would you call it living if you looked like that?”

“But you said the heart was still beating.”

“Well, you know, the heart’s a strange muscle. You can keep it going practically forever with a little electricity.”

The orderly got up and left.

“Where did you get those shoes, man?” English asked the doctor suddenly.

“These are golfing shoes,” the doctor said. “I got them at a pro shop. I’m just waiting for this thing to die, okay?”

Frank went over and sat down on the orderly’s stool. “Here you go,” he said, handing English the printout.

English studied it but didn’t know how to read such a thing.

“What is it now,” the obstetrician said, looking at the clock and sobbing and wiping the snot from his nose with his green surgical cap, “about fifty-three minutes?”

“It’s dead,” English told him.

“How do you know from way over there?” the doctor said. But he knew, too.

Frank crossed his arms over his chest and looked at English. “The codes mean this person had a skin rash, sudden onset. The diagnosis code is for Chinese Restaurant Angioedema. Treated with Benadryl and released. Littleton Hospital, Littleton, New Hampshire.”

“Where’s Littleton, New Hampshire?”

“I wouldn’t know. Somewhere in New Hampshire, obviously.”

The obstetrician stood up tall and opened his arms out wide. “All I can tell you is, I’m going to go the distance, and the sons of bitches can fight over my footprints.”

“Everybody’s tired,” Frank agreed.

“Chinese Restaurant Angioedema,” English said.

“It’s an allergic reaction to that meat tenderizer,” Frank said, “that flavoring agent.” He slumped forward as a sigh went out of him, and ended with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands. “MSG,” he said sadly. “Chinese restaurants use a lot of that stuff.”

On his way out of the building English used a pay phone to call the hospital in Littleton. He identified himself as a detective, and explained he was looking for a missing person who might have been a patient there. “Are you near Franconia, by any chance?”

“About ten miles, yessir,” the admissions clerk said.

“Well, that adds up, that adds up,” English said. “It all adds up, and it’s been adding up and adding up.”

“Pardon me?”

“His name was Gerald Twinbrook, came in on January 2. I need to know the address he gave when he was treated. His local, his Franconia address. Goddamn, I knew he was in Franconia,” English said.

“But wait a minute,” the clerk said, “I can’t give that information out over the phone.”

“Can you look that up for me, please? Immediately.”

“What department did you say you worked for again? What was your department and badge number?”

“Aaah, fuck you,” English said, hanging up.

He considered calling the Notch Lodge in Franconia, whose number he’d dialed so many times he’d memorized it inadvertently. But he’d always gotten the same recorded insistence that the lodge wouldn’t open till June 1; he didn’t need to hear it again. He’d made up his mind to see them all personally up there anyway one of these days. Maybe, in fact, tomorrow.