Denis Johnson - The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

People seemed to be staying at Leanna’s hotel now; English saw lights in a couple of cabins as he cruised to a stop out in the street. Leanna’s living-room window, too, was bright. He often stopped here and looked up at her windows.

He reached for the key to turn on the ignition, but the car was still running. He turned it off.

Now was the time. Time to clear the air, to ease his mind about a few things, maybe — he saw in one lighted cabin a young woman with a bucket and a mop — maybe patch things up.

He rang the front doorbell and Leanna raised the window above him. “Is it you?” she said.

“I guess so,” he said.

“Are you going to sing to me?”

It seemed to imply he shouldn’t invite himself in. He turned and looked down the drive, between the two rows of cabins, at his little car. “I think I’m heading off to New Hampshire tomorrow.”

“Are you moving?”

“No.”

“Oh,” she said.

“You want to go for a drive? The night’s beautiful.”

“Sure, okay,” she said. “I’m glad you finally came by.”

They drove to Herring Cove, a beach on the Cape’s east side, and sat in his car looking out over the Atlantic in the general direction of France. He liked being next to her; he felt all the possibilities returning when he touched her cheek with his finger. He felt the Atlantic tide going out, washing the hair of souls. “Would you mind if we spent some time together tonight?” he said.

“We’re doing the last-minute cleanup till all hours,” she said. “We always open the first weekend in June. A lot of folks come up for the Blessing of the Fleet.”

“Is that a major festival?”

“Not really. But it’s fun if you have a boat.”

“I’ll get one,” English said.

“Really?”

“No,” he said, surprised she’d taken him at all seriously. “I’m just bullshitting.”

“Are you bullshitting about wanting to see me tonight?”

“Definitely not.”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing you,” she said.

“What if I come over later?”

“Sure. Real late. After midnight, like 2 a.m. maybe.”

She took his hand, and they sat in the car kissing for a while, until the clouds thinned out and the sea took on a slanting strangeness under the moon, and in a spirit of reconciliation, English tried to explain himself. “Last March,” he began, “I got kidnapped.” She was quiet while he told her about Gerald Twinbrook, about the look of Twinbrook’s paintings, the light he laid on the canvas, the unidentified mania that had taken him away missing. English told her about the men who’d come to his room and pistol-whipped him in the middle of the night, and he mentioned Ray Sands’s friendship with Bishop Andrew in a way that he felt sure communicated the suspicious nature of that relationship. But a sadness grew in him as he realized that there was a thin, obscene sediment between his tongue and the truth. He wasn’t telling her that Ray Sands had been an investigator, that he’d sent English to look for Gerald Twinbrook in the capacity of a hired detective — that he, English, had eavesdropped on Leanna and Marla Baker’s conversations, that he himself was the person who’d frightened Marla out of town. Talking around the facts made him feel deaf after a while. He stopped speaking and looked out at an ocean that seemed incapable of sound, though all around them the surf acted. Nothing was clean under the spiritless hygiene of the moon. “Look,” he finished as he’d started, “I got kidnapped.”

“Hm” was all Leanna said.

Immediately he felt like defending all this, felt like coming right out and saying what he suspected, although he hadn’t even come right out yet and said it to himself. Many times these last few days he’d told himself, This isn’t a hunch, it’s a psychotic delusion. Don’t tell anyone. Don’t tell anyone because — Joan of Arc, Simone Weil, they spoke of their delusions and were believed. And then? … martyred. It was big. It felt very big to him. “These guys were part of this Truth Infantry. Do you see what I’m saying?”

“Those men aren’t part of a conspiracy. They probably really thought you stole some stuff,” Leanna said.

“But the guy, their boss, he had a professional air about him.”

“He was a nut, Lenny. A bizarre man in a bizarre hat doing strange stuff on chemicals. Same with his friends. They’re just too stupid-sounding for anybody to trust them in any kind of commando organization, or whatever you think it is. Which it probably isn’t. And Ray Sands wasn’t a fascist guerrilla. Everybody knew Ray Sands, more or less.”

“Less, I think. Much less,” English insisted.

“Lenny, Lenny,” she said, “Lenny.”

Her tone irritated him now. “Don’t you see what happened? These guys kidnapped Gerald Twinbrook. Nobody would know about it if he hadn’t needed medical treatment at the nearest hospital to their headquarters in Franconia. Probably,” he said, “they still have the guy.”

“And what was it you said he needed treatment for?”

“Chinese Restaurant Angioedema,” English said.

She blew a fart of laughter through pursed lips.

“Damn,” English said, “sometimes you have no grace. None. You fry my blood.”

“You’re kind of funny, is all. I’m sorry,” she said, still laughing.

His chief hope had been that she’d debunk his ideas. He was surprised to find that now he wanted to defend them at all costs.

“He’s still there! They have him. And Ray Sands ordered it.”

“Why?”

“He doesn’t know why. He was following orders.”

“Orders? From who?”

“There’s a web — a nest, man, with tentacles reaching out of it — and I swear to you, at the center of it is Andrew, our Bishop.”

“Wo, wo, wo,” she said. “You’re scaring me.”

“It is scary.”

“Not it. You. You’re going beyond all sense. Really. Please,” she begged, “don’t think that kind of stuff.”

“I’m just trying to go with what I feel,” he said. “Follow out my instincts.”

“Yeah, and next thing you know, you’ll turn into an animal and they’ll lock you up.” She began doodling geometrical figures on the fogged front window with her finger.

“Animals don’t make mistakes with their lives,” English told her, and began trying his hand at a few designs on the window himself. A hexagon, a cube; here comes a parallelogram. She did, he thought, seem a little frightened.

“It isn’t like you think it is,” she said.

“But everything is like we think it is, don’t you get it? Out of the million little things happening on this beach, you can only be aware of seven things at once, seven things at any given time. I heard that on a tape.”

“A tape.”

“Yeah, a tape, a cassette series on salesmanship.”

“I can’t believe you were ever a salesman,” she said.

“If I can only pick out seven things to be aware of, then I’m selecting just a tiny sliver of reality as my experience. We never really get the whole picture. Not even a microscopic part of it.”

“So? So what? We have to go on it anyway.”

“That’s what I’m saying. Our delusions are just as likely to be real as our most careful scientific observations. And we have to go on them.”

“You’re defending a delusion, and calling it just that,” she said. “Are you aware of that?” She started laughing. “Is that one of the seven things you choose to be aware of?”

“The Bishop is behind all this,” he said in order to shut her up.

But she only laughed again, in a different manner. “Well anyway, I’ve got to go supervise the cleanup,” she said.

“I wrote you a note. The day I came over and Marla was there, that night I—” He broke off, searching in the glove compartment for his notebook. “Here it is, listen. ‘Dear 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 …’”