Denis Johnson: The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

Sands looked at him with sadness, less like a stern judge than a kindly doctor. He had that physician’s air about him, the slowness of a man robbed of sleep for a century, the kind of subterranean eminence nurtured in the light of hospital corridors. “You don’t think ahead.”

This was not, for English, a revelation. “You forgot to tell me about all this,” he said, waving his hand at the world behind him, all the cross-dressers and all the — for him, a guy from Lawrence, Kansas — alt the sexually disoriented people.

Sands followed the gesture and looked at the wall, curtained to make a backdrop for official photos, behind his new employee. “I don’t know what you mean to indicate.”

“This whole town is gay,” English said. “I mean, it’s very unusual to a person from Kansas. A whole town.”

“You get used to it,” Sands said.

“I realize that.”

He was trying to think of something else to say, because Sands was saying nothing now, until he understood that Sands was listening to the sounds of somebody moving around in the next room, from which they were separated by a door. The door shuddered as if someone was tugging at it. Sands reached a hand to it and pushed it open, seeming to lower himself — he was a tall man — toward a child’s small voice.

An old woman whom English took to be Mrs. Sands, whose pink scalp shone pitifully through her white hair, stood there in some confusion. “Should I make some tea now, Bud?” She was heavy and feeble, with fat, doughy hands. A white lace shawl draped one shoulder and was falling from the other, and she was trying to catch it with a grasp that clutched air. “Some tea for the visitor, Bud?” She smiled like the blind, at a space where nobody was.

“Oh, no, thanks — no tea, thanks,” English said quickly.

Sands shooed his wife out with some remark that English couldn’t hear and got back to his new employee as if there’d never been any interruption. “I imagine you’d better get familiarized with these recorders.”

I don’t care if that’s your wife, English felt like saying.

“We’ll teach you a little photography, too. But that’s for another day.”

“How about my shift at WPRD?” English said.

“We’ll wait awhile. I’ve got some surveillance for you.”

English picked up his first surveillance subject that evening as she strolled past the Chamber of Commerce, a small building that looked across a parking lot at a long pier made lustrous and a little bit unreal by the lights of Boston fifty kilometers across the Bay. It shocked him that he’d hardly unpacked but was already at work in a world he knew nothing about.

He didn’t enjoy lurking and loitering like a figure in a cheap movie, glancing every few minutes at the photograph of a stranger. Long-distance buses stopped here, and maybe he resembled a person waiting for one, but he thought he looked like somebody hiding unsavory ideas.

When she passed by him she said, “Hello,” a tiny brunette, jeans and knee boots swaying beneath a jacket of fur, who made him think, for some reason, of dimples. English didn’t care that she saw him. As long as nobody guessed his occupation, he could tail the whole town. It was a metropolis of two streets, after all, and everyone saw everybody else six times a day.

The idea was that this woman, Mrs. Marla Baker, had changed addresses recently. Now she lived somewhere on the town’s east end. By waiting in a likely place and following her home, English was supposed to find out exactly where.

Meaning to give her a head start, English stayed on the bench. Before he could get up, she went into the Tides Club just this side of the pier, and to keep her in view he didn’t have to move at all. As she greeted the man at the bar who sat nearest the door, she shook her shoulders — a gesture to say it was cold outside. There was some discussion with the man, and then apparently they reached an agreement about the weather, because he got up and shut the door.

There wasn’t any public exit, as far as English knew, other than the door he was watching; and so all he had to do to pick her up again was sit on the bench. But he didn’t. He paced up and down in front of it. He’d never followed anyone before, and even if it was easy in a town where recurring visibility aroused no suspicion, he was still completely untrained in how to stay on top of his quarry; or subject; he liked that word better, subject. He was getting cold, too. How did these private eyes keep from freezing?

And now the night conjured up from the waters a gluey fog. It got in his lungs; he felt diseased. One minimal concession of fate was that they didn’t have the terrible lowing of foghorns here that certain films had got him looking forward to with trepidation. The horns of the two lighthouses on the Cape’s tip, blinking red and green across the water, were less dreadfully pitched, high and clear-toned, like sweet bells.

The 9 p.m. bus arrived, all lit up inside. Nobody got off. There was no one aboard but the driver. He silenced and darkened and locked his vehicle. “Waiting for a package?” he asked English, holding his book of tickets in his hand beside his dead machine. “Waiting for my ship to get here,” English told him. “Happy waiting,” the bus driver said.

Now English noticed somebody walking in the lee of shadow alongside the Tides Club, going up toward the little heart of town, but he couldn’t make this subject out, except to say she was petite, like his own subject, Mrs. Marla Baker. As soon as whoever it was turned the corner, English jogged across the stretch of asphalt to the Tides, jerked open the door, and poked his head inside — a statue at the pool table chalked its cue, blank faces looked up at him out of a frozen moment — but she wasn’t there. He resumed his jogging, up the block and around the corner.

Far down Commercial Street she passed under streetlamps and alongside the illuminated windows of closed stores, visible and invisible, like a ghost. English walked, out of breath, until she took a left. Then he picked up his pace. It was still misty out, and when he took the same left onto a side street, the mist closed behind him. He had seen fog, but had never witnessed a back lane that lurked in it, a red light blurring in it above a fire exit, or these back stairs draped with its still, pink scarves and saying everything there was to say about loneliness. He wanted to call out to Marla Baker, tell her that she wasn’t alone and that neither of them was really invisible. But when the lane curved, a tavern came into sight and she went in. He saw her through the window among friends, two women, one of whom squeezed her furred shoulder — he could feel the dew of mist on it with his own fingers — while the other tried to pour beer into her mouth from a mug, and he could taste it.

The three of them, Marla Baker and her two friends, had a drink before they strolled, whooping and laughing together, down Bradford and then back in the harbor’s direction, past the town hall. They were going to some kind of show at the Beginner’s Dance Lounge, one of the biggest places, in terms of square meters, on the water.

Cars choked Commercial Street, and the parking lot was jammed. Dozens of people lingered outside the Beginner’s, making their deals. English’s subjects all had tickets, and he didn’t. The man at the door, dressed in white tie and tails and wearing purple lipstick and green eye shadow, told him they were sold out. English had to bribe the man with a twenty-dollar bill. “Daisy Craze” was the name of this well-attended extravaganza.

English thought he’d be smart and take a table near the door, but he couldn’t spot a single vacant seat. The bar ran along the back of the crowded room, and it looked like pandemonium in that region. People were talking away, a rubble of voices under a sea of smoke, and only those at tables near the stage were paying any attention to the show. In the yellow stagelights an elderly woman — actually a man outfitted as a Spanish dancing lady — leaned on the upright piano and lip-synced “The Impossible Dream” as rendered by the recorded voice of Liza Minnelli, perhaps, over the crackly P.A. system. As the song grew more passionate she stopped leaning against the piano and, with movements gangly and frail, began to emote. She even mimicked the head jangle of the singer’s violent vibrato. Below the hem of her dress, a man’s gnarled ankles hobbled around in high-heeled shoes. She had a tendency to limp and stagger and lean to the right. But English saw that this was not a comic act. Deep feeling that was partly stage fright glistened in her eyes as she sang the finale: “ Still strove — with his last ounce of courage — to reach — the un-reach-able … stars!”