Denis Johnson - The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

A man squatted, then knelt, before a sand castle, finally vomiting up the teeth of wolves broken off in his flesh in a previous life, and a woman who had insisted on wearing her pearls to the beach sat beneath her silver hair thinking, “I’m guilty, yes, but I deserve a trial.” “Do people,” a little girl ten yards away was thinking, “all see the same color when they call something green?” A white filament of tanning lotion. Her mother’s hand obliterated it on her mother’s skin. “No. Wait. The storm is only in my mind,” a man gripping a tennis shoe was persuading himself—“Anything’s possible. I could come home …” but a breeze woke him and crushed the sponge of grief, and he tasted another drop. A grandfather crouched behind his smile, clapping for a dog. “Others have done worse,” he pleaded inside himself; “is it so bad what I’ve done?” Meanwhile, a young man puffed at a fly on his cheek while congratulating himself. “Just one or two minor details,” he thought, “and then—” … and then the moment granted him a vision of his life dissolving away until there was nothing left in front of him but the sea, going on forever.

The body surfers slid along the torched and crumbling waves. “I’m only human, I’ve only got two hands, I can’t do everything at once,” their souls protested. A woman patted the sweat from under her eyes, whisked the bits of sand from her suit, and lay back trembling under the kisses of a sexual angel …

And the others, their chalky laughter and resonating wounds, and still others with murders swimming in their bellies, and people burned as dark and shiny as beetles, all waited at the edge of this immenseness muttering little truths. “I saw him, I sat right next to him, and you can’t even tell.” “It’s all my fault that memory is dark.” “Thank God, I’m out of that mess.” “I’m fat.” “I’m thirsty.” “When am I going to live?” … As English reached the end of the beach, he found other people ripping mussels loose from the breakwater, and men and women who were going after clams with buckets and rakes and seemed to be stepping on their own faces in the mirrors of the tide pools.

This was the place where the lower Cape started to curl back around on itself in a way that got it generally compared to a scorpion’s tail. The breakwater English was standing on stretched a quarter mile across the harbor, cutting the corner, as it were, between the scorpion’s stinger and a point a few knuckles down the tail. A couple of boats, not much larger than rowboats, appeared to be anchored off the tip of the Cape. English crossed over on the breakwater with the idea of walking out to the very end and perhaps taking a ride in one of those boats. He had to clamber in many places across the casually piled boulders, of which the most were granite, and he got his feet wet coming off onto the beach at the other end. He saw nobody else up here. Two lighthouses warned the sailors of the Cape, one at the tip and one about a mile up, in the area of the tail’s last joint. Poison ivy grew everywhere between them.

He tried walking on the beach at first, past a few car chassis beyond corrosion into decomposition, a ferric variety of putrefaction — a beach made not so much of sand as of the long seaside grass flooded by water and killed by water and heaped by the motion of water onto the shore and abandoned there, like a long, pointless rope, by water. It was slow going in this muck. Before him were the huge green flies and the stink that rose off a dead porpoise a half mile past the breakwater, and the hooting gulls that never seemed to mind the stink or eat any of the flies. Bits of light on the surge of the breakers took to the air and flew in the corners of his sight. He walked through the hordes of insects, their angry music burning in his head like something trying to wake him up. He skirted piles of garbage that hadn’t quite found their way back from picnics, mostly the rottings of bait and dribbling cans of beer.

He took to the higher, sandier ground, which was covered with poison ivy. Gulls argued with him as he came too close to their nests in the sand. They rose in flocks, their shadows whirling all around him on the beach. Farther down the shore he saw them walking in little groups, ignoring each other, wise and smug, looking at nothing.

A black wasp dropped a dead spider at his feet. The gulls spoke deeply in voices he thought couldn’t possibly belong to the same creatures he normally heard yodeling, and baby terns flew past above, chirping like crickets.

Seagulls reminded him of coyotes. We like them, he thought, but if we were smaller than they — say sizable as monkeys — we’d be desperate under seagulls. They’d be like land-sea-air coyotes. Gulls: Let’s not forget they’re carnivorous. You know what? They all look like the Pope. Power lines ran between the two lighthouses, poles spaced every twenty yards — a gull, or two or three, perched on the outflung arms of every one like vultures on desert saguaros. As he neared each pole, they jumped off. Couldn’t they guess they were safe twenty feet overhead? He couldn’t think when they’d started getting to him. He’d started out liking gulls like everybody else.

The gun was in his purse. It was getting heavier. He could hardly carry it. The raging molten irons at the center of the planet were dragging it toward themselves. He couldn’t believe that he was actually going to do it, and he couldn’t believe that he actually might not. This was the dilemma, that both ideas were absurd.

He crossed the lighthouse’s fat shadow and checked on the boats. One was a wreck turned upside down, but the other had a motor and two oars and looked ready to sail just about anyplace.

English pulled on the outboard’s starter rope until he was winded. He didn’t know anything about these engines. He didn’t know anything about boats, or the sea — I’m from Kansas, he explained to the sky, I’ll have to row the thing.

Right away he could see he’d be tired by the time he reached the town pier, where Andrew, our Bishop, was blessing the vessels of Provincetown. My craft keeps tacking in a fucked-up way, he told the waters. Keeping her steady as she goes takes practice. Which I am getting.

Thank God the harbor was smooth. Beyond a little slapping to keep his boat awake, it didn’t do anything but carry him. This wasn’t the sea of the inexorable horizon and smashing waves, not the sea of distance and violence, but the sea of the eternally leveling patience and wetness of water. Whether it comes to you in a storm or in a cup, it owns you — we are more water than dust. It is our origin and destination. The hotels rolled out along the shore, the bed-and-breakfast places, were getting bigger. Between here and there, a few trawlers harassed by gulls.

This is sunstroke, he thought, and what a time for it, just when I’m trying to think about my strategy. I’m trying to think what I’m thinking. What am I thinking? I think this about sums it up: A 1940s-style spike-heeled shoe ripping open a child’s abdomen while, in the background, Marlene Dietrich smokes a cigarette.

He waved. Avast. Ahoy. Yes, I am a sailor. One of the fleet.

There was something decimated and paltry about the Blessing of the Fleet ceremony that year. Leonard English attended, rowing a boat with a dead outboard engine, and he didn’t have any fun.

It was cloudy, but the sun was still a menace. The sea was silver. English felt faint by the time he was in hailing distance of the pier. He could see somebody right at the end of the pier, higher than the rest of the crowd, the Bishop or the mayor. English’s shoulders and neck were completely numb. He made for a pier fifty meters down-cape of the municipal dock, heading for the cool dark beneath it.