Denis Johnson - The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

“Not intentionally,” English said.

“And Ray Sands? Was he a great fascist leader?”

“Somebody got that wrong, I guess.”

“And then somebody went a little crazy.”

“Okay, all right, sure. But there is a pattern, a web of coincidence. God,” English confided, “is the chief conspirator.”

“That’s what all the zealots say,” she said. “And the whirling dervishes and those men who bleed every Easter.”

“My conversion hasn’t happened yet.”

“Honey,” she said, “you are the most converted person I’ll ever meet.”

English leaned back in his chair, an olive-drab folding chair with the number 12 written with a laundry marker on the seat of it. “What number is your chair?” he asked her, and she told him it was seventeen. He tried to think of something else. “Did they give you back your clothes?”

“They’re keeping them for the trial. They’re part of the evidence.”

“I don’t get it,” English complained, “nobody else’s clothes are ever used against them.”

“Anyway, they’re considered yours.”

“Oh.”

“On the day you get out, they’ll give them back to you.”

“That’ll be awhile,” he estimated.

“Will we ever meet again?”

“We’ll meet again in seven million years,” he said. “I’ll be standing in a cemetery parking lot and I’ll look up and you’ll be driving a school bus past or something. And that’ll be it.”

“We’ll fall in love again.”

“I’ll see you go by. You won’t see me.”

“Poor Lenny. They’re going to put you away for a long time.”

“Not so long. Less than seven million years.”

Leanna’s visit made English late for lunch. He didn’t like that. He didn’t feel he was getting enough to eat in the first place.

“So, did she ask you to marry her?” Jimmy said.

“Is she gonna break us out?” Fred said.

“God, I would love to do that!” Jimmy said. “I would love to break out. That’d rattle their little gonads, huh?”

It was overly warm in the cafeteria. Huge pipes wrapped in insulation ran through the room just under the ceiling. English kept imagining they’d burst, magnificently destroying everybody’s troubles.

“I wouldn’t break out,” English said. “I like it here.”

English felt hungry every minute. Baloney sandwiches on Wonder Bread with Campbell’s soup for lunch. Cereal and reconstituted milk for breakfast, one piece of white toast. Potatoes and ground-beef gravy for supper, Wonder Bread on the side. “This is the stuff,” English said, shaking his piece of bread at the man across from him. It flopped back and forth like a pancake. “I really like this stuff,” he said. And he did. He liked being hungry and in prison.