The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (20 page)
Read The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man Online
Authors: Denis Johnson
English stood still while the typist in the upper office walked across the ceiling, shut the door overhead, and descended the stairs. When the door downstairs banged and the person was gone, English looked around the room at the mounds of papers and zigzagging columns of books with real irritation, as if the typist had intentionally left him here to do all this reading and thinking without anybody’s comfort.
Now he stood behind the desk and examined Twinbrook’s maps—two large ones, of New England and of metropolitan Boston, stuck full of red-, blue-, and yellow-headed pins and annotated with symbols he couldn’t make out.
Suddenly English turned, gripped a stack of books and papers on the desk, arranged them before himself like a meal, and sat down.
At page 173 Twinbrook had left off reading a book by Stephen King, and marked his place with a shred of typing paper. He’d spilled coffee all over one called
Life After Life
by a man named Moody; the leaves were wrinkled and suddenly antique. A fresh-looking paperback copy of
Tarantula
by Bob Dylan appeared never to have been opened. There was a schedule of buses passing through Marshfield; nothing was marked or underlined. But signs and marks and annotations crowded the pages of
Encyclopedia of Card Tricks
by somebody named Hugard and another called
The Greatest
Power on Earth,
which appeared to be about atomic weapons. There were in-house phone directories for several corporations, including IBM and AT&T, but none of the names in these directories was marked or underscored. It occurred to English now to shake out the copy of
Tarantula
in the hope a slip of paper, something bearing a name or a number, might float from among its pages.
Life After Life
by a man named Moody; the leaves were wrinkled and suddenly antique. A fresh-looking paperback copy of
Tarantula
by Bob Dylan appeared never to have been opened. There was a schedule of buses passing through Marshfield; nothing was marked or underlined. But signs and marks and annotations crowded the pages of
Encyclopedia of Card Tricks
by somebody named Hugard and another called
The Greatest
Power on Earth,
which appeared to be about atomic weapons. There were in-house phone directories for several corporations, including IBM and AT&T, but none of the names in these directories was marked or underscored. It occurred to English now to shake out the copy of
Tarantula
in the hope a slip of paper, something bearing a name or a number, might float from among its pages.
At this point a plan for coping with the major part of this mess—the part that weighed the most anyway—came to him, and he went around the room stooped over, collecting stacks of books and leaving any other kind of paper to lie where it fell. He piled the desk with volumes and began shaking out the pages—a paperback
Tibetan Book of the Dead,
a dictionary, novels by Georges Simenon and Graham Greene, three James Bond books, a fat one called
The Fourth Way,
a Bible, another Bible, and then he ignored the tides—collecting every bookmark and looking at it.
Tibetan Book of the Dead,
a dictionary, novels by Georges Simenon and Graham Greene, three James Bond books, a fat one called
The Fourth Way,
a Bible, another Bible, and then he ignored the tides—collecting every bookmark and looking at it.
On one he found four telephone numbers with out-of-state area codes. He pocketed it. Every other bookmark was a blank shred of typing paper.
Outside, the Caterpillar started up with a gigantic clearing of its throat, and English went to the window to watch it flounder, roaring, in the storm of dust it had raised. As the operator measured a sapling with its blade, it seemed to recover its mind; as it came against the tree, its bawling became steady and thoughtful for a few seconds, and then outraged as the rollers shrieked across the treads and the blade unstrung the plant from the ground. It was sweet to hear the noise.
Coming in through the glass window, the sun’s mild warmth burned the air. English pulled his sweater over his head and sat down at the desk. For a moment he considered these questions: Twinbrook, are you missing or are you hiding? Have you left a clue or have you covered your tracks? He was chain-smoking, mashing his cigarettes out on the floor. Do you mind, Twinbrook? Come in and tell me to stop.
He began on the sheets of paper—hundreds, maybe thousands of them. Many were ballpoint sketches and doodles, some were handwritten lists of names, all of them brand names or the names of political groups or business corporations.
He found two carbon copies of such a list, neatly typed. The listed corporations included IBM, AT&T, all the big outfits English had ever heard of. There were about three dozen of them. The Daughters of the American Revolution, the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan. There was a circle around “Truth Infantry.”
English stood up, greatly excited. Circled! But had Twinbrook circled it, or had he, English? He was holding a pen in his hand. He put the page on the desk and drew a circle on it. The ink looked identical.
Twinbrook, is this a collection or something? What do you want with these names? I’m not going to read the typed stuff. I don’t like reading.
By the time he’d separated the blanker, less intimidating handwritten sheets from those crowded with small print, the sun had passed by the window, and now he realized he’d have a harder time reading unless he turned on the overhead fluorescent.
In fact, most of the typed sheets weren’t typed but photocopied articles from newspapers and magazines. Some of them described freeway accidents or the weather. Others showed beaming brides and grooms, looking, thanks to the copying process, like black-faced riverboat minstrels.
None of these reports seemed connected with any other. But the corporations turned up again. He found two lists of boards of directors, apparently copied from a magazine article. Twinbrook, Twinbrook, Twinbrook. Are you nuts?
English was out of cigarettes, his eyes felt dry and sleepy, and he’d decided, at what point he wasn’t aware, not to turn on the overhead light for fear of attracting attention. He wasn’t used to this kind of labor, this rowing through a sea of letters and words, and he’d satisfied himself already that he’d made a fair try at getting it done. But he stayed a little longer because, to tell the truth, he wanted to satisfy Ray Sands. Sands was dead, but English still felt his power to approve or disapprove. He was still working for Sands. He was carrying out Sands’s instructions. After all, people didn’t die instantly. Their images lingered, and they had to fade away before you could ignore them.
He carried a folder to the window for a little more light. Across the face of it Twinbrook had scrawled the name SKAGGS. English opened it and was shocked and irritated to read, in Twinbrook’s handwriting:
Brain Death II Veith, FJ
Brain Death I
JAMA 238 (15) : 1651—5
10 OCT 77
238 (16) : 1744–8
17 OCT 77
life after death:
J Nerv Ment Dis SEP 77
(Stevensn) 165 (3) 152—70
What he could read of these notes seemed to consist mainly of names and numbers and dates; but the dates were old, the names weren’t full names, the numbers weren’t phone numbers.
—1975 attitudes
British physician
—dead body
—saving life
death—heart lung death
but DRS say should be brain
Twinbrook, you sick bastard, what are you thinking? Are you aware you don’t make any sense?
NYTimes
call wwwwww what is guy’s
name
?
call people on panel
—get address of wwwwww; where can I get
copies?
later, interview people by phone
The folder held a thick photocopied article: “BRAIN DEATH: I. A Status Report of Medical and Ethical Considerations.” English was terribly thirsty and wanted a smoke. There was a page evidently typed by Twinbrook:
what you are holding in your hands is a book about … etc. And I think it is always a book about the verge in conscoiiouslness, the splitting apart of the world, and the end of time.I’m not a writer of essays. I
write first of all because
ETC. talk about the headless man or bodiless head in Brazil what a visitor to this country might think of as a pre-funeral ceremony: strangers who won’t be invited to the funeral driving slowly in single file alongside an accident
Yeah, I get it. People driving past an accident. I get that. Right, brain death, I get that.
I know more about you than your own mother.
How did panel operate?
Was agreement the general rule?
Did opposing views find compromise
in final report? Or did
some views go down to defeat
while others formed basis for report
findings?Who does all the work?
Me. I do all the work. You go crazy, and I do all the work.
He must have been missing for years before anybody missed him. English was frightened for this man.
Among the pages, most of them flecked with words in Twinbrook’s tiny, nearly illegible hand, English found the photocopied columns of an old newspaper—
The
New York Times,
a heading revealed, of September 1, 1870; and others from September 4 of the same year. They explained the name SKAGGS on the folder’s cover: in Bloomfield, Missouri, sometime in August of 1870, according to these articles, a man called John H. Skaggs had been hanged for murder. His executioners had marched him up to the front of the scaffold so that he wouldn’t have to look at the noose just at that moment, and asked him if he wanted to talk to the crowd of people who’d come to watch him die. The killer had obliged everyone with a long speech. “I would like for you all to have some sympathy for me,” he told them; and, talking specifically to the young boys: “In the first place avoid drinking of whiskey; and in the next place avoid the love of money better than you do your God; and in the next place whatever you do avoid lewd women. I want every little boy that hears me to remember that until he lies on his death-bed; then when he is on his death-bed he cannot foller after these things, and never forget it whatever you do.” His sentimental sermon rushed down the column and the printed words seemed to shrink on the paper. “I don’t know but what there is some here on this ground that looks upon me probably as a tyrant, as an outrageous—a tremendous man, but then that is not for you to judge, for you know not. I hope, therefore, that no lady nor no gentleman will look upon me with any contempt as disgraced in my name. I would be glad how well you may all do; I hope to meet you in the better world than this troublesome world is. This world is nothing but sinfui—nothing else; one sin will lead to another. I hope this may be a warning to every one of you, that when you go home, and after you eat your supper and lie down in your bed I hope this may run through your hearts, not only one time, but as long as you live. I think that I know that it is a mighty horrible thing to be brought up right at death’s door and stared in the face. There is none of you like me; you have no idea …” Maybe this incident was long past and everybody involved in it was dead, but English was filled with embarrassment. The guy should have spat on the onlookers.
The
New York Times,
a heading revealed, of September 1, 1870; and others from September 4 of the same year. They explained the name SKAGGS on the folder’s cover: in Bloomfield, Missouri, sometime in August of 1870, according to these articles, a man called John H. Skaggs had been hanged for murder. His executioners had marched him up to the front of the scaffold so that he wouldn’t have to look at the noose just at that moment, and asked him if he wanted to talk to the crowd of people who’d come to watch him die. The killer had obliged everyone with a long speech. “I would like for you all to have some sympathy for me,” he told them; and, talking specifically to the young boys: “In the first place avoid drinking of whiskey; and in the next place avoid the love of money better than you do your God; and in the next place whatever you do avoid lewd women. I want every little boy that hears me to remember that until he lies on his death-bed; then when he is on his death-bed he cannot foller after these things, and never forget it whatever you do.” His sentimental sermon rushed down the column and the printed words seemed to shrink on the paper. “I don’t know but what there is some here on this ground that looks upon me probably as a tyrant, as an outrageous—a tremendous man, but then that is not for you to judge, for you know not. I hope, therefore, that no lady nor no gentleman will look upon me with any contempt as disgraced in my name. I would be glad how well you may all do; I hope to meet you in the better world than this troublesome world is. This world is nothing but sinfui—nothing else; one sin will lead to another. I hope this may be a warning to every one of you, that when you go home, and after you eat your supper and lie down in your bed I hope this may run through your hearts, not only one time, but as long as you live. I think that I know that it is a mighty horrible thing to be brought up right at death’s door and stared in the face. There is none of you like me; you have no idea …” Maybe this incident was long past and everybody involved in it was dead, but English was filled with embarrassment. The guy should have spat on the onlookers.
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