The Resuscitation of a Hanged Man by Denis Johnson Read Free Book Online

name again?”
    “Lenny English. And you’re Leanna, right?”
    “How did you know?” Had she forgotten she’d told him?
    “Things like that get around.” He liked that answer, but she seemed unimpressed. “I work over there at WPRD,” he said desperately.
    “Oh? Yeah? Have you got a show?”
    “Well, I do classical stuff from 2 to 6 a.m., Tuesdays and Thursdays. And also I’m a production engineer.”
    “Oh, 2 to 6 a.m., oh, I’m asleep by then.”
    Sometimes you are, he felt like telling her, and sometimes you’re not.
    Leanna insisted they go over to Fernando’s, a café and bar clotted with hanging plants, and everywhere you looked a sign that read THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING, a phrase that always seemed to resound in his head, like a dental tool. When they got there they went through a tangle of decision-making before taking a place by the window. English didn’t care where he sat; he hated the whole restaurant.
    He started right in. “I’ve changed addresses eighteen times in the last twelve years,” he told Leanna. “I lived in Lawrence, Kansas, that whole time. I’m a nice person, but I have a lot of inside trouble.”
    “Inside trouble. What is that? Inside trouble.”
    “Unsound thinking. Getting myself all worked up over nothing, you know what I mean.” If you told people these things right away, they discounted it all. Later you could say, I warned you. “I smoke cigarettes,” he told her.
    “That’s okay,” she said.
    “I eat meat.”
    “And you’re aggressive in conversations.”
    “That’s true. Yeah. Okay, I sometimes am.”
    “That way you don’t have to respond to anyone.”
    This happened to be the truth. He looked around. “They have any coffee in this place?”
    “When you’re on a bus, nobody sits near you because you look too lonely. I bet you’re lonely, but not because nobody wants to know you. It’s because, really, you don’t want to know anybody.”
    Her accent wasn’t New England; she spoke in the way of stewardesses: “Are fline time wull be wen are en fifteen men-nets.” He thought it made her sound unintelligent.
    “I’m not that lonely,” he said. “Really.”
    She seemed not to have heard him.
    “There’s a difference,” he insisted, “between solitude and loneliness.”
    Leanna raised her eyebrows. “You’re the loneliest person I know.”
    The waitress, a large woman dressed in jeans and flannel shirt like a lumberjack, was staring down at him as if in support of Leanna’s assertion.
    “I guess I’ll have whatever she’s having,” he told the waitress.
    He wasn’t getting any less irritated with this restaurant. These places felt underdecorated if they didn’t have all the accoutrements of a subtropical swamp, including fish from outer space in glass tanks of water and fat little palm trees in big clay pots full of dirt, and a menu on which every kind of item—even tea, even ice cream——was something he’d never heard of. And he was irritated with himself, too. Here was this beautiful woman giving him a little of her time, and he couldn’t think of anything very charming to say.
    In a minute he said, “You’re good at interpretations, so what about my love life? Can you interpret that whole mess for me?”
    “You tell women a lot of lies, but at the time you’re saying them, you think they’re true. Right? I can tell by your expression I’m right.”
    “Well,” he said, really embarrassed, really unhappy, “I can see we’re not going to hit it off.”
    “You think you’ve been involved a lot, but really the story on you is that you’ve just been into a lot of indiscriminate random fucking.”
    And she looked so sweet! Hadn’t he seen her at church? “Do you know a lady named Marla Baker?” he asked—because he wanted, in any way he could, to crack her smile.
    “You know I do,” she said, “or you wouldn’t be asking.”
    “No, no, it’s just a name—there was a call for her at the station. She’s not