Denis Johnson. Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

English left feeling unsure--was he now cleansed, and if so, of what exactly? What crud had the winds of absolution carried off, why did he still feel such grime in the creases of him? An unspiritual explanation was that it was hot. Summer had arrived. Now it was past ten and everybody, even the most debauched, was awake and on the stroll. The crowds were of a size to menace civil authority. Was anybody left in Boston or New York? When you're this completely naked, he thought, much more naked than you'd be without clothes, when you're naked of all your signs and your moves, as naked, say, as the minute you were born, then these thousands of lives going by will rake you. Something like the permeable mask a fencer darkens his face with, that's what his heart needed here.

He put on a casual look: no, not at all, none of this was getting to him; but everything was getting to him--the birds of electricity beating their wings in the wires, the repertoires of ambulances, the thud of defectively muffled engines and the whacking, like rugs being wearily beaten, of stereos through the open windows of cars. The frosty pink was fading from his mouth and the sweat dripped down the inside of his thighs, although occasionally a small breeze reached under and disturbed the leaves and blossoms of his skirt's tropical motif. Above all he was embarrassed to be wearing men's Jockey shorts. It seems an easily appreciated thing, all you had to do, for heaven's sake, was watch him walk. He had to remind himself with every breath that he was invisible to these wraiths.

At a family grocery they were putting out crates of fruit to tempt the thirsty strollers. What a miracle to see a produce truck, uncoupled, drive out from under the massive husk of its trailer. Let him treat his burdens like that!

From the end of Bradford he headed right, out toward Herring Cove. The sky was open now, he was in the National Seashore, a realm protected from civilization, and the road wasn't so crowded. Rather than walk right through the parking lot, he left the pavement a quarter mile or so below the cove and cut across the dunes that rose and fell for quite a distance before they lay down in front of the sea. A few minutes and he'd lost sight of the road, of everything but the sand and the sky; it showed him how all things could fall away in an instant; now he crested a dune and came into a crater empty of everything but sand and the intersecting footprints of other people; the notations delved here by their journeys showed him how each life was one breathtakingly extended musical phrase, and he prayed that their crossings were harmonious.

In some former existence he'd been hunted over sand like this, run down and eaten, turned to the predator's flesh and bones. He felt his life extending backward into the conflagration of all other lives. And it reached out of him like a frond of smoke, touching the tender pink future. This sand presented itself as evidence that he'd someday father children and grandchildren on the earth. He could hear their feet knocking in the rubble as they scavenged in our dregs, stumbling around after some gigantic holocaust. (Denis Johnson. Resuscitation of a Hanged Man. Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991, pp. 237-39.)

(When I read in a recent NY Times Book Review that Denis Johnson's dedication to "HP" in his Tree of Smoke is, undoubtedly, a reference to a "higher power," I was skeptical, but that was only because I'd never read him. But if he's a Christian novelist, he's a Christian on acid, writing of hope and despair in the tradition of Whitman, Kerouac, and Burroughs, trying to hang on to what's left of his soul. In Resuscitation, English moves from the Midwest to Cape Cod, where he falls for a lesbian and attempts to become a private investigator. Written in a style that's alternately gritty, moving, and iridescent, this is a novel that's impossible to put down, if only because the author's got you in a death grip and won't let go.)