Already Dead: A California Gothic

August 7, 1990

Van Ness felt a gladness and wonder as he drove past the small isolated towns along U.S. 101 in Northern California, a certain interest, a yearning, because he sensed they were places a person could disappear into. They felt like little naps you might never wake up from — you might throw a tire and hike to a gas station and stumble unexpectedly onto the rest of your life, the people who would finally mean something to you, a woman, an immortal friend, a saving fellowship in the religion of some obscure church. But such a thing as a small detour into deep and permanent changes, at the time, anyway, that he was travelling down the coast from Seattle into Mendocino County, wasn’t even to be dreamt of in Van Ness’s world.

The side trip he took off 101 into Humboldt County only proved it.

He deserted his route at Redway, went five miles west to Briceland and from there a half dozen miles to the Mattole River and past an invisible town (he saw only a one-room school in the corner of a field) called Ettersburg, and then switched back and forth along mountainous terrain another few miles to a dirt road that cut through the King Range National Forest.

Bucking slowly in his Volvo down the steep zigzag track among 3

dusty redwoods, Van Ness glimpsed the sky above the sea but not the sea. He stopped for two minutes at an elbow of the road overlooking the decline and ate a pack of cheese-flavored crackers and whisked the crumbs from his long mustache — handlebars arcing down into a monstrous Fu Manchu and serving, along with thick rimless spectacles, almost to obliterate any personality from his face. The crackers were the last of his food. He tossed the wrapper onto the floorboard and drove on.

Vaguely he wanted to accomplish some small cleansing of himself in this remote area known as “The Lost Coast,” wanted to fast beside the Pacific and lie on his back all night within hearing of the ocean’s detonations and look up at a meteor storm: between ten and thirty-five stars were expected to fall every minute that night, according to the weather report on his radio.

But when he reached the shores of the Pacific, he realized he’d only managed to find the back way into a place called Shelter Cove, a vast failed housing development on the isolated coast, hundreds of tiny empty lots set among asphalt streets with green signs on poles — CLAM

AVENUE, BEACH DRIVE, and so on — shaken and speckled by the sandy wind. Half a dozen actual homes fronted the beach, and a few over-turned runabouts, and a delicatessen, but really almost nobody had ever lived here. The sea burned in its heartless blueness while overhead flew helicopters filled, according to news flashes on his radio, with National Guardsmen and agents of the federal government conducting a massive raid on the marijuana patches in the unpeopled hills he’d just driven through. Van Ness bought his lunch in the deli and complained silently to himself about the weak coffee and the gull droppings on the picnic table. The only person he talked to was a pretty woman who swore at him because, as he walked past her table to the trash can, she dropped her sunglasses, and he stepped on them. The glasses were unsalvageable. He gave her fifteen dollars, although she claimed they’d cost twice that. Van Ness was back on the main highway again just a few hours after leaving it. He’d circled back to the town of Redway, the point where he’d turned off. The whole pointless excursion had a way of sealing his mind even further against any notion that great changes might beset him unexpectedly. And yet later he encountered the woman, Winona Fairchild, again, more than once; and eventually these encounters forced him to acknowledge the reality of fate, and the truth inherent in things of the imagination.

4 / Denis Johnson

A California Highway Patrolman pulled him over on a stretch of 101 he had to travel before he would reach Leggett and turn west again toward the coast. Van Ness knew he’d been speeding; he did it habitu-ally, compulsively. He carried a passenger at the time, a teenaged girl dressed after the style of Lithuanian peasants, in a long skirt, bright scarf, and sharply pointed purple shoes, her name a poetic creation possibly designating a flavor or a scent, like Rainbow Day or Temple Jasmine, but it had escaped his memory even as she’d said it. Except for the introductions, she and Van Ness hadn’t traded ten words since he’d picked her up hitchhiking by the Texaco in Redway, at which time he’d said to her, “Welcome, Fantasy Lady.”

Now he wished he hadn’t said it. When the young patrolman stooped down beside the driver’s window to peer within and ask for the license, the hippie girl leaned toward him over Van Ness’s lap: “Is it about another ten miles to Leggett?”

“Yes, ma’am, little over eight miles,” the patrolman said.

“He’s really scaring me,” she revealed suddenly.

“Who?” the patrolman said.

“This man,” she said. “He made remarks. He touched my thigh.”

“When?” asked Van Ness. “When I was reaching to the radio? That was an accident.”

The policeman concentrated intensely, irrelevantly, on Van Ness’s license. “Are you friends, you two people?” Van Ness said, “No,” and the girl said, “I was hitching.”

“Go stand beside my car,” the patrolman told the young woman.

Van Ness turned off the ignition. “I feel sick about this,” he told the officer as they watched the girl walk, slightly pigeon-toed, toward the spinning lights of the squad car in her purple shoes. “I really feel confused. I didn’t do a thing. Look, I know I’m no Casanova.”

“Were you watching your rate of speed?”

“Yes, yes — I mean,” Van Ness agreed, “I was definitely speeding, yes, sure. But this? No.”

“I have to write up a ticket,” the patrolman said. “Then I have to see about her. Then I have to see about you. If all you did was talk dirty and touch her thigh, I couldn’t care less.”

“I didn’t talk dirty.”

“If you grabbed, if you left a bruise or mark—”

“I didn’t. I wouldn’t.”

Already Dead / 5

“I’ll talk to her.”

“She’s crazy.”

“I meet very few who aren’t,” the patrolman assured him. “Not in this job.”

“Okay.”

“You probably are too,” the officer said.

“Yes,” Van Ness said.

As he waited for the officer to interview his victim, Van Ness felt the pent-up needs, sorrows, rages, in the cars speeding past them through Humboldt County, the passions walled up behind transparent windows.

Nothing came of it all, and he was on his way within a few minutes.

He hadn’t even been cited for excessive speed. The patrolman relieved him of his passenger, and Van Ness drove alone through Leggett and then over the hills on California 1 until he reached the coast again. Now he was in Mendocino County.

For eighty miles or so he followed the Coast Highway without stopping, testing his tires on the innumerable curves and wishing he had a sports car. Occasionally a house row or hamlet popped up and was gone, nothing substantial or even really provable aside from the towns of Fort Bragg and Mendocino. The terrain reminded him of Ireland, or of his idea of that country, which he’d never visited: the open fields strange and blue-gray in the oblique illumination, fields that everyone called palomino when the sunlight bleached them, but in a clutch of horses shading among evergreens at a pasture’s edge he saw two palominos much more uniformly pale. Coastal moisture kept the grasses vital through the droughts; the potentiality of rebirth visible in the—

A right angle in the highway had him slamming on his brakes. Suddenly he was in Point Arena. He reacted with shock to the echo of his own car’s engine off the buildings. Just before the place, three blocks ahead, where the town abruptly ceased as if coming up against a window onto the fields, Van Ness turned right and continued toward the harbor only because he enjoyed the look of things in that direction. Van had known many such communities, some that had included shabby houseboats. He liked the seafarers and the little clubs of progeny they brought with them from harbor to harbor. The land descended through a flat wandering valley, once perhaps some great diluvial watercourse, but not so much as a creek remained of it

6 / Denis Johnson

that he could see. Still the line of trailers and junk heaps might have been floated and abandoned here by a flood. Not a soul in sight, and the ocean was enormous. Before he turned back to the highway he sat in the idling car a minute looking down at it all. Here were homes, a large half-built restaurant, a fine new pier, boats at anchor. Everything waited to be touched, explored — fingered, broken.

Van Ness’s lethargic pilgrimage — he was meandering south ostens-ibly to look for work in the marinas of the L.A. basin, though actually he had other plans — broke off at the southwestern corner of Mendocino County in Gualala, a town once named among the California coast’s top ten ugliest communities. But Gualala wasn’t so awful, not to his eye, merely aimless, its stores and motels strung along the oceanside cliffs in complete unconsciousness of the beauty they inhabited, of the hills above them massed with redwoods and the waves beating themselves to pieces in the mist below.

Frankenstein, an old friend from the merchant marine, lived a mile back in the complicated terrain above Gualala, on a long ridge accommodating another north-south road and another string of buildings, these more residential and much more widely scattered — a second, elevated Gualala. Frankenstein’s was a small house on half an acre with a distant view, maybe a view of the ocean, it was hard to say: with the clouds lying down on the Pacific today, there seemed to be nothing left of California but the sky.

Nobody came to the door when Van Ness drove between the redwood slabs that marked the drive and alongside heaps of junk and stacks of unidentifiable salvage, the accumulations of a clearly eccentric personality — nobody answered when Van Ness went to the door and knocked, though Frank himself was visible through the picture window, sitting next to the dark mouth of his fireplace with his legs stretched far out in front of him, a long man, six feet, nine inches tall.

“It’ll be dark out here pretty soon,” Van Ness called through the windowpane, “but I won’t leave.”

In a minute the giant stood in the doorway looking down at him. “I don’t answer anymore. There’s never anybody there.”

“I’m here.”

“I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.”

Already Van Ness wished he hadn’t come. His friend had been Already Dead / 7

released only recently from a drug or psychiatric ward. Over the last few years he’d suffered setbacks and disarrangements.

Inside, Van felt even more uneasy. Frank had evidently torn apart his living room with a heavy tool, a crowbar, possibly, working in his surroundings a lot of zany perforations from which insulation puffed like yellow smoke. Much of the flooring had been ripped away down to the plywood.

Before he sat back down, the host yanked a plug from the wall socket, saying, “I was just listening to the radio. Did you hear? We’re sending one zillion deranged Marines to the Gulf.”

“I heard they were considering it.”

“Considering no longer. It’s an accomplished thing. This is a war, man.”

“Isn’t it a little early to say?”

“The Pequod is there right now.”

“Right now?” The Pequod was their nickname for the Peabody, the merchant vessel they’d served on together some years before, a small freighter making ports in the Arabian Gulf and the Indian Ocean.

“Oh yeah, right now. Benhurtz cabled his wife, and she called me last week. Just after Iraq crossed the border.”

“Just before you hit the unit.”

“I was very fucked up, but I understood the conversation. Benhurtz is on the Pequod. Pequod’s on the Gulf. They’re worried Iraq’s going to pop mines out around there, dive-bomb the shipping, et cetera.”

“It’s hard to believe we were ever there.”

“We could be there now. Smack up against a war.”

“Do I sit down?” Van Ness wondered.

“Hey, take my chair,” Frankenstein said, jumping up.

Van Ness dragged a chair away from what must have been the dining table and set it beside the cold hearth. Candy wrappers filled the fireplace, and the splintered lengths of oaken floorboards.

“The fog is here,” Frank said, moving closer to the window.

“It was sunny all the way down the coast.”

“We had twenty-one straight days of fog last month. Usually it licks up this high and then the morning backs it down a few yards. But last month it stayed.”

“How many days have you been back?”

“I wasn’t counting.”

“Six.”

8 / Denis Johnson

“Okay,” the giant said, “six.” He turned and took a can of lighter fluid from the mantel and started squirting down the wood in his fireplace. He lit a cigarette and, discarding the match, set the kindling ablaze. The front of him turned orange and the room filled with purple shadows. “I was only there for three days,” he said.

They’d been shipmates for nearly a decade. Van Ness had left the merchant marine after ten years. A “career move,” a phrase covering a plenitude of small failures. Frankenstein had been drummed out a bit earlier for striking an officer. Van Ness had been a harbormaster in Florida, sold boats on Lake Champlain and most recently on Puget Sound. Frankenstein had taken up a trade and still owned, but did not operate, a plumbing business.

“During that whole time, I was in here with Yvonne,” Frank said,

“that entire twenty-one days of fog. Every morning we looked out that window and saw nothing but the truth — formless uniformity, the full-ness of emptiness. Wow, it made my dick hard! We couldn’t stop fucking! Then the thermodynamics altered off the coast, and the whole monkey dance began again, the universe: relations, progressions, transactions. The designation they give that is fair weather. They say it’s clear. They call it good.” As he spoke he was opening the front door, grabbing chunks of wood from a stack just outside and throwing them on the blaze. He sat down breathing hard, knocking over his ashtray, puffing on his cigarette, coughing. “Makes weird noises, don’t it?” he said of the fire. “Whines and squeaks, clanks and moans. You should’ve been here two weeks ago. Unprecedented acoustics.” He cleared his throat raggedly and spat at the flames. “Our happy little thing went sour.”

“Whose thing?”

“Her real name isn’t Yvonne. She invented a new name to devalue the memory of her parents, castrate her father.”

“Weren’t you doing therapy with her?”

“That’s what was so beautiful, that combination — lover, therapist, goddess. Primal foe.”

He’d struck the fellow, a recently commissioned ensign, a single blow with a closed fist; and squatted for thirty-six hours in the gangway outside the infirmary waiting to learn whether the ensign would live or die. They hadn’t confined him because he’d been well liked by the captain and considered too large for the brig.

“She was victorious,” he said, “in trying to destroy me with lingerie.” Already Dead / 9

“She split,” Van said. “Is that illegal? What’s her crime?”

“What’s her crime, right. The theft of sacred objects.” They’d had no problem dumping him from the service, because he’d lied about his height in the first place; had wilted somehow for the measuring. No formal hearing had been required. It had simply been a matter of correcting the figures and having him cashiered as unacceptably tall.

Frankenstein had been the Peabody’s resident intellectual, at least belowdecks — maybe an officer or two had been more widely read; maybe the officer he’d struck — studying, reciting, often getting passionate about things that didn’t matter to most people. The others had always given space to the tall man, a natural leader because of his size, intelligence, and sweetness.

“I came here,” Van Ness said, trying to speak carefully, “because I thought you might have something further to teach me.”

“Teach you? Did I ever teach you? We read a couple books. Then what?”

“I don’t know — what?”

“Do you think we’re educated men? I haven’t spoken to a college professor in my life. I could have done UCLA on a basketball thing, but I just skated on by. What did we really understand of Wittgenstein?”

“I know what we liked about him—”

“That he rejected his whole order of thought, yeah, and started fresh halfway through his life.”

“His independence even from his own truths—”

“But we didn’t understand those truths. On the Pequod we were just two assholes who collected big words. Everybody knew we were full of shit but us.”

Van Ness was astonished. “That’s very sad.”

“No. It has no value one way or the other.”

“I’m sick,” Van told him.

“Sick?”

Van Ness said, “I’m not well.”

“Not well…That sounds even worse.”

“It is.”

“That sounds like ‘a lengthy illness.’”

“That’s right.”

“‘Has died after a lengthy illness.’”

10 / Denis Johnson

Van Ness put his face in his hands.

“Dying, huh? That’s a very animal thing to do.”

“Is that all you can think of to say to me?”

“All? No. I can bullshit till Christmas. I can spew reams, man.” Frankenstein looked nervous, bopping his foot, rubbing his fingertips rapidly with his thumb, chewing his lip. Van Ness recognized these as Frank’s signs of anger. Intimidated by his own size, he denied himself any wilder expressions.

There was nothing here for Van, but he couldn’t stop himself, not after five hundred miles spent rehearsing these thoughts. “Maybe we were posing, sure. But you opened the door for me. Wittgenstein, Spinoza—”

“Nietzsche.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah? And why not Hobbes, and Locke? Why not Marx?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because they were pointed toward the depersonalized robot zombie Earth we now inhabit. I’m pointed toward the personal, the subjective, the much more deeply real. And I’ve gone on travelling in that direction.

You — you cry, you weep, you want a theory to eat like a pill and make it all go away.”

“You misunderstand me. Fuck you.”

“If you’re dying, then what you really have to do, man, what you’re really gonna have to do most deeply now, is go ahead and die. Just animal right on out. Nice knowing you.”

Van Ness said nothing for a few minutes while the giant chain-lit another Camel and smoked it away with a series of little convulsions, going into and out of the firelight repeatedly to flick the ash.

“I’ve had those golf clubs for years. I took a nine iron to the walls because I heard the mothers inside there scurrying around and whispering. Part of this, yeah,” Frankenstein said, “was psychotic bullshit.

But there are actual people involved, too, taking advantage, you know, of the chemical dementia. I wanted to split their heads open. I know who they are, some of them. They’re shooting some kind of mist, some kind of spray, into the windows at night. I can hear it leaking into the car, man, when I’m driving. Oh yeah! Oh yeah! I can feel it on my skin.

I yanked the guts out from under the hot tub, let the water out, turned the bastard upside down — okay. Nothing there. I took that nine iron and smashed through the floorboard in the panel Already Dead / 11

truck, the Chevy, and I got one, man! I stabbed its face to shit with a screwdriver, blood all over my hands, my shirt, it was like a waterfall.

Got up the next morning, the blood was gone. Not a trace. They washed it all off me while I was asleep. And they’re shooting microscopic darts at me.”

He paused to light up.

“I’m not a golfer,” Van Ness said.

“Ninety percent of this is psycho bullshit, I realize. But ten percent of it is real.” Frank pointed a finger at Van Ness’s throat. “And that’s the ten percent we have to watch out for.”

The burning redwood hummed steadily. The fire was in its middle age. Rocking back and forth to dip his cigarette ash with his large hand, Frank seemed to enter and exit the changing torchlight of a primitive incarnation, in one of the smoky grotto shelters he liked to claim had been forgotten by his mind but imprinted on his spirit.

Frank had always preached a personal creed fixed, in a scholarly way, to the migrations of the human soul. Maybe, Van thought now, he was right, maybe Frank’s own soul had checked out, simply left a TV babbling somewhere in this big, ruined hotel.

And yet two decades before, Frank had been the one to lead Van, the twenty-two-year-old, into the light of philosophy, the one to guard him while he grew.

Among the sailors belowdecks Van Ness had been seen as the large man’s personal creation, a kind of pet — thus the nickname: Van Ness had had to struggle to remember, when asking for his friend’s number from Directory Assistance, that Frankenstein’s true name was Wilhelm Frankheimer.

Frank asked, “What have you got?”

“You don’t understand, do you?”

“What’s your disease?”

“Shit, man. Call it radiation poisoning.”

“You haven’t got anything. You’re not dying.” Van told him, “I’ll be dead within forty-eight hours.”

“A short ride.”

“Still: I could easily outlive you.”

Driving south back into Gualala’s town proper, Van Ness encountered a straight stretch on the coast route and pressed the acceler-ator pedal down all the way. And found himself, what with the fog 12 / Denis Johnson

and his headlights, driving into a wall of brilliance. He had no idea how far out in front of his windshield the pavement stretched before it hooked left or right and his own trajectory hung out over twenty-five fathoms of air. Within a quarter mile the machine was topping out at around 105, he believed, although the speedometer’s needle came un-moored and whipped back and forth deliriously between 120 and nothing, and the Volvo itself shivered rhythmically awhile, then shuddered so hard he had to clench his teeth, and soon it shook like a crow’s nest in a bad gale, threatening to break loose and fling itself to pieces in midair. Van eased his grip on the wheel until he was not quite touching it, warming his hands on the fires of out-of-control; then something in him — not his will — slapped his hands back onto the steering and pointed him at a legal velocity down the middle of the fog.

Van made it a habit to be friendly wherever he went; while he contemplated a late supper in the bar of a cliffside restaurant later that night, he bought a drink for a man who was also a visitor to the area, a wild-pig hunter. They’d started out by kidding the barmaid together and then got to talking. “Make it a double,” Van urged the man. “I can’t drink myself. I’ve got pancreatitis.”

“Oh, any old thing,” the hunter told him when Van asked about his line of work. “I’ve done a lot of logging lately.”

“Where’s that? Here in California?”

“Del Norte County mostly, yeah. Everywhere, practically.” The man’s hunting companion, another bearded, bulky woodsman, came in and joined them. He’d just driven down from their campsite, and he complained about the fog and the curves, and the cliffs.

The first one bought his friend a drink and for Van a club soda. “You got — what? Your pancreas, something?”

“Pancreatic cancer, actually.”

“Oh.”

The men paused, sipping their drinks.

“Shit,” the other burst out. “I’d be double-time paranoid behind something like that. Fatal, right?”

“Nothing’s certain. I could still easily outlive you.”

“Man”—the logger searched for words. “It’s like — a big blue light.”

“Really,” Van said.

“Yeah.”

Already Dead / 13

“Listen. As far as cliffs: my sister’s husband,” the first man now told them, “went to welder’s school in Santa Rosa down here. One day he was driving on the coast, on those cliffs north of Jenner. Have you seen that place? Five or six hundred feet straight down, no shoulder — you’d have time to shit your pants and change into clean ones before you hit.

He was driving along behind this black Corvette. Corvette downshifts, Corvette accelerates, Corvette sails half a thousand feet down to the Pacific Ocean. Right over the edge. Turned out the guy had just bought the car that morning, brand-new Corvette. Some jilted kid. The brake lights,” he said, “never winked.”

His partner asked, “What year Corvette?”

“A year that don’t concern us,” the first man said impatiently. “A year you probably never heard of.”

The chemistry between them was suddenly familiar to Van Ness.

Their connection gave off a sour smoke, like bad wiring. He sensed they’d served time in prison together, or belowdecks.

Wilhelm Frankheimer felt easier when his old shipmate cut the visit short and left him. He had some coal soaking out by the forge, and he wanted to get to it.

He’d come by the forge as he had the rock saw and the panel truck and a few other large items, just inheriting them from people he’d once plumbed for, who’d gotten too old or too dead to use them.

As a child he’d wanted to be a blacksmith and had pictured himself slaving in the mighty light from a smithy’s mouth. But this one wasn’t much bigger than a backyard barbecue grill. You could almost mistake it for one, except for its stovepipe and the hand-cranked blower attached to the side like an oversized schoolroom pencil sharpener. He’d had the forge for years, but hadn’t set it up until he’d come home, this last time, from the priests of reason. Working with steel had quickly become a pointless and happy obsession. He’d fashioned a simple knife and a couple of lopsided horseshoes, but for the most part he didn’t make anything, simply heated steel, pounded steel — affected, worked, and changed steel just for the small glory in it, sometimes burning up the pieces by blowing the fire too hot and watching the metal spray stars until it was gone. Products, forms—he couldn’t have cared less. This was the time of molten things. He’d entered a private and personal Iron Age, submerging himself in the elemental depths.

14 / Denis Johnson

The day was nearly gone by the time he headed out back to the shop, a dirt-floored gardener’s hut built by the people he’d bought his house from.

The fog was bad tonight. If he hadn’t known precisely where the shed stood he couldn’t have found it.

In the backyard Frankenstein held still a minute and listened to the faint yawping of the seals on Shipwreck Rock, a sound like that of numerous unlubricated things — pistons, pulleys, hinges — drifting up to him nearly two miles on the wind. Some of those sounds were in fact words. Some of the entities out there on that rock were not seals. And not the legendary wraiths of the drowned fishers howling without rescue these last eighty-seven years. Nor the lumberjacks, helpless on the stormy shore, who wept to hear them one midnight in 1903 while the fleet of seventeen barks went down, driven on a gale from Bodega Bay and ground up on these promontories with hardly a stick of kindling to show next day for all their lives and works. Actually, no, these entities belonged to him…

Carefully he listened. Not a word tonight. They were asleep in his veins.

As soon as he’d stepped inside his shop and turned on the light, Frankenstein felt his burdens lifting. At the forge he picked through yesterday’s ashes, throwing aside the gnarled clinkers, keeping the pieces that had burned down to coal-coke. He scraped a space over the ash-grate in the tiny hearth and poured onto it three handfuls of wood pellets and doused them with kerosene. But something heavy lay inside him…Where did the weary heart come from? He struck the match, set the pellets ablaze. He didn’t like having to start the fire again, that was the source of this small sadness. You get tired of these endless beginnings.

He and Van Ness should have broken off contact years ago. True enough, they were both alone, but in completely different ways, and they didn’t deserve each other. Van, you’re sort of a demon, he thought, scraping yesterday’s coal-coke back toward the center of the hearth and over the burning wood pellets, using a metal trowel. He heaped onto his fire a few scoops of wet coal from the bucket of soak water, and raked them into a ring around its center in order to cook the sulfur out of them slowly.

Yes, the object was to remove the clinkers and the sulfur because anything that does not burn terribly, producing great heat, just Already Dead / 15

worthlessly absorbs it. Only the steel must be allowed to take heat.

White heat…He stripped down to a pair of cutoff shorts and work boots and put on a pair of skiing goggles tinted amber, then cranked the blower mindlessly until the coal burned with a coppery brightness.

He was making a fireplace tool of some sort, he didn’t know what exactly, an improvised and probably useless fireplace tool. He jammed the end of a meterlong stretch of rebar into the fire’s sunny heart…The fire had a heart and a mouth and a song…he cranked the blower till the conflagration blazed white.

Frankenstein took the three-pound hammer from the wall, found the hand-sized area on the anvil that rang the clearest and gave the most bounce to the hammer’s head — the anvil’s “sweet spot.” Everything has two meanings, he thought, our simplest, smallest words branching off into the storms and whirlpools of sex, warfare, worship. Therefore the words do not work. He breathed shallow while the wet coal at the fire’s edges coked up, the sulfur cooking out of it and filling the shop with lung-stinging fumes. “Coked up”—the verbal thing there made him wonder if he wasn’t just doing this to be doing coke, if the part of him that literalized all words, the undeciphering, dreaming part of him, believed he was in here getting high. Several nights of sick dreaming had preceded his relapse. Various dreams but they all happened in the same place, a city he must have visited once and couldn’t remember anymore, depopulated now, vast and silent stadiums, motionless streets.

The man in the dream was no longer himself; it was some other fool, some other drugged maniac, and he, Frankenstein, watched the rest of it from a place beyond, like a moviegoer — a dreamgoer. He’d never before had a dream and failed to be in it.

Van Ness, now — Van had always showed a quality like that: a figure outside the scene, watching even himself. When he entered the frame, he was dangerous. No such thing as speculation for Van; all aimless bullshit had to be actualized.

As his therapist, a healer, a shaman, Yvonne had been dealing with the dream part of him. Yanking me in a Jungian way…She had the husk of me open — Jesus, it’s not beautiful now, the memory of it is nauseating, it’s obscene—

So, Van, you’re going to kill yourself. Good. Everybody’s agony twists in me, but yours hurts more than most. The only person whose 16 / Denis Johnson

suffering I don’t touch somewhere on the searing surface of it is Yvonne.

I thought it was because we were special, our connection blessed, banishing pain. But there was never any pain in her to start with. Her center’s a pinpoint, a microscopic star, burning without any life at Absolute Zero. She sucked it out of me, the stuff I get back by inhaling the fires of this forge — the heat. She took my heat. Traded it to the devil for some bauble.

An ache had coiled itself around his arm from wrist to shoulder. His perspiration dripped, hissing, onto the hot steel. What were these things in his hands? The anvil rang as he pounded the orange tip of the rein-forcing bar, the kind used in concrete construction, flattening it. What kind of fireplace tool was this? Maybe another knife. A sword. The anvil’s cries were feminine, operatic.

Was there somewhere another noise? he stilled himself, head hanging, the hammer dangling from his fist — the beating of mighty wings? The future tattering his walls with its beak. Something flared beyond this room, headlights, possibly, stroking the fog. Although many of these sparks and vibes signaled nothing, and most meant less and less as he evened out after those many days and nights spent flying in the talons of a wondrous beast, some sounds were real, some were seeds, blossom-ing into events.

This one, for instance, quickly placed: somebody from the barefoot welfare life was in his driveway. That toylike Volkswagen rattle. VW

vans from the sixties survived in this county inexplicably, like frail kites in an attic. The noise of the little engine stopped.

He stood at the door of his shop holding the hammer tightly in his right fist, reaching with his left hand to cut the overhead light.

A small voice cried Help! when the light went out.

“What do you want?” he asked loudly, and in the dark moved away from where he’d just let himself be heard.

“I can’t see — and so I want to see!” A woman — one with a foreign accent. “Please light your door for me or I can’t take one step or I’m going to fall.”

By the uncharted logic of his wars, anybody openly approaching had to be neutral, and he flipped the switch again.

“Thank you, yes!” Who was this turning up out of the foggy dark?

She came at him at a kind of diagonal, like a little dog. “I was just driving by,” she said, “and I saw you. I saw you glowing.” He recognized her now. The Iron Curtain chick — immigrant from Already Dead / 17

the tortured lands. Skinny, devoutly New Tribe — ethereal, yes. She had a beautiful face. She wore a white turban on her head.

Once or twice, but not lately, he’d dealt with her. The van she’d driven up in would be the Sheep Queen’s.

She looked a little wrecked, her mascara descending in streaks. Maybe she’d come from a party, left suddenly after a disastrous scene. Mussed and tearful. She was appealing like that. He wanted to participate in her fugitive chemistry.

“Oh my God,” she said, “you’re beautiful! Sweating, half naked, torn clothing!”

“Yeah? Maybe I should tear your clothes, too.” He hadn’t wanted anybody since Yvonne.

It was not unprecedented for women to walk up to him like this, right out of the void — his size and power, his rippling beauty. Van Ness had explained it years ago: they were drawn to him exactly as they were drawn to horses standing in the sun.

“It stinks inside here. This is a bad pollution,” she said, although she was smiling.

“It’s sulfur smoke.” He sensed no need for delay. “I think I’ll rinse off in the hot tub,” he said, and took off his shorts. He was wearing only his big work boots now, his Wolverines.

“There’s no fat,” she said. “Your physique is perfect.” Her clinical tone was a disappointment. “Why are you here?”

“I heard it’s no more Yvonne. You’re lonesome.” She took a step in his direction, and he thought he might as well lift her up and hold her against him so they were face-to-face.

“Are these silk?” he asked, fingering the waist of her baggy slacks.

Wagging her feet, she kicked off her thongs. “They’re silk from India,” she said, and kissed him very softly. Her second kiss was ardent, needy.

He tasted lemon and tequila.

“Yeah,” he said, “your name’s Melissa. I kind of remember us getting it on one time last winter, at the hot springs.”

“And now again!”

Melissa lived with the Sheep Queen close to the Garcia River and was known to be screwing Nelson Fairchild, an alcoholic pot-grower, very rich. She probably did drive by this house every day, back and forth from the sunken barnyard where the Sheep Queen kept her bleating ragged flock.

She clutched him tightly around the neck, hanging two feet above 18 / Denis Johnson

the dirt floor, onto which he tossed her Indian silk pantaloons after stripping them from her legs. He let her keep the white T-shirt and turban.

“Your light in here makes a dome in the fog. It’s soft.” She kissed him again. “I want to float inside.”

The Sheep Queen made a practice of rescuing these types and taking them in and looking after them until they died or went completely crazy. Well, he was going to jane this psychotic skinny waif. She probably had two dozen diseases but we’re none of us born to perfection.

In order to get hard he had to think of Yvonne. He pictured her naked in the lotus position. It was pornographic when she did that. Arousing not because it was obscene, but because he himself was obscene. He moved Melissa up and down on himself and right away she started, it seemed, to climax repeatedly. For his part he sensed with despair that he wouldn’t come, no matter how long they kept at it. But this activity made him happy, he could stand here all night and offer pleasure to this other human being, this creature of form and flesh crying like an anvil. Not, however, in this atmosphere. The forge’s draft had failed and the place was thick with sulfurous clouds and heat. His eyes burned with the fumes. Melissa was crying out but also coughing. She leaned back in his embrace. Tears ran down her cheeks. “We’re screwing in hell! We’re screwing in hell!” she screamed. But Frankenstein was thinking of Yvonne. Why didn’t she love him anymore? Why did he love her more than ever?

He carried Melissa outside into the dampness and dark. “I can breathe!” she said, and did so several times deeply. She put her face against his chest, and he felt her lick some sweat from his nipple. She offered her opinion: “It tastes like madness.” He put her down. She yipped when her feet touched the dewy lawn, and then she stood trembling in the yellow light from the shop’s doorway.

He stepped back inside for a second and brought her her pants all bunched up. “Matter of fact,” he said, “the hot tub isn’t functioning.”

“Oh? Does it have a hole?”

“I thought some enemies of mine were hiding inside it.”

“Oh, those crazy old enemies,” she said as she got on her pants, bending over and diminishing in the bit of light, looking like small ivory.

“What’s that accent? Where are you from?”

“I’m Austrian.”

Already Dead / 19

“Like Hitler.”

“Yes. And many great poets and philosophers.”

“Wittgenstein?”

“I don’t know their names.”

She put on her thongs, kissed him, and left right away. For that he was grateful.

Before dawn the fire in the forge had died, and Frank lay in his small bedroom sleepless, or worse, lay dreaming that he couldn’t sleep.

He listened carefully to the walls…Nothing. Tonight he had fashioned, from six pounds of rebar, a small flat three-ounce paperweight.

Two visitors in one day, each of them arguably more batshit than himself. The German, or whatever she was, was goofy. But he liked her, and maybe he’d see her again if he didn’t perish first of cocaine or Yvonne. As for Van Ness: just another ghost in another dream. And uglier than ever with his magnified eyes and that Kung Fu mustache like jungle vines. Frank felt sure that Van Ness had materialized here in the role of a demon — but not, thank goodness, one of mine, he thought. This time it’s somebody else who’s conjured him. I was fed up years ago, weary and sick of the power the world gives us to create entities like Van Ness.

His own demons whispered from behind the walls and underneath the floorboards. They had a special slyness, and their cowardice was devastating. Van Ness bore quite other markings. He might have been bodied forth out of some Eastern parable or Buddhist fairy tale, in particular one that Frank now recalled concerning a pilgrim and seeker in the North Country. Tired of his travels, this man sat one day in the shade of a tree in the heat of the afternoon to meditate on the changing emptiness of life. The air tasted good in his throat, but after a while he was thirsty, and he couldn’t drink the air. He wished he had a cool drink. Immediately a big urn full of fruit nectar appeared on the ground in front of him — because this tree he’d stopped to rest beneath happened to be the legendary Wishing Tree. He took a long, delicious drink, and then he felt his hunger and thought how good some food would taste.

Instantly, he had a plate of wheat cakes in his lap. He ate and drank his fill. What a great spot I’ve come to! he thought. It occurred to him this would be exactly the right place for a little home. And there it was, sunlight pouring

20 / Denis Johnson

down around it, a cottage made of white stones. Now, he thought, if only I had a wife…A completely beautiful woman strolled up, sat down beside him, and took his hands in both of hers. They made love and then nestled in the grass together, he with his head in her lap. As the man started to drift off to sleep he suddenly wondered with alarm if these wishes weren’t being granted, perhaps, by some sort of devil.

Sure enough, a terrifying devil, red as anger, huge and stinking of rot, appeared before him. And right in front of his wife and his gorgeous home, the monster tore him to pieces and ate him.

Already Dead / 21

August 8–10, 1990

My wife is a lovely woman, and we’ve built one of this area’s most beautiful homes.

It’s a new house, of true adobe brick, with redwood interiors, solar heating, a fireplace, two bedrooms, all on forty acres. Certainly no mansion but perfect for a childless couple providing they love each other. But we don’t.

Winona loves California. Winona loves her westward, golden dream.

And I love Melissa.

Melissa: your eyes: the gravities and winds across those skies…

I saw Melissa drifting up the rutted drive. Her music was sad. But as I saw her walking in her alien softness, squinting under the indelible blue sky, I vowed again as I had at my first glimpse of her that for this woman I would throw everything away. All of you: if you make it necessary, I will.

“How’d you get up from town?”

“By begging rides.”

22

“No. Melissa — you can’t do that. Someday somebody’s going to kidnap you.”

“And what will they do to me?”

“Things,” I said.

“The things you like to do.”

She was a nature’s child of the drug-demented sort, always living without power or running water and dressing from the rummage sales, but just for me she sometimes wore dark eye shadow and painted her lips a pale disheveled pink. Just for me she’d put on long blazing rags and fake jewels and high-heeled sandals and no panties and we’d whiz in my convertible to someplace up the coast where you could get a freezing margarita by the sea. We’d get smashed and kiss on the open wooden decks of these restaurants while the sun went down and the whole world blushed and trembled. Do you get it? Do you think I could do that with Winona? Thoughtful, muscular, artistic Winona? No — with her I stayed up through the first nights of our romance talking about Europe, and we said everything there was to say about Europe, where I’d never been. Later I did visit there, and it was a fantastic, an inspiring region. But I like Melissa even better than Europe.

Let me tell you about this girl. Her eyes are brown and wet. Her mouth twists from the effort of hiding her bad teeth when she smiles.

But when she’s drunk she laughs widely and her gold bridgework flashes. Bartenders like to lean forward to light her cigarettes and in the match-glow examine her as closely as a lover would. It’s all exactly there. The punished child in the stolen makeup. Eyes that are never going to look at anyone again. And then she leans back, receding into that wonderful posture, her left hand in her lap. Sometimes she wilts, and sits hunched over a drink drumming her fingers on the bar, and then she looks like a whore. She’s capable of sneering. A woman this vulnerable and perverse is usually taking time out from being tortured to death slowly by a man who looks exactly like her father. Things come to me in images. I see the image of a man strangling an orchid. Oh, flowers!

Up and down the Coast Highway you drift, orchids and azaleas, your petals smeared underfoot.

She was looking too hard at the busboy — blue-eyed, ponytailed, shirt open wide under his strong Adam’s apple. His music was Asian flute and hollow sticks knocked together. Ah, she probably knew Already Dead / 23

him. He’d had her, probably, on the wood table of his shack with orange crates full of garbage stinking by the windows, had her on the sand at Schooner Gulch in a chilly wind, he’d torn at her gooseflesh with his beautiful teeth.

“What’s the matter?” she asked me.

“Did you screw that guy? No”—I ran over her sudden, fearful laughter—“but you’re going to. Before your life is over you’ll have every last one.” The tequila was mixing badly, my brain glinted like a knife, I wanted to make a famous speech now, to tell her how much I hated her for being a woman, for being able to open up and receive, but all that came out was, “The whole world will be inside you, you’re like the ocean—”

And then I’m driving fast in the open, yellow Porsche, head clearing in the blasting atmosphere, searching my heart for apologetic words while beside me Melissa cries, “Burst apart, explode, fly, galactic, starburst, asunder!..”

For three generations my family has belonged to Northern California, living in the shadow of its ways — nature’s big moves, the colossal, twisted gestures of cypresses along the bluffs — bluffs, there’s something about that word that rings right, you can hear the grunts of God shoving these massive cliffs into place.

And to this natural grandness the best, the finest people are drawn, people just trying to touch life with awareness and kindness.

But it’s also a land of interminable rains, baffling droughts, and, in July and August, the thick, cloying fog banks. For twenty-one successive days they clung to the North Coast this summer, like…like the American Dream plowed up against the freezing sea. Now we mean to set up oil rigs out there and dig our dreams from under the ocean’s bed, our black, dripping dreams, so that we’ll remain at liberty to drive our dream-deals faster and faster along these tight roads. I myself drive not only the secondhand Porsche but also an open jeep with a high-speed rear end, both very fast. Or I did. Winona’s got the jeep now.

We do what we have to do in order to make it all come true. A few years back a man in our area paid a seedy character to kill his wife so that he could collect her insurance and live with his mistress. The supposed assassin, it turned out, was an undercover agent. The husband was charged with conspiracy and spent three years in prison.

24 / Denis Johnson

After a few months his mistress forgot him. During the third year his wife paid him several visits. They’re back together now.

Melissa’s been my mistress since October. She’s Austrian, this beautiful hippie. I believe she’s anorexic; she’s like a bird; when we make love I try to break her bones. I met her at the high school play last year.

It was a piece of shit, and I was embarrassed to see my wife, Winona, involved in it. Winona worked backstage. Melissa sat right under the lip of the stage, on the floor, with the smallest children. I watched her all night.

I want to lock eyes with Melissa, my passion, while casually destroying Winona — I want to drop Winona crumpled beside the plates of our feasting.

Winona’s music is the big, symphonic kind — maybe Vivaldi, The Four Seasons. Any one of them, or all four. She’s small, somewhat chunky, but on her it’s becoming. Her face we call cute, darling. She’s snuggly.

In the middle of a pasture on our property, Winona keeps a ramshackle studio where she makes her sculptures. Her works stand in the sunny pasture, in that coastal clarity made stunning by the ocean’s nearness, big wooden totems of a modernesque unintelligibility, also unpleasing iron shapes — crescents stuck to parallelograms, et cetera — eight, ten, a dozen feet tall. Winona’s strong. She cuts the wood with a big chainsaw and hefts the iron into position for the welding all by herself. Welding’s dangerous. High voltage. Even a simple mistake can fry you. I imagine coming home to find Winona standing there with her clothes burned off, a crisp black self-portrait among her other statues. I like to think about it. I imagine ways of making it happen.

And she views me the same way. She loves our forty acres. She’d do anything to keep it — increase it — divorce me? Without a blink. I think she’d shoot me. She’d trade her talent, what little there is of it, anyway, and probably her immortal soul.

Our land overlooks the distant Pacific, and below us, all the way to the ocean, stretches fifteen square miles of timber, mostly redwood.

That forest belongs to my father.

If you ask anybody in these parts, I’m sure they’ll tell you without hesitation that my father is an awful man, a terrible person, and they’re right, he’s done harm to anyone who ever befriended, needed, or trusted him, and if there’s anything wrong with me, then I serve as an example of the warpage worked, a map of the fissures Already Dead / 25

cracked open and shaped uncloseable, by a childhood spent loving such a person. Right — I know — the world has its horrors, mine among the privileged, American kind. But let my statement stand: I blame my father for myself.

Father, for his part, was messed up by Grandmother, an Italian woman of mountainous and steadily mounting stature, well over three hundred pounds by the time she died, with the resulting embarrassment of extra pallbearers at her funeral, a banshee from Palermo. She couldn’t stand being married off to a Welshman, the only British rancher around, one of the area’s first sheepers. Couldn’t stand being removed from the Sonoma wine country out here to the coast. She died when I was four and my brother Bill was seven; we share vivid memories of her, in our little eyes she was a nightmare of alpine blubberiness, and vaguely I recall our grandfather, her poor husband, an immigrant from Cardiff, who was dead at fifty-five — a bit earlier than she, but ten years her junior — his British steel battered down by her angers, griefs, and nights of wild religion. My father was the son of that tremendous coupling, and he served to convey its stresses perfectly — the Italian passions choked off in that stiff British neck. It made him mean. His eyes twinkled when he caused disappointment, when he sowed doubt, when he reaped scorn. Uneducated in the ways of domestic life himself, marooned on the shores of parenthood without any equipment, his manner of teaching us, my brother Bill and me, was to ask mysterious questions as a way of indicating we’d made some mistake or other: “Would you like to see that horse bloat up? and lie down? and turn over and die by morning?” Then we knew we’d erred in the feeding or some such, but he’d never tell us exactly how, not until we begged. “How far you think your brains would splash under a tree like that?”—would indicate un-safe behavior in felling timber; “Do you have an idea you’d like your leg broke?”—maybe we were waiting in the wrong spot while a load of logs went on the truck. But in that case where on this earth should I be, Father? Where do you want me, what should I do? Anything, but only tell me. I don’t know what you want! Speak! A child, I’m miserable admitting it, a child stands like a priest under his father’s sky. Why do you fate me to fail you?

“Burst apart, explode, fly, galactic, starburst, asunder!” Melissa liked to shout American words while we drove too fast in the 26 / Denis Johnson

Porsche, a creamy yellow 356 roadster, a third of a century old. But on the rare Coast straightaway it easily broke a hundred. I could get a word in only on the tightest curves, when the engine quieted.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. Then a brief straightaway. A Porsche is not a cream puff car. It’s angry, full of wrenching torque. A curve: “I know you wouldn’t screw that guy.” I meant the busboy I’d accused her of.

“Okay, you would, we both know it. But my job is to love you anyway.

That’s my task.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me. I’m going to show you how much it matters. Show you something I’ve never shown anyone.”

“I’m getting carsick again.” We’d entered a series of zigzag hairpins taking us down toward a creek that passed under the highway and out to sea.

I didn’t keep to the road, but turned off abruptly just before the culvert.

“Why are we turning here? It says no trespassing.”

“I’m checking things out.”

“Checking for trespassers? Is this your land?”

“Shut up, please. Watch for the plates.”

A pickup with a camper shell lowered itself down around the hairpin switchbacks, passed our position, and started climbing up the other side of the gulch. It kept to the highway. They hadn’t seen us turn.

Melissa said, “Plates?”

“The plates! The plates! The license plates! Were they Oregon? They were blue. Could have been California. How many in the car? I saw two. Did you see two?”

“I see someone bringing me a license on a plate. To eat!”

“Were there dogs in the back?”

“English is impossible!”

“Those men are following me. They’ve got dogs.”

“I didn’t see. Listen to me. English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.” She was crazy about words and figures of speech, the result of having had to learn a second tongue.

The skinny gulch the creek cut through made a little evening over us. The surf, out of sight, muted by two big hills, merely grunted and thumped. I was woozy with drink. Still I was frightened in a rubbery Already Dead / 27

way. I calmed myself by contemplating the water and thinking this Buddhist thought: that the river is everywhere at once, at each part of itself, although it gives the illusion of moving and we think of its journey as having a beginning and an end. Many of our most powerful dreams begin on an empty road, beside a river, which indicates the great depth of the dreaming.

Melissa snuggled close, awkwardly bridging the gearshift between our seats.

“Everything about you is extremely tiny,” I said, kissing her tiny nose, mouth, fingers. I tasted margarita salt.

“Who wants to follow you?”

“I could name a few.”

“Why?”

“Because my life is a mess.”

Melissa wore an old high-fashion ladies’ hat, a kind of white turban thing that kept her hair from whipping at her eyes and protected her beautiful ears from the chilly wind. When we drove with the top down she always bundled herself up in a fluffy white terrycloth robe I kept for her behind the seats. In this coast-cruising outfit she looked not quite recuperated from brain surgery. I kissed her some more, dreaming that my miracles would heal her.

Her eyes were sideways and wide open, looking at my watch. “What is the time, please?”

“It’s four-forty in the afternoon.”

“We’re drunk before supper again. It’s marvelous! I’ll be asleep at eight. I’ll wake up at three this morning and walk out naked into the stars.”

“When was the last time you saw the stars at the Sheep Queen’s?

There’s always that mist off the Garcia,” I said, starting the car.

Maybe they had been following me. People were, they truly were.

Anyway, now I was following them. And I would let them get away.

If you drive back inland along almost any of the hill roads, as I did along Shipwreck Road three times a week, you pass out of the fog into a dusty silence filled with tall second-growth redwoods. They make a windbreak for the crumbling old ranches, and they stand over the abandoned lumber camps that brought down their mothers and fathers, the original giants, and they shade and hide the twisted dregs of the old communes — once the best, the finest people, lured here by the piping of a lovely song and then held by drugs or religion, iso-28 / Denis Johnson

lated minds bending around tightly to feed on themselves.

Those ghostly hippies, do you think I feel sorry for them? No. They came here and did what they dreamed of. The lovely song becomes a shape, and strides forth.

Melissa and I came into the town of Point Arena on the particular day I’m thinking of, and I turned off the Coast Highway and climbed into the hills.

I’m thinking about the day I took her to see my marijuana garden, an indiscretion that added to my fears a thousandfold.

I took us far back on Shipwreck Road, miles past where the pavement ended, the Porsche sliding on the gravel curves, hauling a small hurricane of dust. Our tongues tasted of dirt, but back away from the sea the day was far too hot to put the top up. Melissa closed her eyes and left her face empty and hard, stroked by feathery shadows.

When we parked, the trees, which had seemed to be rushing to this place alongside of us, stopped immensely. I cut the motor: the silence played one true, clear note. Beside me Melissa opened her eyes.

From this ridge we looked down into a canyon a quarter mile deep and half a mile across, and saw the peaks beyond Napa Valley, a hundred miles away.

“Do you know where we are?” I said.

“It’s quiet. I feel like we’ve driven to under the ocean.”

“This is where I grow my pot.”

I was trusting her with a great secret, but she was just drunk.

That’s what touched me so electrically, so sadly: she didn’t partake of our dramas. Really, I never saw her more clearly portrayed than in the light of my first glimpse of her at the local high school play: sitting on the floor, in the shadows, up front with the smallest children, while an arm’s length away frightened adolescents strutted the stage and shouted dialogue.

Is that why I went wild over her? Because once I saw her truly? Is devotion as simple as that?

I left her and climbed down off the ridge. First I walked. I stumbled as the canyonside steepened. I sat down and slid on my butt. I stopped now and then, just to make the climb last. Far below me the slope gentled and vegetation flooded the bottom of the world, Already Dead / 29

mostly evergreen on the shady south, and, on the north side, oak and the relatives of oak, their shadows pasted on the platinum grasses. Here and there the blighted chinkapins were resurrecting themselves in this season, dead at the tops from some previous devastation, but living up out of their tragedies somewhat on the order of certain majestic, crippled alcoholic women. And the assembled redwoods, really just youngsters, less than a century old, but already a hundred feet tall, drinking in everything audible, giving none of it back…I felt about these trees that in their mindful silence they were inventing a new, an unexampled bliss, to which I’d be admitted when I shed my scruples.

At the moments most precarious for my sanity I’m lost somewhere on these back roads, teetering on these cliffs, witnessing this grandness and longing to match it with the grandest gestures, acts equally solitary and monstrous, things I can never confess. Is it possible for you to understand? — to imagine? — coming around a curve onto a cliff and looking over the dry evergreens and silent dusty arroyos as far as your eye will go, and seeing a stream that cuts through the bottom of the chasm so far below that you can’t hear it, and finding five black buzzards who stand, trembling, in the middle of the air? The wildness of this terrain creates and explains me as much as anything I’ve inherited or been taught. The shape of this land affords brash designs — no, demands extravagant pretensions. I’ve visited cathedrals in Milan, also Sicily, filled with this same sacredness and yet this same cosmic dementia: very dramatic, very biblical, very strange.

By now I’d come down a hundred fifty feet from the roadside above.

The canyon’s face curved south here for a space before hooking back north. The exposure was southern, hot and windless, but the route to the garden led into and out of a cool, shady draw made damp by a rivulet trickling through it. Here we kept our spring box, a hundred-gallon cedar vat that filled with water and dribbled it out through a thin black plastic irrigation line.

I made my way across the slippery draw, braking my downward slide now by grabbing at the fat, comical leaves of bloomless rhododendrons, following the black line around the draw’s western edge out of the shade, and then along a row of twenty-seven marijuana plants that grew on a wide ledge — tall, lush, expensive bushes, pungent in the summer sun. They got hot light fourteen hours a day this time of year.

The energizing principle of pot cultivation is ecstasy: the 30 / Denis Johnson

object is to get the flowering tips of the female plant to produce as much as possible of the intoxicating drug tetrahydrocannabinol. The plants’

sticky resin contains the drug, and the leaves and flowers exude the resin as protection from the rays of the sun. To keep a garden you need water, hot sun, dry air. Beyond that you need only female plants of a hardy, exotic stock, which will be harvested just before they go to seed.

And you need a garden spot that’s not only exposed to plenty of sun, but also protected, in our Fascist era, from aerial observation. This canyon presented certain hazards to helicopter flight, downdrafts and updrafts, that made it hard to get close. Three years running we’d harvested our plants without trouble from the authorities, an astonishing record of success.

These days it’s likely your plants will be found. Half-trained yokels, cowboys with Uzi machine guns, hired with state money, will likely jump out of hovering choppers and rip up your crop. Unless you’re standing right there at the time, they can’t arrest you; certainly the state can’t prosecute with any expectation of winning. But still they take the plants, and they can hope the faceless grower goes broke. If you’ve dared to garden in your own soil, the revenue people, federal and state, will treat it as an undeclared cash crop, tax and penalize and hound you, eventually confiscate your property. Our plot grew at the edge of a full section, one square mile, owned by a man named Wyeth who’d been dead for years. His family hadn’t gotten around to doing anything with the land. It borders an area of vast timber holdings. A survey some years ago cut a few yards off Wyeth’s section, and he lost his spring to the Georgia Pacific Lumber Company, at least on the map. But the lines of ownership don’t move back and forth quite that easily, and our garden grew in a legal blur.

I checked our plants. The water line was functioning. The ground at their feet was wet. They opened their leafy arms, as a grade-school rhyme once had it, to pray. Not twenty feet distant, buzzards balanced in the thermal currents. Nothing to it, step outward in faith and tread the air.

In my dreams of flying, the power of flight emanates from my heart.

I had many such dreams last year, while touring Italy. Even when awake, I felt much lighter than that world over there — Europe is ancient, the culture has tremendous mass. Milan: greatness and sunlight and the wild eyebrows of the citizenry…I was travelling with Winona; important to remember this now, with Melissa hover-Already Dead / 31

ing like an angel above me on the ridge, out of sight…Winona and I walked into the massive duomo there, a church as tall as a modern skyscraper but centuries old and only a single vaulting story within.

Inside it I felt smaller than ever, farther than ever from heaven. The upper reaches lost themselves in a haze of incense. Looking up I relin-quished my lightness, was suddenly plunging, drowning with the iron freight of desires, frustrations, selfish hopes. Oh, holy atmosphere, marbled with sweet smoke: with how much yearning are we gifted?

Of how much capable? The church’s dome was as deep as a California canyon. These buzzards hanging in the air, one wingbeat beyond the lip of Signal Ridge, would have been at home there; in fact I believe I felt their presence or that of something like them, sensed observant birds of prey balanced high up in the gigantic dimness.

The faith is gone from those places, the heart-power of flight, this I believe. But come to California. Come to these canyons if you want to be driven by sacredness into the air. If you dream of the true, clear silences, if you want those silences to sing — come to California.

I didn’t get out to the garden often, but my growing-partner, Clarence, was down in Los Angeles that month, if I remember right, robbing poker games or attending a transvestite wedding, nothing, certainly, that wasn’t completely unholy. During his absence I looked in on our investment every two or three days, making sure the water flowed. Right now I stood on the cliff with my head poking up from our little jungle. I trimmed the plants, putting their dead leaves in my shirt pocket. Stroked the jagged fingers of their little hands. The upper leaves felt not just sticky but slaked with a substance entirely other, not earthly, not mine, as if my mother would snatch at my hand now saying,

“Don’t touch that!” Almost all twenty-seven were doing nicely, all but one. Transplanting sprouts in the spring, nervous about it because we hadn’t been to this place for months and it had seemed foreign and dangerous, fated, even, I’d jayed the roots of this one, bent them upward; it had never recovered. I yanked it, and now we had twenty-six. Each one of these things might be worth seven thousand dollars or more.

My partner, Clarence, is a surfer. He does everything with a vacant look. Between harvest and planting, after he’s sold the dope in L.A., he travels all over the Western Hemisphere, walking the waves of the 32 / Denis Johnson

world with a big foot of fiberglass. He glides in toward the beaches of Nicaragua, of El Salvador, without a clue. The Left, the Right, class struggle, agrarian revolt — Clarence just wants to feel the softness of the sand. When he comes back from these winter trips Clarence looks un-characteristically alive, so darkly tanned that his eyes seem to glow in his face with the mania of sainthood.

Clarence is a dozen years older than the local surfers, but out of perverseness he speaks the surfers’ dialect. “I could heard that, dude,” he says, and other such unsearchable stuff.

Usually, according to our arrangement, Clarence is the one to stay near the plants. I supervise things, I will take care of any legal problems, I make the contacts for sale down south, I handle all the money; and I can be trusted because if I let him down, if I rip him off, he’ll hurt me.

Clarence was a gunner’s mate in the U.S. Navy and somehow managed to see ground combat in Lebanon. He actually killed people up close, and got medals for it.

At the time I’m thinking of I often wished I could hire him to get rid of my former friend Harry Lally. Terminate, assassinate the guy. But that was a plan with too many indicators pointing back to me.

For Winona I dreamed of a job-related mishap. She used a chainsaw after all. It wasn’t a plan so much as a vision, a guilty one, but one that I enjoyed, that thrilled me as much as fantasies of pirate ships and Peter Pan had thrilled me as a child: Winona lying beside a patch of shiny red grass with something, an arm or an ankle, unfortunately detached.

Tough luck! — but now my life is cured. Melissa and I hide from our consciences awhile, pouring insurance money — half a million on Winona’s life, just as on mine — down our gullets and into the tanks of my fast cars, and then we live out our days on my splendid property, growing pot in these hills and waiting to inherit my father’s timber.

Half a million! In this fantasy I don’t have to kill Harry Lally. I just scrape a hundred thousand off my stack and he goes away happy.

Harry Lally wants money from me and would certainly hire people to get it. I believe in fact that they’re already in his employ and closing fast, two of them, two ugly men who claim to be loggers from Del Norte County and have asked about me, by name, in Jay Haymaker’s hardware store, two slow, muscular, flannel-encrusted mountain men. Here to hunt the wild pig, they explain — that’s why they travel with an arsenal and three dogs. They claim to be old

Already Dead / 33

friends of mine. They’d like, they say, chuckling in the hardware store beside Jay Haymaker’s antique daguerreotype of five gunslingers hanging dead from the rafters of a barn (underneath his sign reading OUR CREDIT POLICY), to take me up into the hills with them. I don’t want to go!

I inhaled the sharp green stench of the shoot I’d plucked. The crop was quality. If everything continued like this, Clarence and I would soon be rich. The hills before me loped inland to where Italian families still grow grapes and crush out wine. I could see, all the way from here, the vapors of life swirling over the Sonoma vineyards where my grandmother had been raised. A place very much like the Sicilian hills overlooking Palermo, and the inland wine country of her father’s birth.

I took Harry Lally’s money to Palermo. Gave it to a solemn Italian attorney wearing heavy black spectacles and beset by a general heavi-ness, which I took to be the great weight of his personal wealth; and as I added to his riches by about a hundred thousand of Harry Lally’s dollars, this attorney gave me a satchel with four kilos of cocaine inside it. Then we had prosciutto ham with honeydew melon, spaghetti, sturgeon, and coffee, which we served ourselves from large metal urns with spigots as in any Tenderloin cafeteria, and hot milk from similar urns. I stuffed myself. All was well, we were devouring this lunch downstairs at the Palme Grande, where Winona and I had taken rooms and in whose mezzanine the Mafia had slaughtered several of each other a few years before, toppling corpses down the wide sweeping staircase. I sensed the mighty stones of a traditional lawlessness, ancient, impenetrable, walling me safely in.

But two days later, at the airport in Rome, I sensed no such thing. I felt empty, I felt alone, and I chickened out. No airport guard, no travel clerk, no janitor, waitress, or ticket-taker seemed incidentally placed.

They were all after me, scratching at their guns. All right! Shoot! Shoot!

But for God’s sake don’t embarrass me in front of my wife, don’t expose me, don’t chisel open the crust I’ve built around myself and air the filth, the nauseating truth, beneath. Winona didn’t tumble. Never had a clue, didn’t turn and say, as in her favorite films, Hitchcock — I don’t like them, everybody’s too happy and ordinary, James Stewart, Cary Grant, I only like Notorious, and then only until we find out Ingrid Bergman isn’t really bad — say, “Darling, you’re trembling, what’s the matter?” as my liver went sinking down through the mush of me.

34 / Denis Johnson

You can’t get rid of an anonymous package in a European airport.

The bomb squad won’t have it. They treat any such object as a disaster until it’s proven innocent. Even the trash cans won’t accommodate anything bigger than a wad of Kleenex. I had to sit on the toilet for half an hour, ripping open forty plastic packets, dissolving and flushing a fortune in cocaine.

As soon as I stepped onto American soil and cleared Customs I couldn’t understand, or even recall the force of, my vertigo in the Roman airport. I turned up in Harry Lally’s living room baffled, empty-handed except for the Sicilian attorney’s Japanese-made satchel, the lining of which I’d ruined by washing it out with toilet water. My failure stretched the fibers of our friendship. Okay, I don’t need to be flip: I can admit that first by my avarice, and then by a compounding cowardice, I earned myself a mortal enemy. And now I’m in a war.

And now the two hunters, and their dogs — clearly part of Harry Lally’s program for extracting reimbursement. He wants his cash. I don’t have cash. These men have been sent to get all I have that’s quickly convertible to cash — these twenty-six plants.

And I would say: take them! Take my watch, my rings, my fishing gear, my shoes and socks! But the plants aren’t mine. They belong equally to Clarence, the decorated killer.

I sat on a hump of earth and cradled the withered slip, moping and shrigging this deadborn of its fronds and looking out over the canyon.

At sunset the redwoods take on a coppery light. The leaves of the chinkapins are extinguished. The bigness of evening walks up the western slopes shivering, trailing a cool damp smell. Dusk comes earliest to these canyons, right out of the fissures in the earth. Shapes fade. The tide of the realm of dreams steals higher and higher up into my life. The wetness of nightmares this far inland…What a jerk! Feeling cornered, strangled, in the midst of this great peace! Only the greediest simpleton could have served himself this mess.

Now I’m terrified to hear the rasp, rising and dying, of tires on the gravel above. I’ve been an idiot. Anybody from around here knows the yellow Porsche. They all suspect I have a garden. Clarence would destroy me if I ever signaled, to use his demented combat parlance, his military phrasing, our position. Could be Harry Lally’s boys. Yes, “Harry Lally’s boys”—my life now spoken out of the side of the mouth in a gangster drawl.

Already Dead / 35

The dust of a vehicle showed around to the north, where Shipwreck Road switched back. They’d passed on.

“Melissa!” I screamed.

I was always afraid she’d vanish when my back was turned, off in some strange, fast car to a new affair.

Her voice drifted down from above me. “I don’t want to smoke any of your drugs because I’m already completely, wonderfully drunk!” I climbed up slowly, clinging to the occasional manzanita root, trying not to leave a trail of torn vegetation. When I stopped to rest, blotting the dusty sweat from my face with a bandanna, I heard her singing something in German, a folk song, maybe a fairy tale, something from very far away, where she lived always.

“Who was in that car? Who was in that car?” I cried breathlessly as I climbed up over the rim of the draw.

And there she was, my love: Melissa, sideways in the open door of the convertible, skirt blown up over her wan, destructible legs so that I wanted to weep. Everything. If these idiots force me I will trade it all for this woman.

“Look at me,” I ordered her.

She stared at me with a question, a smile, and a sweetness in the hesitation of her eyes.

“Don’t you see I’m going crazy?”

Nights are cold but we drive with the top down for the oxygen.

The cypresses on the cliffs high over the sea, dragged sideways by the wind over centuries into permanent blurs, whizzes, smears, seem to be part of a comic strip as we, drunk and dangerous, scream past in the heartstopping blue twilight. Offshore, the small lights of fishing-boats float in the dark: if you let them they’ll start symbolizing everything. I slow way down to light the reefer I’ve rolled, sucking in the smoke along with the damp clean ocean air. Melissa shakes her head. I jam the pedal.

Making love to Melissa is a dangerous blessing. It’s almost all I ever want to do. But when we’ve been on a party like today’s we generally forget to sleep together. I just drive her back to Acorn Road, to the woolly barnyard where she lives in her shocking trailer, and let it go at that. Anyway you won’t too often catch me entering that little home of hers. She takes in stray cats, the place is just a litter box.

She’s organic. I described her as drug-demented, but she eats only 36 / Denis Johnson

untreated vegetables and gets high only on natural herbs and plants, which include most wines and certain very expensive brands of scotch whiskey and tequila; sometimes also marijuana, when it’s baked into pastries — she refuses to take smoke into her lungs. She says she once had cancer of the liver but cured it with her mind.

I took her to the bottom of Acorn Road. The river mist met us less than halfway down. Not visible, but everywhere. “Good night, I’m going to sleep in my clothes,” she said, “and I hope I dream I’m not drunk,” and didn’t even kiss me.

When she’d gone into the trailer, one of the rounded, aluminum ones, a Silver Stream, I laid my head, which was suddenly full of sorrows, against the steering wheel. The night wind stirred through the treetops on the ridges. The distant commotion got the sheep bleating — a word that just doesn’t invoke the aged, human grief in their voices. Across the drive the owner of this property — the Sheep Queen, a Mediter-ranean-looking woman in her fifties, a nice enough person, but perfectly crazy — sat eating dinner in the kitchen of her ranch-style home, feeding bites from her plate to a big dog that loomed over her, standing up, as it were, with its forepaws on the table.

It’s sad to love a woman who won’t love back — it tears at a man — to love a woman who gives herself to others and uses his good intentions and sets his meaning aside. But I have a feeling that this stupid torment is the nearest thing going, for me, to what life is all about. I don’t just sense it dimly. The feeling is overpowering that this is the closest I can get to the truth behind the cloud.

Dreaming of one woman, I drive home to another.

Actually Winona wasn’t here lately. The ranch lay dark, the oaks like cut-outs against the smeary stars.

And actually Winona lived here alone. We’d been separated many months, beginning just a few weeks after the house was finished. But as Winona didn’t have a lover, at least nobody anybody knew of, I wasn’t in the way, I came and went, and in her absence I tended the stables, though I rarely crossed her threshold and this would be the first night I’d slept here all summer. She’d been travelling lately up and down the coast, visiting people she didn’t, in my opinion, actually know well enough to be visiting. On some kind of pilgrimage: Going Through Changes we call it in our region, where the Haight-Ashbury dialect flourishes unevolved.

Already Dead / 37

I parked the Porsche out of sight in the stables because I expected, sooner or later, a visit from Harry Lally’s boys. I hadn’t set foot in my own apartment since I’d heard they were in town. Eventually they’d locate me here. But I’d see them a mile off and be down the hill, walking into the forest — my father’s forest, where my brother lives — long before they reached the house. They’d never know for sure that I’d even been here, unless they searched through all the outbuildings and found the car.

I come and go, but this is decidedly not my home anymore. None of my stuff is here. In the bedroom Winona sleeps in a single bed now.

My office, a shed out by the barn, has been put to a better use, she says.

As a matter of fact spiders live in it.

There was a note from her, three weeks old, run through a nail on the house’s front door. Red’s got worms — feed store has the stuff — give him a full syringe—and I tore it off and put it to my lips and inhaled, trying to catch a whiff of the woman I’d married. A woman I’d loved then.

But that woman was gone. A man told me — this in the Gualala Hotel bar one night — that if I were only older, I’d have seen by now that people pass through ages, and I’d have learned that when they’ve changed and been lost, you find them again somewhere in the next age.

But later that night this same man got mean under the liquor and had to be restrained. He lunged at me, raving — the meaty arms of salmon-mongers and the greasy hands of big-rig operators yanking him back.

Eyes fixed, he gave meaning to that old phrase in his truly psychotic, really animal state. His eyeballs scorched and chilled me across space.

He raised blisters and goose bumps, even through the window, as I stomped off the hotel’s wooden porch into the dark. So much for the wisdom of our counselors. That madman wasn’t going to help me find Winona, not in her current age or any other. Don’t ask me who this woman is, walking around in my wife’s body with a decisive air.

I woke up in the bed I didn’t belong in, woke up smelling my wife, but it wasn’t the same smell I remembered. I stood by the railing upstairs and marked how much the place had changed since the last time I’d spent a night here. My hands shook this morning. I’d slept in my clothes.

My foreignness overwhelmed me. Only the thought of leaving right away held any cheer. I decided to take Winona’s old pickup and get coffee in town.

38 / Denis Johnson

The ridge road parallels the coast for dozens of miles, wagging down into draws and crossing creeks and climbing out again. This isn’t the Coast Highway, but a much narrower route, better suited to my kind of car and my kind of driving, but not so well to Winona’s looming Dodge. No shoulder, the trees crowd right against it. Ordinary, happy people live along here in nice houses you can’t see from the road. Often they report me for speeding past. I sense them back in those woods tending to their animals and their gardens. For them the darker alleys of thought have been clearly marked at the entrances. Everything’s fine, maybe a little guano has to be cleaned from the left boot, something dropped by one of their innumerable geese. Sun-shot California mist in the morning. A stirring of wind chimes, their cats rolling on their sides and stretching in the ripe greenness while New Age Muzak, what I call Electronic Obvious, sprinkles down over everything. My good neighbors. When I hear my good neighbors at the drugstore talking about pamphlets from the Government Printing Office, pamphlets about horticulture, free pamphlets — I want to kill them. I suppose we all feel that way sometimes. We all who? Ah, we who probably should be hunted down and jailed I suppose.

But today no chats in the pharmacy. Today I stop at the feed store for one bale each of oat hay and alfalfa. Since she was a child my wife Winona has kept a red horse named Red. Red is more than twenty-five years old now. He does nothing but conjugate hay and consult with the large-animal vet about his stomach ailments. And hadn’t there been a note? Something about medicine? In my shirt pocket I found it: Red had worms.

I ran into one of Winona’s friends. “Hel- lo.” It was Yvonne.

“Yvonne! Hi! I’m getting some stuff,” I said, talking more than I wanted, as I always do to people I don’t like.

“Nelson, how are you?”

“Fine! Great! Getting some birdseed?” I said for no reason at all.

She held up a small cardboard box. “These are white rats.” In our part of the world people may do, say, or become whatever they feel like without apologizing. And tomorrow its opposite.

“White ones, are they?”

“I haven’t seen you since you and Winona split up. How is that working for you?”

“Working?”

Already Dead / 39

“How is that working for you?”

“How is the breakdown proceeding? How is the malfunction functioning? Briefly, I’m confused and sad and pissed off.”

“The restructuring of the relationship,” she said, not without humor.

She reached out and squeezed my hand. Imagining herself some kind of healer probably.

“Well, see you.”

“See you.”

I went inside without looking back.

“Yvonne bought two rats,” the lady behind the counter told me.

“Why do you sell rats?”

“She buys small animals but never buys cages. Does she let them go?”

“Who knows. Who cares?”

“Some people feed hamsters and things to snakes.”

“And is that why you have hamsters and things at a feed store?”

“Well, I don’t know. It’s not my store.”

“It’s not my store either.”

“Didn’t I see you selling fruit the other day?”

“Anything’s possible.”

“You were drunk, and you were selling fruit.”

“I was just helping the guy out. We got to talking and I — you know.”

“I always get my fruit at the fruit stand. It’s better than the store.

Cheaper.”

“I don’t want to talk about fruit, actually.” Or anything else with you, Feed Store Lady. I’d known her for years — long red hair and glazed blue eyes, possessor of a marshmallowy intellect. Chipper, coping, as in the early stages of some unbelievable catastrophe. She’d emigrated from Los Angeles so long ago that by now she’d be an imbecile in its streets. She barely managed among a few bales of hay. “I need wormer,” I told her.

“Oh,” she said sympathetically, “Red’s sick?” Sick? The animal’s been teetering at the grave’s edge for years. His mistress gives him enemas regularly, cooing. His master’s in the feed store with the staggers and jags, standing before you as the fibers of his reality tear loose. “The wormer’s for me,” I said. She laughed. We in California show anger and pleasure the same way, by a little 40 / Denis Johnson

California laugh. You need an ear for the difference. And things aren’t

“good,” and things are never “bad”—no, in this lush eternity by the sea we measure our moments by two other words. Everything on the spectrum of undesirability, from minor annoyance to universal tragedy, is okay. Anything better to any degree, all the way up to a colossal lottery jackpot or the return of Jesus — that’s neat.

“This’ll get those critters,” she said, handing me Red’s medicine in a little white sack. “Can you get the hay on board yourself?”

“You bet.” Another most useful rural California phrase.

Outside I saw the two strangers who’d been looking for me, probably to kill me, and that was okay. Then they passed by in their big camper.

They headed south, they didn’t find me, not this time. And that was neat.

Not a half hour later I was having a sort of breakfast five miles north, in Anchor Bay. It wasn’t that pleasant. Too much cinnamon in the apple pie, and now the cook had spilled chemical cleanser on the griddle and we were all asphyxiating swiftly here in the Full Sails Cafe.

The patrolman from Point Arena, a new man to our part of the coast, had already been making me nervous, sitting in full uniform at the counter and spying on the restaurant’s gangly brunette waitress, looking bored and hopeful of making an arrest. “I really would like to get a date with you,” he told the waitress.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Go to the movies or something.”

“You mean the movies in Point Arena?”

“Or the submarine races.”

“I’ve heard of them,” she said.

“We could rent a video.”

“I don’t mind videos.”

“How about nasty ones?”

She didn’t say anything.

“You want to rent a nasty video?”

“Okay,” she said.

“Do you like cops? Do you like uniforms?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Yeah. Most of the time.”

“I’ll get a show about a cop.”

“You don’t waste too many words, do you?”

Already Dead / 41

“Maybe I’ll just skip the video completely.”

“There goes our entertainment.”

“Maybe we could rehearse our own video, and I could play the cop.”

“Well,” she said, “you have the uniform, obviously.”

“Maybe I could be the hero, sort of.”

“Then who would be the criminal?”

“Well, I could be the criminal too.”

“I guess you’d have to be.”

“A rapist.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Right then I lost interest in their talk because the two hunters turned up outside. They pulled their rig in next to Winona’s, and one of them went into the Anchor Bay store. They’d come here by coincidence, couldn’t have known Winona’s old pickup by sight, but I died. Their truck was a long-bed Chevy Silverado.

I paid up as quickly as I could, and on the way out I said hello to the cop, whose name was, I thought, Navarone. He nodded. “What time do you have there?” I said, just to be seen talking with him.

“Ten-fifteen,” he said. “Why? There’s a clock on the wall.”

“Oh, that clock,” I said.

Naturally I’d seen him around. He was a big-city boy who just didn’t get it and was stepping on everybody’s feet up here, enforcing the petty ordinances but failing to track down loose livestock.

I caught the two hunters outside as the driver fired up their stupid Silverado. I could hear the dogs scratching and yelping in the camper shell. The passenger had just gotten back in the car with his purchase.

I shouted: “You men!” I pointed toward the cafe. “I’ve made you known to the police!”

There wasn’t much to see of them, except that both seemed big and strong and neither wore a cap. Hunters, it seemed to me, should be wearing bright red caps so as not to be shot by their friends.

They pulled away carefully, hardly glancing back at me.

For a minute I wondered if I hadn’t made a completely silly mistake.

I stood there feeling embarrassed and thinking, Who is anyone, excuse me but who are we all supposed to be? and looking back in through the cafe’s big window.

And I suddenly experienced the gladness of seeing people walled 42 / Denis Johnson

off behind glass: the cop and the waitress, now without voices…each heart quivering in its gossamer of falsehood. His swagger was sorrowful.

He had a look of dawning pain, as if he’d just finished telling a story that trailed away with the words, “I was happy then…” I drove back to Winona’s with the tottering hay bales, also the horse goop, making sure I wasn’t followed by anybody who could murder me. If anybody wanted to. Wild pig, wild pig — maybe they only wanted game pork after all. Of course they hadn’t done anything sinister except lie about knowing me. But when you think about it, that’s sinister enough.

Gualala had been covered in clouds, but the ridge was clear, the house burned whitely in the sunshine. I hadn’t finished my breakfast. The sight of those two had sent me scurrying here. I sat out on the deck behind the house — hidden from anybody coming up the drive — with a liter of wine and a skinny cigarette rolled out of last season’s sinsemilla.

From the height of this ridge I looked this morning down on the cloud bank. I saw nothing of the sea, only this fluffy oblivion under the blue sky. To the westward no land, no peaks, nothing higher than my property. I might have been standing seven miles above everything.

Actually the elevation is about 2,200 feet. Higher ridges lie to the east of us. We’re six miles back from the ocean.

I deeply enjoy spending time here alone, looking out over the Northern California morning, drinking Northern California zinfandel and blowing on a Northern California reefer. To my left I see our pond, nearly three acres of blue-green water, and below me the fuzzy sea of my father’s treetops, all that timber, and all the land it stands on, going down into the clouds. To the right, to the north, glimmers a tiny orange dome: the temple of a Tibetan Buddhist monastery far up in the hills.

On the highest ridge east of here you can see two brilliant white structures, quite similar in shape to the Tibetan one and even, when you think of it, related to it in the tilt, so to speak, of their thrust: a U.S. Air Force radar station, stroking the aether with receptors.

I used to sit out here while my wife talked to me, with my mind five miles out to sea.

Winona became hateful shortly after beginning a friendship with Yvonne. Her “cute” quality took on a piggish cast. By a subtle slanting her cuteness became oinky. She didn’t gain weight. But her Already Dead / 43

vision became near and small and the space between her eyes narrowed in self-absorption. She added to her vocabulary a contemptuous snorting sound and used it on me ceaselessly, claiming she wasn’t aware of it.

Her pal Yvonne is very New Age. Into channeling, crystals, wycca, et cetera. She holds “sessions”: seances, basically, in which she claims to be inhabited by various nonmaterial entities ready to solve petty ro-mantic problems and answer worries about the future. Channeling is just the new Ouija board, but the people involved are grown-ups, and usually money changes hands. Basically Yvonne’s a professional sor-ceress. Flat green, jail-green eyes. Flaring nostrils. To me she looks like a witch, but not because of a warty beak — in fact she has a lovely face altogether. Yet when I think of her face, what comes to mind is something quite different, unappealing, maybe even disturbing. The Slavic cheekbones, broad nose, flared nostrils look, in my memory, like those I saw on gargoyles on Italian churches. In Palermo, for instance, where my life’s dark night fell. Her face and theirs blur together, gazing down on my most stupid moves. Sure, Yvonne’s probably harmless. But I hate her. I’ve got her mixed up in my mind with bad things.

I sit out here and think convulsively until I’m numbed by dope and confused by my own brain — think about my business woes, my wife, my mistress, my region and my region’s demands and allowances. My idiot brother. My ugly father. Free will? Personal decisions? It’s not that simple, not at all. What am I but the knot, the gnarled dark intersection, of all these strands? They keep me from acting, and they tug at me to act. Stand fast, and I’ll be torn. But if I want to move, then all of these things must break, they all have to be ripped apart, and that’s the end of me just as much as the end of them.

What if there were such people as Yvonne pretends to be, sons and daughters of men trafficking with mysterious powers, ready to fix things backstage, in the darkness behind the scenes? The witches who ended up with Carla Frizelli’s crucifix — I’d like to talk to them. Milt Sharkey claimed witches stole it, this token from the Coast Silky’s claws. You know the silky, a creature of fancy with a divided life, like a were-man or werewolf, but of an aquatic order: a seal in the ocean who takes the form of a man and crawls ashore by night, dripping and ashamed and bent to the corruption of the unaccursed.

The Coast Silky is said to have been an actual man, one of the 44 / Denis Johnson

sailors from the seventeen boats that went to pieces in the storm of 1903, only this man didn’t drown like the others. The strife of waves carried him far out past Shipwreck Rock, where he clung to some logging flotsam, slowly freezing until he bumped against a big bull seal and with his skinning knife opened it from jaw to crotch and clothed himself in its bloody warmth, and in the next night’s darkness washed to shore still alive; and thereafter hunted and wore the seals and believed himself one of them. Sometimes he’d shake off the psychosis, traipse the dark fog in his fisher’s rags seeking some way back into the company of humans, some place to begin again. Many times he was witnessed by loggers and trappers, seen weeping in the light from a camp-cabin window. As the story has it, he befriended a young girl, Carla Frizelli.

But soon word got out that Carla Frizelli frolicked by night with a creature of the sea. Laughter and dread formed itself around her. The local doctor said she’d been deflowered in some unspeakable way, and one Sunday at Saint Alphonse, in Point Arena, the priest cursed her from the pulpit. She was jailed for a while in Ukiah and focused on briefly by the San Francisco papers. She disappeared suddenly. Nobody heard of either of them again, not the girl of the woods or her alien lover. But her crucifix washed ashore, knotted around a briny whip of kelp. Milton Sharkey found it on Bowling Ball Beach. For years it dangled from a hook in his shed. I myself saw it more than once. The sea had leached the plating away and turned Jesus green. Milt was a boy when he found it, an old man when I saw it, and now he must be dead or in a home, I don’t know which. The shed still stands, the hook’s there too, but not the crucifix. The rumor is it fell into the hands of local witches, who work with it in their ceremonies of blasphemy and invocation. And that’s easily possible. Lot of those gals around here. Yes, I’d even turn for help to people of their sort, if they weren’t actually just a lot of drug-addicted tramps with runic tattoos, if they truly had a line on spells and curses.

Believe me, you wish for things like that when you’ve built a twisted life of lies — your own deformed universe. But wishes aren’t horses — wishes aren’t witches. In order to get on in this underworld you’ve got to practice bushido, the warrior’s way, the samurai’s inner art, the art of being already dead. Bury your self and go to war. You won’t find anybody to work magic for you. The best you can hope for is to hire a mercenary killer.

Already Dead / 45

My partner, Clarence. When his face is dusty he doesn’t notice, doesn’t wipe away the little smear. Sucks the dripping coffee from his mustache after he takes a sip. Stands around in huge psychedelic short pants just barely kept aloft by his hips, and talks of auto parts, teenage women, offshore currents. Across his torso, from his crotch to his shoulders, he carries seven scars from bullet wounds he received charging into a terrorist ambush in Beirut on the same morning the two hundred U.S.

Marines were killed by a car bomb. He doesn’t see that moment in the urban desert, when the forces of his life drove him beyond the comprehensible pale, when the ties were shredded and their tensile strength exploded into murderous action — he slaughtered six terrorist guerillas, was highly decorated — as anything more than twenty seconds of goofy adrenaline burnoff. If it came to it he could certainly deal with Harry Lally’s hirelings and also, probably, eat their dogs. But I’m devising another plan, a horrible plan. A plan that makes me very sad for all of us.

The pig-men came hunting me that afternoon at Winona’s ranch — their camper moving fast down the drive, bouncing heavily, spewing a wake of dust behind it. I wasn’t surprised. This wouldn’t have been the last place on their list.

I was already out of sight, having leapt off the deck and then behind the heavily treed embankment. Peeking up over the dropoff I watched them bail out of the truck, leaving both doors open and the engine running, and make for the house. Their music was the type from mixed-up Italian westerns, the shiver of snake rattles and the flurries, outbursts, of whacked guitar strings. No try at stealth — the dogs lost their minds anyway as soon as they heard the truck’s doors open. The men were as big as they’d seemed, one just a little taller and thinner, the two marching now side by side with their shoulders swivelling, arms swinging, hands scooping the air. They didn’t knock. Fortunately for the door they tried the lock before wrecking it — in these parts, doors are rarely locked. In the clarity of this air I might have heard their feet stomping through the house if the floor had been wood, but it was ceramic tile, solid and without vibration.

I crouched thirty feet away from the back deck and monitored their silence, which seemed to drift and turn like a gigantic whale through the rooms, while their dogs’ chatter came faintly over the roof. I didn’t have any shoes on. I’d been sitting on the porch in my 46 / Denis Johnson

white sweat socks. Silence…silence…Then cupboards began opening and closing in the kitchen. I didn’t want this! Tears burned inside me, but nothing came up. Corrosive tears, they were giving me an ulcer.

Somewhere in the house was a gun — I’d left it with Winona — a.357

magnum, the original Smith & Wesson issue, with a serial number in the low four thousands, a collector’s item I didn’t know the sure location of and certainly wouldn’t have threatened these types with in any case.

I liked to think of myself as something of a cool guy or even perhaps a cowpoke with my.357 and my 356—my Smith & Wesson and my Porsche — and my adobe rancho. But right here and now I washed my hands of all three of them.

My brother’s cabin lay over a mile from my house, a good half of which I’d have to spend lurching from tree to tree in my stocking feet until I found his drive. It was all downhill or I wouldn’t have tried it.

I just prayed they wouldn’t let loose the dogs.

The truth was I’d never hiked through these woods before. This wonderful scenery and its atmosphere was something to witness, something to inhale. I didn’t like being immersed in it however, stirring up its dust and scraping against its bark and getting its gravel in my socks. All this was fine for my brother, Bill, because he’d given up on civilization. As for me, I was ailing, hungover, had no business rambling under the boughs. I’d been meaning to check myself into one of those places where they feed you grains and herbs and help you moderate the drinking. But the captains of moderation, what happened to them all? These days they want you to stop drinking entirely. Okay then! — let them drink this fear. Taste it coming up from the stomach through the sinuses. Let them try it, it’s like being hung upside-down and everything rushing the wrong way until the blood drips out your ears. I need tranquilization. Those men up there touching stuff, walking into all the rooms, they counted among the many, many things impossible to face.

And I’d hidden the Porsche, but left my jogging shoes in plain sight beside the kitchen table. They’d find dishes in the sink, and upstairs the slept-in — tossed-in, sweated-in — bed. If the men had brains they’d let the dogs nose around and strike my trail. But I doubted the men had brains.

Now I came on a deer path and followed it with less trouble downward. On this walk things that happened played like sparks over the bits of dreams I’d had last night. Stepping on a thorn Already Dead / 47

brought back a dream of catching a large insect. I tore off its wings and stepped on it, and it lashed out, but helplessly, at my foot with a large stinger. Hadn’t I been dreaming, in fact, of this place, and these trees?

Before long I entered the fog. The woods were cool and stopped with a cottony silence. Soothing, protective. The ever-changing here and now presented itself in small discreet chambers materializing out of bright mists. I’m speaking of the actual walk, not the walk I dreamed.

I found Bill’s drive, the winding two-rut road lined with seventeen junked cars, which he believed to be antiques. Most of his delusions were pitiful. The only interesting madness he’d exhibited had been years back, when he visited the nearby reservation and disrobed and begged the Indians to crucify him. He was on LSD.

Here, on the gentler slopes, the big trees can keep their hold — even a few old-growth redwoods, already standing here the day Julius Caesar was born and now nearly two hundred feet tall and thirty feet around.

I might have been wandering through a region of vaulting aboriginal monuments lifted up by a dead race. Nobody worships them now.

Unattended they accomplish their vast meditations. Their indiscernible deaths. Their tremendous, crashing funerals. Then the interminable wasting down until, underfoot, not earth, but a quiet rusty bread. Bill keeps his cabin at the western edge of an untouched several acres of old growth. When the fog burns away he looks down from his back porch onto the ocean, a sunny postcard full of distant black rocks splashed with foam. Yet from his front door he steps right into the prehistoric. Big silence. Big redwoods. Ferny dusk beneath. Forests once sheltered half our race, but now very few humans live in such places, towered over by slow and ancient lives. I believe the effect on my brother has been nearly miraculous. These kind-hearted monsters have wooed him away from madness into a beautiful, if easily perturbable, mildness. Now he’s just a quiet man who gets too excited when he drinks anything with caffeine in it. Once or twice a year I come to see him, and each time I wonder why I don’t just join him forever in this healing place. My father owns it, but it is my brother’s forest.

Among the practitioners of oneiromancy, the forest stands for the unconscious, symbolizes the very place containing all we see when we’re asleep. And the same for the ocean. My brother keeps the forest on one hand and the ocean on the other, dwells between two 48 / Denis Johnson

entrances to the deep dark source of dreams. The forest is a place of danger, magic, and happy endings. All night the dreamer travels in this region and doesn’t realize he’s asleep. The differences between the logic of that world and the logic of this waking one are vast. But they feel the same. And isn’t that how we recognize logic, by the way it feels?

Whatever Descartes may say, his first fact rests only on a feather, this feeling, the same one we have as we wander through forests that don’t exist, forests that are just as primary in that world, entirely as real, as thinking-thus-being is in this one. I passed the junked carcasses with which my brother lines his road, old cars with their histories misting up through their broken windshields, powerful in their deaths, sinister and candid and, to me, frightening. Dust thickening over the stains of messy kids and backseat lovers, engines oxidized to brittle red lumps.

Candid I mean in the absence of any dissemblance in their smashed faces, like dying dogs. If this sweaty hike were dreamed the waker wouldn’t have to ask: these wrecks mean exactly themselves, they mean that everything wastes away, that even steel will be putrefied, they mean that youths coupling in the depths will dissolve. But who cares?

Translating dreams in advance, well, then why have them? Why sleep?

I rounded a bend and there was my brother, bearded and blond, standing beside an International Harvester Scout, dripping water from a coffee can onto its hood.

Bill saw me watching him.

I could very nearly witness the lurching of his brain. He needed words. He’d forgotten they existed. He had to energize his atmospheres and let words form, like clouds, inside him.

“I’m washing the birdshit off this vehicle,” he said.

He wouldn’t get it done, not without a cloth or a brush. No. He was just fooling around because nothing was necessary here.

“It looks like you don’t have shoes on,” he said.

“This is an emergency visit.”

“Hey,” he said, “hey.”

“Nobody’s dead, no.”

Nobody meant our father. Our father wasn’t dead.

“Hey, okay,” Bill said.

“I just had to get here fast.”

We stood not twenty feet from his door, but he failed to ask me in.

Didn’t want me in his one-room house because he thought I’d peek Already Dead / 49

at the letters he was writing. During his manic runs he corresponds voluminously, in a trembling scrawl — with whom I don’t exactly know, but he does in fact mail his letters out, usually in big batches, sometimes, though rarely, to one of our fellow Gualalanians, who then shows them all around town just for laughs. His cabin’s well made, with a back deck, a gable over the front door, a small tidy porch. I followed him as far as the creek that ran beside it, where he got down on his muddy knees to fill his coffee can again. Young acacia trees nosed in under the taller creekside alders. Acacias bloom golden and abundant in the spring, but the variety propagates ruthlessly and has to be contained.

A couple of severed deer heads hung down on bailing twine from the branches, with asterisks for eyes, exactly as the cartoonists show them.

“I believe that’s a doe,” I said of one.

“I’m a poacher,” he admitted, “but in or out of season I don’t take doe.”

This was his life. He killed and butchered deer, packed the bloody meat back and forth between here and our father’s freezer. An elemental calling. “If a couple of people came down here after me,” I asked him,

“would you shoot them for me — make them dead and make their eyes like that?”

“No, no. No, Nellie,” he said, using the hated childhood diminutive.

“I wouldn’t violate anything around here.”

“You killed those deer.”

“But I don’t do war. War is a diseased game.”

“I’m a target for certain unpleasantness.”

“In fact you yourself are a diseased game. Too much exposure to radar. You shouldn’t be here.”

“This time it’s my intention to stay for a while. I’d like to hide here.”

“Stay at the Tides. Or the Hotel.”

“I’ve rented five rooms in six days.”

“Go hide in your pot patch.”

“I can’t.”

“All you need is a sleeping bag! Be a man, will you?”

“It’s my plants they’re after. It’s a money thing.”

“They’d never find the place.”

“I got drunk and told Melissa where it was.”

“Melissa!”

50 / Denis Johnson

Bill disapproved of everything outside this forest. But for my mistress he had special contempt. Well, I guess we both judged her incapable of any real loyalty.

“I’ve got to have a place to hide and think. I’ve got to take care of this mess fast. Before they get around to her.”

“She couldn’t give them detailed directions, could she?”

“In general. She could tell them generally, and they’d find it. They have dogs.”

“They?”

I nodded.

He was suspicious. “Is this a real they?”

“Yes.”

“Or a chemical they?”

“They’re real. They were just at the house.”

“But maybe your reaction is chemical.”

“No, I have good reason to be afraid.”

“Or maybe partly chemical.”

“Once in a while a joint. A bong hit. Recreational use.”

“Maybe you don’t cure it right.”

“Too much alcohol of course. I really should moderate.”

“Green dope and tequila! Plus whatever the radar’s doing to you.” Now I made a scene, I’m afraid, shouting, “They’re coming for me!

They’re coming for me here or there and sooner or later! They’re getting paid for it! These are hit men, hit men, hit men!”

“Okay, okay, okay.” I’d unbalanced things now, set the energies whirling. He was angry but he didn’t know how to be angry. “You mentioned dogs?”

“And I’ll mention more dogs! Their slimy noses in the dirt, jammed against my personal essence!”

“Not police dogs, I hope.”

“The smell of me.”

“This isn’t the cops, I hope. Did you do something bad?”

“What happened to the time when brother helped brother and no questions asked? What happened to those times?” We were standing beside his jeep again by now. He put his can of water on the hood, laid his hands on my shoulders, looked into my eyes. He meant, by this, to signal that those times regrettably were gone.

I’m always astonished by his hands. He’s grown on the ends of his Already Dead / 51

arms the very hands we were always so afraid of. Thick fingers, wrinkled knuckles, emphatic grip. They’re precisely our father’s. Our father wasn’t dead yet, but we’d both already inherited more than we could stand from the old man. We were weighted with it, dragged down struggling, anchored impossibly in our father. Not just by his hands. And not just by things passed on in the chromosomes, but by learned habits and sorrows that gave us an inner understanding of him and made it hard to hate him as much as we wanted to.

Mother left Father — we all left Father — when I was five. Mother never remarried, spent her days recovering from him and raising Bill and me in a succession of rented houses either side of Point Arena until I went away to high school. But it was a long time, nearly twelve years, before she managed to divorce him, and he never remarried, didn’t even date publicly until a year after the divorce — because that was, coincidentally, a week or so after the death of his business partner, whose wife Father had been screwing for decades. He bought her a house, Mrs. Willis Winslow was her name, but for a long time he didn’t change their arrangement. Until very recently they lived apart. She managed his motels. They got together in clean, anonymous rooms periodically. I can’t help thinking they were even more excited then, cuckolding his spirit and memory, than they’d been when betraying Willis Winslow in the flesh. And people wonder why my brother and I are nuts! Or perhaps they don’t. Maybe I’m the last one left wondering.

And now my brother grips me with the old man’s hands. Wraps me in arms a lot like Dad’s. I can’t breathe. I won’t inhale — what if he smells like our father?

“My life is strange,” I told him.

“I don’t like it when you cry.”

“I’m not making it out there, Bill.”

“No. Nobody is.”

“What do I do now? What do I do?”

This got him going. “Hey! I’ve taken stock, I’ve made an assessment, I’ve done the thing sitting out here counting my fingers and toes and actions. And I got the truth on one side and my lies on the other, the nutty stuff and the stuff that’s real, and we’ve convened, me and the trees and the spirits, and I got it calculated that the only thing I ever did right was buy that oak flooring for the cabin when they tore up the bowling alley in Point Arena. That’s it, the oak flooring.” 52 / Denis Johnson

“It’s very nice.”

“I can’t advise, is what I’m saying.”

“I understood you.”

“I mean everything else is on the failure and insanity side.”

“But what a floor! Something to envy.”

“Go ahead,” he said.

“A floor to make you commit sins.”

“Go right ahead and be like that,” he said.

After Mother left, Father fought the divorce like mad. A misaimed Roman Catholic determination. But he failed because she took nothing, wanted nothing but out. What happens when a man like that fails? He goes right on. He starts fighting the scourge of divorce among his off-spring — by willing everything to Winona and threatening to do the same when Bill gets hitched, which he will of course not. Bill’s nuts, but he understands that if Winona divorces me, my life is a pauper’s.

Why would he do the same — pick out a bride to take everything from him?

“I’m asking you one last time: will you help me?”

“I’ll drive you back home.”

“They’re up there waiting! They ran in and I ran out, don’t you get it?”

“They won’t be there. If they come back, you can run down here again.”

“At night? What if it’s at night? Why don’t I just stay awhile?”

“Essentially this isn’t your kind of place. Not essentially.”

“Two days.”

“Not spiritually.”

“Oh. Are we going to do that one?”

“In a very deep way I don’t want you here. In a deep way you’re destructive.”

“Of what destructive? What do you mean?”

“It would take centuries to get the harmony and balance back.”

“I happen to agree. I believe that too. What I don’t believe is that you are in any way aware of these things, that you feel these things, that you’d be affected by any disruption there. It’s like knowing you’re being struck by gamma rays.”

“I am being struck by gamma rays.”

But once I’d entered into this kind of argument with Bill I was finished. Just to acknowledge his concern with the inaudible thrum-Already Dead / 53

ming of the planets and the trees was to throw in the towel. No, my life is a soup of corruption, emanating a sickly voltage. The trees know it, he knows, I know. We can pretend to be not yet convinced — to be waiting for the verdict of science — but we know.

Brother Bill. He gave me the sideways attention of the slightly crazy, his posture tentative and tilted, his left side bathed in radiation from another universe. Pouring a quart of water onto a car. It was thrilling, the confusion of sorrows that moved like a cyclone through my lungs, it took my breath away: my brother — I was more perfectly alienated from this person than from, say, Harry Lally, who wanted me dead, or from my unrecognizable wife.

My brother drove me back home. In his completely funky International without a fourth gear or reverse. Astonishing that he could have got it running, or that he’d ever finished building his cabin — my brother, who’d stopped taking his medication long ago, if he’d ever started — or that he could actually drive the thing, that he even knew which half of the road was his. My brother, the one who’d raced, in a driving rainstorm, all the way to the reservation to be crucified. Once also he tried to climb into the Buddhist monastery and got his sleeves tangled up in the barbed wire on top of the fence. The monks — who look like regular people, I’ve seen them, in down-filled vests and loose athletic apparel — clipped him down from where he was hanging and sent him away. Pretty much as he’d sent me away now from his own sanctuary, and in the same spirit.

Bill knew all the ruts and managed to haul us up out of his world without breaking an axle. He knew the trees and the taste of the water, he killed the animals and ate them. He belonged in these woods. I guessed I didn’t. But in this place he was getting much better, and meanwhile outside of it I was getting a lot worse.

Two miles before Winona’s place we came around a curve and right up against the entrance to the Tibetan Buddhist monastery. Usually I’m anticipating it and it doesn’t surprise me, but today we both had our minds on other things. When you’re not expecting it, it’s like a fatal accident and then heaven.

California!

Suddenly and often in this strange land, there opens before the dreamer the Golden Gate. In this case the Tibetan Buddhist temple with its raging copper dome, five stories high, and the hundred-foot-54 / Denis Johnson

tall pagoda, gilded with actual gold, standing up through the mist above the green pasture — better than one square mile of pasture, and all of it surrounded by chain-link and sparkling concertina wire. This is not a dream, illusion, or metaphor. This is California. There really is such a place. It is not a mistake of the imagination, it doesn’t disappear like a mirage or back away like a rainbow.

Anything, anything, anything! — that’s what California offers.

This day, the one I’ve been thinking about, when I woke at Winona’s, when the men came after me and I visited my brother, was also the day the drought broke and we got two inches of rain.

It had been dry all spring and all summer. The Spanish moss turned brittle, broke away from the boughs and lay on the roads like ash.

Meanwhile dust hung over the world like smoke from a gigantic fire.

“Brown heat,” Bill said as if noticing it for the first time. And this may, after all, have been his first trip above the mist in months.

“Look,” I begged him when he dropped me off at Winona’s ranch,

“don’t tell Clarence about this.”

He and Clarence were buddies and pals, of a sort. They worked on cars together.

“Clarence?” he said. “Clarence isn’t like you think.”

“We have differing interpretations of Clarence. Only one of us can be right.”

We dropped the subject and didn’t bother fumbling around for another. When I got out of the car and rapped on its hood, he put it in gear and headed down the tiny road rapidly until he went around a curve. I heard him making a turnaround in a wide spot, and here he came again past the gate peering ahead intrepidly, speeding off toward wherever. And there I stood in front of my troubles without anybody to help me, not even my brother.

I noticed right away that the bogus sportsmen had strung a filament of fishing line waist-high between the gateposts, a trick to find out if a car had entered — more use to me, once I’d ducked under it, than to them: flanking me as ably as any moat.

Just the same that night I was crazy with fear, cowering inside the house with all the lights out, maybe drinking. Not a fear of men. They’d only check their trip wire, they wouldn’t come all the way in. They couldn’t reasonably expect me ever to return anyway. In fact I was only here because I couldn’t have stood another minute in the Already Dead / 55

car with my brother, who smelled bad, who smelled like shit, who smelled crazy. To think of him as healed was exaggeration; he’d merely gentled down to a precarious strangeness. Anyway, no, that night the fear was of the earth and the moon. Of the abeyance in the air that signaled a storm. Of the silence, of the silver light, of the wolf spiders’

webs I could suddenly see in the meadow, the reflecting dew strung on every strand. Now the spider is a stranger in its nest, the wren confused by these miracles. In this perfection of lifeless things, this steely inanimate loveliness, everything alive is sordid, unwholesome. To live is evil, the word itself is evil spelled backwards. What a relief when the breeze picked up, stirring pockets of warm air, bringing noises in through the screen doors and windows — I heard things, and then one set of sounds was real — an engine, and a car’s headlights passed along the ridge road. They didn’t slow down.

I’m remembering now that it was after midnight when the shower began. But first we had the moon and the mist. The big ones blow past from the north, well offshore, and then twist back around to lash at us from the south, driving the coastal fog up into the inland heights. And yet the warm front, giving way before the coastal cool, keeps the heavens clear until just seconds before the rain falls. So we get the mist over the ground and the piquant irrelevancies of a moonlit sky and slashing meteors above.

And then it rained. I went out to the deck to take the hammock down just as the first drops started, tremendous things, exotic, glittering, cold.

I had a sense of them crashing into the dust on my skin. The breeze had an animal smell. The empty hammock rocked. There was jazz in the little race to get it untied, a happy feeling in getting there just in time.

The feeling of a poetic moment, a mingling of California and nostal-gia — on the air a forbidden, a religious scent, an intuition of the summers of other people’s lives, — airy summers, pleasant people, unfettered lives — of the land from which I was exiled. A moment of tenderness, the smell of rain overpowering, as thick and unbreathable as smoke, and almost sentimental, not just the atmosphere’s pregnancy and ripe-ness, but the strains of grief rising up from somewhere — from within.

The simplicity of certain pleasures bursts in my heart. I’m weeping, and asking a ludicrous question: will my life ever be like this?

For a few seconds everything was brushed with just a single quick stroke of moonshine. The deck chairs and spool tables and potted suc-culents stood out like negatives. Then I lost the moon. Vagueness 56 / Denis Johnson

came up over the ridge in billows. I’d had PG&E put a streetlamp at the head of the driveway, it cost less than seven dollars a month, and they took care of the thing. Its glow a quarter-mile off seemed unattain-able, seemed imaginary. A large creature, an owl probably, in this atmosphere it looked white, swept up from under the edge of the hill behind me and passed directly over my head. I could hear its wing-strokes like desperate breaths. I followed around to the front of the house and watched it moving off toward the front gate and the street-light, where its shadow opened out from behind it like a tunnel through the lamp-lit fog. The tunnel closed to nothing as the bird passed over the source, and now there was only the iridescent mist. Everything looked so much like the cover of a science-fiction comic book it hardly seemed possible to be inside it and not to be able to turn a page, impossible to be breathing the weather and the mix of rain and dust and sea-damp and tasting a little of my own sweat, washed to the corners of my mouth with the rain.

And then suddenly another tunnel opened in the light, the tunnel of a man, a ghost treading the backlit moonwater, drifting through the increasing storm.

I tried to convince myself it was the owl coming back, making another pass. Even if I’d been able to believe it my skin knew different, tighten-ing all over me so that my scalp prickled and my scrotum actually shrank. But I didn’t run, didn’t even take a step, just stood there with my arms around the bundled hammock and waited, getting rained on.

The figure coming up the driveway was clearly a thing too sorrowful to be alive, it was a black absence, the ash of grief, a lost, wounded soul, but was now clearly, as it came even with me, heading right for the pond, a man walking. He got within ten yards of me. I could almost see his face. Still he seemed unconnected with our earth, had nothing to do at the moment with our violent dramas, not even with the taste of rain on the wind changing to a drink, not even with the strands of it thrown against the side of the barn and the sheds as he passed. There was something special about his stroll, as if he were exploring a place once thought familiar but now completely new — like a youth on his first day of hooky, for whom simply walking inside this stolen holiday is exotic and monstrous, and everything — this is what it is about hooky, and about this figure’s emanations — everything is original because it’s been chosen. Yes, he gave the

Already Dead / 57

impression of being somebody who’d rejected the routine forced on him and decided just to walk on the surface of the world, a pilgrim. We see them by the roadside, particularly on the coast, solitary unburdened travellers. They’re probably crazy, that’s true, but we have no way of knowing. Enlightened ones may live everywhere among us, looking like functional failures. This might have been the ghost of one of those.

There was nothing troubling about this presence; this apparition was emphatic but not desperate, also unhurried but not at leisure. It was passing along the edge of my life and I felt no fear. Only a hunger — I ached to discover what gift he’d been given. Because clearly he carried some treasure in his heart, some powerful token from the true universe.

Nothing got in his way, the shrivelled clumps of fern in the pasture, the hunks of log and metal, the haggish sculptures — he’d withdrawn any investment in these things, they weren’t quite contemporary with his purpose. He never looked right or left. His every step had the quality of a stirring finish, of bursting through the tape. He walked right into the pond. At the edge of the bank he spread his arms like wings and took a great step out into the air. In the banshee squall his landing in the water was inaudible, not quite real. And then I got it — I was witnessing somebody in his ultimate moment. For him, the planet, and its ponds and such, didn’t count. A deep preoccupation was making him invulnerable to the elements. He would stride on the floor of the water for its whole width, two hundred feet, and burst onto the facing bank like a military vehicle and head straight on, dismembering the pitiful trees, I was convinced of it. I didn’t realize, until I took a deep, damp lungful, that I’d stopped breathing. Now I dropped the hammock at my feet. I was soaked. The rain ran off the ends of my fingers. And it whipped across the surface of the pond in sheets, covering any trace of him. But I could see him better, now that he was gone — I was seeing the person I can’t be. The one who marches to the bottom of the depths, who beats his bullshit ruminations into a sword and hacks at life’s entanglements until he’s free. He’d come bursting up out of the water in just a minute, like a baptismal figure…

I realized as the minute and then another passed that I was crazy, this guy was drowning, anybody would, it’s the natural result of breathing underwater. I shouted! — but naturally he didn’t hear. He was gone. He was now without action, he’d passed into the under-58 / Denis Johnson

world of drowned souls — who would he rescue there?…No, I had to be him, I had to rescue him, call him back from the dead. I had to be the person I couldn’t be. I swear to you that this was the level of my thoughts and feelings, I was inhabiting the realm of the gods and heroes, this person had truly inspired me. I ran inside the front door and cut on the porch lamps, which lit up the yard and the dirt walk and hardly fingered the edge of the pond; raced back out into a scene completely changed by their illumination — the rain around the bulb, the crinkling and rustling of it on the pond as I plunged toward the water — this night! — wings, sorrows, iridescences, wounds, exile, the owl, the mist, the moon, dew’s light-emitting diodes on the webs — the blow to my guts as the water went over me. I could feel my eyes punched against their orbits, a seizure, a response of some electric force that shot strength out even to the ends of my fingers, even into my fingernails, as I splashed in a half panic, struggling for my own life now, no longer god, hero, not even human, more the mindless raccoon stalked by the dog of death, plunging out into anything. I couldn’t stay afloat. I kicked off my shoes and tore off my sweater, sinking below the surface as I wrestled it over my head. I came up again. My limbs were going numb in the chilly water and I was surprised that it was happening so quickly.

I forgot what I was here for. In one direction I saw nothing but the porch lamps, the other way lay an acre of water in a world of darkness, sizzling in the rain. I was afraid.

Then he surfaced just ahead of me, modestly, without thunder — so unlike me, so much wiser, not struggling at all, unconscious and beautiful. I grabbed his sleeve and pulled him easily to the shallows, but dragging him up out of the water was murder. The world became terrible and slow. I fell backward. All I had out of the water was his arm.

The rest of him drifted like a log. He seemed past saving. I even thought, winded, nauseous with fatigue, of giving up, letting him float away.

But I pulled him up the bank an inch at a time, resting between inches, until we were both stretched out in the mud. I’m saving this person! — but I’m so drained I can only lie beside him, just as helpless, the only difference being that I’m breathing and he’s not. All I can think of is turning him over and putting my lips on his. All I want to do is breathe into his death. But I can’t move. If I don’t, I myself will drown in the flood. I can see it rushing down at me, stupendous, wobbling globes. I turned onto my belly, got my hands and Already Dead / 59

knees beneath me and crawled over to look down at his face — he had a long mustache, and a pair of eyeglasses snagged on his left ear. Mud dripped from my face onto his but there was no response, no breath, no pain or trouble there. He was dead! Complete! Mysterious forever!

I’d heard of pinching the nostrils shut, tilting back the head, clearing the passages of obstructions, but heard about them it seemed in a foreign language I had to decipher now, in the act. Water ran out of his mouth when I turned his head to the side. I rolled him halfway over and he vomited into the mud — alive! Over on his back once more and I put my wide-open mouth over his. The fear ran out of me again and I entered another clear space in which I felt the rain washing us both until we were beautiful. We breathed. He tasted like vomit, but good, like my own when I’m very sick with wine and I know this purging is the cure.

August 9–10, 1990

Right around midnight the beeper on his hip blew, and Officer Navarro had to leave his TV movie to go out on a call, an estranged husband with a gun. The wife was a sweet sort of middle-aged dyke, that was Officer Navarro’s take on the thing, who claimed she and her friend had heard something unusual out back while lounging in the hot tub. The husband, a sixties veteran, she explained, had made threats, was known to go armed, dealt drugs. Her friend was a tall beautiful blonde named Yvonne. Navarro knew her slightly, and she gave him the creeps, or anyway the situation did. The house lay at the edge of Point Arena, at the end of a cul-de-sac, and the deck with the bubbling hot tub looked back over dark empty pastures toward the Ranchero, which was, if he understood this right, an Indian reservation but somehow not a federal one. The girls didn’t see fit to mention the guy’s guns till they’d been standing there a good five minutes. “Would you cut the lights, please, and lay down inside?” he asked them. That gave them a thrill.

Now he was scouting the backyard, and the long flashlight, which he didn’t want to turn on, trembled in his sweaty grip.

He thought he heard something out there himself. Cows maybe, moaning. The fog had cleared down here, it seemed to be rolling on 61

up to the ridge, and with the shine of moonlight dissolving surfaces he could barely make out around a thousand shapes in the tall grass, but they weren’t the shapes of cattle. And he couldn’t use the lamp. No way he could light things up in the vicinity of a guy possibly in a mood to throw rounds at something. This was your typical bullshit. In East L.A. he’d have four cars backing him and a chopper making daylight all over and the SWAT commander on the phone to the lieutenant, angling to be called in. It only made him lonelier and more scared to think about it right now. These are the sons of bitches who’ll pull the trigger on a cop, it’s a pissed-off-husband statement intended for the wife, like smashing something made of glass, a bottle or a window.

And he felt like glass out here. And he didn’t like the wind. Usually there wasn’t any wind. Weird breeze, the moon brooding over it, you can’t do this stuff when you feel like you’re made of glass. For something like this in L.A. they’d have news teams taping it and the block roped off and the whole neighborhood jostling against the sawhorses. But here, just the wind and the empty feeling of the Ranchero inland and the big blackness out to sea.

Officer Navarro hated to retreat, but he’d made a mistake coming out here. He backed up against the house, went inside after two taps on the French doors and then clomped through the silent living room, where parallelograms of moonlight gleamed on the hardwood floors.

“Ladies,” he called, “I’m gonna bring my wheels around back. I’ll try not to scuff the lawn.”

“Okay,” he heard somebody say softly. They were hiding in a back room.

Out front he started up his car and headed it around the house into the yard, lit up the search beam and headlights, and left the vehicle quickly, half-diving but feeling idiotic because, after all, it was merely a small-town thing and nobody’d been fired on — in fact he only had the wife’s word there was a weapon out there. It’s the trunk thing, she says he keeps it in the trunk, I see big-time dealer ordnance, RPG’s and such. And the Vietnam aura, all that, a lot of these guys haven’t given up feeling like killers because nobody ever let them off the hook for it.

At least in this desolate place his outsides matched his insides. But what had brought him here eighteen months ago? What was he doing up here where the sea and the wind made all this noise? Life had turned lonely after the third divorce. He’d felt his future wearing 62 / Denis Johnson

out and had left LAPD, applied to CHP, dialing up his dream, making it a thing. Was turned down — why? Did the Highway Patrol expect he’d been contaminated by LAPD? Then he’d tried the local constabu-laries, last stop before rent-a-cop; sent résumés to several small towns on the coast, was offered a job by every one, and moved up to Point Arena from East L.A., where things had been tense and mean in a way he now remembered fondly. In East L.A. he’d spent his shifts making his way among foreigners and perpetrators and the more-or-less mentally maimed, the slum dwellers rattling loose, who, when he restored them to order, shrilly accused him of trampling over the rights of “ordinary citizens,” and then shut up. Most of them had never met an ordinary citizen, never even seen one this side of their greasy TV screens.

Navarro hadn’t known too many either, sleeping in the day and working that area at night. But here in Point Arena he engaged with actual ordinary people every day, and they were beginning to terrify him. They never squawked about their rights, they just kept quiet or even appeared quite friendly while he issued them tickets or ordered them to leash their dogs on the beach or rattled his truncheon at their drunken teenagers and kicked out their teenage beachside fires. But behind the acquiescence skulked a buddy system of ordinary folks and their ordinary resentments — a network, a spiderweb, practically, of ordinariness.

Everybody he dealt with was somebody’s cousin. The youngster he prodded with a nightstick tonight was bound to be the one bagging his groceries tomorrow, the mayor’s nephew, the judge’s godson. There was a different way of handling things in a small town, and Officer Navarro didn’t know what it was. He just knew he wasn’t popular here.

This person in the field here would probably turn out to be his chiropractor. Navarro hoped so, he’d need his services after all this humping around. Navarro crawled softly, as much to avoid grass stains on his knees as to keep quiet. Suddenly he understood there was truly somebody else in this darkness. He could feel the man moving, flanking him, inadvertently he hoped, before he heard any movement or saw the bit of T-shirt flash briefly going through the headlights. Navarro jerked upright, said, “Freeze!” and moved to his left quickly. The figure didn’t stop or fire but ran.

Navarro followed the footsteps into the dark, limping along as he buttoned the flap on his holster, then letting the adrenaline run his legs over the rough ground, caring for nothing, taking great breaths Already Dead / 63

of air, feeling brilliant, weightless, gaining on the white shirt.

As soon as he got his hands on the shoulders he knew it was a kid and tried to go easy, taking much of the fall on his own knees and elbows and, he knew, getting grass stains on them after all.

The kid’s breath went out of him in a whump. A young sound, kind of dreadful. A girl? He felt the kid’s chest. Thank God, no tits.

They’d run a fast two-twenty here, but the juice was still jolting through. He felt great. He had the kid wrapped in a headlock and felt him shaking, heard him wheezing, panting.

“What the hell are you doing? ”

No answer but sobs.

Navarro let him up. He kept hold of the kid’s arm. But he didn’t feel like putting a light in his face. He could see well enough.

“How old are you, kid?”

No answer. Navarro unbuttoned his light now and put the glare on him.

“You get a good look at them naked ladies?” The boy’s lips trembled wildly.

“Anybody with you?”

“They — no, nobody.”

“Your friends made a quicker exit, didn’t they?” The boy was thin. Navarro had his arm in a come-along hold, and it felt like it might break.

He let go. “Scat,” he said.

The boy stood there.

“Don’t come back,” Navarro said.

The boy took a few steps into the dark. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t apologize. Change your conduct,” Navarro told the boy, who was gone.

Back in the house, in the living room, where he stood talking to the two women with all the lights blazing, he told them the field had proved empty save for cattle. “It could be you’re getting spied on by kids.

Maybe you should put up one of those lattice partitions.” The two women stood hugging themselves, one in a Japanese robe and one in black terrycloth. “We were just absorbing a little of this rare energy,” the tall one said — Yvonne.

He gave her a military smile. “This an energetic neighborhood?”

“There’s a storm on the way.”

“Really?” Not a drop of rain had fallen in seven months.

64 / Denis Johnson

“Don’t you feel it?”

He did feel something.

He took a description of the husband’s car and promised to make a tour of the neighborhood. He took the husband’s last address and assured the two ladies he’d be looking in on the man. “But it doesn’t sound like a crime’s been committed,” he felt obliged to point out.

The homeowner, Barbara James, still legally Mrs. Shank, complained softly, with tears in her eyes. “Regular people are getting buried alive by laws. Meanwhile maniacs roam free.”

The women walked him out to his car. It looked eerie now, parked here in the backyard.

“G’night, Officer Navarro,” Barbara said.

“John,” he suggested.

“G’night, John.”

Yvonne said, “You might have to protect me from my latest ex one day. He’s dialing into some mysterious frequencies. Frankheimer.”

“Don’t know him.”

“By sight I think you would.”

“What does he look like?”

“He’d be the only one out there behind my house.”

“But I mean, help me out. How tall, please?”

“About seven feet.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Better get one of those zoo guns. One of those guns for tranquilizing elephants.”

He laughed. “I’ve seen him around.”

They said good night again and Navarro went out to the squad car, on the windshield of which he found a brief and kind of pointless note — he assumed it referred to Yvonne and had come from one of the peeping children. Did he look like a scholar? Why did everybody send him notes and letters? Driving away he thought to himself that Yvonne wasn’t such a bad sort. She was certainly a fine specimen. He didn’t know what it was about her. When he’d walked in she’d said,

“Hel- lo”—personality forcefully projected, a sense of being met halfway, a sense that you matter. Sunny. Truly winning. But in retrospect, truly phony. Giving one impression in the flesh, completely different when called to mind.

He’d heard her mentioned around. She had a reputation for unsa-Already Dead / 65

vory weirdness. What was it, mistreating small animals, acquiring occult paraphernalia, books — I thought I saw her walking by the road late at night. But I was off duty — the badge was off — I didn’t even slow down.

She looked like a widow. Mourning. Somebody claimed to have spied her one night standing naked on a bluff over the sea. Absolute bullshit.

Not for free. You’d have to pay to see that type naked. Though it was dark and he was supposed to be steering the car, he glanced one more time at the note in a child’s hand—

The lesbo is a Witch

— before jamming it into the ashtray. The atmosphere in this neighborhood seemed unusually warm and strangely hushed. Something thumped on the hood, and then several more times on the roof — and before he’d travelled two more blocks he was driving through a downpour of such ferocity that he could hardly see ahead of him.

It stormed steadily as he eased the squad car down the main street and parked beneath the windows of his home: he’d rented a place over the video store, and at first it had seemed ideal — not far from the ocean, looking out on this quaint little stretch of Route 1 through Point Arena — but since then it had shown itself to be just the kind of spot he always ended up in, solitary and cold. Rather than get wet finding his way up to it, he sat for hours in the car looking out at the blurred drumming California street. Or maybe it just seemed like hours. He cracked the window an inch, rested his torch and stick on the dash and settled back and dozed.

He found himself under black skies, out on a battlefield looting the uniforms of slain clowns. The woman Yvonne was on the periphery of things. He could smell her, and it was erotic. He woke up still seeing her strange face.

Toward dawn the weather let up and he uncurled himself stiffly from the front seat and stood on the sidewalk in a town that seemed fresh and hopeful, its chastity in a way renewed. It made him hungry for breakfast. But nothing was open yet. Despoiled of any alternative, he climbed the stairs toward his home above the movies.

Van Ness woke up with a sore throat, sore tongue, sore mucous membranes up through his ears.

Somebody was having a fuzzy conversation. He seemed to be part of it.

66 / Denis Johnson

“Are you all right? What a stupid question. I’ve got your glasses, let me—”

So he could hear. And he could almost see. Otherwise his lack of information was complete.

“What’s your name?”

Even down to that. His tongue was swollen. He made a noise with his voice. That was a mistake. It went dark. I’ve shut my eyes, he thought.

Then he came to and everything seemed white — daytime, morning?

The guy gave him something in a cup. Van drank it. It was tea.

He wasn’t unconscious, but not paying attention. He felt the warmth of spilled tea with pleasure on his swollen hands.

He watched the man at the kitchen table in his green bathrobe, now punching buttons on a telephone. Zealously he accomplished this, ec-statically. “Do I have the main library? Reference?” he said. “Well, no then, the information desk. Information?” He was leaning into it. The man was on the phone. “I wish to know,” he said, “how far ahead of the hunters, usually, the hunting dogs will go. By what distance usually, usually, does the dog precede its master in the wild? On the average.

It’s a matter of life and death.”

He wore a baseball cap with an emblem on the crown, the bill of which he worried incessantly with his free hand, like a baseline coach.

“I’d like you to direct me, also, if possible, toward some literature that would discuss the smelling powers of these animals. These hunting dogs. Or dogs in general. The whole odor thing.” Van woke up again later. Daylight still, and still the man sat at the kitchen table, but he was silent. He appeared to be playing solitaire.

He looked over at Van. “How old are you?”

The man was willowy, pale, with thin hands, and eyes that were large and feminine and wounded. His ears jutted out because he wore his baseball cap pulled down tight on his head. He looked to be in his late thirties. Maybe younger, but eaten-at.

“Forty-two,” Van told him with an amazing croaking sound.

“Born in forty-eight? Forty-nine? A child of both halves of the century.

Do you remember a song — from the sixties, I think — whose refrain went like, Sometimes…the hunter…gets captured…by the game…?” Van did not reply.

Already Dead / 67

Around sunset, Van Ness sat at the kitchen table with a blanket around his shoulders, spooning up clear broth out of a heavy bowl.

Through the window he saw the man he assumed to be his host, still in his bathrobe, his white feet, in zoris, showing beneath its hem, walking flat-footed in the pasture as if it were wet out there, and carrying a black bucket. He poured its contents at the feet of a fat ugly horse.

He took his cap off, fanning at flies while the horse bowed its head over the food. All around the pasture grandly proportioned assemblages of gray timber and junk farming equipment scattered their shadows. He took their intent to be artistic.

Van found the kitchen a pleasant place. The house’s design was solar-efficient; the late sun reached him now, and it was warm. This was a small home with a big loft upstairs and also perhaps a single room — he saw a door at the top of the landing. Down here just the living room and kitchen and a door to, he presumed, a study or a little den. He’d been sleeping in the living room, in a Hide-A-Bed contraption.

He’d done it. He’d killed himself. And here he was. He was probably dead in that universe, but in this one right next door he persisted; his consciousness had simply moved over into this other, potential world in which he did not die. Right. You go down through one hole and come up out of another. Death just moves you to another square. Now he could be sure all beings were immortal. He couldn’t kill, he couldn’t die. They’d been telling us that life was an illusion, but they lied. The illusion was death.

Van’s host stood inside the front door kicking his thongs off and then strode barefoot to the kitchen, nodding in the direction of the pasture and the horse. “Our equine amigo.”

Van sipped at his broth, which tasted like chicken. It seemed to make him hungrier. Maybe some cereal would go down.

“I’m Nelson Fairchild,” the man said. “And I’m going to pour myself some wine. Will you tell me your name?”

“Van Ness. First name Carl.”

“And you won’t be saying much more,” Fairchild predicted, referring to the terrible sound Van was making words with. “Now,” he said, “I’m going to offer you a glass so you can toast with me. Drink it or not, whatever you feel like.” Fairchild held the liter bottle tightly 68 / Denis Johnson

with both hands as he poured. He raised his glass high: “The first person ever to be born in space!”

He sat down at the table, and Van watched him drink. Fairchild was younger than he’d thought, more like twenty-five than thirty-five. A young dude with an old man’s fear in his eyes — fear was the driving wheel. There was a form of security in knowing a person’s prime mover.

The young man’s hands were steady now. He lifted and spread the deck of cards from his solitaire game, stripped one gently from the fan, slapped it down: “The Suicide King.”

Funny how the pictures were always right side up. Yes, he got it — the King of Hearts, stabbing himself, for some reason, in the side of the head. The Suicide King.

Fairchild said, “You’re silent. Stunned by the coincidence.”

“I’m tired.”

“You don’t believe in destiny?”

Van swallowed with some pain, happy to answer. “The concept is almost always misused.” Anxious to answer, even with his throat all torn up.

“The one real road, the signs at the turnings?”

“I make the road. I draw the map. Nothing just happens to me.” He swallowed, trying not to grimace. “I’m the one happening.”

“How can you say that? I just pulled you back from death. You’ve been lying there virtually not happening for ten, twelve hours. For over fourteen hours,” Fairchild said, checking the clock on his electric coffee-maker.

Van stood up and turned over the table.

“React,” he said amid the noise of breakage and the sound of fragments singing over the Spanish tile.

Fairchild said nothing, righting the table and kneeling to scoop up two or three pieces of china pointlessly. Van could see he experienced his anger from the outside in, first in his skin. In twenty minutes the guy’s guts would start burning and he’d freeze it out with a shot of his wine.

“My point still holds,” Fairchild said finally, setting down on the bare table one dripping shard.

“Theoretically it holds. But life isn’t a theory, not mine anyway. I have to live it.”

Fairchild seemed to make up his mind not to clean up the rest of this mess just at the moment. He sat back down.

Already Dead / 69

“You’re exactly the person I thought you were,” Fairchild said.

“Meaning who?”

“You’re a true man of action.”

“Not a man of action,” Van said, swallowing hard after every three or four words, but feeling compelled to speak, dizzy with the necessity of speaking. “I’m a man of will. But I can’t believe in my will, can’t feel it, unless I act from it.”

“Act from it, no matter what.”

“No matter what.”

“Overriding everything.”

“That’s right, everything.”

“Then you act in boldness.”

“Can I be given a little cereal?”

“A man of true courage.”

“Just feed me. I won’t hurt your table.”

It wasn’t night yet but as Fairchild walked among the rooms on the lower floor, speechifying — Van assumed for his, Van’s, benefit — he turned on all the lights, every last one. “When I saw you heading into the pond! Unforgettable. I’m telling you, you banished the storm. We would all hope to accomplish a moment like that in our lives. You accomplished it in mine…” At one point he put a record on the stereo, a Sonny Rollins thing. Van tried to let it soothe him while the madman talked: “Last month I went down to the main San Francisco library.

They know me personally, I’m famous, my obsessive queries. I drove down there I don’t know when — three weeks ago. I won’t go south of here again, not on that Coast Highway. The cliffs beckon. If you were really trying to kill yourself in our pond, I know the desire. But when I’d turned inland after Jenner, I was safe. You head through the Russian River valley, then you’re in the other California — sunshine, vineyards, windmills, small motels…” He went on without the benefit of Van’s attention until the music ended and then he made a segue, lurching, into talk about some movie…No, he wasn’t telling about the movie as much as the experience of having gone to the thing, of being in a theater, darkness—“big people. Gargantuan busts, I mean their heads and shoulders, not their titties. Although also titties. Now: something quite out of my experience happened in there, Mr. Van Ness. A panic got hold of the people in the theater.”

70 / Denis Johnson

Fairchild had gone pale; the work of speaking and remembering had pinched the blood out of his flesh, perhaps concentrated it all in his brain; his energies didn’t make him lively, Van thought — just incredibly tense, his fibers humming to the point where levitation seemed immin-ent. A deep vibration jiggled the cups and saucers on the table.

“The floor,” he said, “rumbled. There were rapid footsteps down the aisles, a lot of people moving all in a bunch, and all with the same thing in mind, whatever it was, and I had the sense that some group was playing a prank. Something made you feel that it was all rehearsed, like a fraternity stunt, and I expected these people to kidnap a freshman and carry him out on their shoulders or something like that. Then I thought, but there are dozens of them. The rows were emptying in waves, starting at the back, and we, those of us down front, we turned around to see that everybody was leaving fast, through every available exit.” Fairchild himself was in motion now, looking around for something in the kitchen. “Now let me tell you,” he said, rummaging abstractedly in the refrigerator, delighted with this memory, “nobody screamed, nobody yelled. Nobody loosed even a tiny exclamation, Mr. Van Ness.

There was only a little muttering as people wondered what was going on and then decided not to stay to find out. The only sounds were the tremendous rumbling of everybody’s feet, and the actors on the screen continuing their dialogue. Mute, terrorized people pouring out of the place! By this time we in the very front were able to guess what was happening, but we were also able to feel sort of removed and safe from whatever was scaring them so much up there in the back — a crazed killer, whatever. So the people in the first three rows didn’t run. We just waited. An usher, a young woman, entered from the lobby and we heard her talking to somebody, but she didn’t make an announcement until one of us up front yelled, ‘Tell us what’s happening!’ Then she starts screaming, ‘It was just a shoebox! A man with a shoebox! There isn’t any bomb!’ All this while, the giant… heads of actors are conversing up on the wall — moving pictures, talking pictures, without any power of illusion left to them. But do you know what? We sat down, those of us who’d stayed around, and in a couple of minutes we were completely consumed again by the drama, which wasn’t a very compelling one to begin with anyway. Cereal, cereal, cereal,” he said, “it’s all we seem to have.” Van watched him dump flakes into a bowl.

Already Dead / 71

“Afterwards I recognized a famous man, a television star, standing there in the lobby with a red and orange sack of popcorn in his hand.” Van had no idea how to respond to this stuff. The sun was lowering into the clouds, a deep rosy light filling the kitchen window, Nelson Fairchild staring out. Tears shone in his eyes. He rode a roller coaster, all right. The emotional Tilt-A-Whirl. Van watched him fashion a face out of all this sadness before he turned full on and started laying fresh places at the table. “And you’re feeling all right?” Fairchild asked him.

“I’ve never saved anyone’s life before. You’re okay?” Van said, “Thanks,” only because he pitied the man.

“Did you walk here?”

“My car’s by the road up there. It’s out of sight I think.”

“Is there somebody who should be called?”

“No.”

“Nobody?”

Van felt a panic of his own beginning to stir. “Listen. You didn’t call the paramedics? Or the cops?”

“No.”

“Nobody knows I’m here.”

“No,” Fairchild said, “and that’s how it should be. You’re here, you’re a secret, I’m giving you cereal. Your appetite’s back. You look better.”

“Just assure me you’re harmless, and we’re fine.”

“We’re all pretty harmless aren’t we? Until we’re cornered?”

“That’s not reassuring.”

“But I thought you wanted to die.”

“Maybe so. But by my own hand.”

Fairchild closed his eyes, maybe, Van thought, with exasperation.

“The point I was making earlier is this — that each person who went to the movies that day believed each of the others capable of killing all of us. And aren’t they exactly right?”

Fairchild was back at the refrigerator, from which he turned now with an odd, pompous air, upholding a carton of milk. “Who knows what a murderer looks like?”

He stood next to Van’s chair. He leaned too close. “Lately I think I’m ready to become one.” Van smelled the rot of wine on his breath. The hat’s emblem read IGNORE PREVIOUS HAT.

Van relaxed. “I see. You’re just fucking with me.” 72 / Denis Johnson

“Hermann Göring,” Fairchild said, pouring milk over his cereal with unsteady hands, “was found at the end dressed in a Japanese kimono and stoned on opium, wearing lipstick and eye shadow and playing with a model concrete railroad in his living room — that’s how crazy you have to be to kill as many people as Hermann Göring did. This is how crazy you have to be to kill one. As crazy as me. Allow me:” He tipped the carton and loosed a quavering ribbon of milk over Van’s bowl.

As soon as he put a spoonful to his lips Van realized what a hunger he had. But the flakes were hard on his throat. He waited for them to wilt in the bowl.

Fairchild said, “Of course I’m simplifying. It may be that in a case like Hermann Göring’s that’s how crazy you get from killing that many people, and this is how crazy you have to be to start.”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“One murder probably leads to another.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Why don’t we find out?”

“I don’t get the meaning.”

“Would you like to find out?”

“Find what out?”

“I’d like you to kill somebody for me. I’d make it worth your while.”

“You’d make it worth my while?” Van said. “What the fuck is ‘worth my while’?”

“Money, whatever.”

So he’d done it. He’d killed himself. And he’d surfaced into this. All right. It was the next thing happening, and that was that. “Money doesn’t work for me,” he said.

“What would?”

Van Ness hadn’t touched a drop of wine, but the room was accelerating anyway. “I’ll do it. Sure.”

“What would work for you?”

The chickenshit. He was going to ride right past it. “I said I’ll do it.” Fairchild stood up and said, “Louise.” He put his thumb and finger to his eyes and pressed. Visibly composed a speech in his mind and then launched into it, crunching the phrases in the collision of emotions.

“In the place where Louise works there is a lady called the Singapore Lady. The Singapore Lady was once a wild young woman Already Dead / 73

married by common law to a carpenter there in San Francisco. She was the terror of the neighborhood. But the carpenter wasn’t afraid of her; he came home late, he catted around. He didn’t care if the Singapore Lady knew. Mistake! She stabbed him in the eye, and he died. Then, with his own saw she sawed him into thirteen pieces. She put the pieces of her husband in a big trunk and had it shipped to a fictitious address in Singapore. Well, during its journey the stink of the corpse became profound and somebody opened the trunk to find green arms and legs and green other parts, including the one-eyed staring head. The woman was quickly arrested — why? Because she’d put her return address on the trunk. Louise says they call her the Singapore Lady because for the last twenty years she’s been wrapping empty packages, addressing them to Singapore, and handing them over to the counselors and guards at the prison to be mailed.

“Louise is my mother. On the day I went to San Francisco she had three months to go before retirement. I wanted to go see her while she was still working in order to avoid the possibility of a longer visit.” Van had eaten most of his cereal. He pushed the bowl away and sat back. “Ignore Previous Hat, huh?”

Fairchild said, “I’m thinking of inviting you to be my accomplice in a murder.”

“I said okay,” Van said.

“Actually, my henchman.”

Van said nothing.

“Does one murder lead to another? I think it does, because I’m suddenly, now, already thinking in terms of killing two more. Maybe three.

Or at least one more. Harry Lally.”

Night had come and turned the windows to mirrors. Fairchild had a habit of studying his image, moving closer, peering right at the reflected mouth as it spoke. “You do this murder. Maybe you should kill everybody who troubles me! Anyway you do this murder. Then you come back here — well, no, definitely not back here — but somewhere; you go somewhere. And finish committing suicide.” But the guy had a psychotic charm. He entertained. “Have you been diagnosed?”

Among his windows Fairchild kept silent a minute, untwisting cords from their stays and loosing scrolls of rattan down over the glass. “You don’t know the situation. Anybody would go crazy.” 74 / Denis Johnson

“No — I think you’re fine. But I was wondering what the professionals had to say.”

“You wonder why I’d want to get someone killed. I won’t just answer

‘why not.’ But the question implies that a person would have good reasons, and that’s a lie. There are pressures, yes. But nothing to justify it.” He sat down.

Van thought Fairchild was about to take his hand — something about his hesitation, his gravity — but he didn’t.

“I am in trouble with my criminal associates. I owe a vast sum of money. My wife’s insurance would take care of that if she died. I can’t get money otherwise — nobody will give me any, particularly not Father, and anyway the words to ask him have been closed inside the fist of hate for decades now. It would be easier for me to let them kill me, or go to Clarence and say, ‘Listen to me please; I want you to grease Winona; snuff the bitch.’ Or something a little more subtle but with the same meaning.

“You had no right to spill my table,” he added suddenly. “You broke my things. These things are mine.”

“Clarence is who?”

“The only guy I know who’s actually really killed people.”

“This is about money? Divorce her and sell the house.”

“If you go out the door and look west,” Fairchild said, “you’ll see all I stand to lose by divorcing her. All that land and all that timber. From here to the ocean.”

“It’s hers?”

“It’s my father’s, and he’s willed my share of it to her. My Catholic dad. To keep us married.”

“Why not disappear? Pick up and boogie?”

“Or why not kill myself?”

“Why not?”

“The ultimate disappearance. The ultimate boogie.” Van laughed. It hurt, and he stopped himself. “How old are you?”

“I turned twenty-nine three weeks ago.”

“And who do you want killed?”

“My wife, Winona Fairchild.”

“Yeah…that name.”

“Winona.”

“I think I met her.”

“You met her?”

Already Dead / 75

“Yes, I met her. In Shelter Cove.”

“That’s no place to meet anyone.”

“I met her there anyway.”

Fairchild jerked at the pocket of his bathrobe. Produced his deck of cards. Laid himself out a hand of…Klondike, if Van knew his solitaire.

It was dramatic, really kind of striking, Van thought, the way he fought through pain by clinging to something, anything, of interest. “Bushido,” Fairchild said now — Van had known him a single afternoon but already could tell when a lecture, like a whale, was surfacing—“do you know the word? Bushido means ‘the way of the warrior,’ a Japanese samurai concept. The idea is, the samurai achieves total detachment by seeing himself as already dead. I invite the would-be suicide to adopt this concept.”

Again Van laughed, again it tore at his throat. “Coincidences are gonna drive us crazy.”

“You should have seen yourself going down!”

“All right,” Van said. “All this is getting to me. I mean I’m thinking about something, and two minutes later — two seconds, even — you’re saying it.”

“A dangerous chemistry develops between us.”

“You’re not a simple guy, are you? A simple guy would leave what troubles him.”

Fairchild sprayed the cards into the kitchen sink. They arced from his fingertips as if enchanted. He did possess a flair. “I have called for a new deck often. But I have never changed my game.” Van enjoyed topping him. “For the third time: I will kill this person for you.”

Thompson drove the truck, and Falls talked: “I was working on some stuff, just jotting down notes, et cetera — things to work out when I had a chance to sit down. Some of the things he came out with about eighteen months later, man”—Falls was talking about Jerry Jeff Walker, the country-western composer—“not the words, but a little of the ideas and the rhythms, they were exactly and precisely what I was doing, man. Or would have done, was about to do. And he must’ve been working on those things right when I was, if they came out eighteen months later. I have a special quality for him, man. I feel we’re in synch.”

This interested Thompson not at all, the synch or lack of it 76 / Denis Johnson

between Bart Falls, whom he considered to be nothing but a pitiful re-cidivist, and Jerry Jeff Walker the swaggering barroom minstrel.

Thompson liked California jazz. Chet Baker. Art Pepper. People who really lived it. Tom Waits, if you had to have words and concepts. “Look, I think we passed it,” he said.

“No, I’m watching close. No redwood gate.”

“It’s gray.”

“It’s gray redwood. That’s what happens. Redwood turns gray.”

“I’ll go another mile.”

Thompson took them around a tight curve in the road and into what appeared to be another world.

Disneyland. Shangri-la. It knocked the breath right out of him. “You’re shitting me,” he said to Falls.

“Well — stop the car,” Falls had to tell him.

Thompson braked and they looked over a colossal ornate Japanese-looking building with a copper dome, and beyond it a tower, a pagoda, shining like gold.

Thompson stared. A thrill of gratitude travelled his bones. “Hah!” he said, nodding his head several times. He knew his excitement sometimes made him look stupid. But everything had been going wrong, and they’d both been feeling like losers. Now this — this was like finding Egypt.

“Look at the fence,” Falls said. It was fifteen-foot-high chain link topped by loops of concertina wire. From what they could see, there must have been miles of it surrounding the grounds.

“They’re keeping something sweet in there, I absolutely guarantee you, something very sweet,” Falls said.

That morning Thompson and Falls had awakened in the serenity of their camp just inside Sonoma County. It was a state-run campground but nobody else was staying in it, possibly because the rates were high, fourteen dollars a night. The fog was doing its snake dance up from the Gualala River. Falls, propped on one elbow and frisking himself for cigarettes with his free hand, suddenly paused. A feeling had him lightly by the throat. He lay back in the musty bag and listened to a distant rumbling more deliberate than the river’s.

“I could get used to the sound of that train.” He watched while Thompson, fully dressed and freshly shaved, hunted for something in his Alice pack.

Already Dead / 77

“Used to get right up beside the trains going by in Fresno,” Falls said, digging out a smoke from his shirt pocket, where they seemed to have suddenly materialized, and holding it out toward the coals. “Down by the community wading pool. The bigger boys would jump after those things. Everybody’s mom said it would wrench our arms right off if we ever tried it. They also said you’d be sucked under by the wind if you got too close to a train.”

He reached over and gave the coffeepot a jiggle. “I think it was Fresno.” He shoved the pot down among the campfire’s warm ashes.

“That’s not a train. That’s a helicopter.”

“A helicopter?” Falls said.

Thompson tossed his pack aside. “I think I’m out of toilet paper.”

“So? Use theirs.”

“Get my bowels moving about and making sense.”

“Theirs is perfectly good.”

“It’s just like jail. All state paper is the same.” It did sound like a chopper after all. As soon as the noise faded, Falls heard the dogs bumping around and whining inside the camper.

Falls considered himself to be making breakfast, though Thompson would probably claim he was just sticking last night’s supper back on the fire. “Somebody left the top off this chili,” he said, and, “We were in town. We should’ve gotten eggs.”

“I keep thinking I’m gonna fish,” Thompson said, so Falls stopped listening. He crawled out of the bag and tiptoed across the damp earth in his socks to let the dogs out of the truck. They bolted past him through the door as soon as he had it open, the three of them all balled up like one animal, bringing with them a canine stench and whipping his ribs on either side with their tails.

When he tuned back in, Thompson was saying, “She’s full-blooded Norwegian. Her birthday’s the day after mine. She was born in Kenya, South Africa, but she spent most of her life in Fargo, South Dakota.

Does this sound like a confused past?”

“Somebody’s definitely confused.” Women bored Falls even more than fish. He pissed for a long time on a bush and then went over and checked the chili. “This stuff’s all crusty now.”

“Too bad.”

“It dried up because the top was off, is probably what, mainly. And another thing: let’s get out of here.”

“Out of here?”

78 / Denis Johnson

“I don’t wanna do any more time.”

Thompson looked at him with the face of a baffled child.

“You said this wouldn’t be a snatch,” Falls reminded him.

“No I didn’t.”

“Yes you did.”

“I didn’t say one way or the other.”

“You said it’d be a little visit. This is not a little visit. We’re gonna have to take him right off the street.”

“Why?”

“It’s no big coincidence we’re losing him. He’s dodging us. We’re made. He made us.”

“We’re ‘made’? We’re made.” Thompson started humming the theme to James Bond.

“We’ve been here too long.”

“Who made us? God made us.”

“We’re seen and known.”

Thompson split the chili onto two paper plates and started eating his. In a minute he said, “Fuck everything and run, huh?”

“Yeah, more or less.”

“Fuck Everything And Run — F-E-A-R.” Thompson was delighted with this.

“I’m trying to reach a decision, and you’re just playing the conversation game.”

“What is making you so uncomfortable? What’s the worst thing that’s happening to you right now?”

“Start with this idea of bringing three worthless dogs along on this thing. That wasn’t necessarily smart.” Falls sailed his plate away and like some multiheaded harpy the dogs charged from out of the brush and dismembered it.

“We might be glad we brought them. I mean, I don’t know.”

“If we let those critters loose on a trail we’d be all day getting them back. They’re incompetent.”

“We’re hunters. We brought dogs.”

“One hundred percent bullshit.”

“Wait.” Thompson gestured back and forth with his hand between the two of them. “I know what this is about, okay? I know.” Falls sighed and marched over the embankment to the river. He knelt by the clear water and rinsed the saucepan, scrubbing it with gravel that rasped loudly against the steel.

Already Dead / 79

He heard the campfire snapping on damp fuel and went back and found Thompson feeding it wet green twigs, filling the camp with brown smoke. “I want to dry the pan,” he told Thompson, “but I can’t breathe all that smoke. That’s why I’m sitting on your side of the fire, okay?”

“I told you — I understand, I know, I’m hip,” Thompson said as Falls crouched down next to him and held the pan out over the meager flames.

“Hunters get guides, man. Hunters bring their kill to the butcher, they put meat in the local locker. You and me are just dicking around in an obvious way.”

“We’re campers then, Bart. That much is true fact. And, okay — we might have to snatch the guy. Probably we will. Or maybe we’ll get lucky. That’s possible too.”

“And in the case of real bad luck — the joint.”

“Right. Of course. That’s always the thing. But you just do the thing in spite of the thing.”

Falls didn’t think he could feel any more jammed up: the dogs, the job, various concerns. “This should’ve taken fifteen minutes.”

“Whining! Tearful! You know what you’re doing, man? You’re hurting me. I hurt, I feel jack-shitted, when we’re on the line and I look over and you’re there picking your nose and dreaming, because you know what you’re doing man? You’re backing out. Do you realize that?”

“No! I’m just — I thought we were open for discussion.”

“If you’re out,” Thompson said, “you’re out on your own. Take the rig, take the worthless frigging dogs, good-bye. But you’d be leaving me here with no resources and a job to do, because I ain’t out. I’m here.

That’s what you’re discussing.”

“No — I meant both of us should leave,” he said.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Okay.”

Thompson said, “You got any toilet paper?”

“I use theirs!” Falls shouted. “I got the same ass I had in Chico, and Folsom, and Quentin!”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“I’ve just had a chance to think about this situation, that’s the shot here,” Falls insisted.

He lay down with his head on his pack and sighed with sorrow. “I got the doldrums.”

80 / Denis Johnson

“Tough shit.”

“You’re boring me.”

Thompson said, “I feel a real breakthrough coming on.” Falls sat up.

“I like those breakthroughs.”

Falls said, “Let’s snatch him, then.”

“It’s daylight.”

“I like that.”

“Well, yeah.”

“It’s sexy.”

“It is.”

That night, after they’d made miserable losers of themselves, been eluded again and even been confronted by the man, Thompson celebrated by getting drunk on Seagram’s Seven, kicking one of the dogs and chasing the other two around with a stick, standing by the fire with his pants around his ankles, pissing in the flames. “If this was an electric heater, I’d be dead right now,” he told Falls.

He lectured Falls with the apparent idea of delivering Falls to himself.

“You know why you’re so tough? I got you dicked. You want to make yourself strong enough to kill your father back when you were a little boy.”

Falls was angry. Not nearly as drunk. “When I was little, huh?”

“That if you were up against your father now, comparatively the size and strength he was back then — he’d be a giant, but you’d be strong enough to kill him, tough enough, you see what I’m saying, to prevent his abuse. The project of your life is retroactive. It’s empty. It’s total bullshit.”

“Maybe. But there’s nothing wrong with it.”

“How many people have you killed?”

“In my life? Two.”

“Counting prison.”

“Four.”

“And you say there’s nothing wrong?”

Falls had served his first sentence for killing his father.

“You come out with this shit about once a year,” he told Thompson.

“It seems like you don’t even know me, don’t even think about me at all, then all of a sudden here’s the weighty analysis.”

“Excuse me there? Who’s analysing who at the moment?” Already Dead / 81

Eventually Thompson apologized to the dogs and gave them bits of sausage off a pizza he’d brought from town. “Whoops,” he said later, dropping half of it in the fire. The dogs cowered under a bush. One of them made a small high intermittent whistling noise that Falls spent a quarter of an hour tracing to the animal.

“He’s worried about something,” he told Thompson. “Maybe this strange-feeling weather, I don’t know. Do you feel it?” Thompson felt not much of anything by now, but he noticed the rain when it started and he stumbled wordlessly toward the truck. Falls made it to the cab first, leaving the doghouse-camper to his inebriated psychotherapist. Later, when the rain was particularly hard on the roof, Falls went around to the back of the vehicle, tiptoeing in the downpour as it filled the woods with a kind of African music, all percussion, and a cold breath that moved around slowly. He tried the camper’s door, but Thompson had locked it from the inside.

“Tommy,” he called, “Tommy.”

The camper stirred. Thompson’s voice was muffled. “Back off about a million miles.”

“Brother, I got another one,” Bart called…He waited a while and then said, “Well, I’m just getting sopped out here.” In the cab again he sat till the storm blew off east, some forty-five minutes, upright and dazed and gripping the wheel. In the eventual quiet he suddenly came to himself and quickly, shaking ink down into his ballpoint, filled another page in his notebook.

When Thompson came out to slake his drunk-thirst, Falls had built up the fire and sat beside its altering light with his notebook open in his lap. “Okay, man.”

“Jesus, lemme get some water.”

“Are you sober enough for this?”

“I just hope I’m drunk enough.” For thirty seconds or better Thompson attached himself like an infant to the gurgling canteen.

Falls bowed his head above his notebook. “This isn’t about me. This is more really about you.”

You’ll ride them highways like the rivers

naked warriors rode of yore,

making camp alongside mesquite

whispering secrets on the shore,

’cept you’ll be dropping change at truckstops—

82 / Denis Johnson

stomping cigarettes on the floor.

And you’ll know how sad the waitress

gets when she flops down at night

looking at the nighttime talk shows,

heads of laughter, heads of light.

You’d tell her but you just can’t say it right.

Rain slips in your truck’s old doorframe

where it bent that time you wrecked,

you don’t light up because she’d see it,

but right now she don’t suspect,

she couldn’t guess a desperado

loves her in the parking lot,

sitting here inside this pickup

bleeding like he just got shot.

“I gotta say, Falls…Your stuff ain’t that shitty.”

“It’s almost pretty good, you mean.”

“Yeah. You really should make a tune for some of that claptrap maybe.”

“Yeah? The tunes are the hard part.”

“Well, one thing,” Thompson said, “the rain sure dosed that fog. Beat it down to the bottom of the river.”

Falls turned his palms over in the firelight and then back up so they cupped shadows, held up the night’s entire darkness, in fact, as he looked at his hands, a murderer’s hands.

Thompson got down in himself and stared at the flames. “About, what was it, maybe seventy-six cars wrecked at one time on Interstate Five, in the fog. A real bitch mother of a fog. It was one of those Sacra-mento-foothill things, not average like you get down around the ocean here. Fog thick enough you could fuck it. Tooley fog. I say just pull over and sleep till the sun burns it up the next day. I don’t know why people would drive in it. Seventy-six people looking for excitement.” Already Dead / 83

August 28, 1990

Van Ness felt no hesitation. But as it turned out, something forced him to put off his project with the psycho, Fairchild: Van Ness’s mother died.

The news didn’t hurt him. But it surprised him. He’d never heard a word from her doctors. A lawyer got him on the phone at his motel—“Is this Carl Van Ness, son of Elaine?”—and by that time she was already in the ground. The lawyer had contacted the folks at Van’s old boatyard in Seattle, with whom he’d left his address because he was owed commissions. “—son of Elaine?” He knew by those words alone that he was an orphan.

He was the only child, and had to go to Monterey County south of San Francisco to take care of her affairs. She’d left him her little house, but he had no use for it. He ended up spending nearly three weeks there.

Many afternoons he drove over to Salinas, in the Central Valley, to take in movies he didn’t really want to see: to sit for a while in front of out-of-focus scenes from lives that weren’t actual and then walk out into shopping centers surrounded by a vast agricultural enterprise.

Sometimes he followed Route 1 through Castroville, the Artichoke Center of the World, or drove around Monterey Bay to Santa Cruz 84

and took rides on various not too thrilling amusements along the boardwalk there. He had nothing to do with himself but these pointless things. His mother had perished of something he didn’t understand, something to do with electrolytes and the balance of hormones, anyway something that had shut her up for once, the poor, miserable woman, and he’d inherited some money, and the house in Carmel-by-the-Sea.

Carmel wasn’t his kind of place. The clouds moved too swiftly in off the Pacific and managed to look gray and crimson both at once. The fields to the east were burned blond and crested relentlessly by small sports cars. In the town itself he drifted alongside the shop windows, blown by a careless loneliness past arrays of gifts he’d never have wanted for himself. Subtle incense. Liniments — tennis, horses, all that.

He was better suited to the bay’s northern shore — seedy, sandy Santa Cruz. He liked eating out of the cheap beachside stands and trying his luck at the boardwalk games where surely they tried every way they possibly could to gyp him. He felt comfortable among the beatnik survivors and carnival types, people with self-created histories and fictitious names, tainted and used-up people. In septic barrooms he hung out drinking only black coffee and, when asked the reason, explained that he had pancreatic cancer. Or fatal hepatitis. Or things like Tangiers syndrome, which he made up. And when people offered sympathy he told them, “I could easily outlive you.”

He stood for hours at the shooting galleries, always his favorite thing, blasting away at ducks and jungle animals who lurched happily into his sights and disappeared and then turned up again, identically reincarnated. Now he saw why, as a boy, he’d felt called to such places. It amused him to identify these contraptions as important teachers and this completely mechanised region as the birthplace of his life’s philosophy: everything happens again and again…

At one point he joined a handful of tourists looking at least partly amused by a monkey dancing on a long chain. The animal wore the stock getup, the bellboy’s uniform minus the pants, performed somersaults absentmindedly, flipping himself as easily as the onlookers’ coins, which he gathered up with a brisk professional aloofness. When they weren’t tossed he approached people one at a time with his startlingly pale simian palm outstretched.

But the instant his gaze fell on Van Ness, the little acrobat charged at him viciously. Van had seen the surprising menace and then the Already Dead / 85

baffling rage pass over the monkey’s face, and was already backped-alling swiftly so that the beast, now nothing more than that, a wild, killing animal, savaged its own belly by running up against the end of its chain. Van walked away fast, shaking his head for the benefit of anybody looking at him — and they all were. A hundred feet from the scene he turned to see the monkey clinging to the side of a litter barrel, still staring at him, its mouth wide open, hissing from down in its throat.

With surprising strength it hoisted the large receptacle and banged it down on the ground over and over, never taking its eyes from Van’s face even across this distance. The crowd stayed back. The monkey’s master crept up on him cautiously, gathering up the chain hand over hand. He looked as confused as anybody there.

This run-in seemed just a silly part of his fate, a maverick detail in the general design. He’d ended one life a suicide and planned to spend the next a murderer, but things like this, stinging outbreaks, ambushes — he thought of the woman he’d picked up hitchhiking who’d nearly accused him of rape — things like this still had the power to hurt his feelings. And now he couldn’t believe it. He was weeping. He bent over and tried to make it look like a bout of coughing. An angry monkey, an angry monkey was making him cry. No, no — it was Elaine Van Ness, his mother. She’d lived alone, had raised herbs in her weedy garden, stolen books from the local library, collected miniature ceramic cats.

And now something had happened and all of that had stopped. Her loneliness, how had she borne it when he himself couldn’t stand even the thought of it? Her son…he hadn’t felt like her son since some time in childhood. Waiting for her to come home from work on schooldays, watching TV shows meant for younger children and eating the peanut butter and crackers she’d left out for him on a plate under a pastel paper napkin. They’d lived in an apartment near Baltimore, just the two of them. Later he’d taken to starting her car in the basement parking garage and driving it around down there. On the smooth concrete the tires squealed, even at a snail’s pace. Eventually he’d smashed one of the headlights against a concrete pillar. His mother had forgiven him. Today he’d have described himself as once again unsupervised and piloting a stolen machine. Quickly, with the heel of his hand, he erased the tears from his face, and then stood up straighter, clearing his throat several times.

86 / Denis Johnson

As he recovered from this inexplicable fit of mourning, he looked up and noticed a woman watching him. A small blonde by the entrance to the Haunted House. She’d just tossed a big head of cotton candy into the trash and now she wiped her hands on a napkin, holding them far out in front of her as if temporarily disowning them. She stared, and then turned away — it annoyed him to be a small panel in the tapestry, it annoyed him to be brief.

Van Ness was sure he recognized her. She passed under the boardwalk’s arch onto the sandy lane of shops and stalls, Pacific Street, and Van followed her for a while with a sense of how she brushed through the thickets of aromas and things like that coming out of other lives, sunlight banging down off a wall, cool dark hovering behind windows, the entangling essence of one person after another at the center of every little scene she passed. He could feel how she let them stroke her — he’d been doing it himself for days now around here. Irrelevant bastards.

Nobody to be introduced to. It annoyed him to be one of them.

He’d seen this person before in similar surroundings. Shelter Cove, the seaside deli — Mrs. Fairchild. This was Winona Fairchild. The woman he was supposed to kill.

She stopped at a shop selling neon signs and the plastic busts of clowns, openmouthed surplus Bozos from squirt-gun shooting arcades.

She spoke to no one, studying their painted faces. She made things like that herself. Van had seen her sculptures. Her husband had seemed proud of her work.

Fairchild planned to knock her out with pills. After some hours, Van would smother her with a pillow. He himself had slept in the bed where she’d die.

Fairchild would spend these moments of terrible genesis in a public place, some miserable tavern it was likely, where he’d be visible. The coroner would blame pills and booze, always an unpredictable mix.

Van reflected that you never knew with these delirium-tremens types.

The extremity of Fairchild’s delusions, the abandon of his folly. He intended to move in with his mistress — whom he’d described for Van, and Van had been amused — and position himself to lead a life in most respects more conventional. He wouldn’t know conventional if it walked up and spat in his face.

Van observed the wife. No question who it was. He hadn’t quite Already Dead / 87

placed her at first because on this breezy day she’d tied her hair back in a long blond ponytail, that was all. In her tattered jeans and sweatshirt, black high-top sneakers, she looked like anybody else around here, but for Van she stood forth magnificently. The day burned in glory, the sun slashing into dark doorways, the woman surely more beautiful than she’d ever been, more virginal and serene in her role as sacrifice, unconscious target, dead clown. It pissed him off. She’d never been so beautiful. He’d never been so angry. And he realized he’d been feeling it for days — the tapestry laid out, a tale told in panels, by design — for days feeling the tragedy and loveliness of fate. First his own. And now hers.

August 11-September 5, 1990

A

s caretaker at Winona’s place my final act was to give Red, the horse, his wormer. I’d been putting it off, but Winona had called. She’d started home. Odyssey over. Although, come to think of it, it’s in setting out for home that the odyssey, the Greek one anyway, the one full of monsters and gods — in turning homeward that the odyssey really begins. And it ends in poignant strangeness, among staring alien eyes, the foolishly gazing faces of the wanderer’s beloved people melted, thickened, elongated by time. Maybe you, too, Winona! — maybe you’ll find nobody you know at the journey’s end.

You’ll stand in just this spot, inhaling the dregs of night mist evaporating from the world, perhaps, and shudder to realize you’ve never smelled anything like it, and you never touched any of this, you never made these sculptures, it’s all garbage now, thanks to your mistakes, most of them innocent, and thanks to my father’s stubbornness and to certain bad conjunctions, like that of myself and Van Ness, the killer I conjured out of a storm. Thanks to these things you may soon be dead — the ultimate stranger! In the meantime, I’ll cure your horse. I couldn’t face you if I sluffed it off.

The horse was something of an epic traveller himself, having started in Vermont and crossed to Oberlin, Ohio, with Winona dur-89

ing her undergrad days. Where he languished without her while she travelled on to Berkeley for graduate school — she and I met there, in fact, during my freshman, and only, year as a big-time university scholar. That June we left school together, Winona with a master’s in fine arts and I with a lot of bitterness. She sent out to Ohio for Red, and here he stands, fatter and fatter on the fields of lotusland.

“And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy,” say Ulysses’ men among the lotus-eaters, in the poem I believe by Tennyson. And this is how I came to old Red this morning, materializing slowly, bearing unpleasantness. Coexistence was our game, but today I intervened. Finally I felt ready to deal with a sick horse, walked directly out of the house from the last dream in a good night’s sleep, a dream of flying so inspir-ational I found myself already standing beside the bed as I woke up, tasting victory and looking for fresh tasks. In it I piloted a one-man jet and then actually became the jet, rocketing straight upward, screaming and dangerous, but friendly too. Why should a bad man be visited by beautiful dreams? I suppose because the dream is unconscious, knows nothing of good and bad. But Red’s unconscious too, and he knows.

Red has never liked me. I approached this morning holding out a big carrot bright as a flame, keeping the plastic syringe out of sight by my side. There’s no needle involved. You simply jam the thing in his mouth and squirt a bunch of paste onto his tongue. Gunk the consistency of peanut butter, but no snack for intestinal worms. Once it’s stuck to his tongue he can’t spit it out, down it goes. Simple in theory. But then again. Red’s a horse, yes, but he’s no idiot. He doesn’t eat poison, even if it’s prescribed. Let him get a whiff of that stuff and his lips are sealed, he doesn’t know you. In fact he flattens his ears and claims boldly not to be a horse at all—

Carl Van Ness, what did you dream about, down under the water?

The bastard, he refused to say. Not that he’d soon befriend anybody ripping him from that incredibly comfortable sleep, his drowning. It took him two days to decide to wake up. When I walked him around the grounds on the second morning, the tall sculptures coming forward out of the mist surprised him. But he’d been looking out the window right at them all the previous afternoon.

I executed a classic switch on poor Red, substituting the syringe for the carrot as it passed between his lips, jamming the plunger and gag-ging the old boy with his wormer. One more thing he’d hate me for.

The perpetual sad boredom blasted right off from his face and his 90 / Denis Johnson

tongue performed all sorts of tricks in his mouth, but the only way through this experience was to swallow his medicine. As for the carrot, I almost tossed it outside the fence. Sometimes I feel like being cruel.

These dumb animals frighten me, so complete, and so prophetic in their completeness, arcing from infancy to old age during the short time we know them, promising us the same. But I gave him the carrot, fed it between his lips like a log into the pulp mill.

The idea was to pull a similar substitution on Winona.

Carl Van Ness had understood the mechanics all right, but I wanted to make him understand everything.

I tried to explain why I’d fallen for Melissa. “I’m not fated to be burned up in the fires of ecstatic adoration. That’s who I am, but I landed in the wrong century. In the days of saints they had heavenly entities — virginal, right? and immaculate, right? — but today I settle for somebody transparent and uncomplicated. Somebody you can see through.”

Van Ness really had nothing to say on this or almost any other subject.

“Sounds like a dose of push-push fever” was his sole remark.

I talked to him on every subject anyway. I’d always wished for a confidant, someone I could open up to about all this. Clarence was my partner but forget Clarence. Melissa on some levels could be spoken to, but never talked to.

I was walking him over the property, letting him get his legs back that second day among us. We toured the sunny acres and stood at the edge of the steep woods and their soothing amber light and muted ocean-sound, and I showed him a sacred spot, believed by the man my father had bought the property from to be an ancient Pomo Indian burial mound. I’d never excavated it because allegedly spirits camped here. Farther on, in an open place among very old madrones, crackly garlic plants still marked the garden spot of the area’s original homesteaders, and we could see also where wild pigs had rooted, just the night before, under oak trees where for hundreds of years various clans of migrating Pomos had stopped to gather the same food — acorns.

The pigs hadn’t lived here way back then; they’re descended from escaped domestic animals. We toured the boundaries and ended up staring, I stared, anyway, at the muddy swatch torn out of the pondside grasses where two nights earlier I’d dragged him from the water. And at that moment he’d been dead. Here he’d been a corpse, now he walked past the same spot alive, gazing through from Already Dead / 91

another universe, or so I gathered he believed. But he hardly glanced at the spot. I told him I was going to name the pond Loch Ness. Did he think it was funny? I couldn’t tell.

“You said you’d pay me to kill her,” Van said.

“I don’t mean I’ll pay you. You have to go on and finish drowning — and do it in somebody else’s pond, please. But I’ll give ten grand to anybody you say.”

We sat on two oaken stumps side by side. Last year I’d sold most of the younger hardwood, a hundred thousand board feet, to a timber outfit. They’d chopped it all up and peddled it for firewood. I know — I know. But I’d been desperate for cash.

Sitting there on the stump, Van Ness put his hands on his knees and looked tired and confused. He wore mustaches like two horse’s tails, and round rimless glasses, very thick. These accessories nearly took away his face.

He said, “I want you to pay for Wilhelm Frankheimer’s rehab.”

“Rehab?”

“He’s a coke fiend. You know him?”

“I know him.”

“It’ll run you more than ten grand.”

“I’ll pay for his care.”

“Not until he wants it, though.”

Certainly I knew Frankheimer. In fact Frankheimer had done the plumbing for the house, and he’d also put the roof on top. I saw him once at a beautiful moment — watched him balance his hammer on a stack of cedar shingles one day, step carefully to the structure’s edge, and stand there two stories up in his giantism, loosing a glittering archway of piss down through the light. Evidently they were great buddies, Frankheimer and Van Ness, or had been once.

I took Van (as he liked to be called) back into the house because he did seem weary. Also I had something I wanted him to see. But I was nervous about it and so I began to hold forth and hog the whole show — it’s a terrible habit I have. I knew he’d like Nietzsche, if he hadn’t already heard of him, so I read to him from a book on Winona’s shelf.

It turned out he’d not only heard of the arrogant German, he could quote him endlessly and really get you squirming with boredom. I indulged him as long as I could stand it, after all he was my guest, and then I said, “I want to show you how I’ve arranged things.” I went up to the bathroom to get it while he sat in the living room 92 / Denis Johnson

on the couch. From the loft above he looked small and isolated. He did appear capable of almost any crime. He seemed possessed by a curious inactivity, settled there alone on the edge of the cushion, a tentativeness conveying complete disbelief in everything in sight. You can do anything, in a world you don’t believe in.

In a minute I sat down next to him on the couch and put a plastic bottle of capsules on the coffee table before us. “These are Winona’s Nembutal capsules,” I said. “Pretty potent.” From my pocket I produced another bottle.

“More Nembutal,” he said, reading the label on the second bottle.

“Why don’t you take one? One won’t hurt you.”

“I’d rather not.”

“What if I offered you a thousand dollars to take one?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Two thousand.”

“So these aren’t Nembutal.”

“You knew right away. You’re a natural-born plotter.”

“What’s in them?”

“Nembutal on the outside, horse dope on the inside. Zielene. Two of these will knock out a thousand-pound horse.”

“Will it kill her?”

“No. It’ll just put her out. Nothing will wake her. Tie a plastic bag around her head and go off for half an hour. Come back later and remove the evidence.”

He put his hands on his knees in that old-man way of his and scowled through his thick lenses and down over his dangling mustaches at the two little bottles there on the coffee table.

“I’d rather just smother her with a pillow.” The electrifying thing about all this was that each of us had come to the other out of nowhere. Nothing contradictory surrounded us, no evidence that we weren’t capable of anything — no familiar context full of obstacles, no deflating local histories. As a prophet gets laughed at in his hometown, so also the big-time conspirator. But a stranger could be God. If we kept on talking like this it would all actually come about.

“Then, afterward, you have to finish killing yourself,” I said.

“You won’t have to remind me.”

“If you have trouble going through with it, I’ll do it.”

“You’re too nice to me, Mr. Fairchild.”

Already Dead / 93

“I would have to, you see that. I couldn’t let you live. One way or another you’re sealing your fate. In a sense you’re dead as soon as you kill her.”

Van Ness pursed his lips, seemed to be kissing that thought as it hung in front of him. “That’s poetic.”

At the Wharton School in Monterey County, a prep school, one of the best (which I bored right through, though I hardly dented college), I read Hermann Hesse’s Demian and dreamed of a friendship like the one between Max Demian and Emil Sinclair, a bond that frees a person from other bonds and leads him into a new dimension.

From the little he told me I gathered that Van Ness had started out looking for that friend, too, and for that life worth staying on for, that religion, that woman, that vocation. The tall plumber, Frankheimer, may have served for a while in that regard. Once upon a time he’d accomplished a painful transit through a sort of incarnation where he’d been capable of friendship, arriving eventually at his present unapproachable state, this coked-up condition, everybody knew about it, that made him pitiful and dangerous both. And once upon a time Van had depended heavily on Frankheimer’s kinship, and on Demian as a guiding light, an affirmation and a model. But now he’d outgrown it in what he thought of as a cold and Nietzschean way. Outgrown all models, all reasons, outgrown life itself.

Now Van Ness claimed already to have died, more than once, in various other universes. Who can refute that? Is there any proof otherwise? Imagine a slight revision in Nietzsche’s myth of eternal return: not that at history’s end all matter collapses back to the center, Big-Bangs, and starts again identically; but that it starts again with one in-finitesimal difference in the action of a single molecule — every time, and an endless number of times. When you die, your consciousness blanks out, but it resumes eons later, when the history of molecules has been revised enough to preclude your death due to those particular circumstances: the bullet hits your brain in this world, but in a later one merely tickles your earlobe. You die in one universe and yet in another go on without a hitch. You don’t mark the intervening ages — subjectively you experience nothing other than almost having died. But in fact you’ve edged into another kingdom, ruled by another king, engaging other potentialities.

94 / Denis Johnson

If this were true, the person who understood it would have conquered death. Would be invulnerable. Would be the Superman.

There’s a dizzying thrill in a philosophy that can only be tested by suicide — and then never proven, only tested again by another attempt.

And the person embarked on that series of tests, treading that trail of lives as if from boulder to boulder across the river of time — no, out into the burning ocean of eternity — what a mutant! Some new genesis, like a pale, poisonous daisy.

The terrible drought had broken only briefly, that single night of rain soaking us with less than two inches, but the winds seemed bene-volent afterward, often trundling high, white clouds along the very shores of outer space, and mixing the airs so that the coastal weather stayed in general crisp and sunny. People called it an early autumn.

Van Ness disappeared the minute he left Winona’s ranch. He’d been registered at the Tides Motel, but now no more, and I suddenly really didn’t expect to see him again. He’d succeeded in scaring me more than I’d scared him, and maybe that’s all he wanted. But he sent me a postcard from the town of Carmel, explaining that his mother had died and promising to return on Tuesday, September 4. Then we’ll see, he wrote.

We’ll see if our eyes are open.

Still, the reality of our plot was fading. Maybe he just wanted to keep the fear alive by saying hello.

Meanwhile I learned, also, that the phony loggers in the black Silverado pickup had been camping across the Gualala River but lately hadn’t been seen there. Things were easy. Winona settled in after her coastal wandering and the ugly horse Red was no longer my responsibility. As soon as Clarence came back from L.A. I’d have the pot cultivation off my hands. And Winona mentioned that Harry Lally’s wife had boarded her horse at the Say-When Ranch, where the equestrian set held their gymkhanas, and gone off for three weeks in Brazil with her gangster husband. It seemed these autumn breezes had carried away all the heat and fog around me, leaving my days sweet and vacant.

I had more time to spend with Melissa, but she had less for me. I’d never suspected her of anything like fidelity, certainly, but since the day we’d started up I’d believed I was the only steady one. Now I didn’t know, I sensed another presence in her thoughts, and I didn’t ask for the truth because I feared that’s what I’d get.

Already Dead / 95

A week after I left Winona’s I woke up in my own apartment, a rickety box in a fourplex, but mine, an apartment holding more garbage than furniture, but all of it gloriously mine, for the first time in many days. Nobody after me, and coffee in my very own cup. Maybe the weather had anticipated this happiness, this treading through trash in what was supposed to be my living room thinking that I should wash the plastic floor, that I should pull the bedsheets from the windows, popping tacks, which I’d sweep out of here immediately along with all this other crap, mostly wine bottles and paper plates, and put up hopeful, restful curtains.

But such spacious freedoms can’t be infinite. What we gather together has a way of unravelling. That morning I visited Melissa, but she acted nervous and, if possible, more foreign. As if she were hiding something from me. And when I refused to stop talking with a phony British accent, she kicked me out of her little trailer. She’d actually swept the place, and I’d have been willing to hang out longer.

But I felt alien vibrations as we made love in her narrow bed, our knees and elbows banging the trailer’s walls, and when I came, I ejaculated a paranoid essence.

“Did I mention, dahling, that my teddibly beloved wife is back in town?”

“I told you, please don’t talk that way.”

“Okay. Okay.”

“It isn’t funny, not to me. I’m trying to learn American. Get out.”

“I’m leaving,” I said.

For a few minutes I sulked, sweating beside her in the bed, our skins sticking together wherever we touched.

Usually she let me open up, use different personas. One was a version of my grandfather, the Welshman, revised somewhat during my years in ritzy prep school and then put away. Usually I made her laugh — I spoke in Granddad’s voice, walked with his bowed legs, expressed his smugness, his gruff eccentricity and the ubiquitous terror wriggling underneath it. I hadn’t known him long, but having seen him a little as a very small child I had no trouble tracing some of his mannerisms through my father and finding them in myself. My brother Bill, in profile, especially when the late sun lights his blue eyes, looks exactly like Granddad. It’s breathtaking, the persistence of that man’s invisible force, that soul, blazing up decades later in another face. Anyway lately I’d let my Britisher out, and it was hard

96 / Denis Johnson

to get him back in. I’d seen this man in my dreams a lot lately, angry dreams where he attacked, sometimes brutalized, soft Italian film stars, white Italian statues, even a church door of the type I’d admired in Milan. It doesn’t take a high-paid shrink to explain that the two faces of that alliance are still at war, that the feelings once knotted up in the marriage of my paternal grandparents still whirl in my own guts, that the judging Anglo half of me blames the passionate Italian for all my troubles, and that my going around imitating him isn’t just a stupid laugh, but a sure sign that the strong British male is dominating, that he’s going to do the horrible things made necessary by the woman inside, the crazy Italian female part of me who’s disarranged my life.

“Did you forget how to put your pants on? It’s over the legs.”

“Right, I’m sorry.”

“You’re just holding them in your hands!”

“I’m sorry. It’s been chaos. People have truly been after me, but it’s going to be better now. Those two loggers, you saw them, in the Silverado — they weren’t loggers—”

“With the dogs? Such happy dogs!”

“Their happiness really doesn’t interest me, honey.”

“They came here yesterday. They paid a courtesy call.”

“Who? The dogs? The men? Yesterday?”

“The dogs with the men. They want to ask me about you but I said, I don’t know.”

“Oh my God. Yesterday? ”

“Yes, it’s as I said, yesterday! They ask if you have some marijuana growing.”

“I’m having an attack. I’m going to vomit.”

“I said I don’t know. Nothing, nothing.”

“And they accepted that?”

“The man said, very well, okay, see you, we’ll be in the neighborhood, we know your address. I said that’s obvious!”

“Oh, yeah? And what did he say to that?”

“He told me that this is just a courtesy call, and next time no. It won’t be.”

“No, sweetie, it won’t. Do you remember where my pot patch is?”

“Sure. I wasn’t so drunk.”

I put my face in my hands and expected, from the wild churning in my solar plexus, to explode with horrible sobs. Instead it suddenly Already Dead / 97

occurred to me that the timing here might be not too inconvenient.

“Actually,” I said, “if we lose the plants before Clarence turns up, he’ll never know how it all came about. He won’t necessarily blame me.

Harry gets the plants, I get off the hook. Clarence gets the shaft, but that’s better than eternity in the grave for me.”

“Clarence the surfer? I saw him last night.”

“I’ll cut out your tongue!”

“In the Safeway I saw him buy bread, and beef jerky, and magazines.

And for that you want to cut my tongue?”

“Forgive me,” I said.

Take it all around, life showed every troubling sign of having sunk to its usual clammy depth. Clarence! I’d have to get honest with him, fill him in truthfully, face his disappointment.

I’d just dragged my jogging shoes onto my feet when she asked me,

“What are you thinking?”

I was always flattered when she asked after my thoughts. I always gave her the truth.

“I’m thinking how nice it would be for us if most of the people I’m supposed to love would drop dead.”

Wilhelm Frankheimer sat on a stump beyond the sheep pen, bending far over toward the ground, going to almost acrobatic extremes to attack small scurrying ants with an old saw blade while Melissa moaned and sighed and sometimes laughed inside the trailer. Frankheimer was still naked.

After a while, Fairchild came out and drove away.

It sounded to Frank as if the little heap, a rickety Porsche, stood in need of potent ministrations. But it got Fairchild up the hill and out of sight and that was all Frankheimer cared about. He strolled back inside.

Melissa sat on the bed’s edge shivering. The whole business turned him on.

He stood in front of her until she took him in her mouth. In seconds, he came — he’d been screwing her for half an hour and hadn’t even been all the way erect; now the low-rent quality of the moment gave him ecstasy.

She turned her head, leaned sideways, and spat sadly onto the floor.

It made him feel like marrying her. This underfed wench he could usually take or leave. Women did, he seemed always to forget, have moments like stilettos. No telling when you’d be stabbed.

98 / Denis Johnson

“Why did you make me hide?”

“I told you to leave!” she said. “Not to hide!”

“Where am I gonna leave to, with no pants on?”

“Obviously to no-place. And then you come back inside and make me suck your cock!”

“Why did you make me hide?”

“Because,” she said, “he’s important to me. Now do you want to lie down with me? He won’t come back. Do you want something cold to drink?”

Frankheimer reached down under the bed, feeling around close to the wall. “I just came back in here for my clothes.” He was standing there buttoning his trousers and looking at Melissa’s very white features, her small, pretty mouth, when it hit him again — the astonishing persistence of the Yvonne problem. That hurt kept swimming up. He looked at his reflection melting in the cheap mirror and declared out loud: “Maybe I just need sincerity. I think that’s all I need.” All of a sudden, he understood that he was going to shoot up.

He happened to be carrying some crank, a quarter ounce of pebbly amphetamine he’d agreed to deliver to Harry Lally — but not to Harry Lally in Brazil. He could feel the bulge in his right-hand pocket. He’d really never cared for the stuff but it had a habit of presenting itself at certain moments. He consoled himself that he’d probably been intending this anyway. He’d been carrying his outfit around for days.

Melissa watched him, scowling. “Rape me, spy on my boyfriend, now you’re going to shoot cocaine.”

“I’m not doing coke. This is crank, not coke.”

“It’s all poison.”

“Frank’s on crank,” he said.

“So long. So long to your mind.”

“Would you lend me some money?”

“Good-bye and good luck to your brain.”

“I could use a little cash.”

“Do I look like I have some? Or even any?”

“Just a thought.”

Frank rummaged in her kitchen drawers and then bent the neck of one of her spoons to mix up in. The needle was barbed. He had to file it sharp on a matchbook cover. He liked the fascinated look on Melissa’s face.

Already Dead / 99

For a minute he sat with one leg draped over the other, holding the syringe between two fingers like a cigarette.

She was goofy and told him her goofy fears. “Nelson is going to do something about his wife.”

“Who’s Nelson?”

“Him. Nelson Fairchild. Don’t you recognize him, didn’t you work for him?”

“I laid the roof on his house.”

“There, you see?”

“I did the plumbing, too.”

“He’s going to do something bad. You see?”

“All I see is you don’t speak English.”

“He’s going to murder his wife.”

“Nelson Fairchild?”

“Nelson! Yes!”

He stuck a vein, introduced the crank and walked a half mile up to the ridge and four miles down to Point Arena feeling electric and friendly. When he got to town his legs just kept going.

Some kids in a Chevy van picked him up walking south along the cliffs. Ragged Metallica echoed out of their stereo’s speakers, but the black ocean contradicted all rock-and-roll. A bit farther down the coast the cloud cover dissolved, and he stepped from the van onto the sunlit sidewalk of Anchor Bay, two rows of buildings laid out on either side of the highway, which became the town’s main street for the distance of one city block. He’d built half these structures. He remembered measuring and cutting the wood for the counter in the Full Sails Cafe, the counter at which he sat now, spreading his hands out on its surface in front of him and feeling they were magnificent things and smiling at the waitress. He grabbed a napkin from the dispenser and wiped at his nose as a way of covering up his convulsive happiness.

The waitress said, “Catching a cold?”

“Oh…” He paused to consider the question. “Not necessarily.” He remembered he wasn’t hungry and hit the sidewalk outside, the thud of his feet on the pavement running up through his head and the screen door slamming with a thrilling rightness.

Across the street were the Laundromat and service station. A spiky-haired young boy stood by the gas pumps with his mouth open and his hands in his pockets. Frank believed he recognized the lad.

100 / Denis Johnson

He crossed the street, adjusting and readjusting his sunshades, and raised his hand in greeting.

“I was sorry to hear about your dad.”

“My dad? What about him?”

“Well, that he died, little friend.”

“My dad?”

“I knew him well,” Frank said. “He had a great tan.”

“My dad is right there. That’s him. He’s alive.” The boy pointed toward two men talking by the grease pit.

“Well, hell then, shit then. Who died? Somebody’s dad, I thought.”

“Not mine.”

He didn’t like this. Second thoughts started eating him and the clouds began to look like fists and the shadows like deep gashes.

Half-remembered things, words he hadn’t quite heard, details that hadn’t quite registered, suddenly swarmed over his consciousness. The connections proliferating, lighting up, formed a grid that fell down over his understanding like a net. He shook it off.

“Going to school, kid?”

The kid wouldn’t talk to him, and walked over toward his father instead.

Frank took a few paces to stand by himself at the edge of the street, taking note of everything around him. The cars, the people, any distraction at all. But random facts now coalesced in a geometry of crushing significance. Remarks, events, all of which had seemed by chance, suddenly became evidence. Things he’d heard, whispers. Words he was about to remember became tendrilous heads like those of sprouts, their mouths open. But nothing came out. They didn’t communicate telepathically. It was much more intimate than that.

He turned to the window behind him and looked through it. He saw the Point Arena cop doing the bad Laundromat thing, moving and folding clothes — bad because it’s all yours, all falling apart, like the universe — and it occurred to him that now was the time to go public with all this, time at last to seek justice through the system.

To the west, assuming they had Laundromats in Japan, it was seven thousand miles to the next nearest coin-operated cleaning machine. Four dozen miles north to the Laundromat in Fort Bragg, fifty miles south to the one in Jenner, several others Already Dead / 101

twenty-six miles due inland in Ukiah — over twice that far by the roads.

A long ways to a wash, any way you wanted to go. It irked Officer Navarro that he had to drive down here to Anchor Bay, nine miles from Point Arena, every time his socks smelled. Certainly he’d travel that far for a steak, a show, two minutes with any reasonably pleasant woman, but there was nothing to do in Anchor Bay — twelve buildings and a commercial campground set between Gualala and Point Arena, with a spectacular view of the Pacific — except sit in the one bar and have a few, then drive with an illegally high alcohol blood level back to Point Arena. And he really shouldn’t do that. He was off duty and wearing plain clothes at the moment, but everybody seemed to know him.

Navarro fed dimes into the automatic dryer and made up his mind to nurse a beer at the Full Sails.

Just as he left the Laundromat, half expecting to end up publicly drunk, the tallest man in the county — Frankenmayer? — approached him and held up a hand the size of a baseball mitt.

“Can I get a minute, friend?”

He’d seen this guy around — from a quarter mile off, you saw him — but this was the first time up close. The man created a shadow.

He was a walking eclipse of the sun.

“Sure thing,” Navarro said, and, keeping in mind his public-relations crisis, made certain to smile.

“People are doing things to me.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“That’s the simplest way of putting a complicated thing. The other night I heard something out back and I found one of my hoses cut.”

“A hose?”

“A water hose, yeah. I think I know who’s doing it but I can’t prove it.”

“I wouldn’t get too worked up about it.”

“That’s just the latest example. People are watching me, cutting into my phone lines little by little, tampering with stuff, spraying mist through the windows. They had my car rigged to spray mist. Now listen,” the big man said, suddenly smiling, almost jovial, “I know how it sounds. But if you staked out my place for forty-eight hours, you’d make the biggest arrest of your life. You’d change history. I shit you not. The history of the world.”

“People are pranking on your car?”

102 / Denis Johnson

“I’m talking to you. Are you listening?”

“If there’s been actual damage, then you’re talking about vandalism, which is illegal.”

“They’ve got very tiny devices attached that spray mist out at you.

This mist fucks with your meridians. It upsets the physical metabolism in a very dangerous way.”

“Meridians?”

“Do you know anything about acupuncture? The I–Ching? Ancient Chinese philosophies?”

There was a way of sliding around a thing like this. You had to regard it as encased in glass. “I’m not sure I have your name right,” Navarro said.

“Frankheimer.”

“Could you show me these devices, Mr. Frankheimer? Something that doesn’t belong in your car, that sprays mist like you say?”

“I tore all that shit out, man. The mirrors, everything. I don’t get in that fucking car. Why do you think I walked down here?” This guy was massive. Massive. “I don’t see where a crime has been committed,” Navarro said.

“You mean it’s no crime to yank on a man’s mind? To cut a person’s hoses? Assault him with chemical mists? I’m telling you, they’re stretching me out about yay tight. This is tension”—showing the cables of muscle in his forearms. Jutting his chin and turning it, like a man shaving, to display the tendons in his neck—“this is tension.” It was only prudent to map out the moves for restraining this remarkable specimen should that become necessary. Shit, Navarro thought, I’ll shoot him in the knee. Nothing less would do it.

“What was your name again, please?”

“Wilhelm Frankheimer.”

“Wilhelm. I gotta tell you. Do you have anything physical to show me? Something that’s been damaged? Because it’s all sounding very unreal.”

“Just stake the place out,” Frankheimer insisted.

“Again, I’d have to say we’re dealing with suspicions here. Probably not too rational ones.”

Frankheimer executed an abrupt shift in his focus. “Now there’s something for you, Officer.” He swung his head around slowly, following the progress of a pale convertible sports car as it passed.

“I’ll stick with General Motors,” Navarro said.

Already Dead / 103

“That’s Nelson Fairchild. I just got a message that that guy is plotting something nefarious. Do you know what he’s doing right now?”

“He’s going to the store.”

“He’s picking up the Barron’s financial weekly for his dad, I bet.”

“I gotta do something similar, Wilhelm — errands and such. We’re always available if something specific turns up. Until then—”

“Was it his dad who died? Was it old Fairchild?” Navarro flashed him a false smile. “Nobody dead around here lately.” The tall man raised up one finger in front of Navarro’s face. “By way of a simple farewell: don’t get your lips frozen on me. And don’t run over my foot.”

“Great,” Navarro said, and started across the street thinking that anybody who hung out in a Laundromat deserved exactly this.

The kid he’d caught peeping the other night was also on the scene.

He stood over by the gas station, his gaze avoiding Navarro’s, trying to look as if the man with him, obviously his dad, was no acquaintance at all. Navarro decided to let him shape his own zone, and crossed to the cafe without looking back.

He thought he’d better not start with the Coors. Better get a piece of pie, check out the cafe’s fragile-looking waitress, avoid having to arrest himself later. It was warm inside, and the place smelled good. The waitress was a little older than he’d thought. Or at least not too well made-up.

He’d talked to her before and had felt, at that time, that he was getting somewhere. In fact she’d practically agreed to host an orgy. “How’s the pie?” he asked her.

“I wouldn’t lie about it,” she said. “I don’t own the place.” He hadn’t stopped in again, so he guessed she’d put them back at square one. But she smiled halfway when she set down his pie and coffee.

She had a tattoo on her right hand, a tiny peace symbol. And it looked like one nostril was pierced, though she didn’t have a ring in it. In L.A., cops didn’t date such women.

Here they did. Here he was opening up to aberrations, transforming under the unrelieved stress of these absurd people and their New Age ideas, which seemed less and less outlandish beside the genuine psycho driveling of the Wilhelm type, not to mention the pounding surf, squawking seals, laughing crows, and the aliveness of all these 104 / Denis Johnson

monster trees. In L.A., it — these people, this scene — would all fit, all of it and much, much more, into the category of senseless Martian crap, this category a kind of fishbowl in which almost everything swam except you and a few other cops. You had to cut yourself off in L.A., stay outside the glass. But here the majority of these thousands of lives are only big, slow trees. Slow isn’t even right, the concept probably hasn’t got a word, it’s just that the aliveness of these millions of cedars and redwoods is hardly happening. So you find yourself dropping your defenses, opening up, breathing things in.

He sat at the counter jabbing with a fork at his apple pie. When the waitress came down to his end of things with the coffeepot, he lifted his hand to detain her wordlessly while he wiped his lips with his napkin and swallowed. She was svelte. Okay, bony. But definitely beautiful. “What’s your name?”

“Mo. But everybody calls me Maureen.” She laughed wildly. “I’m sorry!” she said quickly. “Cops make me nervous. I mean, it’s the other way around, they call me Mo.”

Her smile hit him right in the gut. She definitely had the face. He’d always been a face man, come to think of it. “Mo,” he repeated.

“And you’re Officer Navarro.”

“But everybody calls me Off.”

“No. But really.”

“John.”

“Okay, John. Cops make me nervous, John.”

She left him and went to take care of a young couple way over by the window, the only other customers.

And of course every once in a while you breathe something of these people into you, their kinky exhalations. You don’t breathe in anybody in L.A. Breathe? Breathe people in? Christ. He was starting to think like them. Which only proved he was breathing them in, a concept which, itself, he had breathed in. It was a vague deal, but then too he sensed that if he had to shoot somebody around here in the line of duty, if he killed one of these types, he’d stop turning into one of them.

What about the big man and his lurching accusations? What had he said? Anything real? Maybe drawing attention to himself, maybe trying to get himself some help or just his way of saying, Stop me before I do something too uncontrolled? Sometimes the twisted ones accused everybody else of doing what they really, in their hearts, Already Dead / 105

wanted to do themselves. These berserkers were infants in big bodies, that’s what the condition chiefly consisted of. Imagine a six-month-old with manual dexterity and an arsenal. He’d get his bottle all right. Then the SWAT people, and everybody dead and nobody knows why.

“Mo—”

She brought over the coffeepot.

But he covered his cup with his hand and said, “Remember when we talked before?”

She didn’t answer. Because they were virtually alone she was, he could see it, reluctant to be flirtatious now.

“I’d still like to see you sometime. Tonight, even.” She wouldn’t quite look at him, not directly.

“What do you think about that?” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said, and suddenly her loneliness stank all over the room.

He told himself: let’s get out of here.

“Save my seat,” he said to her. “I gotta move my clothes around across the street.”

He left a five by his plate. Because he wasn’t coming back.

“Wait a minute,” she said when he had his hand on the doorknob.

He could feel his shoulders hunching and knew she could see it — he’d be looking yanked back, stopped against his will. “You left too much,” she said.

“No — keep the change.”

“This is a five.”

“I’ll be back in a second.”

“It doesn’t seem like you will.”

He had to go back and break it.

“If you’d really like to get together sometime,” she said.

“Sure,” he agreed, revolted with himself.

“I get off at nine.”

“Okay. Yeah. Fine.”

The look in her eyes was friendly and not that stupid. “You sure you’re up for it?”

“I said so, didn’t I?”

“You look like you’re under arrest.”

Navarro got back up the coast with his laundry before 5 P.M. to check in with Merton, nominally his boss but no one’s boss, 106 / Denis Johnson

really, before Merton headed home or wherever he headed each day at five. Navarro in truth didn’t mind the drive between Anchor Bay and Point Arena, a stretch of coast that opened into breezy emerald meadows where an occasional bunch of cows or horses just stood still, apparently thinking. Here the coast jutted westward, farther westward, he’d been told, than any other part of California, and well out into the clouds and fog of the ocean’s weather systems. Point Arena was generally sunless, damp, depressed, a scrawny community gathered around a fishing harbor whose pier had been wrecked by a great wave some years back and only very recently rebuilt. Now the revival was on, however: other renovations had started along the main street, and Navarro only hoped they crept up the hill a couple blocks to include his own territory. The police station didn’t quite rate the designation — it was a moveable structure meant for use as a temporary classroom in overburdened schools. Certainly it was big enough for the two-man department, but it felt wrong. In a workspace this size they needed di-viders, which they’d had briefly but which had been command-eered — by the school, as a matter of fact — and which would have given it less this air of a hovel crouched in a universe of chaos. Everything was everywhere, and the three desks, his, Merton’s, and the part-time clerk’s, seemed to be rising on a tide of stuff, mostly paper: fliers, notices, findings of the county and state attorneys, things that should have been taken out and burned.

Merton greeted him only by raising his eyes while lowering his head to drip Skoal snuff out of his mouth into a Styrofoam cup.

Judging by Merton’s silence, nothing was happening today. The office closed at five, and after that the two men could be summoned by beepers — Navarro would take the calls tonight.

In fact he’d had it in mind to ask Merton to switch with him because he felt he might get lucky with Mo, the tall waitress, but now he decided against it because, in the event he was wrong about his luck, he didn’t want to be loitering around and lamenting the fact.

He paused at the file cabinet to check the mail, which had obviously lain all day in its wire basket undisturbed. Jenny, the part-time clerk, did not actually open mail for fear of creating confusion. Merton didn’t open mail either, but as today’s included a stack of half a dozen brown envelopes bearing a familiar, earnest scrawl, he might have been expected to. Merton enjoyed these little communications — the first one Navarro opened started right out PS: Now I am Already Dead / 107

mad as shit kicking in Hell… Their correspondent wrote and sealed and stamped them on different days, but dropped them in the box all at once like this, in a batch. Two or three times before they’d come, and Merton always got a kick out of reading them out loud. Today’s sampling looked basically illegible.

“Anything up?”

“Nah,” said Officer Merton. “Another perfect day.” Merton was a large battered handsome man on whom a police uniform looked like something he’d wear doing yard work. He kept his boots next to his desk and worked in his stocking feet. Good clean white socks. Nothing untoward there. In fact to a degree they offset the effect of the snuff, and the spitting. He’d been employed by the Sheriff’s Department in Ukiah for one year, in the county jail; then he’d been out of work for quite a long time before moving over here for this job. In Navarro’s opinion his colleague showed a flair for law enforcement though he lacked experience in basic police procedure. The truth was he navigated the local waters more skillfully than Navarro could ever hope to. Merton had found great success in viewing Point Arena as a large jail — there were good and bad prisoners, some serving sentences and some not yet proven guilty, and he anticipated nothing much to do unless called upon to crush a mass disturbance. “What?” he often said into the phone, “I’m not going out for that. I just had my feet up and was reading the newspaper. Dogs are supposed to bark. And if your neighbor calls me tomorrow and says his dog’s been poisoned,” he might add, “I won’t go out for that either.” Without a word right now, though, Merton pulled on his boots, stood slowly, winked, touched a few things on his desk in a secret, supersti-tious way, hefted his Styrofoam spittoon and then pitched it into the wastebasket, gathering himself to leave the building as usual with great informality, even haste. Navarro suspected him of some arcane habit or vice. He pictured Merton in a smoky den gambling with Chinese guys.

Opening another of the day’s brown envelopes, Navarro noticed that it was addressed to him by name. He discovered they all were.

Last May, the second of his three ex-wives had written to him, sounding strange and sentimental — he’d wondered if she’d lost her looks or fallen prey to booze. Otherwise, these collected lunatic ravings were the closest he’d come to receiving any personal mail. He 108 / Denis Johnson

got lots of ads, that was about it, and he wished he could take a cut on the money people made selling him off to mailing lists, mostly for companies offering high-tech law-enforcement gadgets. All the cops were buying plastic Clock automatics now. He wouldn’t have minded owning a ten-millimeter himself, 649 foot-pounds of knockdown power in every one of fifteen shots, and all that. To what purpose? Well, for the hell of it. I have activated brain power, the second letter began without salutation or heading—

I have activated brain power to 85 % brain capacity and using every inch, every drop so help me GOD in anti-beaming these rays as mentioned, but had to move at 4.14 PM to here behind the hill which contains zinc, zirconium compounds, and combinations not to be revealed despite CIA efforts, including almost getting that girl to intercourse with me, under the alieas or alien name of Miran. 4.14 PM on March 12, 1985, this is the day fateful indeed that I gave up the battle but it remains to be seen if only temporary as a disguise or strategy or, in the end, really. If you examine any leading author on electric, magnetic, physics, thermodynamics, also related to evolution, solar, exc. You find that positive and negative equals out. Not so as mystic authors tell us, even the Bible if original translation could be released by CIA from the library of Congress and Smithsonian Institution, but which would destroy their ruthless, magnificent plan to CRATE A FALSE UNIVERSE.

Therefore mathematicalmystically it turns out the two domes do NOT

cancel or neutralize out and what is breaking my heart is the tragedy of this and its effect on anything metal, even trace elements, in our brain, our endocrine, our everything. But wait. The mind is bigger than that.

Ultimately we are safe. But how absurd and it bends me low to be the only one to say, look, just turn off the radar and see! Paradise in ten seconds! As soon as the beams stop, and a few of us activated up to 85 % brain capacity like me, not to mention many over that, not too many but say 1200 on planet earth. We’re tired! I am anyway. Let us heal the sick and teach you to activate to high and even higher than that, so you can do it. Then you get UNIVERSAL HARMONY, and I mean ten seconds! Put an injunction on them at 1.21 PM and ten seconds later, Paradise in ten seconds. I cannot stress how good that would be.

No exageration. And I’m tired, my whole head gets overheated and burning, THERMONUCLEAR I might as well say from the pity of Already Dead / 109

it. And it’s stupid. You turn left off the ridge rd. where the picture of a boat used to be. I hope you stop off for coffee. Drive two miles down dirt rd. there. That is if I just don’t put an end to it by joining the army and turning over my capacity and teach them how to jump the radar beams for the purpose of destruction instead of harmony like I am now, God be praised.

Not to offend anyone but I choose you for reasons not to be revealed in this letter, which is being read by satellite and analyzed in Pentagon, exc. They won’t kill me but it’s just for your sake. I think it’s all through computers and radar but who knows with these unscrupulous men twisted by their own MENTAL-DESTRUCTIVE MACHINES, they might drain your brake fluid or something to fake a wreck. Rays, or off the coast road — your just as dead either way, so tread lightly with prayer on your lips and understanding of GOD ALMIGHTY and infinite love. I Am sorry to involve you. I am sorry to involve you “but”! Remember the goodness you feel is not God’s goodness it is actually God.

And so your feeling God. And remember STOP THE RADAR and best wishes.

W. Fairchild

Navarro bent to stash the envelopes in the “Federal” file, where letters from W. Fairchild were kept because they sometimes came close to constituting threats against the Air Force radar station atop Arena Ridge.

He didn’t like Merton reading them out loud and making fun. Navarro agreed you had to keep your distance, but he respected crazy people.

He more than just sometimes felt a little crazy himself.

Navarro had visited the radar station once, just driving around. Kind of an imaginary place, a hot, windless island surrounded by an absolutely stationary sea of silver stratus cloud. Nobody had challenged him, in fact he’d seen not a soul that day, and he’d wondered if the radars actually operated — that is until he’d pulled up near the forty-foot-tall twin domes and heard static spitting from his radio, although it was switched off…

The “Federal” file stayed pretty thin — mostly these crackpot pleas and a few others tattling on tax evaders and campsite vandals in the national forests. Vague bureaucratic nightmares had made these messages a harbor here, some incompletely imagined disaster that had everyone destroyed for failing, when Congress demanded, to produce one of these letters. PS—

110 / Denis Johnson

PS just to mention as proof they don’t know their stuff microwaves made me a eunuch before 1985 (brain capacity doesn’t count) but they still sent Miran, an alieas or alien name for an implanted agent of surprising disguise (real name Yvonne) who said I’m lost, please, help, and tried to intercourse with me (which they told her just get him alone and broadcast mentally, his brain capacity will pick up mentally what you’re beaming.) Pretty stupid, huh? Just to show you they have no protection from their own mental-destructive beams, can’t think straight till they get the compounds analyzed in this and a few other hills not to be revealed. No way, not by me!

Sincerely, W. Fairchild.

Navarro’s hamstrings burned. For some minutes he’d been crouching before the file cabinet’s open bottom drawer with these letters in his hand. He stood up to make sure that Merton’s car was gone from its parking space out front. He took the letters to his desk and sat down.

AUG 8

Since coming behind or also down this hill which contains zinc, zirconium compounds, and other precious compounds (or trace elements compounds, not to be revealed) at 4.14 PM March 12, 1985, where spirits can be interacted, God is king, and operating at 85 % brain capacity without anti-beaming, I am definitely resting, getting ready, and my final decision is YES. I will network up with those of such capacity to mentally anti-beam as long as the fight is necessary, UNTIL THE

DOMES GO SILENT. Then wouldn’t they be beautiful things? The round white knees of some giant sunbathing up there is what I saw when I thought of them quiet.

Officer Navarro! Sorry I had to choose you in this capacity “but.” Do you think I get so thrilled being the only one anti-beaming on this planet literally until my ears are smoking? AND I smell my hair burning? AND I have been exhausting even further in the task on top of that, which has me screaming in the woods until you can feel the sap going whop-whop-whop inside of all trees, which is to sort out screwed up acid nonsense of those years back from true visions made available after activating up to 85 % brain capacity in late February 1985.

Already Dead / 111

Then at 4:14 PM on March 12 I moved behind zinc-zirconium-not-to-be-revealed-compounds protecting me in this hill, and God have mercy but the struggle is just exchanged for the next one, which is exhausting me further as I say, to separate the true from the false. Now at last I can make the spectacular announcement (please broadcast over police frequency in designated code remember always) ten days and two hours ago on July 29, 1990, I boxed in black mental powers ALL THOUGHTS, VISIONS, MESSAGES, HALLUCINATIONS that I received of any kind at any time before 4:14 March 12 1985 and will hold it in unused percent of brain capacity, where it can never do harm to our fragile loving spirits on this earth again. I would say Halleluah but dear people of the planet the tears are falling down like rain, that struggle I am sorry to say is just a minor one compared to the energy-drain unless I can network up with others of high brain capacity. Sometimes I wish I was dead. Is this hill preventing anything and everything from getting out, just like its compounds protect me from the beams? Therefore please in addition to aforementioned broadcast send out in designated code on police frequency the following message: ALL OF INCREASED CAPACITY NETWORK UP THE TERRIBLE STRUGGLE BEGINS ON

JANUARY 15, 1991 BUT GOD IS WITH US. Repeat daily.

P.S. Fear not, it’s all for the best.

AUG 8 IN THE PM

PS: Now I am as mad as shit kicking in Hell, buddy boy. Not at you, but I forgot what’s going on! Networking is for the purpose of anti-beaming radar domes. But I forgot to stress you must get an injunction to stop the beams at the source so that those of us with 75 % brain capacity or higher (I changed the number due to the enormous danger of the situation bearing down on planet earth like an enormous asteroid, planet-size…). Could be as many as 2000 of those. If we are free from anti-beam duties and terrible energy-drain we can heal the sick, teach others to activate up to high capacity — all within ten seconds of shut-off on those radars. Please read the Bible.

Sincerely.

112 / Denis Johnson

P.S. Something important, a woman of surprising disguise was sent to mentally attempt intercourse with me, alieas or alien name Miran, code unknown, origin unknown, on a date not to be revealed. Real name Yvonne. May still be in area. Current alieas or alien name unknown. In my loneliness result of protection from radar, preventing me from connecting mentally, zinc-zirconium compounds and others not to be revealed basically a blessing and a curse, I don’t know. But I’m getting vibes that she’s still in area. Still practicing witchcraft.

AUG 9

I believe there is now a situation I can’t straighten out. I am attempting to work on it mentally but it’s torture, I think the suffering and exhaustion may be letting in some laser rays or things I can’t deal with, only lie down and let them cut me up in AGONY, TOTAL AGONY. This torment has got me about ready to JOIN THE ARMY. My brother came down behind this hill. He was implanted long ago, it’s not his fault. But he speaks in code. Please as your HIGHEST PRIORITY interview with recording device and decode by reverse playback over police frequency at designated code. Bible does not work to decode this one, but don’t let that stop you from reading the Bible and prayers on your lips. WHAT

CAN I SAY. Too bad, you were chosen? I know, I know. Just all will be well and fear not, that is all.

PS I have mentally boxed in a black box all messages, thoughts, hallu-cinations from before March 12, 1985. But the information that my brother was implanted (Nelson Fairchild, Jr.) comes from both eras of from before said date and also SINCE then. So don’t be confused.

Sincerely, W. Fairchild

AUG 10 IN THE PM

Dear Sir

What is really fooling them is completely organic surroundings around here. They figure the beams have to penetrate. They forgot two things: zinc, zirconium compounds, and certain compounds, mainly trace elements not to be revealed, not even to you. (not your Already Dead / 113

fault, it’s all mental, you’re not activated up yet) Then there is the question of floorboards in my house, which started out organic but absorbed beams in Pt. Arena (alieas, alien) bowly alley, reversing mo-lecular structure to nonOrganic radarium. This keeps anything from getting up from under. I don’t care if they tap in mentally on you and get that one, there’s nothing they can do really.

PS. The Bible is mistranslated but all you have to do is touch it. It’s still there, gets decoded even on the way to your head. God’s power. Ultimately we are safe. Just HANG IN THERE BUDDY. You’re all I’ve got, your mission the fate of planet. But don’t get nervous.

P.S. If it gets bad go inside Pt. Arena (alieas, alien) movie theater. That has been absorbing rays a long time. Molecular structure of organic materials reversed to make radarium. Bring others, espec. women and children, if DIAMOND GRIDS or anything like lasers appear in the sky.

PS. Advise you to pick out survivors in advance of January 15, 1991, as per coded messages coming fast and furious. For some its just in one ear and out the other, but for you, pick who you want and shelter in Pt. Arena (alieas, alien) movie theater. I forgot to tell you that if DIAMOND GRIDS or laserlike things appear in the sky it’s probably too bad. Your fried. So be alert and get in there 1/14/91. How do you like this weather we’re having? Very nice. All peace is available in this eternal present.

Sincerely, W. Fairchild

PS. — This is being read by satellite and analyzed at the Pentagon by CIA, FBI, exc. I don’t code it because they just put it in their decoders anyway. If we remain simple and true they cannot help but defeat themselves. UNSCRUPULOUS, SATANIC, INSANE, EVIL. There’s no fighting that. Remain simple and true. Fear not. Resist not evil. All will be well. Infinite love. God says so. STOP THE RADAR. God says so.

W. Fairchild

114 / Denis Johnson

AUG 11—

Dear Sir

Up till now I have been too tired anti-beaming to explain about implants. It’s hard to explain. How did they get even the idea of a third lifeform? How did they discover processes for structural disintegration-reintegration? Was it through study of RADARIUM post-WWII? A lot of radarium turned up then. But in fact I cannot use my powers to see behind this hill protecting me by GOD’S STAR-BURSTING GRACE

into their dastardly minds to tell you. Anyway—

Anyway they continue in pentagon, CIA, FBI, exc. (some presidents know, most don’t, and others get assassinated) to continue to pose nuclear threat as a ruse. Had you fooled, huh?

Third lifeform SPERMS destroy and reintegrate inside the womb (don’t worry, this doesn’t happen every day, it costs 17–19 trillion U/S

money for each attempt, which is successful one in a million. That’s why my brother may be one of the only ones and may explain why I’m involved. Or were we just chosen? Like you?) (Again I can’t see.) When the implant population reaches critical mass, LOOK OUT. But look at me. Do I look worried? Sometimes I’m not sure if I should be taped, reverse-played over police frequency at designated code. Oh God in Heaven I hope and pray please NO! But if you suspect me at all then you must do so in the name of all that is holy and spiritual and standing between our human hearts and the complete total DESTRUCTION OF

THE UNIVERSE. Take the left turn where there used to be a picture of a boat. The sign still says HILD and the rest is broke off. 2mi down dirt rd. to cabin with RADARIUM floors. Peace and tranquillity all your blessed days.

AUG 11 (CONT. LATER LATER

All will be well. The goodness that you feel is not God’s goodness, it is actually God. So you are feeling God right now. Thanking you for your broadcasts, which I cannot pick up mentally living now since 1985

(March 12, 4:14 PM) under protection of subteranean compounds in this hill, mostly zinc, zirconium-compounds, and others mostly trace elements (not to be revealed). I have been resting mentally. Peace in the valley. Spirits, deer, hilarious rodents with a small capacity but telepathic and humorous, squirrels, woodchucks,

Already Dead / 115

chimpmunks, all warming in the sun. What a pitiful sharp joke it is because my very protection cuts me off in loneliness. But it must be that the networking has begun, the miracle is at hand, I just wish I could lead the way. But it’s my fate, IMPRISONED, MISUNDERSTOOD, FORGOTTEN, half the time I’m screaming until the trees fall over and some other times I cry until the TEARS MAKE MUD AROUND MY

FEET. Now possibly soon from happiness, lonely happiness but happiness. Thank you for your broadcasts, Officer Navarro! I am sorry I chose you but now you know. All was always going to be well.

All was always going to be well.

Sincerely. W. Fairchild

Inevitable” and “dreaded”…“Bloodshrinking”…What other words describe our visits with our mothers and fathers?

How I look forward to visiting their graves.

Each Monday Barron’s financial weekly came in at the Anchor Bay store. I usually delayed till Tuesday, sometimes Wednesday, but in the months since he’d taken to his bed I had never completely avoided picking it up for my father and paying him this horrible regular visit.

I drove over directly from the store that afternoon, Tuesday, September 4, a week after I’d left Winona’s and six days after Winona’s return — the day Carl Van Ness would show us all what he was made of.

We’ll see if our eyes are open. Maybe I believed his note. Maybe I was looking for an alibi for murder. But few folks hereabouts would imagine Nelson Fairchild, Sr., as an alibi for anything.

I’d come from an unhappy interview with Clarence — vaguely unhappy, not violently. Yes, he’d come back to town and found me and I’d told him about Harry Lally’s henchmen. He didn’t thump me — in fact he raised my spirits, but not before making it clear that he hadn’t cultivated the marijuana just to ransom me from my fate, which he called “the just punishment of a fuck-up.” I had a little bit of hope, just a feeling, that he wouldn’t abandon me to those killers. He wanted time to ponder this mess, but he didn’t know how to say, “Let me think.” He was a doer, not a thinker.

Oh well, the day had been a long one, that was all — Melissa resonating strangely, then giving me the horrible news that my pursuers were back on the scene, and after that I’m afraid I told her too much. Also possibly we had Carl Van Ness bumping up on the horizon, and 116 / Denis Johnson

because I thought he might already be in town I’d gone to Winona’s ranch while she was out and — done something; a little thing I’d probably later regret. Could thirty minutes with Father make the day any longer?

The old man lived north of Gualala, on an acre looking out at the Pacific from the highway’s west side. Two stories, three bedrooms, a two-car garage and a workshop, like the home of almost every other sixty-two-year-old person in Mendocino County.

The door from the garage stood open, so I knocked while stepping through it into the kitchen, and Donna Winslow asked me if I would like some tea.

“Thank you, no,” I said, “but what about a glass of wine?” I generally found Donna here in the wifely regions, with her stretch pants and long-sleeved yellow dish gloves and her failure to connect, in certain important ways, with her surroundings. Willful failure.

Cheaper by a long shot than tranquilizers. But it made her seem a little scary, even if her face was pale and kind. Eva Braun might have turned out like that. “We’ve got some open,” she said of the wine, “is that okay?”

“Open’s fine. Poured is better.”

Father had refused to let her move in before the stroke and after that had probably just failed to prevent her. I thought it was fine that she lived here. Particularly I admired her ability to survive without cheap conversation. She never bothered me with that stuff.

I stood there sipping red table wine from a too-small glass while she climbed the stairs to tell him the elder son had turned up with his Barron’s. I don’t just bring it here each week; I also read it to him. It is the strangest thing I do.

I heard Donna’s voice from above. But not his. Maybe he’d snuffed it, and I’d be spared.

His partner, Willis Winslow, had suffered a run of strokes and been laid up for months when my father started sleeping with his wife. The story they tell now is that Father hefted Donna across his shoulders and carried her upstairs to the master bedroom one night right out from under Willis Winslow’s helpless gaze, and had her every night after that while Winslow wasted away in a downstairs room, listening.

Now Father lies in bed as Willis Winslow once did, attended by the same woman. She’s too old, I would imagine, to be cuckolding him.

But I hope she is.

Already Dead / 117

And the same woman he carried up the stairs is coming down now alone.

“He’s kind of dozing, Nelson.”

“Should I disappear?”

“No, he said to come on up. Then he drifted off.”

“I’ll come back later.”

“You could go up and just give him the paper, maybe.”

“Okay,” I said forlornly.

“You want a refill?”

“I’ll take the bottle.”

She’d done a tremendous job on the house, over which formerly his office had run amok, inroaded generously by his shop. She’d pushed everything back, all the tools and ropes and greasy broken automotive parts and fatly unrolling blueprints and escaped and antique correspondence. His rusty file cabinets had disappeared, all but one, the drawers of which she managed to keep closed and the top of which was free of anything but two white daisies in a vase. In his living room she’d put up flowery curtains that matched the Pacific, also hangings of woven rope from Mexico, and, on the walls of the staircase, which I climbed now, but slower and slower, my ankles in a sense shattered, dragging the devices he’d laid years ago to trap his children — let me never reach the top! — she’d nailed up pictures bright as windows.

Don’t ask me why I’m here. Because of a sickly fascination, I guess, but that’s only one of the many feelings that stab at me now as I find him asleep in his small room at the top of the stairs. There he lies, out of it. And I’m as shocked as ever.

He once threatened to kill a man, a perfectly unsuspecting tourist, when he found this stranger sitting in his accustomed chair in the barroom of the Gualala Hotel. He’s famous for having decked a county commissioner at a meeting of the Point Arena town council; also he assaulted the high school basketball coach right on the street when that fine citizen started dating our mother, and although that contest went against my father — he ended up flat on his ass — the coach quit calling, and Mom never had another date in these parts. All night once, with a shotgun across his knees and a two-gallon jug of gasoline beside him on the floor of his bulldozer, he waited quietly in his equipment lot — this a great many years ago now — to surprise whoever had been thieving from his construction supplies. Father did

118 / Denis Johnson

nothing when the man pulled up under the nearby trees in his pickup truck, he sat like stone while the man peeled away the tool-shed’s padlock with a crowbar, waited until he’d gone inside before climbing down from his perch up in the monstrous vehicle. When the bandit tiptoed out of the shed with his arms full of tools, my father paralyzed him with the touch of the shotgun’s barrel to his throat, and soaked him with the gas, all two gallons of it, pouring it down over his head.

“I’ll give you ten seconds’ head start,” he promised the man while producing his Zippo lighter. They both leapt into their pickup trucks, and Nelson Fairchild, Sr., hounded his victim all the way to the outskirts of Ukiah, where the poor burglar took himself, his skin eaten by the gasoline, to the hospital emergency services. Later he sued for thousands. My father would have had to pay him, too, if the man’s lawyers hadn’t bungled it. Father’s never been sneaky when it comes to revenge.

He’s rumored to have had people murdered, but I doubt it. I think he’d have done the killing himself, openly, publicly if possible, and then brazened it out in court surrounded by unbeatable attorneys.

Always the same image arises when I think of him — a face quivering on the border between irony and disgust — so I think of him as always the same. Not till recent months had I ever seen him with his eyes closed.

But he slept a lot these days. There was no irony now in his face, just a bland, pasty innocence ratified by a cowlick. They’d moved in one of those hospital beds that rise and flatten with a button — they’d made a puppet out of him, even if he controlled, to a degree, his own strings.

I wasn’t about to wake him. Maybe he needed his sleep. Anyway just getting to his room had licked me. I was beat, might as well have swum up here through blood. I poured my glass full and raised the window just a handsbreadth and inhaled. Without the fog to dilute it, the sunshine put everything on a slow bake, but this near the shore the air felt cool and smelled of voyages. Faint thunder drifted up this way, the flailings and snoring of the Pacific. It came through the window and woke my father.

He opened his eyes. He spoke immediately: “Let’s make every little thing illegal, and put all of ourselves in prison.”

“Hey, dig it, why not?”

“I’d like to get the sombitches”—he pushed himself up on his elbows, forgetting his automatic bed—“I’d like to get the sombitches Already Dead / 119

down under my boot for just ten minutes, and then I’d stomp an explanation out of their sorry faces. Just why is it that a motel, a good aesthetic-looking structure designed by any hippie or any faggot, they can choose whoever they want, cannot rest by the edge of the cliff, a badly needed motel? When rooms are up around two hundred dollars a night on this coast? So the sea can remain beautiful, they say. Beautiful with bars across it. Beautiful if you can pay two hundred dollars a night and wait a month for the reservation. Don’t they realize where beauty is? Do you happen to realize where yourself?”

“I think you want me to say beauty is in the bank. In the faces on the money.”

That shut him up. He wrote me off. I could see it in his eyes. But if I’d had to I could have seen it in his ears or hands or hair. I could have looked at one fingernail and told you I’d once again squirted away my chance to be his son. He always gave me a chance and then always, within minutes, saw me fail. I was used to the process. It gave me a sick thrill, if you want me to be frank.

Part of his silence owed to his disease, whatever it was. He woke with a bang but petered out fast. He wouldn’t say what disease he had.

The doctors knew, and they’d told him. But he felt they lied just for fun, if for no better reason — projecting his own relentless untruthfulness onto others. His dishonesty wasn’t weakness: it shaped his faith, helped constitute his creed. He believed strongly in the efficacy of lying. He valued falsehood as a tool. The truth he feared as uncontrollable once you let it out. But he knew the difference between the two.

“Well, it’s Higgins and Tom Aiken”—two environmentalist lawyers—“my personal Rawhead and Bloodybones. If half their rat-shit buddies weren’t on the Coastal Commission I could subdivide down to square meters and build clear up into the clouds. They figure to stall.

Get the game called for darkness. They think I’ll roll over dead. Not hardly! Hand me that phone.”

“It’s damn near six P.M., Dad.” I always get western in his presence.

“Dial me a number.”

I put the receiver into his tiny clawing grasp and punched the buttons he wanted. “Give me a minute, please,” he said, covering the mouth-piece.

Banished inside of sixty seconds? I may have achieved some record there. I left him to his shenanigans and went down the hall to the 120 / Denis Johnson

toilet. The one-man barbaric horde, he’s in yet another war. Everybody knows he’s a crook. Big deal! Who cares? My father not only knows the difference between right and wrong, but he’s also willing to live with it, and let others draw their own conclusions about him. Not me.

Not me — I’m the Mole Person, hiding from the truth in any hole, here, for instance, in my father’s upstairs bathroom, on the shady side of the house, half-dark and quiet and cool as its tiles. A small chamber, but with me in here it holds magnificent structures of natural growths, the big fat systemic organism of my deceits. Maneuvering through my lies was like hopping faster than the eye could follow from branch to branch across the roof of a jungle, a jungle cultivated to cover up earlier lies, the whole business lacing back delicately to find its mother-root in my first lie, completely forgotten now, and never to be discovered by anybody else, the lie to cover my first little crime, also forgotten — no, I swear I didn’t take the cookies — or, more probably, a whole childhood fashioned to avoid the question of the cookies in the first place, my every move, to this day, warped around the absence of getting caught, the void where there should have been my arrest and trial and punishment: a new route to school planned in order to avoid the boy who owned the stolen cookies, and a reason invented to explain the new route to whoever might ask, and evidence concocted to demonstrate that the reason isn’t a lie — I need the exercise, I’m going out for track and field — and then a career of track-and-field events and long practice in a sport that doesn’t interest me, and a new personality shaped, a false persona who thrives on track and field, who loves running (But I do love running. Don’t I? Or else why spend so much time doing it?) and hurdling over the intricacies of his falsehoods toward this day, Tuesday, September 4, when I’m ready to commit murder to deal with my mistakes without actually correcting them because…because I don’t want to correct them. I can’t survive the correcting of them. I just want them erased.

My father would never have understood these things. Even now, if he’d found himself in my place, he’d have crawled out of bed and somehow gotten, he and his sawed-down Winchester shotgun, up the hill above Anchor Bay to put a third eye in Harry Lally’s forehead.

He called from his sickbed, “Somebody hang this thing up! Hang this sombitch up for me, damnit!”

Already Dead / 121

Donna was standing at the turn of the stairs as I headed toward his room. “Yes?” she said. “Yes?”

“Tell her to get lost,” he said as I entered. Donna must have heard this, because she didn’t appear. I put the phone on the table for him, and he said, “I’d hate for them to win the last goddamn battle.” I pulled up a chair and unfolded the paper, the Barron’s.

He said, “Didn’t it come yesterday?”

“I don’t know when it came. I picked it up today.”

“You know how you talk to me, you little pissant? Like all the other little pissants on earth now. Like I’m old and fizzled out in the brain.”

“I don’t think you’re fizzled in the brain.”

“You repeat my words, like these are the key words…It’s hard to explain. Read.”

While he rested and caught his breath, I read out loud about this and that, the conclusions to be drawn from certain upswings and the stance most profitable given the tenor of the times (all of it obviated by the week’s events in Kuwait, and nothing that would help my kind of money trouble certainly), glancing up once in a while at my sick father with his zero face. His eyes were open, but I don’t know if he was listening to this stuff any better than I was.

“How’s Winona?”

“I haven’t seen her. We’ve talked on the phone. She got back.”

“Why hasn’t she stopped by to see me?”

“Because she doesn’t like to see you like this. It nauseates everybody as a matter of fact.”

“Did she file the divorce?”

“She did. I don’t have the money to fight it.”

“I’ve written her a letter.”

“Concerning what?”

“I’m yanking her up and kicking her legs out from under.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve straightened her mind out on a few things, is all. She’ll see what it means to discount me. And you, meanwhile, you’ve been seen drunk in public with that gypsy runt.”

“I have?”

“Your hedge-whore.”

“Melissa.”

“Do you dispute the appellation?”

122 / Denis Johnson

“Hedge-whore, no. You’re very colorful.” You who have lain with them endlessly.

“By God, I won’t see my line carried down through that bitch’s scabby sluice!”

“No danger of that.”

“You say! Because she says! She ain’t fixed. She’s deceiving you.”

“Is this new information? Or the same old misogynist paranoia?”

“I base my suspicions out of experience. A woman without guile in her thoughts has guile aplenty beating right down in her bones. You poor elongated day-old infant! She’s got your brain sucked down to your pecker and the blood squoze out in that tight little kennel of hers.” He mumbled the last of this. He’d lost interest in my follies since the shadow of the death-bird’s wing had covered him. The carrying forward of his line, that was his passion now, that and somehow controlling his sons and his dough and his land from beyond the grave. I doubt he cared, really, which particular wench or wattle mothered his grandchil-dren, so long as somebody did.

“Father, I want to talk to you again about the timber.”

“The timber stays. I’ve seen to that. It’s deeded in now. Nobody harvests them redwoods.”

“Ten thousand acres! For God’s sake, let us just thin them! A forty percent reduction wouldn’t change the profile!”

“You can take the windfall out with horses. There’s plenty in there, and it’s all redwood, don’t matter if it’s been on the ground awhile. But I don’t want no fifty mile of skid road cut through there, or no timber cut neither. The day I bought my first woodlot I swore an oath: that someday I’d own ten thousand acres of trees that would stand forever.”

“Is it this? — no, let me ask this, I want to understand — is it maybe that you want to take it all with you? Is your secret myth this Celtic thing that you have to preserve your own land to live on in the afterworld or something? Your own patch of earth in Valhalla?”

“Valhalla? That’s not Celtic. And I’m a Welshman, anyway! And I don’t explain it to you because you’re idiotic! Deprived of oxygen, I’m sure, back in the womb of that harlot who spawned you. Just be aware that I’ve sworn an oath. And my word’s good.”

“I’m aware.” I stood by the window again listening to the sea and hoping he’d sleep now and never wake. I didn’t understand how somebody who wanted to string the world’s loveliest coastline with Already Dead / 123

the cheapest possible motels could also be passionate about a bunch of redwoods. And it hurt me that I didn’t understand, because this was my father.

I didn’t want to clear-cut. But we could live in comfort forever off a periodic thinning, my brother and I — Winona too, and Melissa — once we’d built the roads.

“The Hospice people called me again.”

“Hospice? You mean—”

“The morbid pissants, the voyeurs of death, yes, them’s the very sombitches I mean.”

They’d been after him for a while to let them ease his death. Fat chance! If anything was going to be hard, it would be this old man’s dying.

“Close that window, will you son?”

I pulled it shut.

He said, “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

“Which time? When have you not yelled at me?”

“I hate to see my own boy kill a jug before sundown.”

“Then don’t watch.”

“You’ve got a purple mustache, you look like a child. No, don’t sass back at me. Read. Read. Read.”

I read to him from the opinion pages, amazed and depressed that I let this runt boss me. My height comes from Mother. He can’t be taller than five-eight. Today he looks half his original size, only a miniature of the mean giant of my childhood. And all the time he gets tinier. He brings to mind the Mole People who also terrified me back then. They were in a movie, on TV. Big, strong mutants living in subterranean darkness. But even so much as a dash of sunshine wrecked a Mole Person. Dragged out of their tunnels they became shrivelled, lifeless, went from Mole People to Prune People in no time at all. I think they scared me because they hinted at some sort of truth about our shy, secret selves. Now even Father seemed like one of them, groping around, seared by a tremendous light from another world. I’m telling you.

Everywhere I go the people seem to be staggering, fatally irradiated.

There’s a dose out there for me. I can’t duck it forever. The old man, Christ would you look at him, was proof enough of that. For he’d once established himself in my sight as a figure to blot the sun, the world’s entire sky, and now he’d ushered forth something that would shrink and extinguish even somebody

124 / Denis Johnson

like himself. He sinks to the sand before a great lonely sea — naked and old — something vast is dawning, and nothing he’s built can shelter him from its revelations. I guess I’m reading but I don’t hear a word of my voice, I’m only aware of my father and a feeling: me, my father, and a feeling.

Had I kept on reading? Or had I just stopped?

“Dad?”

Twilight was turning the pages gray in my hands.

“Dad? Are you sleeping?”

Father? Are you dead?

I watched him breathe. Someday soon somebody, maybe the woman who loved him now, would be sitting here like this when his last breath spiralled up out of his throat toward the rafters, parting the lips of a corpse.

I laid the paper on his nightstand and left the room.

The woman who loved him was waiting downstairs, sitting on a stool in the kitchen, beside the counter, raising and lowering a teabag in a little cup. I gave her the empty wine bottle, and she said, “How’s your dad?”

Or someday soon somebody, maybe one of his sons, would come downstairs like this and in answer to that question say, “Donna…” and right away she’d know.

Meanwhile the old man would probably be up there pretending to be still alive. If there’s one thing he’s been desperately hiding, it’s the terminal nature of his sickness. This love of lying, I don’t share it. I hate my lies, they oppress me. But I did inherit one of the tenets of his strange faith: I believe in boldness. Believe that boldness makes things happen, makes the unlikely possible. Therefore, don’t hedge. Bet your stack.

Wager half on a long shot, you lose. But you win if you wager all.

“He’s sleeping.”

“That’s good.”

“Good for the Coastal Commission,” I said, and she smiled.

Outside I put the top up on the Porsche. I was shivering.

I have the belief in boldness. What I generally lack is the boldness itself.

Because boldness doesn’t feel bold. It feels scared, not brave. The explorer feels more and more lost, the prophet hears himself unintelligibly blaspheming.

Already Dead / 125

Naturally I’m thinking about the dare I’ve taken with Carl Van Ness.

But we are, at this point, just — still, at this point — just hypothetical, surely. With Van Ness out of town the reality seems to have diminished.

What we’ve done up to this point is possibly only a rehearsal. I started the Porsche and, as the sound covered my voice, realized that I was talking to myself out loud, saying, “That we’ll do it seems still likely but with, how shall I put it, an ethereal likelihood…” But how can I talk of boldness, when it’s Van who’s taking the dare?

Well, yes, because, as we know, I’m a liar, mine the kind of dishonesty that can cherish two beliefs at once, opposing ones. I can act the coward while telling myself I’m testing the limits of boldness by the same puzzling mechanism whereby we sometimes know, for instance, that it’s Tuesday, September 4, and that we have an appointment Tuesday, and yet fail to understand the appointment is therefore for today.

On the other hand, making it happen is making it happen. If I shoot the gun, am I somehow a coward because I don’t happen to be the actual bullet?

Van does his part, I do mine. We’re a lethal combo. And if Van Ness is back, and means what he says — then that’s it. Because my part’s done already.

This afternoon, while Winona helped a friend break a horse at the Say-When Ranch, I traded her bottle of Nembutal for the Zielene.

She’ll have come home tired from the stables, turned in early with two little red capsules. She’ll be out. And I’m out too. I have stepped out in boldness. Boldness. Out into dreams made real.

Each move I made now was one I’d invented months ago and played along in my head many times. How drab the real thing felt!

Driving the mile into Gualala’s little strip of shops and restaurants just made me tired. The light and aromas from the pizzeria next door to the big old wooden hotel bored me, and a certain not totally unfamiliar neurotic symptom developed as I pulled in beside the hotel, the convic-tion that something oily had got all over my steering wheel. Inside the reeking barroom I made straight for the toilet, wiping my hands on my pants over and over. A dozen or so people drifted down the loud canyon of certain hilarities, lifting their steins or whatever. The Gualala Hotel has stood across the road from

126 / Denis Johnson

the Pacific for close to a century, and for some decades of that period stood miraculously, on the brink of falling flat on its face, but in recent years through a jag of remodellings has managed to recast itself as no longer a place where men might spit on the floors in the hallways; but men still do spit on the floor in the bar. Going into the bathroom I had the experience you have at least once a night in such a place, that of ramming up against somebody, some derelict masturbator, coming out of the stall. “Pardon,” I meant to say, and meant to step back, but my jaw went tight, the words jammed, and I leaned forward. I tasted murder in my throat, I shoved past, staring at his eyes — the same rage showed in his face, it all flared unbelievably. It was Carl Van Ness. He shouldered me aside. He stumbled away. We couldn’t stop staring at each other. He never glanced anywhere else as he straightened himself and left the bar. I was breathing hard, my chest full of a lion’s roar. Then we’ll see if our eyes are open. His were. It was abundant in his eyes: he’d been to Winona’s house. He’d done something terrible.

Van Ness thought himself a traveller through eternity, and whatever he did to negate himself — suicide, murder — it’s all fuel for the journey, so why not? And to the mystifying question “why murder?” isn’t “why not?” just as good as a whole constellation of answers? But I have a theory why he agreed: I just bring out the killer in people, that’s all. Spend a little time with me, I’ll work on you like Dr. Jekyll’s potion — the man a few months back, for instance, in this very bar here among, I wouldn’t doubt, these same rough drinkers, the character who started out lecturing me in a peaceable way on the stages of woman-hood, the progressions of marriage, and so on. But after thirty minutes inside my aura the man got hostile. As if somebody had flipped a switch and turned out the spark in his mind. What a darkness, nothing more than that. Only, I swear it, the pinpoint reflections of the jukebox in his eyes, and images from the oversized TV screen. Nothing from inside, just a lot of light bouncing off. The scene ends there in my memory, with him in his animal state being restrained while I beat it with I hope dignified haste. But how can you be dignified when you’ve just shown yourself and everybody else this puzzling trick you have of stirring up the preconscious evil muck at the bottom of one of mankind, some guy you never saw before — clink! — somebody you were toasting ten minutes before?

Already Dead / 127

And here I am in the same Gualala Hotel bar and the same thing has just happened with another man, with Van Ness — and I realize it’s all that’s been happening between the two of us since the moment I watched him drown himself.

I went on with the plan, though now that it had started, going on with it seemed almost impossible. I yanked at the pay phone by the bathroom, forced a coin on it, pressed Winona’s phone number… Hello, her voice machine said in its laboring parrot-cum-gramophone falsetto, I can’t, it explained, talk in person right now… “Winona, it’s Nelson, eight P.M. Tuesday. I wanted to pick up my fishing rod. I’ll just stop up tonight and grab it”—this errand my excuse for appearing there.

I hung up the phone, got through the press of idiots, put my elbows on the bar. Immediately the tavern’s breath soothed me. I expect always to be a small child in this place. That I can see over the tables surprises me briefly. In here I spent the most comfortable moments of my sonship, when Father was tipsy and told me stories and tossed me quarters, and I knew, at least, how to sit in a chair without disappointing him.

I ordered a glass of Carte Blanche, absolutely the world’s cheapest sherry.

Till well after 1:00 A.M. I sat at a little table in front of the forty-inch TV screen, sipping drinks and watching baseball and rerun comedies and news bulletins — the world was falling apart around me as well as inside; the president was emphatic that he wanted a war with Iraq, if fuzzy as to why, precisely, and refugees poured into Jordan, and the New York Mets left the field with their heads down — but I’d gone crazy and didn’t care who won or who lost, not in baseball, not in warfare.

And then around half past one I stood up, not the least bit drunk, and went to find out whether or not I’d committed a murder.

Aren’t they always saying, “I’ll never know how I got through the next few minutes, hardly remember,” et cetera? The hell with them.

They don’t know what they’re talking about. I remember the exact length of my fingernails, the sherry’s sweetness, the bill I paid with — a five, face up, our beloved Abraham Lincoln — the give in the wooden floorboards under my shoes walking out, the wet smell of the air and the shine of moisture on my car, and two finger streaks in 128 / Denis Johnson

the dust that made an ideogram, unintelligible and scary, on the Porsche’s dashboard; and I remember driving in the moonless dark and passing through the streetlamp’s glow at the head of Winona’s drive as through the spongy boundary at the end of the universe, remember realizing, at the moment I stepped from the car in front of her house, that it would almost certainly rain tonight, remember feeling the laces flap on one of my Invader-brand jogging shoes, remember pausing to deal with it, remember deciding not to. The kitchen light burned. Otherwise the place was shrouded. Winona’s customized jeep, formerly mine, a Japanese jeep, a Subaru, waited by the walk. Out in the dark, Red bumped against his stall and snickered. I felt my left hand go out, palm up, in a gesture I often make in conversation. I was talking to nobody: I’ve come home to look for my wife, don’t know what I expect. Maybe I’ll warn her she’s about to be murdered. I don’t really want to go through with this. I’ll give Harry Lally the pot plants, Clarence will break some of my bones, that’ll be okay, then they’ll heal, that’ll be neat. No need for anyone to die.

— All the while humming with excitement in the center of my heart, because I’ve stumbled onto an explanation, correct me if I’m wrong, for the tendency of our race to grope toward tragedy: in order to ponder the imponderable — war, murder, our power to mutilate the planet — in order to concentrate our thoughts on these matters, we have to plan them. We have to be mapping out, not merely contemplating, the un-thinkable. Or we can’t think about it at all. And I reflected, forgiving my own delirious pun, that designs just lead naturally to executions.

I put my head inside the door as any nosy neighbor might. I called:

“Dear?”

No answer.

I willed this. Yes. But I’m not sure that’s why it’s happening. I think I willed it in order to ponder it more deeply. I’m not a doer, I’m a dreamer. Ask anyone! This isn’t me!

Had Van Ness stood here in this room?

Did something of his aura linger by the couch where I’d told him about the plan and read to him from Thus Spake Zarathustra? Nietzsche’s wisdom on sleep was somewhat on the order of this: to sleep well, stay awake. Winona would have done right to have read that!

Already Dead / 129

When I’d showed Van Ness the Zielene and Nembutal, I’d read to him from Nietzsche on sleep—“Avoid all those,” Nietzsche’s Wise Man warns convulsively, “avoid all those who sleep badly and are awake at night.”

“I might apply that to you,” I’d pointed out to him.

“And vice versa,” he’d said.

Yes, yes, yes, I agreed with him tonight, half-aloud, running my finger along the spines of books…Oh yes. We should have avoided each other.

We’d talked about things other than sleep — he’d quoted at some length from Zarathustra—but what we’d read I couldn’t quite — fumbling among the shelves beside the couch for the book, which wasn’t there, scattering books to the floor in a spasm of irritation — couldn’t quite recall.

Where was my book of Nietzsche? Winona never would have touched it.

Had Van Ness come here, and found my wife comatose, and put the pillow over her face? And held it there for a long time, until she was dead, and then gone on to violate something — please be sensitive to this, it’s not absurd, please feel this corrupt truth — and then descended the stairs to violate something delicate and precious by stealing my Nietzsche?

I called out: “Winona?”

I looked around the living room. Nothing seemed disturbed. In the kitchen half a cup of coffee on the table and a scattering of mail, junk mail, and off by itself an envelope with a folded card jutting from it, a Hallmark card presenting the portrait of a little girl cuddling a dog.

Inside on the left-hand page a printed cursive read “Just Thinking of You” and on the facing page in my own father’s weak hand: Since you don’t have the care or interest it would take to pay me a visit, here’s a letter for you. I mean to cut your name from my will and testament. Everything goes to my boys but they can’t hack up the redwoods. Meeting my lawyers next week. You might as well clear out of that house, it’s Junior’s. And don’t come sniffling around here at this late date. Once I say a thing it’s solid.

I’d hardly begun to make sense of this communication before another one caught my eye — a postcard, the same kind Van Ness had 130 / Denis Johnson

mailed me—“Greetings from Santa Cruz,” where the ferris wheel meets the ocean and seems ready to glide into that gigantic blueness.

I turned the card over. The message read Now we’ll see. No postmark.

He’d carried this card here in his pocket, and laid it down with his hand.

The spasm that wrenched me knowing that he’d actually entered this house set loose a spray of images inside me, bits and pieces blown above the forest, the forest of dreams — I’d walked in a dream through these rooms, but their walls had given onto other places, a ramshackle barn full of strangers who claimed I should know them, and I lied, saying that I did, and in that place this very tabletop had upheld a pile of fruit.

It was impossibly strong, nauseating, violently so, the sense that I was both remembering and experiencing this, that I could, if I just stood still and collected myself, predict the next thing to happen in this kitchen.

According to the plan, the point of my being here was to discover the body. But I hadn’t considered that I’d actually have to discover the body. This was no theory. I was living it.

“Winona?”

The silence sank me. Told me that Van Ness had lived it too. And Winona had felt his hands on her throat — or, no, the pillow against her face — or dreamed a cloud had come down and drowned her. What had Winona dreamed? What had Van Ness felt? What is it like? Who are we really?

Had she known it was someone, a person, doing this to her? It seemed only right that even in a dream, even in total blackness, even in drugged dreams, we’d know the truth if we were dying.

A man walks into the house where his wife may lie murdered. And realizes that he’s twisted his life so badly that only this, the worst thing he’s ever done, could twist it back the other way.

“Winona!” I scream, and it echoes beyond the window, puny and garbled, down the arroyos and out to sea. I can’t bring it back. The name just disintegrates over the waters and that’s that. It’s impossible to bring it back!

Through this feeling of helplessness suddenly burst a piercing nostal-gia for the lost world of childhood. The way it came right up against the heart, that world, and against the face. No indoors or outdoors, only everything touching us, and the grown-ups lumbering past overhead like constellations. I can feel the big silence upstairs Already Dead / 131

getting bigger. There’s nobody there and I’m not going up to see. Because I can’t move. I’m small and my hands and feet are too large. Tonight’s music was the moans of Gyuto monks and their smashed cymbals and rattling broken instruments and the unearthly squalling of their horns. Madness at first, adrenaline nightmare, nothing to grip, zooming madness, voices, a hundred thousand feelings, grief and regret chief among them. I’ve plunged into the water and I’m sinking, sinking.

Memories roll over me. Italy — Rome, above all, Rome — pigeons lit up in the sunlight — and I saw the buildings in their dirty greatness but I kept thinking Keats, Keats died around here someplace…In Italy I felt closest to Winona, particularly in the churches, where I felt the farthest from heaven. In the cathedral in Milan I looked upward through twenty leagues of failure to the beautiful dome above. A bomb going off couldn’t have hurt that silence. Everywhere dripped the blood of stained-glass martyrs, too many of them, we’ll never get them sorted out. When we toured the duomo’s basement, a region that seemed to pre-date even its stones, something in the ripe, must-filled cloisters seemed to have gone out — not a light, but a time. And something about those skinny moldering rooms of deteriorating jewelry made the whole cathedral somewhere above our heads seem a lie, the pomp dissembling over the darker miracle worked in the streets, in the spermy churches of apartment flats, where lovers in their beds were getting high, or spilling toward the Sea of Love with eyes grown soft and blind in loused-up situations. Miracle! — your incense followed the blond American woman to Sicily, to the town of Monreale in the altitudes, and I, her husband, followed you. And felt myself erased by the cathedral…fading beside the flowers…This church in Monreale was smaller and more to the point. On the walls and ceilings, from the making of our wild, tearful earth to the martyrdom of Saint Paul, they’ve laid out Christian history in a billion tiny tiles…You have to drop money in a slot to get the lights to go on — as grand as all this is, it operates on the principle of the honky-tonk jukebox. The electric lights brighten and darken according to the random coins the faithful feed the meter box, and in the dome Christ’s concave face, the world’s second-largest mosaic portrait, lights up overhead, looks down awhile, blacks out again. It doesn’t matter that the church’s curators are niggardly. Nobody goes there who isn’t crushed by its beauty. In those vast religious places, as here, now, in life’s deepest abyss, we feel a plunging 132 / Denis Johnson

sexual vertigo. Is it any wonder that later, exploring secret passages in the church’s eaves, when we came out onto a parapet and found ourselves staring at half of Sicily and the ocean and the sky, I suddenly wanted to make love, right there in the daylight, to Winona? She said no. But later said she wished she had let me take her, in that high place overlooking a Palermo that seemed dreamed, with underneath us the massive mosaic Christ going on and off, Christ blooming and failing—

All right. In my breast pocket, a phial of Nembutal — replacement for the phony stuff, the Zieline. I turned, walked steadily through the house and up the stairs to the open door of Winona’s bedroom.

A man climbs the stairs toward the room where his wife lies motionless. His feet tread the vacancies of starlight…I flipped the switch at the top of the stairwell.

She lay on her right side, her back turned, her right arm flung behind her as if reaching toward me. Not Winona, but a corpse, a thing. Nothing worth looking at. I stepped into the room and stood beside the body but I was still alone.

I pushed open the double windows and looked out onto the dark pasture. No stars, no moon, no wind. Just the head’s unbelievable racket.

Something, a leaf or an ash, drifts down in front of my vision. No.

Have I just seen a night bird drop dead out of the sky?

It strikes me suddenly that birds must actually, sometimes, die in midair. I’ve never seen this truth before — that sometimes they must enter heaven having lifted themselves halfway there. It seems such a little thing to understand, but I start shaking. I’m afraid if I try to touch something I’ll pass my shimmering hand through the mirage of my life.

I moved the chair from her desk and sat down beside the corpse and closed my eyes and looked at blindness. I would do anything to undo this.

I have made a mistake.

What could be more trivial and irrelevant than this true fact? A few plain words — over all of this the phrase came floating like a sports headline, FLYNN HURLS SEVENTH STRAIGHT, on the destruction of a maelstrom: steeples and living rooms and drowned puppies and little dolls, whole lives washing down out of sight, then a line of old news turning in the current: I have made a mistake.

Already Dead / 133

I’m sorry, meaning, I want another world. Give me a different world.

I leaned over the bed and looked down at her for a moment, an incomprehensible moment, trembling, hollow, insane. Not a moment, but a life. Not a sentence to prison, but a prisoner’s life, not a moment of slavery, but the life of a slave. Converging darknesses like black cotton clouds…I hadn’t taken her life, but my own.

I have never done anything real. There is nothing to get back to.

Everything I am is shit. Everything to do with me. Everything I’ve made.

All I have.

I touch her arm. She is substantial — I look down at her face in profile.

But this is nobody I know. I’d never seen her before. No mistaking it.

I’ve thought often that this person, this Winona, couldn’t possibly be my wife. Now I know.

I’m not going to do anything wrong. I can’t have done anything wrong. I have not done anything wrong.

Before this moment I’d lived as a mind. Body, heart, soul, intellect, so we carve ourselves into parts. But the whole of us, what can it be?

We’ll never name it. Before this moment I’d depended on the head, on thinking my way out of trouble, and when there was no way out depended on the head to tilt and revolve and distort until it found a new, a transcendent perspective, or a cheap rationalization for my shames, I didn’t care which.

Intellect rampant on a field of ice, now it plunged through and froze and sank down to the heart in its cage under the North Pole. Will you believe me please if I tell you that the nameless whole of me had arranged all of this — just to break my heart?

A man walks into the room where his wife lies murdered. And begins to realize that only this could have saved him. That this, the worst thing he could possibly have done, was his only hope.

And then something stuns him like a blow to the neck. What is it?

The phone! It rings and rings…

He won’t respond. Won’t touch it. Won’t, ring, won’t, ring, won’t — two more and the machine would answer.

But she answers. Turns over. Reclaims her outflung arm. Fumbles with the telephone. Clears the death from her throat with a rasping sound.

“Hello?” my dead wife says.

Then says my name: “Nelson?”

134 / Denis Johnson

Then lies back on her pillow, lets loose of the receiver and says,

“Dear?”…This time she’s calling out the word. Groggy, sightless, calling out because she thinks I’m far away. Calling me dear because under the water of dreams she’s forgotten that I don’t live here, that we’re not close.

Dear—it can mean cherished, beloved, close. It can mean expensive, hard-won.

A man arranges to have his wife killed. (These things actually happen, tragedy does sometimes turn one particular night in people’s lives into a crashing metallic thing, and sometimes that this tragedy has been willed makes all of it majestic.) He walks into his former home because he’s arranged to be the discoverer of the body. Then the telephone rings.

Then the corpse answers it, holds the phone out to the murderer, and calls the murderer dear.

He fakes it, takes the phone, clutches it in his hand.

She’s fallen instantly back to sleep. Out cold, not a muscle twitching.

You can’t see her breathe. You could easily think she was…but yes.

You certainly could.

He puts the receiver against his ear.

The voice of his brother says, “I have terrible news.” Asmall fierce rain began. Van found himself standing in it beside the Volvo’s open door, looking into the dark leather interior, completely distracted, his heart thudding with after-shocks. He’d looked right into the man’s face: his eyes like tunnels and a wild animal lurking in a stench of fear way back in there.

The joke had cosmic dimensions. But who was the joker? The trickster.

Van made a mental note to get hold of a tarot deck, he seemed to remember a jester or some similar figure among its symbols, and then he forgot all about it as he supported himself by hanging on to the car’s open door and a wave of nausea and hilarity crashed over him.

Threads, only threads, nothing more than threads — the curtain between this life and the sweet core, he could nearly push through it, it was down to threads.

The physical sensations accompanying all this — blasting, shaking, wrenching — had a completely unexpected intensity: he’d do it again soon.

Already Dead / 135

Navarro was stark naked, Mo was, too; still he could feel the badge.

Mo’s place lay above Anchor Bay, up the hill and overlooking the stores. It was damp and chilly out, but they had a fire going and a sleeping bag wrapped around them.

He liked her because she was happy. “Jolly,” even. It remained to be seen, though, who Mo really was. Sometimes people pulled out a whole new personality after sex happened. He’d been known to do it himself, and in fact he felt this might be one of those times. He was drug-out and lonely around here, starve-hearted. It was too easy in that frame of mind to start yanking on her like a security blanket. The worst thing about being a cop was the fear of disgusting somebody if you acted like a scared child. You get naked, and that’s when you really start to feel the burden of the invisible badge.

They’d finished making love and were just lying around, halfway watching a porno flick. “Black women don’t do it for me, usually,” he said. “She’s okay though.”

“Are you against black people?”

“Me? Hell no. I’m more against Mexicans, if you want to know the truth.”

“Isn’t Navarro a Mexican name?”

“A lot of Americans have foreign-type names.”

“I’m wondering. Why’d you decide to be a cop?”

“Dragnet,” he said. “They show the reruns every day in L.A.” They watched two couples humping in the same bed and listened to their soft, unconvincing cries.

“Brunettes turn me on,” he said.

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“I could do without all these dicks, though.”

“The dicks aren’t there for you, hon. They’re there for me.”

“I know where there’s a real one.”

“So do I.”

Her thinness worked better when she had all her clothes on, but he really didn’t mind either way. She had the laughter and the sweetness of a fat girl. “I like your muscles,” she said.

“They come in handy.”

“Did you ever beat on anybody? Are you that kind of cop?”

“Not around here,” he said.

136 / Denis Johnson

“What about down in L.A.?”

“I was never accused of excessive force.”

“What does that mean?”

“I thumped a few, yeah.”

“But that’s illegal.”

“A couple per week, probably. Thump ’em if they jiggle…I’m not talking about attempted murder. Just a shot with the truncheon. It’s kind of like punctuation. Makes it so you’re understood.” He drew her closer and then with one mind they decided to open the sleeping bag and let the fire’s dry warmth play over their sweaty bodies.

He turned his attention to the TV, to camouflage the sweetness he was feeling.

“Everybody does what they have to do. Sometimes you’ve gotta stab your sister and get sent to Quentin and get kicked to shit by the guards and raped by guys with diseases, you know, and shut down in the hole for sixty days and nights. And if that don’t do it, the poor sonofabitch’ll just have to go get some more for himself somewhere, because this is what I believe, everything you get laid on you you asked for it, because you want it, because you need it.”

“You just don’t ask for it right out loud in your mind,” she said,

“yeah.”

“But most of us don’t get half the hits we need. One life won’t hold that much horror-show, sometimes I think.”

“That’s what the next lives are for. And the ones you had before.” He got up on one elbow and jostled the coals with the poker. “I think we’re leading into some nonsense here,” he said.

“Then what are you saying?”

“I’m just improvising,” he said, “to be polite.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t like to screw somebody and then just lay there quiet.”

“Oh.”

“Like I’m sulking or I don’t like you or something.”

“I’m sorry. Did I fuck up?”

“No. No. No.”

“Oh.”

“All that’s happening is I’m hanging around in your bed, because I like you.”

She made an attractive circle of her mouth, opening it around a word that couldn’t be spoken or something like that, a certain hesita-Already Dead / 137

tion in the feelings before she said, “Oh. I like you, too”—liked him more than she wanted him to know, he could see that.

They lay quiet on her sleeping bag by the fireplace on the big dusty-smelling rug. Maybe he whiffed some cat piss there from a long time ago, he didn’t care. He liked her too, and he felt serenaded by the mist outdoors sprinkling the trees and ticking down out of the boughs, low sighs from the fire, tinny sound from the porno movies, surf huffing and breathing below the cliffs way down across the highway. He was sadly content inside this smoky warmth, especially with the windows open a bit as they were, admitting cold fragrances on the wet wind, the little evergreen smell, the strange thin rotten smell of continually wet bark. It was generally kind of intimate, he found it all very sensuous.

They turned the sound off on the TV. She had a good stereo, and there was something playing now with just one acoustic guitar. He could hear the click of the flatpick and the instrumentalist’s fingers squeaking across the strings. With the fire’s hiss and the dampness down this close to the sea, you’d almost think it was drizzling.

He watched her while they made love. She lifted her legs up high on either side of him. It was beautiful, but everything she did that he liked — moaning a little, clutching his waist so tightly it almost hurt, holding him still against her when they were finished so he wouldn’t get away too soon — he’d done it with somebody else before. He’d been around too much. He didn’t get off like he used to — in fact sexually he got much more voltage out of watching triple-X rentals and jacking off.

What really moved him about all this was her skin, and the way tonight it seemed almost to be raining.

He liked her belly better, somehow, than the bellies of young girls way back when, in high school and just after. He liked the still-soft but definitely older skin in the crook of her arm. It wasn’t that the young ones had had less beauty, but he hadn’t quite appreciated, hadn’t tasted, hadn’t savored. Now this woman was here and the others were gone.

What a sadness, like watching things riff past with that half-happening feeling from the window of a train.

A man on the screen masturbated over an Asian woman’s breasts and spewed jism while the woman raised her head from the pillow and watched, lapsing from fake wild passion into true interest, curiosity.

Then she lit herself up again and started smiling furiously, signalling some unidentifiable emotion. Oriental women turned him on.

138 / Denis Johnson

Mo lay in his arms, her head hurting his collarbone a little, and with one finger touched the sweat pool in the hollow of his chest. He smelled wood smoke in her hair.

They were all the way back to the caves again, when there was nothing to say. The blue shadows around them seemed friendly. The TV glittered like a sheet of ice. Everything was here.

“You can be quiet,” she said. It was just the right thing to say.

“Do you feel like all this happened before?” he asked.

He came awake and heard himself asking, for no reason he could name, “What time is it?”

He heard her struggling out of the sleeping bag, and then the heels of her hands squeaking on the floor as she crept off the rug and found her watch.

“Just about two. About ten of.”

He rubbed his face briskly. His beeper was going off. That’s what had wakened him.

“It’ll be the hotel,” he said.

The drunks weren’t happy to see him just when they wanted to get behind their wheels and crawl home. But often they misbehaved at last call, and he had to show.

“It’s above the sink,” she said, watching as he felt along the wall in the kitchen area for a lightswitch.

This time of night all calls were forwarded to the sheriff’s dispatcher in Ukiah. He sat at her kitchen table with the phone and punched in, holding the receiver between his chin and shoulder and getting his socks on as he talked.

“Are you going?” she asked when he’d hung up.

“Yeah. Somebody croaked.”

“Who?”

“A Mr. Fairchild Nelson.”

“You mean Nelson Fairchild?”

“Yeah, some old guy.”

“No, he’s young.”

“Well, he was old enough to go.” He had his outfit on and was strapping on the holster, reaching for his beeper. “Can you turn those tapes in for me, honey?”

“They’re triple-X!”

“Drop them in the box. Go real early in the morning.” Already Dead / 139

“Well—”

“Because they’re not rewound yet and I’m already gone,” he said, making for the door, limping because one shoe wasn’t all the way on.

He opened the door and stepped back. “Hey, it really is raining, actually.”

“Yeah, it’s gonna gust right in here if you don’t shut the door.” She knelt by the hearth and wrapped the sleeping bag around her shoulders.

“It’s roaring right down.”

She came and stood beside him at the open doorway, which was now suddenly a wall of wet. She took a breath to speak, but then just inhaled the rain’s overpowering perfume.

October 30, 1991

Almost a year later, after it was all over, the drought of half a decade broken, the Iraquis decimated, his latest love affair a faded remnant — but before he’d quit in confusion the Point Arena Police — Officer Navarro sat one dusk on the wooden bench in the Anchor Bay laundromat while his clothes revolved, and he tried to sort through a mess of pages that he considered to be strong document-ary evidence explaining events of recent history — the Fairchild thing, that whole tragic business. And anybody else would have agreed with him, outside of a court of law. But nobody else, as far as Navarro could tell, was interested.

Next to him on the bench lay the envelope he’d found the pages in, a white ten-by-thirteen mailer from the California Board of Franchise — the state tax people — the mailing label of which bore the name of Nelson Fairchild, Jr., now Xed-out and replaced by two names written, Navarro assumed, in Nelson Fairchild’s hand: TO:

Winona Fairchild

Carl Van Ness

For days he’d been combing through these unnumbered sheets, but he couldn’t quite get them into a sensible sequence. Going by the first and last words of each page, he’d arranged them in several bunches, each of which seemed to be in order. He was aided in some sections not so much by the syntax as by the shape of the brown stain along the right-hand margins. And then what must have been the end page actually written in blood — as if Fairchild had dipped a quill in a vein to record his fading thoughts. But Navarro couldn’t make a coherent whole out of all the separate parts… the devastating force with which, this one began midsentence,

the devastating force with which I am now this. Why do I think of lounges where black guys in mink coats softly worry the ice in their drinks? Films where the rotting corpse lifts up its hands? There are bars full of girls who do not want to be whores, they want to pick and choose, to fall, to find the shallows of love and be squandered. And who am I?

Girls with tears in their eyes and bus station grime. Drove south some weeks ago to San Francisco, what was I running from, nothing escapable certainly. Getting down there I drove fast, on the Jenner cliffs I nearly took to the air, not a suicidal thing but something more in honor of my powerful car. Then soon—

Navarro had been in the habit of driving down here from Point Arena after work, nine miles, had done it almost daily, and for half a year, to see Mo. But that was over. And actually Mo didn’t work across the street anymore. Still, he didn’t feel like visiting the Full Sails, a place draped with cruel memories.

He blamed the spirit of this region for that. And for lots more. Certainly for the trouble with Mo. But above all for something coming loose in his own soul…

So he sat here with the handwritten pages he’d read and shuffled obsessively since discovering them he didn’t know how many days ago — long enough, now, that he knew he wouldn’t be reporting the find — in the Silverado with the camper shell and the two dead dogs inside it.

Then soon coming south into Marin County, first the bulky towers, sagging power lines, there’s something elderly about them, and the last rural thing I saw was one farmer by the road, somebody who 142 / Denis Johnson

could have been my grandfather, except for this man’s olive-drab oversuit, which is just what Grandfather would be wearing if he’d lived to see these modern, incomprehensible times: dressed like a mass murderer he stands in the vineyard facing the Frosty King near Novato as the fields at their edges crumble into clouds, a sign that says SEEK

YE THE LORD and the smell of piss and shit from the dairy making lonelier the angles at which the planes of noon light lean…Everything gets kind of emerald down in Marin, and then the Golden Gate Bridge, and after that I just get tired. Frisco. Frisco. Frisco. They hate it when you call it Frisco. I can’t abide our beautiful cities, not even our San Franciscos — the scourge of smells — joints with greasy doorknobs — air brakes coughing and whooping — gargoyles and doodads on all the buildings — down every sidewalk crawl little bits of trash. But that day I should have felt exalted. South of Market the porno-shop windows gleamed like the windows of cathedrals. Inside, a cartoon sexuality under fluorescent lights, videos of glories gone wrong (Yes I’ve been in them but I didn’t find you, or anybody I ever wanted you to be).

And then Army Street with its flat-faced, secretive hotels, the pauper’s breath of its doorways, stinky old men in the parks, unrepentant winos standing on the corners like figures in a parable. If only I could decipher them. No I don’t want to. Ultimately all these old men turn out to be somebody’s father. And how frighteningly old he’s become, each one of them. Ultimately all these old-men thoughts turn out to be aimed at the matter of my own very ill probably dying dad (as he was that day, but now as you know all too well, no longer). And the faces, the faces, the faces: the murderous faces of children and the innocent faces of old men, the happy faces of the dead (Yes, and I want to tell you about that, I did actually see a dead person later that day). The planetary faces of gluttons. The faces of the rich sealed and locked. Also don’t forget the day-old immigrants with their stupid clothes and suddenly useless life histories and their faces like broken toys. I should have seen the beauty in their stares. The religion. Instead I parked and bought a newspaper right away because you can’t hide from them anywhere but in the movies.

Then I loitered with the newspaper at that restaurant where we saw the saxophonist, the breathy pissed-off one you probably don’t remember but who astonished me, the tough broad, the tenor. That time we found her it was Jam Night or some such — a pickup group Already Dead / 143

offers up an aimless jazz among cigarettes, our souls glinting and glimpsed in our plumes of smoke: our weird phony smiles, our bright exhalations — various semiamateurs trying out their moves, many of them talented but none like her. Remember how she extended her solos with reluctant widely spaced honks and quacks that made her seem disgusted? And I sensed in that a true cherishing of the art expressed as a loathing for her own attempts. And I’ve been back there once afterward with Melissa because I enjoyed it so much with you. Just as I’ve given Melissa poems I wrote for you and presents I bought for you. But in the morning it’s not a den of jazz and smoke but a sort of washed-out student place with a lot of I presume unemployed younger Chinese from Stockton Street and Clay Street. I wondered if I’d see the sax woman, find her surfacing with her cigarettes and coffee into the day, and I hoped so because I was so happy with the way she would with distaste in the manner of a thirties cinema belle kiss another and then just one more despairing note from the thing. But of course she wasn’t there, neither was the clarinet crying that it’s hopeless, or the alcoholic muttering cornet—

Where was I? Oh yes: assaulted by San Francisco, looking for a film to hide in. I opened the paper, turned to the entertainment part, and when I read the double-page ads for new releases I felt a thrill in my soul, so many wonderful movies, the critics were amazed, according to the testimonials. Poets of the age! hack off your tongues. The impression dawned that we’d entered a dazzling era — this week, this single week, would glow in racial memory — and I shared it all, was in fact dazzled, you know how I respond to those ads and feel cheated later in the dark by all the fakery. But it doesn’t matter. Nothing can help us anymore. There’s no escaping the contradictions: but only here, at the movies — window looking out on the home from which I’m exiled — land where people look in one another’s eyes feeling the words they say.

That’s what I wanted in life, still want, I want blue light on their breasts, wet sorrows, endnesses, endnesses, death after every satisfaction—

(Nobody was enough. Not Melissa. Not for long anyway. And never you, Winona. But you knew that. I just wanted to live as long as possible coursed through by that electric intoxication)—

I can’t tell you how ordinary everything seemed at the fourplex movie house, or, I don’t know, fiveplex — but this is important. Everybody moved, waited, ruminated, conversed — at the popcorn or 144 / Denis Johnson

the tickets or the advertisements or the bathrooms — the same as always when I paid my money for a courtroom drama, because I like the talking in those things, and headed through a little traffic jam near the drinking fountain. And I stepped into this group and almost tripped over the legs of a woman lying on the floor in their midst. A dead woman. Such revelations in the parted crowd! — I hadn’t thought anything hidden here, certainly not this corpse of an elderly female with its blouse torn open and its gray-green face, not these two or three paramedics, one of them holding an IV jug up above the dead old woman’s head, another bending to put a pair of those small hand-held flatirons against her breast and jolt her with charges from a small portable defibrillating machine. I caught a glimpse of worried faces, a middle-aged daughter and a son-in-law, I believed, and I turned away. Everybody had turned away. The lobby went on as usual. Out of a general, a profound, an aboriginal politeness, we went on in fact much more usually than usual.

Submitting to the same instincts I went into the bathroom and washed my hands…

Five minutes later, when I came out, the group around the woman had moved back a little. One paramedic was speaking to another while glancing at his watch, and the second, crouched there with a clipboard resting on his knee, wrote down the time. — Jan? Jan? — a third was saying to the victim, who sat up now looking at him with not much more than an animal in her eyes, — Can you hear me, Jan? Can you hear me? — They’d brought her back to life. Can you hear me, Winona? The dead woman was alive again.

And that’s not all that happened in that theater that day. In fact I witnessed a panic in the darkness just minutes later. But I’m too tired to tell you about it. Enough to say I got my money’s worth at the movies, and then I called Louise. Precisely as I used to walk to the pay phone when I was eleven and call her and say, — Mom? It’s over. Come and get me — I dialled her number now. She met me at a tearoom, where I watched her eat Welsh rarebit. She works in a prison you know. She still loves Father I think. Also, maybe more so, the booze: on her cheeks and nose the trailing burst capillaries (I’ll have them too before it’s over) like faint grape stains. She’s so fed up with herself she often pretends to be someone out of a book, copping monologues right out of Jane Austen, Dickens, Jack London…like me, a reader and a drinker. Especially fond of the introductory lines,

Already Dead / 145

when someone first appears on the stage. She probably puts on a whole new self — more real? or more false? — to go to work at the joint. Five days a week bossing lady criminals around, most of them nymphoma-niacs, most of them abused a hundred ways since birth, most of them only half awake. I can’t imagine what she does there but I sense without being able to explain why that these are the happiest and most worth-while days of her life, I sense that she’s helped people. Her blind hands groping to find their hands. Everybody lost together behind great cold walls.

Anyhow she’s different. I don’t know who she’s turned into. In the laughing presence of the woman she used to be my father would throw me, his weightless toddler, toward the ceiling over and over, but always eventually too high, past any point of thrilling, and in anticipation of a crash I’d clench my whole body, as I did here and now in the tearoom, at teatime…The transience, the flight, the unbelievable rushing away of everything that looks so stationary, it’s breathtaking, any old chair can stand there exactly like a chair in the field of my perception but nothing it’s made of is where it was when I started one millisecond ago to perceive it. And so with this woman. Vague, vague! What happens to people, what happens to our mothers — our brothers and wives — what is being done, for God’s sake, to the people we love? — No, this is nobody I’ve ever known. This one is sixty-five, still in many ways as energetic as she was at thirty. But she’s got it all right, she’s got it, that smell of defeat and confusion and rosewater and hovering angels. The florid atmospheres accompanying old women. They bring to mind the death of apple blossoms. The partial, nonessential deaths in orchards — fruit and flower but not the tree — the child who dies by growing up — the perpetual death of everything standing in this moment, all these items that pretend to hold still but are in fact, in fact, only known to us because of the unbelievable commotion, the chaos, of subatomic particles that are not particles at all, not matter, but energy, process, thought, concep-tion, the enacting imagination of the thunderous intelligence that obviates the Great Void, the Void of Eternity—

Seeing a woman dead on the floor. Seeing her brought back to life.

Why should a murderer be granted this privilege?

But anyway, excuse me, I’m not talking about her! I’m talking about you. About betrayal. About the fact — which I hid from you — the fact, the poignant hidden

146 / Denis Johnson

Navarro looked around the Laundromat. His dryer had stopped turning, and he guessed the silence had summoned him.

Holding the pages in his lap he thought, aching physically, right in his heart: what could be lonelier than trying to communicate?

There were many more pages here. Navarro had read them all, more than once, and he would read them again. He could probably prove that this was Fairchild’s handwriting, but without Fairchild he couldn’t begin to prove anything else. And Fairchild was gone. The guy had sunk without a ripple, been missing for nearly a year.

Navarro couldn’t quite remember Nelson Fairchild’s face now, or much else about him except that Fairchild had been tall and very shaky.

Navarro had met him just twice, first at the father’s house — the night of the old man’s death — and they’d hardly spoken either time. That first night the brother William had been there too, a woodsy, philosophical-looking guy with a beard and extremely pale blue eyes. Going only by their writing styles, Navarro would have guessed wrong as to which brother was which. Nelson junior had seemed a lot crazier than the author of this letter sounded, while William, the nutcase, had seemed much calmer than his wild communications. But nobody acted typical on the occasion of a death. It hurt a little to think back to that night, because he’d taken the call not two hours after he and Mo had made love for the first time. Then there’d been a storm. Not a long one, as he remembered. The wind had wrung the rain out of the clouds within minutes, and by the time he’d found the Fairchild place — overlooking the ocean, with the windows glowing warmly at 2 A.M., signalling tragedy — the squall had worn itself down and the drive over had mopped all the water off the squad car. He shut the Caprice’s door and stood beside it a minute noticing how the gusts had softened to breezes.

The weather had blown out to sea — he could hear it like a distant orchestra — and what was this, now: somebody else coming?

A cartoony little sports car pulled into the driveway with its headlights jiggling the way a Porsche’s will, and a lanky breathless citizen got out saying, “Good evening, how do you do,” while pushing past.

Navarro followed him along a line of several other cars and into the house through the door of what turned out to be the kitchen, where an elderly man in crisp blue overalls sat at the wooden table, writing on a pad and puffing a cigarette. “Why wasn’t I called!” the new arrival shouted at him.

Already Dead / 147

The man kept one finger on his notebook and looked up and back and forth between the two of them, as if unsure which one had spoken.

“Weren’t you called?”

“Well, when did it happen? I mean, who was here?”

“Just Donna,” the older man said, and then shouted, “Donna!” while vigorously stubbing out his smoke.

He reached into an orange kit bag on the floor beside him and took out a small bottle with a rubber diaphragm over its top, the sort for keeping injectable liquids sterile. He raised it up three inches before his face and, peering closely at its label, jotted some more notes on his pad.

Navarro was used to taking charge at the scenes of crimes and accidents. But as far as he could tell this was not one of those. He cleared his throat and removed his cap.

“Be right with you, Officer,” the man said, and finished writing and set the bottle of medicine down.

“John Navarro, Point Arena Police. Would you be the physician?”

“Henry Schooner, M.D. Everybody calls me Doc. I requested your presence,” the doctor said.

“And you must be family,” Navarro asked the other.

“I’m sorry — how do you do, Officer. I’m Nelson Fairchild,” the man said. And, after a breath, added, “Junior.” He addressed the doctor: “Is my father really dead?”

“Yes,” Schooner said. “Donna found him about eleven, when she thought he was calling for her. But by that time he was well gone.”

“Well gone? What does that phrase mean?” Schooner said, “It means cold. He was cold to the touch. Donna!” he called out again.

“Well gone,” Fairchild said.

“What’s in the bottle there?” Navarro asked.

“Morphine sulfate,” Schooner told him.

“Was he in pain?”

“Considerable pain, for certain. He had colon cancer and refused surgery. But this is the only bottle he had, and it’s full to the brim. Donna says she never administered any. He wouldn’t take it.” Navarro figured this was Donna herself coming downstairs and into the kitchen, a woman in her late middle age, freshly groomed and dressed, gripping a hairbrush and gazing at the three of them with her comprehension running about ten percent. “Excuse me—

148 / Denis Johnson

yes?” she said. She seemed at that moment to discover the hairbrush in her hand, and she laid it on the kitchen counter and looked at it.

Navarro had seen hundreds of people in this state of mind in the middle of the night at the end of someone’s life.

“Mrs. Fairchild, I’m John Navarro of the Point Arena Police.”

“Winslow,” she corrected him.

“Winslow?”

“Donna Winslow,” she said.

Schooner said, “I was telling them how you found him, Donna.”

“I heard Bill at the door and woke up and went upstairs,” she said.

“I thought it was Nelson calling me. But Nelson was gone.”

“Well gone, in fact,” Fairchild said, and then said, “Excuse me, boss,” helping himself to one of the doctor’s Camels. Navarro realized only at this point that Fairchild must be quite tipsy if not completely wrecked.

“Ms. Winslow, did you say somebody was at the door when you woke up?” Navarro asked her.

“I think Bill’s around here someplace,” she said.

“Bill,” Navarro repeated.

“My brother,” Fairchild said, and asked Donna, “Where is he?”

“He was out back,” she said, “cutting up a doe.” She looked around among the three of them, but they said nothing. “Otherwise it’ll turn,” she added with an apologetic air.

Navarro leaned over the kitchen sink to look out the window and down into the darkness one story below him, where a man in a raincoat entered and left the dim ellipsis of an electric lantern, butchering a deer.

He had the carcass stretched out on boards between two sawhorses, with a heap of skin on the left and entrails on the right. Navarro believed he was making small sounds with his voice. “Hm! Hm! Yep!” For the joints he used a machete.

Now Navarro smelled sour wine — Nelson’s breath, in fact. The tall man stood at his shoulder shouting down, “Bill! Will you get up here right away please? For Christ’s sake.”

“Would you excuse me now?” Donna asked. The men looked at her expectantly but she said no more, neither did she leave the room. She turned a chair sideways from the table, drew a paper sack toward her on the floor and put her feet flat on either side of it, reached in and began the process of snapping string beans, tossing the stems into the yellow trash can an arm’s length away. For about thirty seconds they Already Dead / 149

watched her, until she paused and asked, “Should I be doing this?” Schooner put his hand out across the table, a friendly gesture that didn’t quite reach. “If it comforts you.”

“There’ll be people around tomorrow, and they’ll have to eat.” She resumed snapping the beans.

The brother turned up at the kitchen door now, minus his raincoat, which hadn’t kept blood from spattering his T-shirt. He pressed down the latch with an elbow and wrestled the screen door open with the toe of his boot. Navarro moved to hold it open for him. Nelson came a step forward as if to offer his brother a sentimental embrace, but stopped short; and so did William, with his gory hands upraised to keep from smearing things.

He said to Nelson, “I was on my way here. I felt it coming. I was seconds too late.”

Navarro gave him a nod but got no acknowledgment. So this was the W. Fairchild whose letters, the latest addressed to Navarro personally, took up three-fourths of the “Federal” file at the Point Arena Police station. W. Fairchild stepped to the sink and turned the tap carefully with his pinky finger and started washing up.

Nelson stuck his face in his brother’s face. “A doe, did you say? I thought you wouldn’t shoot a doe.”

“I didn’t. It was dead by the road.”

“Why wasn’t I called right away?”

Bill turned off the water and looked confused and said, “Winona’s was the last place we tried.”

“Found me in the last place you looked?”

“It was the last place we thought of.”

“The very last place!” Nelson seemed to be smirking. He started to laugh, blushing deeply at his own inappropriateness and then giggling all the harder, finally clamping his fingers across his mouth, but the laughter blew out his nose. “Fuck me! I’m so very sorry!” he said, coughing and snuffing back mucus and fumbling over to the sink, where he yanked at the handles and splashed cold water on his face for a full minute, gradually calming himself but giving out with an occasional hysterical-sounding bark. The others didn’t know what to do but watch.

In a moment he asked his brother, “Am I getting this? You came here, found out Dad was dead, called the doctor, and went to collect a deer?

A dead deer? Went to collect some roadkill?” 150 / Denis Johnson

His brother was suddenly animated. “Look, asshole, we tried everywhere. I called the Sheep Queen and the bars and the pizza joint and anyplace that was open. I drove over to your apartment — that’s what I was doing when I grabbed the doe. Doc told me it was down, I spotted it, it looked fine, so why not. It’s edible meat.”

“Is it? Then what the hell! Let’s eat!”

“Nelson,” Doc said, “I hit her coming over. So he went and got it.

That’s all. So settle down.”

“Are you one of those people,” Nelson asked the doctor, leaning over him, “who think they know what they’re doing but really don’t?” His face was three inches from the doctor’s. Schooner could only lower his own gaze. “Show some respect for the occasion,” he mumbled, clearly embarrassed. “Show a little sensitivity.” Navarro couldn’t stand it. “Maybe I’ll have a look around,” he announced, talking mainly to the woman. But she didn’t get it. “Ms.

Winslow? I’ll need your permission, if you don’t mind.”

“That’s fine,” Donna said.

“It’s just a good idea, when there’s been a death, sometimes,” Schooner assured her, standing up now from his seat.

“That’s just fine,” she repeated.

Navarro followed the doctor through the living room and up a staircase with a turn in it, then a few paces along a hallway and into a lightless bedroom that smelled of age and illness.

“The cancer started in his colon.” Schooner turned on a bedside lamp.

The corpse lay in a hospital bed with the blanket drawn up over its head. Schooner gripped the hem, flipped it down to expose the face for a second — Navarro was looking elsewhere, looking around the room — and covered it over again.

“Why am I here?” Navarro asked.

“Well, he was out of bed.”

“At the time of death.”

“Yessir, just here beside the bed, they tell me.”

“And who put him back?”

“The son did — Bill. And Donna helped, as I understand it.”

“Does that seem suspicious?”

“Nah. Your time comes wherever you are. He voided in the bed, but there was also urine on the floor. He was often incontinent,” Schooner explained, “but he refused to be catheterized.” Already Dead / 151

Navarro spoke with a certain gruffness that generally worked to cover the kind of confusion he was feeling right now: “I don’t make the deduction here. I mean about urine and so on.”

“He was pissing his bed, started for the john, and dropped dead on the floor. And finished pissing.”

“He had colon cancer, right? You got a specific cause?”

“Something coronary, probably.”

“Heart attack?”

“Nah, there wasn’t enough heart left to attack. It just ran down and stopped, more likely.”

“Well then, but—”

“He had about eleven holes in his pump.”

“But what about the colon thing?”

“That too.”

“So, cancer, heart — shouldn’t he have been hospitalized?”

“Should’ve been, definitely. Should’ve been in CCU the last six months. Should’ve junked three yards of lower intestine. Should’ve been hooked to a gallon of painkiller.”

“And you wanted me?”

“If he dies out of bed, yessir.”

“Because you’re not sure as to cause?”

“Because I had a lot of trouble on one of these many years back. So now if anybody under my care goes down while away from his or her bed — well.”

“You don’t just toss him in a casket and say adios — not unless I sign off on it.”

“Right. Roger that, as you men say. But if you say so, I can have him in the funeral home in forty-five minutes.”

“On the other hand, if I tell you to ship him to Ukiah for an autopsy, which might take — how long?”

“Which might take a week or more, and would certainly lather up the relatives—”

“Right. I’d take the heat.”

“I guess taking the heat is partly what you’re paid for.”

“Almost entirely what I’m paid for, I’ve been thinking lately.”

“Well, give yourself a raise,” Schooner said.

“Yeah. Roger that.”

Navarro wandered over to the window. It was wide open, and a little rain had wet the sill. He listened to the sea, realized he wasn’t 152 / Denis Johnson

coming to a decision — wasn’t even thinking, if the truth were known.

“Well,” he said, “let’s hear what the wife thinks.” He stood staring at the bed as Schooner went out to stand at the top of the stairs and call down for Donna Winslow. By the small round depression in the bedclothes covering the corpse’s head, Navarro figured that at this moment Nelson Fairchild’s mouth was wide open. Navarro felt a brief, crashing vertigo. Nothing to do with corpses, because he’d seen plenty, but more to do with the force, the jolt, of suddenly remembering that just an hour ago he’d been making love with Mo.

He noticed the electric cord dangling beside the mechanical bed — the button that worked it up and down. He reached for it, held it in his hand, and would have indulged a sudden macabre impulse to make the corpse sit up and the shroud fall away from its face; but he heard the others on the stairs. He stepped away from the bed as the doctor came back with the woman of the house, Donna Winslow.

Donna Winslow took three steps into the room, looked at her lover’s shape under the sheets, and sighed.

“Did he like the window open?” Navarro asked.

“Sometimes.”

“Even in the rain?”

“I don’t think the storm started till after…so no one noticed.”

“Dr. Schooner says he was on the floor when you found him.”

“Bill and I found him together. Something made Bill come,” she said,

“in the middle of the night.”

“And this is his urine here, right?”

“Oh,” she said, grabbing a box of tissues from the bedside table, kneeling—“oh, let me just”—and she sopped it up with a succession of wadded napkins, tossing them in a wicker wastebasket, while the two men stared down at her.

“Who put him back in bed?”

“We both did. Bill did mostly, I guess.”

“Here — maybe we should adjourn to another room,” Dr. Schooner suggested.

“In a minute.” Navarro knelt by the bed and picked up a pillow from the floor beside it — bare, no slipcase. He asked the wife, “Would you have been the only one in the house around the time of”—he sought a word other than death but couldn’t find one—“when his time came?” Already Dead / 153

“I was alone downstairs.”

“Did you strip this pillow?”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Where’s the pillowcase? Any idea?”

“The pillowcase?”

“Just curious.”

“The hamper’s in the bathroom. That’d be the logical place, I guess.”

“Could Nelson have put it there? Did he have the strength?” She came closer to the corpse and pulled back the sheet to bare the astonished death mask — blue-gray, openmouthed, with deep-sunk, wide-open, porcelain eyes — and said, “This is Nelson Fairchild, Sr. He could’ve done anything at just about any time. If he wanted to right now he could probably jump up and spit in your eye. There’d probably be no truer epitaph than that.”

She didn’t replace the blankets until Schooner cleared his throat and said, “Thank you, Donna.”

“Let me just peek in the bathroom a second,” Navarro said.

“Whatever you have to do, Officer,” she said.

Schooner directed him across the hall, and he went into a small chamber and found the lightswitch and then the clothes hamper. Among the musty pyjamas and towels, all of which felt like artifacts because in them lingered the life that had just been lost, he found the pillowcase.

Holding it up before the light, he examined a patch of half-dried saliva and mucus in the center of the white material, of a size and shape, he would have wagered, that nearly matched the corpse’s open mouth.

He bunched it up and threw it back into the dirty laundry.

When he came out, Donna Winslow was gone. But Schooner was still hanging around. “What’s all this about a pillow?” he asked, following Navarro down the stairs.

Navarro shrugged. “Details, details.”

“You want him cut up?”

“Do you?”

“I asked you first.”

By now they were about to enter the kitchen, to which Donna Winslow had returned and where she now stood beside the table, pouring out cups of coffee for the two sons.

“I don’t see where it’s required in this case,” Navarro suddenly con-cluded.

154 / Denis Johnson

It stunned him that he had said it, because the statement ran straight up against his duty and training, which at a time like this required him to initiate all sorts of procedures. He was almost sure the man had been murdered.

What had him stalled was the added certainty that this had been a mercy killing. Probably perpetrated by this poor tired woman.

“I was seconds too late,” the younger brother said. “Something’s gonna be missing forever. At the end of time it’s all gonna come up short!”

It occurred to Navarro that the younger brother could have done the killing. But everything he knew about people told him this one wouldn’t hurt anybody intentionally.

“Would anyone like some coffee?” Donna said.

“No. Thanks. I’m going,” Navarro said.

The older brother sighed and stared at his coffee, his hands circling the cup and his arms stretched out straight. Navarro could see that it was hitting him now, everything attending the death of a family member. Guilt. Relief. And a white curtain over the future.

To Donna Winslow he said, “I’m sorry to intrude on your grief. We’re satisfied he passed on as a normal consequence of his illness.”

“I’ll call the mortuary in a minute,” Schooner told them all. “Let me just see the officer to his car.”

Outside, Schooner held the car’s door as Navarro got in. He rapped with his knuckles on the roof, basically a nonspecific gesture, one that might have meant, case closed; but maybe not, because he failed to shut the door. “I guess you can see for yourself this is a colorful bunch.” Navarro said nothing, and hoped the doctor wouldn’t say too much.

Schooner took several short breaths, as if suffering a spate of indiges-tion. “Look,” he said finally, miserably, “it’s my signature that goes on the death certificate. If this family gets a notion, they’ll be in everybody’s hair till Judgment Day.”

Navarro coughed. Cleared his throat. “You bet.”

“They think they’re important. The old man’s famous up and down this coast, a big property owner, sort of a semisociopath. I knew him well, and I can tell you that most of the rumors you’ll hear about him are true.”

“Who owns the property now that he’s dead?” Already Dead / 155

“I couldn’t say for sure. From what I know of him I’d guess most of his holdings go to his sons, the lunatic Fairchild boys. Donna wouldn’t — I mean to say, I doubt if Donna…”

“She doesn’t profit from his death.”

“No,” the doctor said.

The dawn seemed ready to light up. Navarro hadn’t realized he’d been here that long. Perhaps it was an illusion created by the ocean’s phosphorescence or something like that…He sat back in the seat, feeling tired in a cranky, unpleasant way. But all in all, this hadn’t been so bad.

He’d seen real killings, occasions where he’d reached the blood half a block before he met the person it was flowing from. “Well,” he told the Doctor, “tag him and bag him, and let’s all get some sleep.”

“Fine.”

One of the brothers had just come from the house. “Gotta go,” Navarro said.

“All right, sir. I’ll get him shipped out.” Navarro said goodbye and headed north, away from Gualala, toward Anchor Bay and toward Point Arena. In his rear view he saw the Porsche leave the drive and turn south.

Nobody had complained about the lack of an autopsy. Navarro could have promised the doctor they wouldn’t hear a word from Donna Winslow…though now, today, he knew his reasons for believing that had been completely wrong.

Thinking back on it now, Navarro wished he’d found some excuse to show up at the funeral. No reason it should have occurred to him at the time, but if he’d come around the Catholic cemetery in Manchester that day he’d have seen the whole crew in one spot, the living and the dead.

He shuffled through Nelson Junior’s letter, looking for the part about the funeral — if he remembered right it started on a page winding up the description of one of Fairchild’s boring, pointless dreams, but finally for once a dream in which Fairchild had been feeling good, everybody had been joyful and content—

content and having fun, and I’m not annoying, I’m comic. It’s happy, pleasant — some part of me must be that way. But I don’t want to meet that part. Why should a man who’s plotted murder dream happy moments?

156 / Denis Johnson

I haven’t been damned by dreams. Haven’t had dreams that fall into the classes described in the Talmud, prophetic, oracular, therapeutic, spontaneous, provoked, and so on, or dreams where long-sought answers come, answers that disappear at dawn — Wait, it suddenly comes back to me that Mother was at the dream’s periphery. I can see her but not her face, now let me think, basically she’s dressed as she was at the cemetery, in fact I see now that this dream is a reprise or a revision of Father’s funeral. Curious as hell that you never met her. I really don’t think you recognized her when she turned up at the service and didn’t say a word. Sorry, turned up? No, she was an apparition, she signaled that all the prophecies had been accomplished, her gown was blacker than if it had actually been black, if it had actually been a gown.

You, Winona, or anybody who happens to make such arrangements for me: I want a plot in the same graveyard, the Catholic cemetery south of Manchester, there by the sea, at the end of the world. Not because my family’s in it but just because it’s such a pleasant grove, with that long soft grass and the giant kneeling cypresses whose prayers have outlived all the griefs and crimes of the people beneath them, and the cliffs from which probably their souls plunged out after their funerals into the endless cycling of the water. Nice to anticipate getting buried in a place where you wouldn’t mind, actually, residing in life.

Did you know Dad’s was my very first funeral? We weren’t invited to our grandparents’. Nothing for a child there anyhow, what’s to experience, basically a static display around an open grave, almost like Christmas but with a coffin instead of a manger and a pile of dirt instead of straw, a kind of reverse Nativity scene composed mostly of people you haven’t run into in a while — I guess, in the case of you and Mom, people you’ve never even met. But there was only one total stranger there — Father himself. He’d worked up something to amaze us all! He’d turned himself into a thing in a box, he’d accomplished the ultimate refusal. Of course we all knew he’d have arranged his own service, the cheapest one possible, practically nothing to it, and almost nobody welcome.

And what about William, did you get a load of William? All dressed up with that self-inflicted haircut and that suit from Hell? He looked like Stalin-Goes-to-Church, I mean you’d have thought he not Dad was the one worked up for the occasion by some unaes-Already Dead / 157

thetic mortician’s helper. He did however appear calm. Let’s give him that. Three nights before, he went quivering through the house insisting that he’d gotten some sort of telepathic summons from dying Father.

Balanced beside the chasm of schizophrenic relapse, man, I thought he was going over. And what I wouldn’t give to see him now and talk with him and hear him set the gibberish rolling out of his brain. I’d take him by the ears and kiss his mouth…Now I see he never grew. Nobody does. We stay children and only the pretending and the games and the dreams grow old. Billy. Billy. It hurts!

Well, at the funeral I couldn’t have looked any less embalmed than Bill did I suppose. I started out that week blockading myself the usual way, with wine, but it didn’t work right because of the increasing awfulness of the hangovers. Woke up the third day, Funeral Day, with my soul hollowed out.

Then the funeral, with Mom coming uninvited and the two wives looking at each other across the abyss of this guy, this black hole in our lives who never let any light out of the horizon of his immense gravity.

Donna didn’t throw her arms around my mother, but you saw as clearly as I that each respected the other’s right to be there. It spoke well of our father that he’d chosen two women capable of trading respect — didn’t it?

Father Tom orated monotonically, stoically, without shame. Priests!

Once they had spine. Drove such as my father from the doors of the churches, held them off with shotguns on Sunday morning. Does gracious acceptance have them admitting every sinner nowadays, or is it apathy, hypocrisy? Donna hadn’t called him to the deathbed. He’d dropped around the mortuary next morning and unctioned the corpse.

So Father Tom with his birdlike face and perplexed eyes sprinkles a few verses over Dad while out there in the ocean Carla Frizelli drifts unforgiven, unconfessed. And then he left us, his coffin swaying on canvas belts over the void, lowered over chromed rollers onto cheap green felt by two drunkards in aluminum hard hats. I’d seen one of them in the Tastee-Cone just outside Point Arena once, talking trash with a little girl. She couldn’t have been ten years old but she was puffing on a cigarette. Then they stepped back, the two diggers, so we could line up to toss down dirt onto my father.

No thief ever beat him, no enemy, no rival. His children he put in the same category as thieves. Detractors, partakers, leeches, swine. He withheld, defended against us with fire, tossed us slop. Well, give him 158 / Denis Johnson

this much: death didn’t just walk up and inhale him. He wasn’t exactly whisked away. He left claw marks on his life.

I guess you know Mother didn’t talk with anybody at the funeral, not a word. But you don’t know she didn’t speak afterward either, not even to me. I stood beside her looking out over the ocean. I’d watched him shrink away. I’d learned how much bigger the sea could be. But she was getting it all at once — how endless the world is without him!

I’d seen her like that once before, out back of the Blue Whale Motel where we lived for a while when I was seven, maybe eight, and back then, as now, I stood beside her a few minutes until she turned and wandered off along the cliffside. There is something ineradicable about a woman walking into the wind. Everyone remembers their mother at this most unmotherly moment, her hair behaving like a cloud. And seeing it at any time afterward returns us to that motherless feeling. I believe in beauty. Especially in these moments that make us children again.

Naturally the whole time between the death and the funeral had been crazy, spent phoning innumerable people and getting phoned by innumerable others — Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata (no. 21 in C Major, opus 53) the nervous urgent silent-movie allegro con brio part, I love that phrase, con brio, connoting brutishness — mainly I telephoned lawyers because I wasn’t waiting around for any formal reading, I wanted it straight, had my father actually willed my entire share of his estate to my wife? Oh yeah. And had he died before he could change the document? You know the answer to that one. And what about the ten thousand goddamn acres? He’d put in what’s known as a “timber clause,” deeded it in, from now until forever the place would be a kind of zoo for big old trees. My wife and brother owned all of it now, all of it. Of course I co-owned half with my wife, but only until she divorced me. Unless — before she could arrange a will that prevented my owning it after her death — I brought about her death.

But you don’t understand, Winona. I didn’t want to kill you. Not anymore. Not since the moment I stood beside you thinking I’d done just that. And can I ask you now: were you actually sleeping? Anyway you don’t understand that in the dark bedroom that night I wasn’t gloating but wishing you back to life, realizing I didn’t want you ever to suffer the moment of your death — still don’t, still, I really don’t — and coming to love you perfectly. I mean selflessly and with Already Dead / 159

disinterest as only the completed unapproachable dead can be loved.

Because that’s what I thought you were. I’m even compelled by his death to love my father that way. Even though the stripes stay fresh, those wounds — I can feel them all over me, I can see them on Bill, almost spelling words, a thousand scars — he not only hurt us but with a certain careless cruelty taught us to carry on hurting ourselves after he stopped.

And I love him.

You don’t know about the last thing that happened that night, I mean the night Father died, and you won’t believe me when I tell you, why should you believe me, I’ve always been a liar, but anyhow little Winona do you know this one stretch of the ridge road where it narrows and in April the beautiful purple trumpets called naked ladies bloom right along the edge for about a half a mile? I started crying so hard that right at that spot I was forced to let the car head off the asphalt. I must have crushed a hundred bloomless naked ladies as I pulled to the side of the road.

Before long I had to ask myself what the hell I thought I was doing there. It was so dark I couldn’t see the dashboard, much less the world outside, if there was one, or had everything lapsed back to a formless pretime ungeometry with nothing in it but a lowing sound, small, far-off, agonized, as of something dying or being born? And what exactly was that sound?

Behind me the fog brightened and brightened, until the huge aurora suddenly burst and shrank to the size of two headlights. I waited for the vehicle to pass and pull the darkness closed behind it, but it didn’t pass. Very near to my car, about a hundred feet behind me, it slowed down and pulled to the side of the road. Its headlights went off. Then nothing. It just sat there in the dark.

In a minute I believed I saw the brief glow in my rearview mirror of the other’s dome light. But I couldn’t make out any sound of the other’s door opening or closing. I wasn’t sure if I heard footsteps or not. I didn’t turn around and look back. You know how the back roads at night unease me. It feels like hallowed ground. In Mendocino County so many beings seem to be awake when everybody should be sleeping, beings creating themselves, stirring and boiling and mumbling their prayers, sex-slayers and sacrificial maniacs, Jesus-wants-to-kill-you polygamists and Christian cannibals…Treefrog Jenny the castrator lived for years on the Boonville Road. And in West Point, you remember they found those seven skeletons

160 / Denis Johnson

in a single grave? And whoever dug that grave may still be living back here, may be awake tonight…Now I heard the footsteps coming. I jammed the pedal, cranked the starter, flooded the thing, had to wait there lame. On the other hand, I felt ridiculous. This could be some roadway Samaritan, this could even be some friend of mine, somebody coming to help the helpless. Or to destroy the voiceless. Because I knew I had no voice. Like one of those dreams where you can’t scream. I could barely grip the key and turn it in the ignition.

Then the car wouldn’t fire, and wouldn’t fire, and wouldn’t, and in a sort of happy torment I ground the starter till the battery gave out and then I let my heart break for every failure, for every bit of shit, and especially for us, for you and me. You see, I was on my way back to your place. I wanted to tell you what I’d just discovered about love — that in fact we need another word for it now, because this one we’ve maimed and crumpled, trotting it out to express our cheapest passions — all right, I admit they’re not cheap, these passions, sometimes they exact an astonishing tribute — but they fade, they — look at it this way, they shoot up like miraculous fountains but dribble away into mud. And I wanted to promise you that these feelings, my lust for Melissa, my fever for the land, the timber, the money, they aren’t love. But now I was broken down and sobbing in my bullshit machine with the future lovely flowers mashed beneath my wheels because I couldn’t get to you. Now listen.

Way down there’s something I long for. I don’t think for you it’s possible to comprehend how I wish for this thing, how hungry I get sometimes for this thing I can taste on the wind, when the night carries a sweet teenage music, for a whole history that can’t be mine, a tale of you and me: I’m baffled by school, I play the guitar, I work at the Texaco. I find you on your mother’s porch. You wait for me while I’m in the Army.

Sometimes I can feel it sliding by me like a twisted self in the house of mirrors, and I realize that’s my life, and I am the distortion. There is the world, and here is the mirror. Here the car won’t work and my father lies like granite in his bedroom and the wind scrapes against the grass and the moon goes down leaving such darkness I can’t see my way to walk, and a stranger steps toward me on the road. And the rain that left everything so wet and cold hangs out over the sea in the night miles away with its ghostly tuba and faint horns, playing for the dance of the dead.

And who was the stranger made of shadow? Who came to my car Already Dead / 161

and put his hands through the window and touched my skin and said what’s the matter?

The killer. Your killer. That is, the one who should have killed you.

— I wasn’t even sure you owned a car, I said.

Please excuse me a second…

The old proprietor just interrupted me elbowing at the door with an armload of kindling and busted up my mood. You might recognize him darling, I’m staying at the little joint where we stopped a year ago last Christmas — or the one before that? — in the very same room, with the fireplace and the ratty bear rug and the stuffed trout on the wall.

The same old boy still runs it, still lives and breathes, still refuses to take that cigarette out of his face, meanwhile frowns at my ascending amber tower of empties. The wheezy old moron. He dislikes me because I suggested that by the look of the pelt maybe his bear had been hunted down with ack-ack. I’m special that way, capable of making a lifelong enemy with one anemic

Navarro loosed more dimes into the dryer’s slot.

The light outside was dying, and so he could see himself reflected in the window. He looked like a man in a Laundromat, but he felt like a man in a darkness, man standing in a tropical sports shirt and brown slacks way down at the bottom of a hole, his strongest identification now with another man who was probably dead and whose words floated slowly past on these pages. He hoped Fairchild hadn’t died. He hoped…but he knew. And yet he couldn’t have said for certain what he knew. In the blackening Laundromat glass Navarro saw the picture of a guy who would never know what had happened during a period roughly between the start of August and the end of September a year ago — particularly the first two weeks of September 1990—to a group of people Navarro couldn’t even be sure about the composition of, but which included the Fairchild brothers and their father; also Winona Fairchild, and Carl Van Ness, and certainly the witch and “channeler,” Yvonne. And possibly one other person who’d also been missing for a long time, an associate of both the Fairchild brothers, maybe a confed-erate or cohort — a local surfer by the name of Clarence Meadows.

162 / Denis Johnson