Already Dead: A California Gothic

September 2–5, 1990

Around one in the afternoon a dozen or so miles short of the Bakersfield cutoff, just after making the long decline from Wheeler Ridge, Clarence Meadows took a ramp off Interstate 5

and headed into a Coco’s Restaurant in the shadow of the hills for one of those prefab lunches. Lunch with the sheep, as he thought of it. He’d gotten a late start out of Long Beach and wouldn’t make Gualala till midnight anyhow; another thirty minutes wouldn’t matter. And the car’s radio didn’t work, and he wanted to get an update on the real bad news from Kuwait.

He bought a paper in the restaurant and sat at the counter drinking a Pepsi and looking things over: the hostages were leaving Iraq; U.S.

troops still poured into Saudi Arabia.

As for Clarence, the whole idea of ground combat disgusted him. If they refused to make peace, let them use the atom bomb. That was honest warfare.

He laid the paper down and unveiled the squinting face of the man sitting two stools away, who must have been trying to read the back page. Their eyes met. “Here we go again,” the fellow said.

“Another Sunday in paradise,” Meadows agreed.

“No — I mean what’s happening in the papers.” 165

“I wish it was happening in the papers,” Meadows corrected him,

“but it’s happening somewhere over there for real.”

“You think we’ll get all the way into it?”

“Yeah.”

“A real war?”

“Yeah.”

“For oil?”

“When it comes to the price of gas, we’ll nuke the Vatican if we have to.”

The fellow ran an unusual kind of salvage business. He bought old computers in bulk, he told Clarence, and broke them down and hauled the pieces to Southern California. “An obsolete computer’s worth zip.

But there’s a hell of a market for some of the gizmos inside.” Up in Montana he had three airplane hangars full of the stuff. “Hey. You should see my hat,” the guy said, but then failed to explain why or to display anything in the way of a covering for his head. Clarence found the Montanan’s manner soothing. There was a whiff of snake oil about him.

“You do just the opposite of what I do,” Clarence said.

“You build them. You build computers?”

“No, I mean I buy junk in L.A. and put it back together up north.

Classic cars.”

“Where do you sell them?”

“Back down in L.A. It’s really just a hobby.”

“And what do you actually do for a living? Can I ask?”

“No,” Clarence Meadows said.

Meadows was driving back north from L.A., having sold a car for Bill Fairchild and bought this junker and set up deals to sell the dope, his and Nelson Fairchild’s, after it was harvested. Nominally the barter-ing was Nelson’s thing, but Meadows happened to know a couple of music people in Long Beach, and he didn’t see where the arrangement with Nelson was etched in steel.

Fifty or sixty miles north of the Bakersfield cutoff, Meadows pulled to the shoulder long enough to twist a piece of coat hanger around the brake’s linkage, up near the firewall, because the pedal was rattling insanely. While he was down there under the dash he noticed two wires dangling, evidently chewed through by corrosion — he touched the ends together and heard the radio burp. He spliced them 166 / Denis Johnson

with a twist of his fingers, and now the speakers put out a flow of static that sounded promising.

When he raised his head back up to the level of the window, it mys-tified him to see something like a blurry cliff standing over the planet, bulging enormously in its middle, resembling nothing so much as a mushroom cloud and taking up the horizon’s entire northeast quadrant.

What had happened, as he began to understand now, was that a colossal wind had lifted the desert half a mile into the air and kept it hovering there. The dust storm didn’t seem to be moving. But he realized that it must actually be approaching fast. Quickly he rolled up the windows.

His main concern until this minute had been the running condition of the car, a Mercedes 190SL, a beautiful old thing but mistreated, with an unsteady carburetor and a tendency to blow oil out through the manifold seal. Now all of that seemed very secondary as the wind slammed across the road ahead and the car seemed to dive into darkness. Right away he was lost. He couldn’t even see the pavement. Despite the tightly shut windows he tasted dust on his tongue. It itched in his nasal passages, and soon it made his eyeballs feel parched. He messed with the dials on the radio. Nothing reached his hearing but the faint voice of his engine and the fluttering of the wind, a very deep, suggestive sound. He let the car angle gradually to the right until the tires on that side commenced a steady shuddering. He didn’t quite stop, but kept his left tires where he could feel the smooth pavement, the right-hand tires bumping through the dirt, and figured that this way he must be cutting straight along the shoulder, inching ahead so slowly the speedometer didn’t register while the car’s inside heated up and the dust and sweat turned the steering wheel all grimy. The drifting desert earth smelled old and untouched.

A white Cadillac materialized on his left and drifted past and faded away like a thought.

It seemed lucky now that he and Billy Fairchild had agreed in advance on a sports car. Otherwise he’d have brought his surfboard along, it would be sticking out the window at this moment, and he wouldn’t be able to shut out the dust. As it was, he was packing a bowling ball and a trumpet and the accoutrements for other hobbies he’d suddenly been seized with a desire to develop because he’d been feeling very much at loose ends. He’d made the drive down just Already Dead / 167

last week; within two days he’d sold the ’38 Hudson he and Billy had restored, reinvesting the seven hundred profit in this wrung-out antique and performing temporary wonders on it to the degree, at least, that it was now rolling him north. This old Mercedes would be impossible to restore unless they got a line on parts. So what? Billy would be happy just contemplating it among his other pitiful monsters, not one of which he read as a failure.

In Clarence’s vision Billy Fairchild, over the last couple of years, had taken on real stature because when it came to self-reliance, Billy was an actual instance. He had his episodes, but he’d learned for the most part to separate his spirit from the diseased part of him, the head, which produced the worthless thoughts. Every once in a while he jagged a few days on coffee and wrote letters to the president and screamed in the woods, but did it matter? Witch doctors behaved similarly. It was part of what made them valuable. Meadows felt he’d rather have a mad hermit defending him than a lawyer owned by credit-card companies.

To find the people who’ve become truly sane, seek among those who’ve managed to do without sanity. The rest of us, Meadows thought, just brainlessly acquiesce.

Moving forward in first gear, Meadows decided he could travel on in this fashion indefinitely, groping ahead blind and strangled. Which was fine except that it too closely resembled life in general.

Again on his left, he passed two cars stopped in a kind of embrace, the huge intimacy of which he felt almost embarrassed to be witnessing.

It didn’t look too serious an accident. The cars’ owners stood out on the median, one man scrutinizing the wrinkled bumper of his vehicle and the other craning, searching the little limit of visibility for…and then Meadows was past and the whole thing absorbed by the amber twilight, sucked up as by a sponge.

Off to the right he saw, occasionally, other things, a wavering mile-post, a green unreadable highway sign, a stretch of faded fence. Fascinating the way each seemed to jump up solid, hover there, and then dematerialize like a smoke ring. Taken in sequence they seemed to want to say something, to act as the grammar of an emptiness that was trying to deliver some sort of coded hieroglyphic message.

As best he could figure, the squall had been boiling westward when he’d cut into its path, and somewhere in the middle of it he’d left the desert and crossed into the irrigated farming region of California’s Central Valley. He started to see implements of modern cultivation, 168 / Denis Johnson

machines as big as houses only with giant, silly wheels and innumerable claws. Visibility improved. The cloud was not so much night now, but rather fog, with startling bands of sunshine falling through it here and there. He swung past a row of three shabby orange biplanes, crop dusters tied down beside a field. The wind seemed no longer as loud.

The storm had passed. But all these obscuring clouds of stuff it had unsettled would stay in the way perpetually.

Clarence shifted into second gear and picked up speed. He’d been two hours making the last dozen miles. Another twenty minutes and he could expect to reach the hospitality of the Regis Ranch, according to an advertisement shimmering in the dust, an electric sign that not only welcomed him but celebrated this as the nation’s largest family-owned beef-cattle operation. He began to sense something other than dirt in the air. The storm had all but smothered a pungency which he’d often noticed in this region and which, now that he’d seen the billboard, he realized must come from the ranch’s slaughterhouse. He’d been smelling the blood for miles.

The ranch had probably operated here for decades, but only in recent months had these billboards — and now a titanic yellow marquee pulsing above an exit ramp — sprung up to proclaim the place. Meadows took the ramp and pulled into the parking lot. The wind had died completely and the dust and afternoon sun brewed an exotic ocean of layered nectars, plum and violet and indigo, shot with streaks and cleaved by the shadows of hills.

The Regis ranching family, if that was in fact the family’s name, had decided to found a regular oasis here, with a hotel and a restaurant and several boutiques. And pumped it full of money, he gathered: things had a grand but tasteful feel, hand-hewn wood and adobe like cinnamon and a spaciousness that felt very western — elbow room all over inside, also a big, quiet feeling generated for the most part by a sense that nothing would ever happen here. Retail commerce had overlooked the Regis Ranch. The stink of distant butchering, just a whiff but still perceptible even indoors, might have had everything to do with that.

Meadows wondered if he could scare up some trouble in the bar, but it was huge and he found only the barman there, looking more forsaken than any of his customers would ever feel.

Suddenly aware of how played-out and grimy he was, Clarence went farther down the concourse to rinse the dust from his face in Already Dead / 169

the men’s room, which by its size and decor could easily have been the train station in a southwestern heaven. Blue tiles in sprays and arches gave it almost a pre-Columbian feel. Mostly it was adobe — russet, sound-absorbing, serene.

In there he found the computer-salvage guy, the Montanan, standing at attention before one of the urinals: unusual things, ceramictiled bowls something like the bidets Meadows had seen years before in Lebanese hotels. “You again!” the old gent said. Meadows only shrugged by way of a greeting. The Montanan had taken off his overshirt. Now he stepped over to his kit bag by the sinks to don a green silken one of a fancy western cut that seemed tailor-made for the immediate environment.

After spending some time brushing his hair energetically in several directions, without any apparent idea what the hell he was doing, the old man seemed satisfied. “Remind me to buy you a drink one of these days,” he said to Clarence. “And, also, I forgot to show you my hat.

You’d get a kick out of it. You know,” he confided, “I kind of like your style.” Clarence wore distressed canvas deck shoes without socks, baggy madras shorts, and a UCLA sweatshirt with the sleeves torn off because it was too small in the shoulders, small enough altogether that a strip of his belly-flab showed beneath its hem; also a green BP baseball cap; and so what the Montanan might have meant by Clarence’s style remained unclear. The door shut behind him and Meadows pondered the question as he stood alone before the squad of urinals, the sound of his piss jingling in a great and terrible and enchanted and holy silence.

At the sink he removed his BP cap to wash himself and confronted in the mirror a brown face with the line so sharp and the skin and hair so clean above it he looked scalped. He stood for a long time whapping the dust from the hat on the sink’s edge.

Meadows had taken a parking space that put the nose of the Mercedes two feet from the side of the building. When he got back to the parking lot, he discovered a big lemon-colored station wagon blocking him from behind. Its driver had backed right up against the bumper of the Mercedes, possibly without having noticed the smaller car, and now the station wagon sat there with its rusty hood raised.

A young woman in a black dress stood beside it, reaching awkwardly into the driver’s window with one hand and, Meadows guessed, turning the key in the ignition. But without any luck.

She stood up straight when he approached — a secondhand black 170 / Denis Johnson

evening dress with, he now saw, red roses on it — but the awkwardness didn’t disappear. It seemed her natural state. Her car was tilted too, with one front tire smaller than the others. “Hear that?” she asked Clarence. “It’s just this gah-dam click-click-clicking — oh dear Jesus forgive me for swearing. First the battery won’t keep a spark n’more.

Got to jump her every time. Now this,” she said, kicking the fender, and then laughed.

“Let me take a look.”

“Ah! You’re heaven-sent.”

“You got me boxed up. I don’t move till you do.” Meadows looked under the hood, surveying the engine for anything obvious before actually popping the distributor cap to see if she was getting a spark. The woman hovered around him saying, “I can’t think why it won’t start right up. Usually she’ll sit an hour or more before the juice runs out totally. Maybe all this dust plugged something up, do you wonder?”

Meadows thought he saw a wire dangling down below the chassis from a junction that ran to the solenoid. Out of reach, unless he crawled under the car.

Looking around for a piece of cardboard or something to lie on, he came face to face with a child staring out the back window, a black-haired kid about four, a boy, a Latino maybe, though his mother, a blonde, looked and sounded from the North. Junk, belongings, bedding surrounded the kid. You could see these people lived back there. That was all right with Meadows, but it probably made for a weary childhood.

What the hell, he was a mess anyway — Meadows gave up and slid under the car on his back and took hold of the dangling wire. It was just a plug that had worked free from its joint. He shoved it back into place, crawled out from under the vehicle, and turned the ignition, reaching in through the window as the woman had done. It started up instantly.

“You’re a godsend, I knew it!” the woman said.

“I’m a generalissimo of loose connections.”

“What was it?”

“These prongs are loose in this socket.” Meadows showed her where.

“You have any electrician’s tape?”

“Nope.”

“Any tape at all?”

Already Dead / 171

“Sorry.”

“It’ll rattle loose now and then — just keep an eye on it.” They all had an early supper in the restaurant where she’d just applied for work. Meadows invited them. He felt sorry for the kid and also wondered if the mother, on such short notice, could be persuaded. Her name was Carrie. He liked her in that wild dress with the cartoon roses and those bright red two-inch-heeled shoes and nylon stockings that seemed a little loose. Her hands, intricately weathered, but slender and graceful, with blunt nails crusted under by dirt, kind of got to him.

Sweet eyes but definitely not feminine — everything about her a little big-boned and angular. Yet not coarse. Just strong, just ready. She had little hairs above her lip whitened by the sun.

“You following the crops?” It seemed to fit the evidence.

“I’m down for the lettuce. Then back up to Washington for the apples.

But I’m applying for waitress jobs.”

“You have a green card?”

“You got me, eh? Yeah, I’m from way up there. Born and raised in the Canadian Yukon.”

“The restaurants hire you?”

“I’m a resident. No problem there. My old man’s U.S.”

“And the old man,” Clarence asked, “is where?”

“Down the road. Nobody knows which road. We keep him in our prayers.”

Carrie hadn’t met with any luck here in the way of employment. The restaurant was big, with red tablecloths and good Mexican food, but it was mostly empty.

Meadows had lost any sense of a schedule. The concept of direction itself seemed to be on the fade. He didn’t mind following them across the interstate to the Seven Flags, a generally cheaper truckers’ kind of place, and waiting with the kid while Carrie went inside to ask for work.

He and the boy leaned up against her station wagon and watched a series of peculiar-looking American people fill their tanks out front of the Big Chief convenience store. Meadows sensed a species change unless he was mistaken. The sheep had retired and here came the others, jamming at the trough. This was the low-rent side of the highway, evidently existing before the Regis Ranch had set out its lures. Hog Heaven. Porkville. Oinkopolis.

“Get a good look at that.”

172 / Denis Johnson

“What?” the little boy said.

“Whatever happens to you, kid — don’t let it be that.”

“I’m getting in back now.”

“Do that. Yeah. Whatever.”

Carrie’s little boy, it now turned out, had established a small fort in the back of the station wagon from which he ran a complicated imaginary war. It cut across the lines of space-time so that some of it was science fiction and some of it was medieval Europe and some of it destroyed the wild American West.

“Did you see the dust storm?” he asked Clarence.

“Yeah. Did you?”

“I’m making a gray thing,” the child said. “He can talk.”

“Good.”

“He shoots.”

The child had modeling clay under his fingernails as his mother had soil under hers. Probably she’d been digging in some of this earth right here surrounding them. The Central Valley was all farmland thanks to the irrigation, but up from it jutted various dead formations, craggy desert hills of the kind you’d expect to see biblical figures driven to the top of and whipped without mercy. And these big interstates were scary. Certainly people had built them but they had this aura of deep geological truth, they seemed connected to infinity, gave you the feeling they’d erupted here like veins of—

But here in his stunning green cowboy blouse came the Montanan out of the Big Chief suddenly, gripping a six-pack with his thumb and finger as if with tongs. “Hey,” the man said, and jiggled the brim of his baseball cap with his other hand. “Hey — get it?” Clarence felt like asking the guy if he wasn’t perhaps a faggot. “Check it out,” the man said, stepping forward and pointing at his own skull. Now Clarence registered the hat, with black hieroglyphs on it, or Greek writing. The Montanan stepped back. “See?” But no, Meadows didn’t see — and then he got it — the hat’s label did a trick of optical magic: the man took two more steps backward, and the outlines disappeared over this little distance, the hieroglyphs resolved, and the shapes became a message: EAT

MORE PUSSY.

The Montanan leapt into his pickup truck and drove away, pulling along in his wake a utility trailer soon to be refilled, Meadows assumed, with priceless digital junk.

Meadows visited the Big Chief himself now and picked up a six of Already Dead / 173

Colt.45 and some cheap wine coolers, thinking it was funny the guy would come along and offer him such irrefutable advice, and just when he’d been trying to remember his purpose.

The little boy crawled out and sat on the car’s back bumper. They shared a patch of silence which the kid traversed by leaning over and trying to drip spit on a bug.

“Looks like you got brand-new shoes there.”

“Yeah. Somebody threw them away.”

“They fit?”

“They fit if I wear four socks,” the boy said.

“What’s your name, little dude?”

“Clarence,” he said.

“No shit? That’s my name too.”

“I know. It’s my name too,” the boy said.

He swapped a Colt.45 back and forth with this miniature Clarence.

Before it was half done the boy said he felt dizzy and lay down in back with his head on his arm. He had big eyes with unusual, almost purple eyelids and looked very Third World, very lost, in his clean tennis shoes.

His mother returned, declared she disliked wine coolers but happened to be thirsty, and drank all three. She didn’t embarrass herself however.

Meadows watched her eyes, waiting for that flat look, but it didn’t happen. At most she got a little sparkly and maybe even a bit more attractive.

She inspected his Mercedes and noticed the things behind the driver’s seat.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a head, a severed head.”

“No. Really.”

“I was gonna shrink it, wear it around my neck.”

“Is it a bowling ball? It’s a bowling ball.”

“Shit, really? Hell, I don’t think I can shrink one of those.”

“Come on, now.”

“I guess I’ll have to take up bowling.”

“Are you a serious bowler?”

“I’m taking it up.”

“Come on!”

“No, really, I got this one for free and I’m thinking what the hell, you know—”

174 / Denis Johnson

“Well, let’s see it, then.”

He unzipped the zipper. “Take it. Go on.”

“Lemme get my fingers in—”

“There’s a bowling alley in every town, just about.”

“Back off, now!”

“Give her a roll, honey.”

He killed his beer while she bowled across the blacktop. The ball, a green spangled Brunswick, collided with the Big Chief’s Dumpster and then rolled up beside the building among some old crates, where it looked very precious and original. Meadows wandered after it.

She called out to him, “And what have we got here? A machine gun?

A pool cue I bet.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he corrected himself, coming back to her, “this is not a bowling ball. I’m terribly sorry. This is a golf ball. So this here’s the dealy, the whacker. The club. You screw this thing together—”

“This is a golf club?”

“That’s — yes. A seven iron. Yes, Ma’am.”

She swiped at the bowling ball with the butt of the pool cue. “Got a tennis racket or some such?” she asked. She reached through the window again.

“Now this — ah, ah, ah — don’t touch that,” he said.

She tried to open the trumpet’s case, and he said sharply: “Hey.

Goddamn it, I’m serious.”

“Oh,” she said.

He enjoyed seeing the uncertainty in her eyes.

“I’m sorry. I—”

“I’m just kidding,” he said.

“Oh…”

“At the proper moment I’ll play you something sweet.” She smiled and looked away. He’d sunk the mood.

Not that it mattered, but he asked again just to be asking, “And what about the old man, now?”

“Like I say. King of the Road. Hasn’t been heard of for a year.” He tried messing with her a little bit, and she jammed up against him so hungrily it pinned him to the car.

“Well,” he said when they broke free, “you feel hot enough to take to church.”

She was licking her tongue all over his teeth in a surprising way. He couldn’t back up, and so he slid sideways.

Already Dead / 175

“The Lord sent you to me.”

“If you wanna try this again sometime when we’re sober,” he said,

“you got a deal.”

“We got a deal now. Don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel the deal?”

“No, I don’t,” he said.

She changed the subject suddenly, started describing some scene, some mushroom-picking thing in Oregon. “There was, like, boocoos of people there. Mostly Cambodians from — they said they shipped them in from Seattle or somewhere. Whenever I found a spot with the little suckers popping up, then the other little suckers come popping up too, nipping ’em and sacking ’em up quick as they could grow. The buyers all complained they were picking ’em too small. But they were on those little fungus bastards, I tell you, just as quick as piranha fish.” With her hands she made two such fish, rapidly chomping, a gesture that broke his heart about halfway.

She was reaching into the car’s window again. “What’s this say?”

“Where’d that come from?”

“What’s it say?”

“This?” It was the cryptic baseball cap, actually a brand-new one, still creased. He guessed the Montanan had slipped an extra through the window.

“What’s it say?”

“It’s in an unknown tongue.”

The saddest truth about this person wasn’t the car full of junk or the fact that she was broke or her future life of grubbing for lettuce or onions or walnuts. The saddest truth was that, for her, he was the only thing happening for a thousand miles and maybe for a thousand years.

He said, “Fuck it. Let’s do a motel.”

“Sounds pretty good to me.”

As the bullets opened up his body the Lebanon of dreams went black, and Meadows found himself awake in the California night. Alive.

But he smelled carnage.

He placed himself now: here in the bed beside the woman, Carrie, and not too many miles from the Regis beef ranch and its slaughterhouse. The breeze must have shifted. He’d been smelling it in his sleep.

176 / Denis Johnson

For years this nightmare had visited him, but less and less vividly, until now it returned with the shapelessness of a distant echo. And it no longer came to him every night, but these days only when urged by a little something, talking about it with someone, or, as tonight, feeling Carrie’s fingers touch the scars and then sleeping beside her with those same fingers brushing his knee.

A few hours ago she’d reached across him in the bed and said, “Close your eyes, Clarence…”

“What for?”

“I’m gonna turn on the lamp.”

When she could see, she said, “Oh, Lord God — looks like somebody went at you with a half-inch drill.”

“I got shot.”

“By who?”

“An ambush in Beirut. And I’ll tell you what, I wasted all six of those fuckers. They’re dead.”

It had been six — no — almost seven years; and still that fact was the one, among all facts, that made him happiest.

But the dream had all the feelings, slowed down as if for savoring — or maybe they savored him — that during the actual events had been smeared sideways by motion and soaked in a wondrous deafness.

Clarence dreamed of driving in the open jeep across Beirut with the sunrise burning over his shoulder. He didn’t know what they were heading for but they were heading straight toward it. This was a general scramble of hysterical proportions, anyway some brief, giant thing had torn into the day like a can opener, and none of the rules applied at this point. He rode in back behind Tom Rule. He could name the others when awake but in the dream he looked only at the back of Tom Rule’s head thinking, “The rules don’t apply,” while dark buildings tumbled past on either side. This was exactly as it had felt in actuality, including also the deep dread — it was all around them because of the all-hands scramble, the Condition Red that might mean a nuclear war — this dread accentuated by the fact that even all the Lebanese cowboys had abandoned their posts, and in the dream the jeep was blasting right on past each checkpoint, although in the real experience they’d had to stop while somebody jumped out and pulled aside the rubber strips of nails the cowboys always laid across the road, and then the jeep screamed through, scraping its antenna under each lifted gate. Somebody threw mud at Tom Rule’s head.

Already Dead / 177

Then the back of his head came off. The jeep stopped and Clarence got out and found himself standing at the edge of Lebanon in a gigantic desert watching Tom Rule flop back and forth in the jeep as it pulled away. In life he’d grabbed the big L-60 as more bullets hit the jeep. He’d shouted orders that he be left behind, and moved, as if in a dream, firing rapid bursts, toward the orange barrel-flashes and flowery sprays of ignited cordite erupting from the base of a hedge on a dirt knoll before a gutted building. In the dream he just walked empty-handed toward these innumerable little flares shouting numbers and foreign words — enraged because he thought if he could only make himself clear, he could change the situation — and in the dream, as he had in life, he felt each bullet hit him. In life the bullets hadn’t mattered. But in the dream it terrified him to feel his body opening up and the air and dust touching parts inside that should always have been sealed off. At this point, in both the dream and the life, everything turned black: here was the border between the two worlds. Often he opened his eyes believing he’d just come awake, now, for the first time since he’d been shot. In fact, during the first couple of years, he’d invariably felt that way, and it was also during this period of the first minutes after waking each night, while he walked around the room in a small panic and then showered off the sweat, that one by one the little details returned to his mind. Standing by the jeep, he’d seen Tom Rule’s right hand move. He was convinced that Tom had felt something and was trying to lift his hand to his head, which was no longer there. He remembered hefting the L-60, twenty-five pounds of incomprehensible metal — Where was the safety? Where was the trigger? — its feed box disengaging as he hit the wrong lever and the ammo stringing away like a broken necklace.

From that point he was moving, and he experienced events as occurring not in time, but in terms of bullets and inches. He’d never been able to recall anything of the next twenty feet, which must have included many bullets. He remembered, after that, kicking the machine gun’s ammo belt leftward in order to straighten it. Then he was on the ground crawling forward and firing steadily. By this time he’d certainly been hit but couldn’t tell where, and didn’t actually care — he just wanted the weapon beside him, pointing toward the ambushers, and the strength to pull the trigger, and that was all. By the time he’d gone through fifty rounds he’d been hit again, more than once, but the L-60

had chewed up the knoll and the wall behind it, and he wasn’t 178 / Denis Johnson

sure he was getting any return fire. He draped the ammo belt over his left shoulder, counted to three, and then stood up. He found that he could move forward, and did so. He leaned into the bullets as into a hot wind.

The doctors had said if you bet your life at roulette five times straight and the wheel turned up your number all five spins — he’d been that lucky. Although the doctors had routed his digestive tract out of a nipple under his armpit, they’d promised him it was only a temporary thing, and they’d kept their promise.

A week later President Reagan came to the area to weep among the dead. He came to lift the spirits of the troops. Clarence had been scheduled to get his decoration, the Navy Cross, from the president on the Nimitz, but his wounds had kept him down. Clarence felt sure the president understood. The president had been shot once himself — with how many rounds Clarence didn’t know exactly. Clarence had taken four slugs from Kalashnikovs, three of which had been slowed by his flak jacket and ended up in his intestines. The fourth had hit his left seventh rib, spun alongside his heart without touching it and torn around inside his right lung before flying up out of his shoulder — he’d heard it whisper a word as it came up past his ear. The jacket had stopped several.223 Armalite slugs, but one had come in high, just above the collarbone, skidded down the sternum, danced through his stomach, and lodged in the muscles of his back after barely nicking his liver. Five bullets altogether, and an additional small laceration where a.308, possibly one of his own ricochets, had nosed through the mesh of his flak jacket to break the skin. He’d stayed conscious long enough to empty the ammo belt and locate the six motionless cowboys in the ditch behind the knoll. They were skinny kids with red-checkered scarves around their heads like all the other cowboys. He pried loose a Kalashnikov from the hands of the nearest and put insurance in the right or left eye of each one of them.

People said of a killing, “It was him or you,” without any understanding. Because that’s who it is, at the moment of killing. It’s both. It’s either one. It doesn’t make any difference.

Right now he sat up in the bed, swung around, put his feet on the floor. Stared down at them a long time. He thought maybe he’d get his pants on and walk over to the quick-stop there, the Big Chief or whatever it was, and get some coffee and talk a little with the clerk.

Sometimes that sort of conversation could bring you back to level.

Already Dead / 179

But the abattoir’s odor…He smelled the ripe taint in the air as if it belonged to something that had followed him from that time back, a physical something, the meat that had let loose all these ghosts.

Carrie lay on her side with her back to him, one arm sticking out behind. He took hold of her fingers gently, so as not to wake her.

He didn’t think he wanted to screw this woman again. Not after this evening’s entertainment, no.

The Lord stuff had been just a phrase or two on her lips before they’d made love. Then afterward it was dark and they were lying there together and he touched the space between her thighs and she shuddered, moved away on the bed, sighed almost as if with exasperation. He’d only wanted to put his hand on her crotch.

“Clarence: I read the Bible. And this is wrong.”

“What?”

“I ask you. Can’t you just feel all that wrongness?” In fact, he’d noticed no such thing.

“It burns a hole,” she said, “right down through.”

“Yeah? Well well.”

Well well — he’d wondered if she could be persuaded. And so she could. But, he guessed, not without making it into something cosmic.

Also rapturous, tragic, et cetera. Anything but casual. Not that casual existed when it came to this kind of business. Boring and silly, or dramatic and painful. Those were the existing categories.

That was the moment when she’d reached across him to cut on the light and got him thinking back to that morning in Beirut. He’d started messing with her again, turned on by the passion, his own wounds, darkness, raw smell of blood, all of that. Carrie responded for a minute, but then she brought it around again: “Clarence, it’s the Lord dealing with me. I don’t know what I was thinking. Look. My life ain’t mine.” She sat sideways on the bed, letting her hair hang down between her knees, a regular portrait of dejection.

“I believe I’ll start smoking again,” he told her. “It gives me something to do when assholes are going crazy all around me.”

“I had to lose my life in order save it.”

“Hmm…I can’t exactly decode your shit.”

“Look,” she said miserably, “I don’t belong here, I belong to the Savior. In your fancy flesh-world I’m nothing but a ghost.”

“I respect that. Really, most highly.”

180 / Denis Johnson

“Get down and pray with me.”

Together they knelt by the bed, both of them naked, exactly, Meadows suddenly devised, as you should be naked to kneel down and pray.

Carrie reached her hands out before her across the mussed sheets and knotted her fingers together tightly. So Clarence did that too. He felt a draft on his ass. “Dear Father in Heaven, Lord of all,” she said.

“Could we do this in silence?” he asked.

She whispered, “Sure.”

And before a minute had passed, the silence had turned into a charged beautiful moment, and Meadows cleared the spit from his throat and said, “Hey…why don’t you put on your high heels.” She said, “Okay.”

And then they made love.

“Don’t expect me ever to do that again,” she said immediately afterward, before she’d even caught her breath.

“You are one spun-out monkey,” he said.

“Don’t you see? This is just a flesh feast.” Flipping and flopping. As quick as they turned him on they switched him off. “I tell you this in a friendly way, Carrie. I liked you the second I met you. But you won’t be seeing much more of me, because you’re dizzy.”

“I understand,” she said.

Then he’d slept, and been visited by the dream. And now he was awake and trying to shake it.

He felt better as soon as he stood up. He walked into the front room.

He’d splurged on this two-room suite, but it was either that or leave Carrie’s little boy out in the car by himself. The kid slept now on the couch before the TV, which was running, and on whose screen a weather woman paced sideways from one end of the country to the other, pointing at geography with a stick and smiling falsely, bravely, as if the weather was hopeless. Meadows sat down naked in a cold vinyl chair. The news came on. Not much today. The president planned to make a speech. The pope was in Tanzania. And a hundred American hostages had made it home from Baghdad. Meanwhile, Meadows felt like a hostage himself. Maybe he should get back on the interstate. He wouldn’t sleep any more tonight anyway. If this was the eleven o’clock news, and if he left before the end of it, then by dawn he’d have reached Gualala. And would no doubt start designing reasons to leave.

Already Dead / 181

They’d probably get around to it, but they hadn’t yet passed a law against coming and going. He could visit two days in Gualala and then head back south. He’d stay up there just long enough to make sure Nelson hadn’t starved the garden, and spend some time down in the woods with Billy; with straight-out, mechanical problems and the tools for solving them. Billy was a healing influence, because he lived entirely out of his own stores. Self-reliance, it went deeper than mere independence — it meant, by Clarence’s reckoning, complete balls-out freedom from any other fucker’s will. People wouldn’t have believed it about him, but Meadows was familiar with Emerson’s essays. He revered them, but he hadn’t read them lately. His stomach lurched when he considered the waste of the last few years.

It was a fact that occasionally something, some vague ripple, surged forward out of the past. And then you were dealing with despair.

Cath, his wife — ex-wife — had given him the Emerson book. He’d been fascinated with her when they’d met, because she read such things and seemed to live in two worlds at once — the world of her life, and the world of books in which she found her life explained. Eventually Meadows had seen that the two worlds came together somewhere inside of her and made for tremendous strength when it came to making large decisions, as, for instance, the decision to turn her back on her husband.

And occasionally what surged forward was panic — what is he doing floating around out here in his life without Cath? Seven good years, two on either side of his thirty-six-month naval tour. A couple terrible months off of some legal problems he’d had in San Luis Obispo, when an indoor pot-growing operation in the valley north of there had turned sour. He’d been accused of murdering his two partners and burning up their bodies in the greenhouse to conceal the crime — groundless charges, brought against him just for the nuisance of the thing, and dropped as soon as he’d bankrupted himself on attorneys. Cath knew he hadn’t done it, but she left him anyway. It had been three years since they’d spoken to each other. He was ashamed right now that he’d let his mind go back to her. He tried to console himself that everybody had at least one. One unforgettable wife. One still-burning flame.

He shut the TV off and waited a few minutes in the dark before going back to the bed and laying himself down, as quietly as he could manage, next to Carrie.

182 / Denis Johnson

He put his hand against the back of her thigh just to feel the warmth.

But she was awake, and as soon as he touched her, said, “No.” He lay still, paralyzed in a way with solitary embarrassment, and reflected to himself that it wasn’t working with people. So he moved instinctively in the direction of avoiding and silencing them. That’s why he’d taken to travelling to foreign waters, to foreign beaches evoking a seamless sameness underneath all thought, taken to spending his winters in foreign places where the language eluded him.

That was supposed to be bad. You were supposed to find people and connect with them — and that was supposed to be good. But what could be worse than this, right here, tonight?

Yet a weight began to lighten in his heart. He had a feeling this was the last straw. Maybe, just by coincidence, for both of them. Possibly she too was facing with relief the prospect that this absurd game between the sexes had finally tapped itself out.

Maybe he should give it all up. Join a monastery. Or confess one or two things to the cops. Certainly he’d strayed far enough to merit a good long stretch in their custody. In either place he might finally come to value discipline, and then go on to make something of himself.

He’d always hated discipline, but he felt he’d met its essence in certain moments of his military training. Discipline consisted of keeping himself separate from whatever thoughts might be passing through his head.

He needed that detachment now because he seemed to be reacting to the sadness of turning thirty, and still being at zero, with funky spasms and flashes of religious light. He’d set himself up for all this in ways that were now obvious: spending long days alone on this infinite-feeling highway with nothing to do but point the car and sit there and let his head trouble him with riddles, breaking the trip in odd empty places where he sat by the road to watch the desert or farmland drift around him like a sea, stopping off sometimes just south of Gilroy at a Holiday Inn tricked up to duplicate a Spanish mission, complete with a small chapel whose atmosphere worked on him, just as Karl Marx had predicted, like dope. Surfing was also a case in point. What had started out as an adrenaline thrill among teenagers constantly partying had turned into a cycle of lonely vigils in a huge blue medium that sometimes lifted and carried him — in the direction of all the beach parties and the

Already Dead / 183

sandy skin of young girls, yes, who smelled like marijuana and tasted like beer and salt; toward the high times and flickering fires on the beach, yes; but he never seemed to reach them anymore. He’d at first reached them relentlessly, spent the days racing over the ocean and the nights lying under the stars and seducing some of the world’s loveliest seventeen-year-old females. But he was beginning to reinterpret these triumphs in a way that made them look like failures. Only the waiting, never the waves, had been real. And now it seemed that with the hot little girls he’d only engaged in repeated sorrowful transactions, trading their fake lust for his fake affection.

He wouldn’t have bothered to suggest this woman here was any different, not essentially anyway. But she was more grown-up and felt much more real.

He didn’t know what, besides that fact, had made him decide to follow this thing out. It had just been that kind of day, the wind making the ordinary sand harmful, filling the air with pain, and so on. This had the taste of a regular adventure. He takes on the woman and child forever maybe, or they rob him or he gives them all his money.

As he left the next morning, Clarence said to the kid: “You got a Social Security card? No. You’re not a citizen of anywhere yet. You don’t know how rare you are.”

The boy crawled around on the floor looking for one of his new shoes.

Meadows could see it under the couch but didn’t feel like telling him where it was. Carrie sat all dressed up on the bed with her legs tucked under her and her feet, in those red pumps, sticking out sideways, her hands clasped before her, while she looked straight at him and wept.

Not trying to make him pay; just honestly grieving.

He stood in the doorway feeling happy that he wasn’t connected with these two. He could make any gesture he wanted to right now.

He could piss on the floor. Start a fire in the wastebasket.

“Well,” she said, “you fixed my car.”

“I was born to mess with loose connections.”

“Thank you. You saved us.”

“Where do you get your religion?”

“From the road. From the radio. TV sometimes.”

“You’re not a member of a church?”

“The road is a church.”

184 / Denis Johnson

“I guess it is,” Meadows said.

Gassing up at the Big Chief a few minutes later, Meadows watched her across the distance of several hundred yards as she came out of the ground-floor suite and packed up little Clarence and drove her limping Dodge from the parking lot of the Super 8 Motel. Tumbleweed bounced along the pavement beside them. A buzzard’s shadow zipped across their path. It was like that.

Not a half hour later, while the day widened over the interstate, he overtook them in the northbound lanes and thumbed the button on the wheel. But the horn didn’t work. Some sort of short circuit, it wouldn’t be much trouble to fix.

He reached the Montanan’s clever cap from the passenger seat and put it on, pulled the brim down low, looked straight ahead as he passed them.

He took 580 when it forked off Route 5 and drove west and down among the Altamont windmills, hundreds of them turning fast, like white whirligigs, on either side of the highway.

The whole thing…he’d been right at the edge of seeing it. Sometimes it seemed as if the outlines, blurred by the activities of dust, suddenly went away. Then the true picture showed itself, utterly simple and vast.

The Mercedes wouldn’t make it over the second bad rut — and a lot of new ones, some almost gullies, had him surmising it must have rained — so Clarence left the car at the head of the drive and came down through the woods walking and blowing his trumpet. He heard deer skittering through the brush, running from the trumpet’s echo at their backs and then panicking to discover the sound suddenly forward of them. He was thinking maybe Billy would hear the horn and meet him halfway. He’d want to hike back up to see the car anyhow. But Billy hadn’t showed by the time Clarence made the cabin.

On the porch Billy stooped above a bucket and splashed rain on his face, waking a little late this morning and still smiling at his dreams.

“Dude! Señor Clarencio! How many women did you soil?”

“Dude! — funny you should ask.”

“I bet. I bet. Did you just hit the coast?”

“Yesterday afternoon.”

Already Dead / 185

“Welcome home.”

“Your road’s worse than ever. Did it storm much?”

“Inch and a half one night last week.”

“I got a 190SL sitting up top of the hill.”

“I’m right with you.”

They took Billy’s International. Clarence drove. “This shit will make you a believer,” he said, plunging into and over the gouges in the track.

“Yeah. One of these days,” Billy said, but he’d been saying so for years and the road just got worse. “Did you hear about the raids in Humboldt?”

“I think it’s over.”

“They spent two weeks tearing up people’s gardens.”

“Yeah. It doesn’t bear on anything I’m into.”

“Really?”

“Really. It was ordered in Washington. Just to show the coke countries we’ll deal with it and no mercy.”

“I felt that whole thing happening, man. I felt a burning sensation in my soul. I wouldn’t want them here.”

“If they were coming here at all, they’d have made it simultaneous.”

“Those G-men are poisonous evil fuckers.” Now, in sight of the convertible Mercedes, the tone of Billy’s voice changed. “They don’t know it, but they are.”

As he walked around the car and looked it over, Billy was plainly so happy he couldn’t discuss the feeling. “Does the top work okay? Any holes?”

“Have to wait for the next rain. She’ll leak in a dust storm is all I know.”

The vehicle was a 1957 with a white paint job over the original blue, faded right through in places, but showing no rust. Billy jacked the hood and held it aloft with one hand and politely refrained from mentioning the black oil sprayed all over the engine compartment.

“Must be some serious warpage there,” Clarence acknowledged.

“It’s not just a gasket thing?”

“I replaced the gasket. It’ll take a whole new manifold.”

“Oh well,” Billy said.

“I figured what the heck.”

“Damn right what the heck,” Billy said, and screamed, “A ONE-NINETY ESS ELL!” and the region immediately surrounding them 186 / Denis Johnson

clenched, paused, then resumed its chattering and foraging. “Let’s go,” he said, and opened the driver’s door.

“You go,” Clarence said. “I gotta see your brother.” Your fifty-five wheels drive me crazy, Clarence thought: Nelson Fairchild had a sharp mind which he’d twisted, using pills and liquor, into an instrument of torture.

Out of this garden they’d shortly be rich, he and Fairchild. Anyway he himself would see out the year in style. Fairchild would go on sweltering in a self-dug hole. Nelson hadn’t learned to live without — hadn’t grasped the utter necessity of living outside the need of — the great slavers: money, women, euphoria.

Therefore every place was the wrong place.

“Do you know what I would like not to do? I would like not to hang around here,” Nelson said.

“Relax. Hypnotize yourself. Be like them…” Buzzards floated lightly as ashes overhead.

“I’m trying to segue into a confession of what’s happening.” The breezes through the canyon stoked the gray embers over which Meadows was baking up half a dozen buds in a pie pan. They’d had to move upwind of the plants, closer to the lip and overlooking a great, heady drop toward the creek — the treetops looked from here small and soft, almost like moss — because of the overpowering pungency of the marijuana flowers.

“Do you or do you not have your bong?”

Fairchild handed him the small portable water pipe from his pocket.

“Let’s engage in a little quality control.”

“Control? I wish.”

“You do appear sort of messed-with.”

The boo looked to be drying too quick. Meadows unsnapped the canteen from his belt and doused his hands with water and fluttered his fingers over the coals, steaming the buds a little. One of the buds had blackened on the griddle, and quickly he pinched it up into the pipe’s bowl and held it out smoking to his companion, who hunched and moved sideways like an owl on a branch.

“No, thanks. Not in my present state of mind.”

“You feeling psychotic?”

“Oh, I’ve been having a bad day.”

“Here. Drugs make it all better.”

Already Dead / 187

“I think actually it’s adding up to a bad life.”

“Well, in that case, drugs won’t help. You need a hobby.”

“Can we be serious?”

“We’re testing the dope, Nelson.”

“Sorry.”

“Let’s smell the roses.”

“When I was at school in Carmel there were guys who’d swagger into the bathroom and get you in a headlock while you were innocently standing there trying to pee.”

“Hey, lemme ask you something—”

“Here, just grab my head. Hurt me.”

“—I heard you were the student-body president back in high school.

That true?”

“President of the Young Democrats. And my senior year I was editor of the Wharton School’s newspaper.”

“You need an engaging pastime.”

“The Crimson Handjob or some such.”

“You could buy my board and take up surfing.”

“I think we should get out of here.”

“The thing is if you start to understand a sport, you start to understand life.”

“A philosopher of games!”

“Even a spectator sport. I watch wrestling on cable every Thursday night regular as I can.”

“Are you kidding? That stuff is rigged.”

“And everything else isn’t?”

Fairchild laughed and swiftly darkened. “This camp smoke is visible to observers.”

“You’re thinking about the raids up there around Garberville.”

“Just partly.”

“It doesn’t concern us.”

“I agree.”

“It’s a foreign-policy thing.”

“I agree.”

“Nelson, you surprise me a little bit. I mean, a number-one chance to be paranoid.”

“Paranoia is a fond memory now. I’ve got plenty more to scare me than a few thousand troops of the National Guard.” Meadows sighed and the usual slanted, half-angry pity for Nelson 188 / Denis Johnson

Fairchild raked his brain. “Okay. I can’t delay you. Confess.”

“Only panic would drive me to, that’s got to be obvious, only shitpants motherfucking fear, Clarence. My life is at stake. I face them or I face you — I’m down to two options, and you’re the less nauseating one.”

“Who’s them?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

“Oh. That them. One of those them.”

“Anyone who followed me around for twelve hours would understand — you’d be convinced. Just shadow me.”

“I’ll shadow you if you go up to Fort Bragg.”

“Okay.”

“To the Redwood Lanes, okay?”

“The bowling alley.”

“I’m into that. It’s a new thing.”

“It’s very old. Since the Egyptians I think.”

“I’m taking it up.”

Meadows uncapped the canteen and tipped a dollop into the bong’s water chamber.

“Please take this seriously. These are real live hit men.”

“Hit men have to be paid.”

“Shit yes, Clarence. A body has to eat.”

“So who’s paying?”

“Harry Lally’s involved.”

“Did you bone his wife?”

“We were partners on a coke thing. It didn’t work.”

“You wouldn’t expect it to.”

“This was an arrangement for several pounds.”

“Uh-oh. How deep did it sink you, Nelson?”

“I owe him big bad money.”

“Approximately what.”

“Ninety-two.”

“Sell your house.”

“I don’t own the stupid, son-of-a-bitching, cunt-fucking house!”

“Better not sell it then.”

“You are impenetrably smug and deeply, deeply idiotic.”

“Still — I’m not the desperate one.”

“Profoundly! Radiantly! Do you think I’d admit all this if I saw any way out of this hole?”

Already Dead / 189

“Oh no, are we gonna cry?”

“We’re going to cry, yes. And we’re going to beg. I’m begging you for help, Clarence.”

“I’m not saying no right yet.”

“For help secondarily. Primarily though I’m begging you for indul-gence. I beg your forgiveness. Our own enterprise is threatened.” Clarence jumped up with a stick of kindling and laid it like a sword to Nelson’s throat. “The plants better be growing right in this spot at harvest time.”

“They will be. It’s just that they’ve come into play in this ludicrous situation.”

“And you think that puts me in play?”

“I didn’t plan it like this.”

“I refuse to be committed here. Shit. I’ll just dump your body in Lally’s pool.”

“That would be something of a committed act, I think.”

“The just punishment of a fuck-up.”

Clarence loosed his weapon and dropped a bud in the bowl and set it going. Fairchild took a hit automatically, failing to savor, dragging it down where it wouldn’t hold. He coughed and strangled and then looked weepy-eyed at Meadows out of his true face, the face of a naked sinner.

“Aah, Nelson. Nelson. Why don’t you just clear out?”

“I live here.”

“Maybe that’s the problem. Is it time to leave?”

“I just can’t make it anywhere else. I’ve never lived anywhere but here and down in Carmel. I’ve never been anywhere but Carmel and here and Italy.”

“You’ve been around L.A., haven’t you?”

“Okay. Yes. And I’m not going back. It’s completely over for Southern California.”

Clarence took a small hit and held the smoke down, and then an icy ridge seemed to congeal along his sinuses. He could hear and yet felt virtually deaf. “Well, I know what you mean.” He decided he’d better not take another toke and then did so anyway and blew it out, saying,

“Destiny’s moving over this land. You just gotta ride it like a wave.”

“Who made you the Surf City boddhisattva I’d like to know.” Meadows graced this one with no more than one-tenth of a shrug.

190 / Denis Johnson

“I’d like to know who told you the rules.”

“The rules for what?”

“For everything. How to get born and how to be cool.” Who knew what went on in that skull? Maybe a brain tumor beating like a jungle drum. Nelson was his brother’s brother.

“Clarence, what are you going to do about all this?” His head floated in a cloud of smoke and he heard it say, “I’m handling all this fine. All that you describe. I go bowling, I stay close to the sea, I suck down a lotta tequila. It’s easy and short. It’s a skate.”

“How groovy for you.”

“Thanks.”

“Stay as groovy as you are.”

“I’m doing that.”

“Thanks.”

They’d smoked too much. The stuff was almost immeasurably potent — uncured, half-dried, bitter. Meadows suddenly understood what it would be like to turn into his own tongue. Was he lying prone or draggling down from above? Only a breathtaking surrender of his soul kept him floating upward and pressed against the capsized ground.

Any slight failure of this abject unwilled movement and he’d plummet into the sky.

He’d be thinking something and realize that this flotsam had been plying his mind untended for perhaps many minutes before cresting into view. He did not consist of his thoughts, did not even produce them, was just the nameless fact they drifted through.

In a while — a half hour or a thousand hours — Nelson roused him, stirring around in Clarence’s own pack and putting on his blue enameled kettle for coffee and upending the canteen above the pot until it gurgled dry.

Nelson dumped in the ground coffee at the boil, let it steep a minute away from the fire, then looped his belt through the kettle’s handle and, with shocking deftness and equilibrium, stood up and slung the brew in circles, driving the grounds to the kettle’s floor.

“You’ve got moves to surprise a person, haven’t you?”

“I was raised to this land. I can live off dirt. I can rope a tree, hunt the mugwump, all of that.” He poured coffee for the both of them into Clarence’s one big cup. Meadows breathed the steam and sipped. The day was already hot, and this made it hotter in a righteous and purifying way.

Already Dead / 191

“This bud,” Fairchild said. He couldn’t quite get his belt restrung through the loops.

“This shit right here,” Clarence agreed, “is the explanation why they make us outlaws.”

“I’d hate to see it fall to the possession of corrupted souls. Money-grubbers, hit men.”

“Lally never seemed all that serious.”

“I owe him close to a hundred grand. I’m worried.”

“If you told me I owed him money, I wouldn’t be worried.”

“Clarence: if there were any action you could be persuaded to take, what would it be?”

“Me? I’ve been blown off the map. I’m way uncharted.”

“Could you perhaps, you know, frag these mothers?”

“Don’t think in extremes.”

“Or maybe just talk to Harry Lally. Talk to him in a way that frightens him.”

“He’s frightened now. He leaves footprints of shit.”

“And I’m no less a coward.”

The tall coward plunged into a telling of some length and detail, reaching across the months and waters to Palermo a year ago July. At one point he jumped up and began weaving like a shaman and the soul of a wild boar entered his body. He snuffed and charged at breezes and shouted that false hunters had run him to bay in this secret garden of ecstatic herbs. Meadows was astonished by this primitive seizure. And made reverent. In silence he waited for the gusts of totem beings to cease storming through Nelson’s eyes.

Later Meadows said of Harry Lally: “The guy’s a silly cocaine dealer.

Everything about him is pointless. After a while he’ll get arrested or something.”

“Arrested by whom? This is Mendocino County. People don’t get arrested here.”

“His scene will crumble. Wait him out.”

They paused, both looking upward until it seemed they were doing just that, languishing in this sunstruck abyss until their enemies should fail.

“And your two buddies from Del Norte,” Clarence said, “do they know about Billy?”

“What about him?”

“Like the location of his residence?”

192 / Denis Johnson

“They’ll get around to everybody eventually,” Fairchild said.

The coffee had cooled and Meadows took a big gulp and found that he was thirsty and that it was good to drink. He watched the buzzards totter in the currents.

“Do you remember,” he asked Fairchild, “where it was we met?”

“Everybody I’ve ever met I met in the Gualala Hotel bar.”

“Well, that’s right. That’s where it was. We had a conversation, we sensed an opportunity, we struck an arrangement. Three years later it’s still in effect. That’s unusually lucky, when you think about it.”

“Is this a farewell speech? Do I sense yet another divorce in my future?”

“No, man, no. In fact exactly the opposite. I’m seeing that we have a past here, and I want to value it. I will do what I can to maintain our partnership.”

“Clarence! You’re better than any shrink! What about the pig-men?”

“What can they do?”

“They’ll staple my penis to something, I think.”

“They’ll leave. How long can they hang around? Didn’t you say they left once already? I’ll talk to them.”

“Clarence, look: I’m happy!”

The night’s heavens kept clear all the way to M-47, a galaxy lying some eighty billion light-years off and appearing over such unframeable distances no more impressive than an asteroid. In fact it would have swallowed the Milky Way and two others just as big. Meadows while at sea had learned to locate it. He and Billy lay now on a plastic tarp in a clear spot out front of the cabin raptly marking a pinpoint candes-cence’s course toward M-47 and praying for a collision. A weather satellite, most likely.

“Oh lord, oh lord, so close,” Billy said as the bright little mover failed to pierce the galaxy.

They’d put away a feast of venison sausage fried up with eggs and beans, and hard biscuits baked in a covered pan. Meadows lay there wedded to the deep basso pulse of all outer space and feeling only recently surfaced from total amnesia.

— No matter how untrustworthy his sensations, interpretations, conclusions, the bare unnameable fact remained. You couldn’t know it. But you could be it. A relaxed but attentive attitude, nothing more Already Dead / 193

was required. No need to push through to the next thing. It’s already here.

As on the road that had taken him back this way. And he moving forward, blind and strangling, through the storm…

Billy said, “Did you ever imagine, like, a guy who keeps hearing something from way out, way out, but it won’t reach down here where it’s all twisted and full of vengeance, and it’s like if he could get out there, he’d see — because he could look back down here—”

“Twelve now,” Meadows said, counting yet another meteor’s trace through the northwest quadrant.

“—and without all the boundaries cutting it up it would be made obvious — I mean like his unknown purpose, his not-to-be-revealed identity.”

“His secret mission.”

“Yeah. But don’t laugh.”

“I’m not. I was thinking those very things while I was driving up yesterday. Have you ever seen these trick hats that look like Greek writing until you get far enough back? And then they say, ‘Fuck You’?” Billy seemed to hold his breath in the dark a minute, and then said…“No.”

In a while Billy asked after the garden, and Meadows told him how if a person only walked along the rows and breathed the plants’ exhalations, he saw visions. “I got a couple crumbs, if you want a hit.”

“I don’t think I should touch anything even remotely psychedelic.”

“That’s what your brother said.”

“Some times we agree. Not always.”

“He’s jammed up some way, he tells me.”

“It’s his buddy that he partnered with on a rotten deal.”

“Lally.”

“Harry Lally. He’s slick.”

“Slicker’n a wet bean.”

“That’s nothing. Nelson knows demons way past Harry Lally’s level.”

“I believe you.”

“Why doesn’t he try talking to a cop?”

“A cop?”

“Like the new guy. My instincts tell me he might be okay.” 194 / Denis Johnson

“Do you realize we’re criminals, Billy? We don’t think cops are okay.”

“There are good ones and bad ones. Like any profession. The world is full of bad news. Anybody who’s not an asshole — thanked be fortune.

Thanked be fortune, cop or priest or I don’t care who. The mayor.”

“Thanked be fortune.”

“Yes, you got it.”

“Is this place getting crazier and crazier?”

“Very likely, yes. You referring to the North Coast?”

“Here. Here. Here, man. The entire western portion of the Milky Way.”

Billy kept silent a minute and then said, “The whole age is turning.”

“So they say.”

“When you erase the lines, that’s God. God is all.”

“You’re not gonna trip your wires now.”

“Me? No.”

“You haven’t been doing coffee.”

“No. But wow. The stars.”

He asked Billy, “Did you one time tell me you had a Coleman stove?

Could I borrow it? I think I better start sleeping out by the garden.”

“It’s in the Scout. Fuel’s there too.”

“Okay. Remind me.”

“Remind you what?”

Clarence told Billy about the woman named Carrie, the woman with the kid named Clarence; of how he’d watched her calmly sleeping.

“…but she’s awake, she’s penitent, suddenly wants to go chaste, all religiously deranged and messed up.”

“Godliness isn’t bad, Clarencio.”

“Did I say it was bad?”

“Religion’s okay. But those highways. Some people just get rolling.”

“And their scene boils down to looking for the one thing that’ll stop them. That’s why she was out there in her defunct evening dress laughing and pretending to be normal.” A thought came into Clarence’s mind and he laughed: “I got me a bowling ball, dude. I got you a hat, too.”

“It was probably just highway madness,” Billy offered in defense of this godly woman he’d never seen.

Already Dead / 195

The same constellations lit the clearing when he came awake that same night, disturbed by movements in the cabin where Billy must have turned in. Meadows lay by the cold coals where he’d drifted off, his bag wrapped around him but his feet sticking out and paralyzed by the chill. He kicked his boots off and jammed his toes into the down-filled folds while a flashlight beam jerked and floated the cabin from inside. With the moon so low it wouldn’t yet be eleven; he’d only napped a little while.

The light moved outside and the cabin door clapped behind it.

“Something’s wrong!”

“You sick or something?”

“Something’s happening!”

“It’s just a night on Earth, man.”

“There’s something happening, Clarence. I really — I gotta go.”

“Are you about to disappear into the woods?”

“I’m going to Dad’s.”

“That don’t seem too smart.”

But Billy was moving. “Something’s happening, brother.” The lantern swung west and Meadows could make out Billy’s form occluding it. Billy headed out under the glittering galaxies through the trees and toward Carter’s Landing Road, by which he’d find the coast.

Clarence was at a loss here, but judged that Billy would probably make his way and if he foundered would get his bearings easily by daylight. Meadows sat up in the bag and wrapped his arms about his shins and then saw the full moon break the treetops: dawn not five hours off.

He crawled from under his bag and pulled his boots on quickly, shivering against the breeze that stirred up around him that faint sweet fetid redwood smell like mystic yeast. He threw his things into Billy’s Scout, made certain of its fuel level and gave the gallon Coleman tin a shake — plenty for the stove — before trying the road up to the ridge.

The headlamps lit the ruts undependably, but he knew his way around the big ones, and before the moon had made ten degrees of arc he’d topped the drive and the ridge and was making east on Shipwreck Road, passing through pockets of varied airs that signalled, but not clearly, something noteworthy in the weather. By the time he’d reached the garden and hidden the Scout amid coils

196 / Denis Johnson

of manzanita, the wind was treading over the evergreens on the canyon’s north, and he could smell the wet on it. He carried a flashlight but didn’t use it descending, just checked any plunge with the jacks of his boots and went down in the dark hugging his sleeping bag with the plastic tarp and the Coleman stove wrapped within it. By the garden he made his camp quickly — braced the tarp with twine and made an A-frame and lay inside it. During a half-minute’s eerie calm he breathed the pungency of the plants and also, with the higher air cooling quicker than the lower, a whiff of creosote just now rising from the valley. He could very nearly taste it in his throat.

As the storm broke it drove in under his protection. More wrack than rain, it didn’t douse him badly. He sat with his knees drawn up and his head jammed between, heaving on personal seas, stunned and clinging, his life’s tremendous wheel turning over. He looked up at it and howled out loud, Who runs this scam? The words went under in the medium gale — thankfully, as they conveyed nothing of how privileged he felt to find his inner maelstroms matched by outer ones, as if all the powers endorsed and had even orchestrated his journey. For years now the weather hadn’t been typical. The drought through months that should have rained, and then the recent almost unprecedented August downpour, and now this one shooting tiny stinging drops that blew for three-quarters of an hour. Then it ceased, whisked itself away, be-queathing the calm of the morgue and a thin general mist. The silence rolled through him too, and he lay back to drift pleasantly down through his exhaustion. He’d brought nothing for breakfast, but he’d see to that briefly tomorrow, drop into the Anchor Bay Store and lay in some necessities and be back in an hour. He’d wake tomorrow and go down the hill and buy beans and eggs, bread and cheese, coffee and canned meat — and didn’t know it yet but he’d also learn of Nelson senior’s death and how everything was changed and how the sons, the brothers, owned ten thousand acres of California; and he wouldn’t return here for many days.

and then, read the blood-marbled pages John Navarro held in his hands one year later—

and then in its every detail I envision it, how with the rain’s letup Van Ness you came yourself into a spell of calm and leaned against Already Dead / 197

the Volvo on the passenger side, draped your arms over the roof, laid down your head across your dripping khaki sleeves. Curious how the weather gusted out there in the seaward black, while right around you along the coast road everything wilted and scarcely sighed. You were drenched. You thought of yourself as glistening. Every few minutes as a vehicle passed from behind and rolled you through a bath of light it came to you afresh that these people didn’t know in the least what they were looking at.

And me, the sucker, Nelson Fairchild, Jr. — he hadn’t known. But now his eyes would be opened.

You got back inside the car, crossed the Gualala River onto the Sonoma County side and laid by again in sight of a bleached derelict cattle barn, its shape both looming and tentative at this lightless hour.

You had another stop to make tonight, but not yet, a little time to kill before — and now you started laughing out loud, and the ocean laughed back. You wiped your mustache energetically, laid the white kerchief on the dash and turned to and cracked open with your dirty hands the Fairchild family’s copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra, stolen earlier that night from Winona’s living room.

And didn’t you find this place in earshot of the sea’s cachinnation and tolling completely in accord with your new understanding of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s words, of how Nietzsche’s words rang hollow — kid scaring his elders to fend aside his own true terror, he’d never actually lived it all the way out, never tasted his own wares — and weren’t you thinking about his words as you reversed direction three hours later and drove to the hill on the coast road’s east side looking down at the hooded unintelligent eyes of the house where Nelson Fairchild, Sr., lay dead, as you watched the comings and goings of people with grim business in that place, and as you followed — at a great distance, but easily because it was the only other vehicle out that late — my, Nelson Junior’s, sports car up onto the ridge road and into the iron moonless dark and nearly overtook him there; weren’t you still thinking about Nietzsche as you pulled to the roadside a hundred feet back of the stranded Porsche and waited and listened while far, far away the Pacific rolled a marble down a tin groove of infinite turnings; thinking in particular of certain of Nietzsche’s lines concerning evil, a subsistence with which it pained — or did it exult? — you to admit the philosopher had never really stained his fingers—

198 / Denis Johnson

An image made this pale man pale. He was equal to his deed when he did it: but he could not endure its image after it was done.

— and thinking in special particular of one line you’d perhaps read over and over and felt you were probably enacting at this moment as you moved toward Nelson completely sightless but smelling him out by his fear—

In wickedness, the arrogant and the weak man meet. But they misunderstand one another.

— reviewing this line in great confidence having proven it wrong by experiment, by deeds, in fact knowing it wrong because we, you and I, the arrogant man and the weak, understood one another exactly to the degree necessary?

You heard the tenor of your footsteps alter, warped by the car’s acoustic mass, you bumped your hand against the car’s left rear quarter panel and dragged your fingers along the canvas top until they plumbed midair at the driver’s open window, heard the driver’s terrified breathing but couldn’t find him in the drisky black except by reaching through the window until you touched his face. You could have put your fingers to your lips and tasted his tears. And you heard with a curious grieving apprehension the action of your own innards and thought to yourself that Nietzsche never experienced his own guts in his belly, not truly, not like this, and the other said — I wasn’t even sure you owned a car.

— You recognize me.

— Of course I do.

— You think you do.

— My father is dead.

Only the purity of this darkness kept you from laughing out loud.

— And my wife is still alive. As you know perfectly.

You kept quiet because the noise of words seemed to create this place by inhabiting it — nearness, farness, a space…The other coughed in the dark and you believed you heard him spit through the opposite window.

He spoke again:

— This is the most absurd night in my experience. It’s completely liberating.

Already Dead / 199

— Don’t bore me with lies. You don’t get liberated by someone else’s life or death.

— I mean the absurdity. The absurdity’s liberating. Okay?

— Okay by me Jack.

— What happened?

— What happened when my friend?

— Don’t piss me off, Van Ness! How do you know I’m not pointing a gun at you right now?

— Maybe a three-five-seven? Maybe for instance a Smith & Wesson?

Maybe because I’m pointing it at you.

— What is that thing?

— I borrowed a book to read.

— The goddamn Nietzsche. The fucking Zarathustra.

— I borrowed it off Winona.

— What happened?

— Nothing happened.

— But you were there, right there.

— Nobody home it seemed.

— She was asleep, you son of a bitch, asleep as planned.

— I’m getting in.

You came around the car. The inside smelled of leather and gasoline and mildew. The other shrank and reared like a viper as you sat beside him.

— Do I gather my father being dead doesn’t interest you very much?

— I knew about it.

— Who told you?

— Perhaps some asshole in the hotel bar.

— You are a mutated strain.

— I’m just one station farther down the way. I’ve shed just one more shape than you.

— Bullshit. You’re crazy is all.

— Don’t let a little earthquake shake you off. You’re moving to a new stage of yourself. The caterpillar and the butterfly — they can’t imagine each other. An intellectual like you, naturally your own metamorphosis is gonna scare you to the jams — it’s a process beyond the grasp of your mind.

— And what am I metamorphosing in to, professor?

— The lion.

200 / Denis Johnson

— Really? Which one?

— You know. The camel. The lion. The child.

— Oh… Zarathustra.

— First the spirit is a camel, taking on great tasks and reveling in its strength.

— Also sprach Van Ness. What a bore.

— Then it turns into a lion, fighting against the dragon of convention, rule, law, even morality — killing all that shit.

— And how does he turn into a child?

— How? According to Nietzsche it just happens, it’s inevitable. The spirit breaks the rules and then experiences another birth. The child — (and you quoted now as if reading aloud) — is a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes…

— Enough. Okay. I get it and it bores me. You bear the burdens as a camel, you break the bonds as a lion, you’re born again as a child.

— Yeah. But Nietzsche’s wrong.

— Of course he’s wrong. How could anybody with five successive consonants in his name be right?

— There’s no child stage. Why would there be? Child of whom?

Nurtured and cared for by what?

— I don’t know, boss.

— There’s no child stage. Once you become a lion, a spirit acting from will and making its freedoms, that’s the end of it.

— Your beliefs make you deranged. If you’re a lion, your beliefs make you a rabid one.

— Relax. Isn’t this better now that your father’s gone? As soon as Winona’s crossed off, you get all the money.

— Nothing I say can have any meaning to somebody as completely crazy as you.

— Let’s give it another try.

— Nothing I’ve ever touched has ever been touched by you.

— Let’s hit that little honey. Make her dead.

— I wish I could tell you, get through to you, one thing, the following thing: that you couldn’t say anything like that right now unless you were the complete personification of evil.

— Evil? I thought we were way past that. Let’s have another go.

— Just waltz on in.

— She’ll fall asleep again.

— Fucking A. Probably does it nightly.

Already Dead / 201

— One more time.

— Listen. Those Nembutals. It’s not easy to make a switch. The capsules fall apart, the tweezers dent the little things, you have to be very gentle or they look plainly battered. Plus the powder gets all over them on the outside — enough to make a reasonable person wonder.

That’s when you knew…

You struck a match and lit up the damnation in his eyes: the self-defeat, the foregone failure. A queazy self-righteousness translated through his face like oil. And you said:

— Here. Your book. Keep it.

(Carl Van Ness: I sixth-sense, telepathize and soothsay what you saw in my jutting ears and big gaze — the shocked naivete of a fawn picked up by the headlights. Oh yes my eyes had been opened. That everything would play as you wanted, that’s what you saw. That this creature had worked out his own destiny at a table in a void with unthwartable agencies. You saw your own efforts like a spoon in a maelstrom and helping no more than that to stir it. You saw me. And I saw only Carl Van Ness with his nowhere face behind those thick specs, moving along our ridges like an empty wolf, preexisting and reexisting endlessly. As I see right now vividly and too late looking up out of the well of my own death with what fine velvet you played me. How you greased me along to stop me breaking to the cops. And what an idiot I was. I believed I was playing you until I’d have them trap you in some final way — catch you square by rights with your teeth in her neck and drag you down to dungeons, boy. I never should have tried to swap our roles. My mistake was thinking you the tempter. But it was I. All along you were Adam moon-naked and I was the baffled snake.)

— We’ll give her another spin — you said.

— It would have to be after the funeral. My father’s funeral.

You held the match till your fingers spasmed.

September 4–12, 1990

She leaned against the car a second and jumped back, swiping at her arm and squinting at where it burned.

Clare was weary and giving her the business. She put him down with a comic and went in to sit at a table near the videos the truckers played.

Eleven empty chairs before as many games — one farmer boy about sixteen dipping a quarter down into the cleft and the colored light changing over his face while a hand of poker snicked out across the screen — a waitress retying her apron while she watched the images from behind the boy’s shoulder — the cook pressing meat down on the griddle so it spit — one old man and his old woman sunk to the bottom of marital silence in a vinyl booth.

“Any work?”

The waitress stared at the game and said, “A position you mean? Or just for a meal?”

“Position I guess.”

“No, sorry.”

“Swindling old monster,” the farmhand said and fetched the machine an openhanded blow.

“Or maybe just for a meal, did you say?”

203

The waitress looked her over.

“I got a little boy travelling too.”

She changed out of her dress to wash out empty lettuce crates by the Dumpster, spraying the asphalt to keep it cool beneath her bare feet.

She drove the sad torn leaves against the wall and scooped them together into one big mess between her hands. She dumped them in…The tang of Dumpster rot…She rinsed and throttled her bandanna and scrubbed herself up to the fringes of her cutoffs.

Clarence came and joined her, though he should have been taking his nap. He seemed in a trance and broke down grieving when she sprayed him. “You got it wet.”

“Well, you had to walk right at the hose, didn’t you?”

“Shit anyway,” he said.

“Don’t foul your mouth over a goddamn comic book.”

“I don’t care what I do,” he said.

She took him back to the car. He lay down and stared up at the comic until the drawings fell over his face, and later he seemed vague and content while they ate hamburgers by the cafe’s big eastern window and watched the colors of the empty sky and ripe fields swiftly deepen and the building’s shadow stretch out over the concrete-curbed row of walnut trees and the four parked cars. She listened to the farm boy and the waitress recite slowly, like bingo callers, lists of pregnancies and car wrecks. The Lord had banned her from smoking some months ago, and right now, with the day used and the coffee in front of her, she felt that old demon running just a feather along her throat. Clare caught up on his fingertips the last crumbs from his plate and fed them to his tongue. She said, “This is the most loveliest time of day.” She bedded him down up front and lay in the cargo space listening while the breeze felt around the cracks.

“Hey,” she said. “Clarence…?” and fell asleep.

“Yeah?” he said.

The cook banged her up the next morning and handed her two boxed breakfasts through the car’s window.

“For the road.”

“Thank you very much.”

“Can’t let that little stomach get growly.”

“Say thank you, Clare.”

204 / Denis Johnson

“Thank you.”

The cook was a little woman with short arms and a flat face and a long-ago smile. “It’s just the number three minus the gravy. You don’t want gravy in a cardboard go-box.”

“No ma’am.”

“Where you heading?”

“Well, we’re trying after a crop, if there is one.”

“Sea urchins.”

“Lemme get that open for you, Clare. Sit up straight. Put it straight, you’re gonna spill it and have a mess all over you. Sea urchins?”

“Yeah, they’re like a cross between a cucumber and a garden slug.

The Japanese pay a shitload of money for things like that.”

“Where do you pick ’em?”

“Near the sea, I guess. Or right down in it, for all I know.”

“I’m no swimmer.” She opened her box and fell to with the white plastic fork.

“Anyway the coast is just right this time of year. Summer’s a bitch with a gun down along this stretch, I’m sure you noticed. Man. If I could cook gourmet I’d go to one of those little hamlets by the sea.”

“This is good. Gourmet enough for me, eh.”

“You ever been to Pacific Grove or any of those places?”

“Not as I believe.”

“Anyway I think you’ll find what you’re looking for in the sea.”

“Are you religious?”

“Fuck no. Not even close.”

“I am.”

“Your boy’s got big beautiful eyes. What do you see with them eyes, sweetie?”

“I don’t know.”

“The girls are gonna eat you up. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“Well, they are.”

She drifted the Dodge past the Phillips 66 with the broken door on its john and the row of motel rooms with their red doors burning in the morning light, and gassed up as cheaply as she could at the other one, the Star Store and Fuel, figuring the distance to still cheaper prices at about four gallons’ worth, or fifty-two miles. Back Already Dead / 205

again on Interstate 5 with the driveline’s regular shudder tunneling under her and the tires’ intoxicated tremolo drilling her ears and the tightness starting in her nape, she begged for safe passage and unmit-igated guidance and wiped the sweat from the wheel with a sour washcloth. They passed lengths of farmland separated increasingly by blonde hills. Buzzards explored the world far overhead, and beneath the buzzards a crop duster biplane switched back and forth over the highway, laying out a billowy white spoor. Mother and child drove right through it. “Hold your breath, Clare.” The plane’s image passed across the mirror. “Shit. That’s him. That’s the closest thing to Satan you’ll see today. Remember how people got sick at the orchard?” She was coughing, dizzy, saw a giant foot planted in the sky with its bestial claws dripping venom. She needed a breather here but felt wary of turning off the car. Yesterday she believed she’d come to the desert to break down and lift her heart, felt the great promise in coming up against a storm — miraculous, unique type of storm — then her car gets fixed and she herself also, popped by the character from Los Angeles, and now the man gone and his smell all over her and the storm lifted, just the clear vista faintly messed with by agricultural chemicals.

So the dust storm wasn’t the thing. And the desert wasn’t the place.

And the man was definitely not the man.

Carrie on Route 5 negotiated palpitating zones of heat alongside burn piles that cracked and rattled like the last two cars on the bone train, and then a whole acreage being burned away, the wind unrolling a black rug fringed with flames and thick mustard-tinted smoke across the open fields toward the anvil of the heavens…She made for the coast — up Route 5 as far as the town of Williams and then west over to Ukiah on California 20, past Ukiah along the Boonville road into rolling hills and oaks, and then among redwoods in Anderson Valley, on through Boonville to Mountain View Road, a skinny lonely zigzag alongside precipices made less nauseating by enclosing forestation, then down a long grade from whose halfway point she spied the open Pacific, where she had to get clean, even drown herself if necessary — made for the coast with something gigantic happening to her there to the west, and eastward, back of her, all death and Devil.

At the Coast Highway’s T she observed the stop sign, waited in a pointless silence, in which she could smell the surf, while nobody and 206 / Denis Johnson

nothing came north or south, and then turned left only from a vague desire to have the Pacific at her right hand. The first town was Manchester, but it had no cafes, and they headed through it, passed a seaside Catholic cemetery in a cypress grove, stopped for supper in Point Arena, and south of there pulled into a lay-by with a public outhouse. Hours past dark she suddenly disliked the feeling here and sat up and drove off, deciding to keep on for Anchor Bay. “Eight miles,” she told Clare when they passed a sign. Around 2 A.M. they arrived.

“Where are we?”

“Usually you don’t ask.”

He put his fingertips together before his face and lowered the joined hands slowly to his lap, watching the car’s descent along a steep curve.

She and Clarence rolled into Anchor Bay just as a storm broke—“Big thunder, little rain,” she told him.

In the morning she shut the car door quietly so as to leave him sleeping and strolled among rows of trailers and motor homes to the toilet barn, carrying her kit bag and a change. The feathers of the redwoods had been washed and then torn by the storm and now rested, outlined with damp, on the dry patches of asphalt that remained from some paving operation many years back. The clock she kept on the dash had run down. She guessed the morning at eight. The campground lay mostly in shadow, but toward the beach the sun had found it, and she stood in the light to watch a few skinny wetsuited surfers who looked a lot like seals, slumped forward astride their boards and talking; she could hear their voices, the voices not yet changed of young boys. It swept over her, the feeling of having arrived and seeing no place further to go. She turned to the shack and went through the door marked LADIES

and showered for some minutes, tromping her clothes clean beneath her on the stall’s mildewed boards.

When she came out and wandered toward the stretch of beach to lay out her wash, she came upon a man, blond and bearded, the blue of whose eyes, like windows giving directly onto the water behind him, made his head seem like an empty quiet room.

The man was dry and fully clothed, but he appeared to have been borne here by a wave and now to be emerging cleansed and changed from the sea. “You know,” he said, smiling at her, “something strange happened last night.”

Already Dead / 207

Something not just strange, but also bad. She could see that much.

“Oh, no.”

“He’s dead.”

“Oh, no. I’m sorry.”

“I’ve just been walking up the shore all night. I never left the shore.

Climbing over rocks and stuff like that. Cliffs. The radar’s got me all screwed up.”

She lowered her gaze and mutely prayed for him.

“What’s your name?”

“Carrie. What about you?”

“Fairchild.”

“That’s a perfect name for you. Or I would have chosen Goodman or something like that.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“What are you doing here, anyways?”

“This is where the Lord sent me.”

“Yeah…A lot of people get sent to the coast.”

“Or maybe I think Satan gave up chasing me here.”

“Well, you could end up going up and down it. People get sent here but — highway madness. They just go up and down this coast forever.”

“My car couldn’t handle that.”

“Yeah. Yeah…I just had to ask you what brought you here.” She jammed her hands in her pockets, stood there stiff-armed. Smiled, when she thought of it.

“He was way past due,” Fairchild said, “but it hurts just as much.”

“I believe it. I’ll be praying for you.”

“Do you go to church?”

“When I can.”

“Have you been to West Point? There’s a tiny little church there. They work miracles there all the time.”

“I believe it if you say it.”

“Get them to pray for my father,” he said.

“I will.”

Mo had located a spot near the cemetery’s edge. Navarro let her go on and stood with the toes of his service shoes just touching the cut border of fresh sod over the ter-208 / Denis Johnson

minal rest of Nelson Fairchild, Sr., who had lived on this earth from June 7, 1928, until just last week. Californian: so read his epitaph.

They spread a picnic among many such Californians, and Navarro popped the cork on a red wine while Mo worked open a can of smoked oysters and cut up some cheese. Before they got to the sandwiches they weren’t hungry anymore and fell to kissing and talking. Navarro was happy with his decision, which he’d come to on their first night together, to let his heart run away with him. He lay next to her looking sideways at the headstones, feeling privileged to associate with these families, some of whom pre-dated even the building of the coast road, counting himself almost a participant in their blank-faced courage. Pre-dated even the pigs. They’d brought the pigs here, in fact. The pigs had gone wild and now flourished, hounded, lean, and gamy, inland among the hills. He lifted Mo’s sweatshirt above her breasts and spilled wine onto her belly, which was hardly there. Her breasts were meager and her chest thin, frail, the rib cage very much a cage, her heart kept inside like something that would otherwise fly up out of her and get away.

Navarro licked wine off her nipples. “Yep. That definitely gives the vintage a boost.”

“Here.” She kissed his lips, and he tasted more.

“Hey. Am I in heaven?”

“I guess in this neighborhood, you’re getting close.” True enough. He crawled over to a patch of sunlight on a grave and lay back in grasses like voluptuous bedding.

“That ocean’s got more sounds than a city,” he said. He didn’t know if she was listening or not.

She crawled over beside him and said, “The Indians used to believe the sea would kill you if you just waded in as far as up to your ankles.”

“Oh, I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah. They did. They wouldn’t go in it.”

He shut his eyelids over a red pulsing warmth and felt beneath and all around him these many Californians floating in the dirt. Around quiet almost archeological places like this you started to think about the continents drifting for millions of years toward their present berths.

Not ten miles north, a flatbed valley crossed the coastline and carried on down to the shore and then past it, out under the water. This was the famous San Andreas Fault. West of the road where the fault line, verdant and full of breezes, pitched toward the sea, a Already Dead / 209

farm — an orchard, a white house, a red barn, a gray silo — waited, dealt out like a throw of dice on the floor of the trough while the earth held its breath.

“Listen,” he told her, “this thing could work. It’s already working.” With her chin on the backs of her hands, stretched out flat on her stomach, Mo stared over the surface of the grasses. “I don’t fall in and out of love that quick.”

“I never said I did either.”

“You’ve got the moves, though. You’re fast.”

“Not really.”

“Fast, boy.”

“I can slow down.”

“But your foot’s still touching the pedal,” she said, laughing.

“For the right person I can slow way down.”

“Would that be somebody like me?”

“The feeling definitely has that quality.”

“Yeah? What quality.”

“The quality of I want those pretty tits to kill me.” She started to laugh. But her eyes stopped dead. “Man, I know what you mean.” She undid the front of his pants, and he slid himself up inside the leg of her shorts, and onward. It felt just right, and then even better when she looked up over the edge of some huge late sorrow and said, “Man, we’re so good together.” He could hardly believe his luck, that it should come back again one more time after all those other women.

The sunset tossing the headstones up out of black shadows, and the green graves of all the dead strangers.

They lay quite still until he thought he’d come just from being inside her, or rather from her graciousness in permitting him there. Then they heard the sound of a small bothered engine nearby.

A rectilinear old-model black Saab came along among the headstones with its nose bobbing like a hound’s over the trail. Parallel to them along the bluff it stopped, and a solitary man got out and started juggling maybe as many as half a dozen things, tennis balls or the like, his knees flexed and his head arced back slightly and his hands and head and shoulders moving a little and in a way that made him look, at first glance, as if he was only pretending to credit himself with the running of this system; as if though he turned away it would abide; his face making small circles linked as by the hub of a camshaft to the 210 / Denis Johnson

more majestic orbits of this flotilla he’d set before himself, in truth nothing about its flight escaping his concentration, its planets impelled and guided by his attentions. He stopped his head. The worlds descended and he gathered them out of the air to his breast.

“I think he’s coming over,” Mo said.

Navarro slipped himself out of her. Not what he’d have predicted.

You’re lying here screwing in the grass and a juggler comes and practices in the cemetery.

He adjusted himself and yanked surreptitiously at his zipper and wondered: should I arrest him? The guy stood on the bluff with his long shadow hitting a headstone and absorbed by it, and the headstone letting out its own shadow about the length of a grave.

“Salutations and prestidigitations!”

Navarro couldn’t understand why so many coast people wanted to look like fairy-tale creatures. He’d have marked him for a reefer fiend but doubted any but the clearest synapses could have passed the necessary signals between those eyes and hands.

He wore a Jamaican beret and a brown beard divided at the chin into two braids, and was small with a stunted, vegetarian smallness. He’d clothed himself in patchwork burlap, not colorful, but of many origins.

He began juggling again as he walked crab-legged toward them, feeling along the earth with his feet.

“I like it here this time of day. Can you guess why? — because the shadows make it look like every grave is open. As if our friends have gone wandering. If you came here at the right time of night on the right night of the year, you could see that same vision — only by full moonlight.

“Watch my eyes. Watch the eyes. W. C. Fields could read the label on a seventy-eight RPM record while it spun. The World’s Greatest Juggler they called him. He was also the world’s greatest comedian, and one of the great consumers of martinis. He didn’t drink all that many. But they were big mothers. I am the most prestidigitous trigetour…in all of trolldom.”

They were spongy multicolored spheres, his juggling materials. As many as six; Navarro couldn’t quite count.

The trigetour plucked the balls from the air, cradled them in the crook of one arm, and turned to steal a blossom from a grave — a fresh grave — Nelson Fairchild’s grave: a black-eyed Susan from the spray in a white pot of earth.

Meanwhile the red sun balanced briefly on the bluff and then Already Dead / 211

rolled slowly backward. A squirrel skittered and paused and cursed on a branch. The whole grove turned a corner suddenly and stopped in a shady silence.

The trigetour stood above them in this silence, knelt long enough to hand Mo the flower, and walked to his Saab and drove away.

Clarence ran into Carrie after crossing onto the Sonoma side of the Gualala River to visit the state-run campground there and look in on the two Lally’d hired. Ran first, in fact, into little Clarence.

The boy lay on a grasspatch in the sun with a red-haired dog, a bitch, the animal stretched out long on her side and chugging in the heat, the kid’s arms and chin pillowed along the flank and his head bobbing, his eyes open and looking at thoughts. The river ran low, chirping on the juts and scrubbing along the bed.

Meadows said, “What’s the skin, Daddy-o?” But maybe the kid didn’t recognize him.

The door chopped shut on its spring. Carrie came out of the wooden Ladies’ with wet hair, in a clean white Arrow shirt and cutoff jeans, the shirttails tied up under her breasts and her stuff evidently kitted in her damp towel.

“Whose dog?”

“What dog?”

“That your dog?”

“Oh — him,” she said. “I hope not.”

“Whose is it?”

“First I’d like to hear, Hey, Carrie, surprising to see you.”

“Okay. I figured that goes without saying.”

“Strange.”

“You bet. Unexpected. Who does the dog belong to?”

“Two guys. The only other ones here. And I’ll tell you why. Damn I’m in a fix. Fourteen bucks a night.”

“Try Anchor Bay. They’ll let you slide a couple days if it’s for a good reason. Unless you’re scurvy trash or something. And,” he said, making his voice soft, “you’re not.”

“Thanks.”

“They hunting?”

“Who, them?”

“Those guys.”

212 / Denis Johnson

“Don’t know.”

“Just two of them?”

“Yeah, and a million dogs, it seems like. They jabber like a zoo.”

“They going armed?”

“Now there’s a strange question, don’t you think?”

“Just answer it.”

“I guess. They seem like nice guys, though.”

“You see any guns right on their person like?” She looked down at her navel with trouble on her face, untied the shirttails and tucked them down the waist of her shorts. “Actually, I stayed at Anchor Bay two-three nights ago.”

“In holsters or some such?”

“Not as I recall.”

The younger one swirled the coffeepot and tipped it toward a stone.

“Make yourself easy.”

Clarence said, “I guess you know your dog’s loose.”

“Yeah. She’s okay. She won’t hurt nobody.”

“That’s good. That’s good. Because hurtin’ is a hurtin’ thing.”

“No argument there.”

“Good. Real good.”

The two exchanged looks and the older one said, “I’m sure.”

“Guy,” the other said, “—why am I getting that feeling? That chilly feeling?”

“Shit, I don’t know what I’m saying. Sometimes I just go apeshit. I get in an apeshit mode. Hey. I think you know a friend of mine.”

“No, I don’t.” He shook his head.

“Harry.”

“Harry. Nope. Don’t ring a bell.”

“This is just my opinion, okay? But he’s all wrong. He gets people hurt.”

The elder of the two said, “Oh. I see.”

The younger said, “But we don’t know him.”

“People get around him, and they end up fucked up.” The older one smiled and said, “Am I supposed to be scared?” Meadows smiled and said, “You’re supposed to be rational.” Also carefully smiling, the younger one said, “Look, I’m into martial arts and I like to drop reds and drink shit and get rowdy. Do you know what I mean?”

Already Dead / 213

“Enjoy our lovely coastline.”

Everyone was smiling.

He left them with a wave and scuffed along the dirt through the trees, opting against the road, and back to the privies. Inside the Men’s room he stood around with his pants unzipped and his penis in his hand, listening to the flies, unable because of emotion to pass water.

“Hey, Clarence,” he said when he’d gone outside, “you remember me?”

“No sir,” the boy said.

“Nobody does,” his mother agreed.

Meadows lifted his BP cap and ran his hair back. “Can I get you to lend me a camp knife?”

“Here’s a few things, yeah.”

“What do you possess there? Lend me that bolo. Come on, sport,” he said to the dog.

He took it over to the park entrance and rubbed its head as he looked westward over toward the empty highway. The animal looked part Ridgeback, auburn except in the hairs permanently raised along its spine, which ran a purer brown. Meadows cut its throat with a chopping stroke up through the larynx and major blood routes and then dragged it, blood vomiting from this second open mouth, around the circular park road the opposite way from Carrie’s camp and then to the edge of its masters’ campsite, where he laid it down in the shade of the yews to open the abdomen, first with the bolo and then wider with both his hands. Nobody in sight. The dogs in the camper went crazy when he walked around and knocked twice on its eastern side. The two men tumbled out the back door to investigate as Meadows walked through the cleared ground not twenty feet behind their backs with both the dog’s ankles in his left hand’s grip and its jaw scraping a track along through the sand toward the blue sleeping bags. He stretched the carcass out on one of the bags and made his exit, yanking at the entrails and unravelling them across the circle of stones, where they lay stinking and hissing in the coals.

From twenty yards back, among the stubby evergreens, he witnessed a fluid pantomime as the younger of them stood at the fire briefly paralyzed with fascination, ran about, heading toward the truck some several steps and then whirling to stagger over and look openmouthed at the dog again, shook his head, pointed accusingly at 214 / Denis Johnson

his friend, put his hands on his hips, found his breath, and said, “Fuck!” His friend watched all this somewhat warily. As the wild one rummaged under the driver’s seat and stood up tall holding a gun, a long-barreled stainless-steel revolver mounted with a scope, Meadows departed.

He doused the blood away in the river and then returned the bolo to Carrie. She sat on a towel beside the car, combing out her wet hair.

“It’s genuinely odd, you turning up here.”

“Definitely outta wow.”

“I believe you were sent again,” she said, “by the Lord.”

“I don’t know. Is the Lord really that heavy into this kind of action?”

“I’m not a theologian.”

They heard a shouted conversation from over across the campground.

“Those two. Don’t tell them you know me.”

“I don’t.”

They’d be right behind him. He should make Gualala before the crash. A familiar inner pressure stopped him. Not lust, not necessarily.

Curiosity.

Time and drinking. With enough of each, anything could be accomplished between the sexes.

“Maybe I should return with some wine coolers.”

“Maybe you should try down the road.”

“I thought the Lord sent me.”

“Well, I’m forwarding you on.”

Here we go. Gimme the Casull. Come here, baby.”

“Hey. Hey. That’s exactly his game, right there.”

“I can get him fifty yards out with this.”

“He wants to get us crazy and running around the woods and shooting. Then we talk to the constable and — listen to me goddamn it, hey — that’s that. We’re gone.”

“Fuck it.”

“If you wanna drop thirteen hundred dollars of Casull in the creek, far out. There’s the Casull, there’s the creek. Because that’s what’s gonna happen if the Man comes around.”

“I’ll stash it.”

Already Dead / 215

“You’ll dump it, man, because if he shakes the sheets and out it drops, man—”

“That fucker! That fucker! That fucker, man!” Thompson pounded on the camper’s walls with the meat of his hand and the gun butt, and the two live ones inside gouged at the door and vocalized like dozens.

“I want him this close when I blow him up. I want my tongue in his mouth. SHUT UP!” he told the animals.

“I advised you to don’t bring no handgun. And no dogs, et cetera.

In fact I pointed out from the beginning that this sucked. So anytime you wanna leave.”

“A four-fifty-four Casull. Most powerful handgun ever made. This is a lifetime gun, man. Fuck you if I’d ever drop it down no hole.” Falls squatted on his heels before the poor bitch’s carcass, dragged a brand from the fire, and touched it to a cigarette. “I’m ready to go back and bust up trees again.”

“Stash this gun any fucking place. What are they gonna do, search the whole forest?”

“The bastard’s gone anyways. He aced us.”

“Who was he?”

“I don’t know. But he was all business. Shit. Look at her.”

“What’s old Busk gonna say?”

Falls stood back up. “Let’s get her bagged.”

“I swear I’ll kill him. That I swear to God.”

“Let’s just get her guts back inside her here.”

“Jesus. This is tragic.”

“And go get double shitfaced.”

“It’s tragic, brother. She was the only one of them worth a shit.”

“We’ll tell him a boar got her. He’ll be proud.” They bent to the task.

He detected, under the colliding of the winds and the waters and the bluffs, a minor, solitary rhythm — somebody chopping wood out back of the place. Then as he followed Mo into the house and she turned to smile and give his hand a squeeze, almost a shake, as between strangers, and then let go, the sounds of the shoreline fell back, didn’t trail them into the cathedral-ceilinged living room where one small woman stood, studying a ceramic ashtray on the bookshelf. Navarro heard a kettle signalling from the 216 / Denis Johnson

kitchen. Mo said, “Can I help?” and went that direction.

“Okay if I let down the blind?” the woman said. She wasn’t talking to him. He sat on a footrest with his feet apart, forearms on his jutting knees in the room filled with almost horizontal light. The sun lit up faint roads of dust along the wooden floorboards at his feet. His Sears service shoes and his polyester pants. The woman stood with her hand on the cord, a blonde in jeans and a hooded pullover and spectacles that magnified her eyes and made the lashes prominent and whose rather thick lenses, when she faced him to speak, he saw were speckled with drops of paint. A short, ample type, still young enough that her plumpness was an attraction, though she wore a ponytail and Navarro generally didn’t like that sort of thing. “I don’t want to trap her on the balcony,” she said. Yvonne, the medium, or channeler, or lesbo witch, stood out there with her hand on the rail. The house was cantilevered over the drop so that out beyond her only the sea and the sunset were visible, and she seemed to be standing at the bow of a ship and almost disappearing in the fiery illumination, miles from any earth. The sun had lolled into the space between horizon and cloud bank to shatter the Pacific into a lot of confusing colors, and she entered from the balcony with the light filling her loose shift and silhouetting her slenderness and sparking from the fork of her thighs. Navarro tasted some sort of sour thirst in his heart.

“Hel- lo—anywhere’s good,” she said, which he took to mean that sitting on this footrest was perhaps not good. He’d been waiting for an excuse to rise anyhow, having felt awkward, maybe even cowed. He did rise. “Have you introduced yourselves? Winona Fairchild, this is John Navarro.”

“Hi, John.”

“I came with Mo,” he wanted them to understand.

Winona let down the blinds and a pastel silence opened around them.

Through the kitchen’s entryway he saw a sweet-faced woman in stippled gray overalls laying out cups on an Oriental tray. Meanwhile a guy banged through the back door and then through the kitchen with firewood crooked in one arm up to his chin. He snicked the tennies from his feet deftly, getting them just side by side, and paddled like a duck across the living room in two thick orange socks. Navarro had never been introduced, but had seen him almost daily, attached Already Dead / 217

to the side of a big Victorian right across the road from Navarro’s own apartment in Point Arena. He was a carpenter, remodelling the old building. Navarro and Yvonne and Winona spectated with interest while he made a fire of shavings and loaded the stove with chunks of oak.

Yvonne said, “What’s that I hear?” Everyone listened intently. “Nelson.”

Now the motor’s sound came up from under the breeze and stopped dead in midrevolution, dead so to speak in the middle of a thought, the way a good German engine will do when you cut it off.

Winona said, “Oh well,” with a lot of world-weariness in her voice.

Through the living room window they watched two figures climb from Fairchild’s old Porsche and come through the reddening light outside, past fir and cypresses swirled into human shapes.

Nelson Fairchild entered with a little hippie girl who turned out to be not a girl but a woman, a pale thin woman with a beautiful face, the face of a porcelain doll. She ripped from her head a kind of pill-box hat and uncovered a thick black braid coiled in a bun almost like the thing she’d just taken off. Glittering blue eyes. She smiled with her eyes but not with her mouth, and it made her seem frightened or sad, while Fairchild’s eyes looked like somebody might have blackened them with a ball bat. He wasn’t well. He’d dressed himself all in white right down to his crepe-soled shoes. He looked like a yacht-going lemur.

And now Navarro sat. And now the feeling was complete. He’d stepped quite definitely onto a stage where everybody held a script but himself. They had their passports and their tribal scars. Where was Mo?

He heard her laughing in the kitchen. Somebody else had joined her, a squat female he hadn’t seen come in. The carpenter joked with them inaudibly in there now, hovering in particular over the one in the railroad oversuit. A sweet young girl surely not yet twenty. Navarro wondered was the carpenter diddling her. Or either of them. Probably just diddling the fat one, he looked to have about that kind of luck.

Nobody said much. The young one came among them with the Japanese service. She paused before him and proffered the tray with the hint of a curtsy that made him smile and reach out and say, “Thanks.” He put his cup to his face and inhaled some pleasant minty vapors.

Gravitating toward the bookshelves and tilting his head as if 218 / Denis Johnson

reading the titles, he set the cup beside Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow and abandoned it there.

The young woman turned up again, smiling in a slightly apologetic way and shaking her head irrelevantly so that her long brown braid swiped along her spine. She was smiling at Navarro; she wanted him to move his ass. He and the others put themselves against the room’s margins while she herded a miscellany of chairs into a semicircle.

Folks seemed to be taking up positions. He returned to the seat he’d just been prodded from while Yvonne put herself in a tall straight-backed kitchen stool facing them all in their various chairs, his own a deep-sinking type he’d probably be napping in soon, despite his alertness in these surroundings. What he’d at first believed to be distant chimes in the breeze he located now as low-volume New Age from a stereo, the speakers stashed up high in the corners.

Yvonne closed her eyes for ten seconds, opened them up wide, and smiled at each one of her guests in turn. “Everybody, let’s introduce ourselves.”

“Mo. Maureen.”

“John Navarro.”

“Melissa. But I want to change it.”

“To…?”

“Something, I don’t know, but it should mean a word.”

“Winona Fairchild.”

The carpenter said, “Is that gonna be too hot?”

“I’m Ocean,” said the young girl in overalls.

Yvonne said, “Ocean lives here.”

“I’ll fix the draft.” The carpenter knelt beside the stove.

Nelson junior just sat there, staring at his wife, until Yvonne said,

“And this is Nelson Fairchild.”

Mrs. Fairchild didn’t look back. Navarro dedicated himself to catching her at it, but she never glanced at her husband, not once. And generated thereby an impression of obsessive awareness of the guy, kind of a retina-burn threat, Fairchild’s status that of hot spot or solar eclipse.

One more came in, the woman he’d seen in the kitchen with Mo, a flustered person with plain strong weathered hands but painted toe-nails, in sandals, and her meaty neck wrapped in a gypsy scarf.

“Sit. Sit. Everybody knows you but John.”

Already Dead / 219

Navarro nodded, and noticed as she sat across from him that she didn’t shave her legs. When she crossed them, he glimpsed her yellow underpants.

“Hillary Lally.”

“Like the nursery rhyme.”

“What nursery rhyme?”

“Just kidding around.”

She scowled and smiled and looked hurt. He’d meant Hickory Dickory Dock.

Suddenly Melissa let out a bright laugh, like change falling in the street. Gold bridgework in her mouth. She shrugged, and waved at everybody with her fingers. She’d chewed her nails down. She pulled her lips shut over a tilted smile and again she looked like a roughed-up, invalided child.

The carpenter hadn’t introduced himself by name. “Where’s Billy?”

“I wouldn’t count on Billy getting here.”

Yvonne smiled. “I’m a little surprised you turned up even, Nelson.”

“Actually, honey, the entire world has been peeled away. Anything can happen now if you ask me.”

“That’s a tremendous juncture. You know the Chinese character for our word crisis is a combination of the characters for danger and opportunity, danger plus opportunity, did you know that?”

“I know I’d like a cigarette.”

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

“Just to fuck you up.”

She laughed in a charming way and then looked around the group, a long look that inaugurated a certain seriousness. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply several breaths in through her wide nostrils and out between her lips, and most of the others did the same, but Navarro didn’t, and neither, he saw, did Fairchild. Yvonne opened her eyes and smiled at them both, as if recognizing without condemnation their resistance, and then addressed them all: “One of the things we’ve come together for is to celebrate the life and afterlife of Nelson Fairchild, Sr.

He’s between lives now, and we’re here to thank him for his recent one and wish him well on his next.

“Something of great importance that we can do is just come together and let our perceptions of him smooth out. Let his deeds and personality, as we perceived them, sink back into the unruffled 220 / Denis Johnson

pool of time. Where he’s without any earthly individuality. Beyond experience, beyond perception. He’s not a villain. Not a bad guy. We’ll do everything he’s done and experience everything, maybe even work the kind of horror Hitler worked ourselves before this journey through a billion lives is over. Don’t put anything past yourself. We let him go now. What we thought we saw is gone. None of that was real. What remains is pure. What remains is real. We say good-bye…we say hello.” They waited there in some sort of reverie for a while until Yvonne let out a long, pleased, somewhat phony sigh, and the group settled its attention on her again. She turned to Hillary Lally. “How was South America?”

“We were there three days and then we left.”

“Oh.”

“There was an accident.”

“I heard.”

“A young girl died.”

“Was it when the car hit you? Hit your car?”

“Not then. Later. It was — she was a pedestrian.”

“But was it the car that did it?”

“We didn’t know. And then we left and — we’ll never know.”

“I think this is a good time to call Randall in.” This proclamation doused the house in silence. Yvonne put her chin on her chest and you could have counted no more than five before she lifted her face to them again.

“Hello. Good afternoon. I’m Randall MacNammara.” Her eyes weren’t rolling in her head, her voice stayed exactly her voice, nothing about her had changed in any way. Nobody was playing spooky tapes or blowing fog. It showed taste and style, Navarro decided, to let the marks run their own grift.

Mo put her hand over his and something happened in his head, but nobody seemed to have noticed, so he wasn’t sure. He was probably in love.

The witch had a true skill. This had to be one of the region’s more elegant scams. But he’d showed, and something was working on him.

Yvonne was all touch. No push or pull. She’d slipped off her sandals and bared her feet, draped her shift’s hem across her thighs. She had great legs; Navarro could see himself throwing cheap vodka on her and then licking it off.

Already Dead / 221

“Let’s look back,” she said, or Randall did, “to our past lives…Relax completely. Start at the top of your head. Let the tension flow out into the void. Relax the muscles of your neck. Relax, let it all flow out…the shoulders…now the back…torso…hips…thighs…calves…Let every bit of tension drain now through the soles of your feet and into the grounding center of the earth beneath us…And as that energy drains away, the energy that we’ve taken in from all the daily influences outside us, what’s left is a kind of very softly glowing pulse within, our true energy, the real, eternal, unchanging, unquenchable, quiet and irresistible truth that we are…Let’s pause now and just be that truth.” Nothing happened for a while beyond the rearrangements of the wood burning in the stove. Navarro did his best, he believed, to envision this bit of swamp gas ignited inside him somewhere, either in his chest or his head, he couldn’t quite determine which, and kept switching between the two.

“Now let this true self travel. It wants to take your vision somewhere, to share with you the sights and sounds of an incarnation you’ve forgotten. Keeping your eyes closed, become aware of the eyes within your eyes. Keeping your eyes closed, open the eyes within your eyes.

Keeping your eyes closed, look around you with the eyes within.” Navarro engaged the game and envisioned a place, a kind of dormit-ory, the lowest floor in a honeycomb of indestructible lightweight cubicles, and he lived there. Lived as a cog, nothing more, with a sturdy suit and a weapon and no thinking past these limits, no desires. In another minute he became aware of Yvonne’s voice again and realized he’d fallen briefly asleep.

“…not to reveal any secrets about ourselves, but just to share where we’ve been, if that seems shareable. Any volunteers? Okay, Ocean.

What did you see? Where’d you go?”

The young lady spoke. “I was by the sea, and I’m almost sure it was this coastline, I mean, Mendocino or right around here.” Something just too beautiful seemed to be messing with her ability to breathe.

“And what were you doing?”

“I was washing clothes.”

“What kind? Did you see what sort they were?”

“I think — Indian clothes? I don’t know. I think I was an Indian.” Mo said, “A Miwok. Or some branch of the Pomos. That could be.”

“What sort of clothes did the Miwoks wear?” Yvonne asked.

222 / Denis Johnson

“I don’t know,” Mo said. “Skins, maybe, until they started trading with whites.”

“You wouldn’t wash skins, would you?”

Sadly the girl admitted it. “You wouldn’t wash skins.” The probability deflated her completely.

Navarro reflected she wouldn’t have been signifying like this if she’d been one of the team. No partners, no promises, no gizmos. We’re all marks.

The carpenter cleared his throat. “I—”

“Excuse me,” Navarro said.

“Pardon?”

“What is your name?”

“Well, Philip — Phil.”

“Hi, Phil.”

He sensed a stiffening beside him. He turned to Mo and was just about to say, Fuck you, honey, when Yvonne cleared her throat. “Were you going to share a seeing, Phil?”

“Yeah. I don’t think I was human this time.”

“Oh?”

“Well, I was running across ice, and I had claws, big claws, I know that much. And I think it was dark. No trees or anything, or plants. I can’t think if there was any wind. Just real barren. Wait…eight claws on each — they were like fingers. Real thick hairy arms. Well, legs, because I’m running on all fours.”

Yvonne-Randall waited.

“What was that? Was I some kind of mythical beast?”

“You were on another planet. I’m not familiar with that one. Maybe I should tap in…” She closed her eyes. “Hm. You were out there. I’m not getting anything. Some of these planets have been destroyed, and there’s word that some burned up when stars went nova very early along in the evolution of the inhabitants. They all scattered into various rebirths, widespread incarnations. They haven’t made it up the chain yet to the afterworld.”

“Nobody to tap into.”

“Right, that’s what I mean. Information is not forthcoming.” He’d looked for spooky stuff, but she was serving around a little sci-fi.

“Question?”

She meant Winona Fairchild. “What?”

“You look like you have a question.”

Already Dead / 223

“I do,” Winona said. “I was just — how’d you know I had a question?”

“Nothing mysterious. Just the look on your face. No telepathy here!”

“Oh. Well, I was wondering if anybody here of us, did we know each other in the past? In past lives?”

“Let me tap in…” She shut down again; a long pause; opened her eyes. “These two”—with two fingers scissoring and unscissoring, she indicated Mo and himself—“have been married four times.” Mo laughed with embarrassment. Navarro took it as a boost. Next time I pinch you, he thought, no ticket. But doubted anyway she’d ever failed to charm a cop.

“Three times you’ve been the wife,” Randall-Yvonne said to him.

“Wish I could remember how to cook,” he said, something affable being required now, in light of his tendency to look cross-eyed at and ridicule such geeks as these. Everybody chuckled, and a familiar fantasy came to him, one along the lines of seeing everybody stripped, suddenly, to their undies; but in his case, as he generally went armed and at the moment sheltered a Compact Officer’s.45 ACP under his bulky sweater, in a holster clipped to his belt, the fantasy skewed toward multiple murder, as if he’d just whipped it down and opened up on everybody.

“I just wonder if you wouldn’t mind,” Yvonne-Randall said. “Can I ask you to put your weapon somewhere outside the room?” He cleared his throat. Found no comeback.

“Something’s creating a very low vibration. A distracting hum. Would it be your sidearm?”

“Uh — yeah, sure.”

And why not? But what am I doing? he thought as he stepped from the room.

“Now you,” she nodded in Hillary’s direction as Navarro went out the front door, “have a tale to tell. I’d like to hear it.” He passed silently over the packed dead needles underfoot, looking back over his shoulder toward the driftwood-colored house and wondering what all that had been about. Okay, okay. Northward the bluff rounded to make an inlet and a strip of rocky beach no wider than a footpath, and then the shore tumbled upward to this property with its blunted evergreens crouching lower and lower as they approached the edge. The car was Mo’s, her dinky Cadet. He dis-224 / Denis Johnson

armed himself and jammed the Colt under the driver’s bucket, locked and checked the doors. Okay. You zinged me.

Nobody looked at him as he took his place again between Melissa and Mo. It was dark in here. Somebody had lit some candles on the bookshelves, creating shapes and shadows in a dimness. Hillary Lally sat with her head down and wept onto her knees.

“I guess he wanted to — he’s not faithful. I mean he plays around. I’m used to it. I mean, not used to it but — you know. He plays around. I think he wanted something involving me. I might have done it. He knows me. I’m open to new things. So he, so we, she ended up overnight with us. In the hotel. It was a suite. But nothing happened. I mean she died. That certainly happened! She was in another room, just lying down. There was nobody there. She just wasn’t alive the next thing anybody knew.”

“Go on. It’s fine. Go on.”

“I went in and found her. Well, on cable you can get everything in English. No, I guess it’s satellite. Well, who the hell cares? I don’t know why I brought it up. We were just watching TV and Harry — we were doing, you know — cocaine is quite a casual thing in Rio. Harry said, let’s go out, so I went to wake the girl up, Esperanza, they called her Perry, anyway she gave that as a nickname. Dead, like a lump of something. Like a great big fat fish, you could tell from across the room in the dark. I think it was a lack of vibration. Don’t you? It was quite mystical right there, in fact at that point I left my body…and somebody else came in. Do you believe me?”

“Yes.”

“Another soul.”

“I believe you.”

“Another soul entered my body.” Hillary breathed rapidly several times. “A soul wandering for years and looking for—”

“Revenge against your husband.”

“Oh! God!” Sobs burst out of her. She wiped at her face. “Who, who, who— was it?”

“Somebody born into a life of weakness. The weak lives are long ones, because they often continue in the void spaces between the afterworlds. They can involve a lot of wandering and confusion before the next birth. In his earth-time, out of weakness, he turned to pleasures and drugs. He blamed others for his weakness, your husband among them.”

Already Dead / 225

“I could feel his hate. I wanted to kill Harry.”

“Shhh. It wasn’t you,” Yvonne-Randall said. “Maybe you felt the feelings, but they were his. Not yours. In your body he went in to stand over your husband for a long time. He almost killed him. Then he found forgiveness. He saw that this life is a punishment for your husband, at least in the terms of warfare and tribunal in which he sees things.”

“I still hate him,” Hillary said. “And there’s nobody inside me now but me.”

Was the woman claiming some evil spirit had entered her heart and made her want to kill her husband? An uncomfortable notion…Something Navarro didn’t like known about himself was that stories of possession by dark forces, of people fallen under the control of enemy souls, felt to him quite believable. In East L.A. he’d arrested any number of sunk, baffled fathers or sons who only moments before had torn their houses down around their families, as if demons had come and gone in their hearts. And many times he’d seen a blurry happiness in the eyes of people just arrested for something inexplicable and ugly, as if demons had come and stayed.

“Goddamn Harry,” Hillary said, still crying like a child. “Oh, Harry, I hate you…”

“Shhh. Shhh. Hush. You and I, we’ll end up doing everything, tasting every fruit, whether good or evil. There can be no penalty, no purgatory, no hell. Only a relearning after error. There’s no banishment, only wandering. No torture, no retribution for our deeds, no need for forgiveness except our own forgiveness of others. And of ourselves.” Hillary wept, drawing long jagged breaths and giving up her misery in short, interrogatory-sounding outbursts, and Yvonne said, not only to her, but to them all: “Shhhhh…It’s Eurus…” Shh. It’s Eurus: Shhhh…” and her susurration blended with that of another flurrying past from offshore. “It’s Eurus, god of the east winds.” Out the window the runty bull pines and knotted cypresses hardly moved, they had built themselves against exactly such gods. Arboreal contortions, sculpted into agony. Topiary likenesses but likenesses of what? Some grotesque and lovely inner churning.

In the lull as the wind blew by and old Hillary whuffed as if foaling, Fairchild heard again Yvonne’s Electronic Obvious in the air.

Covering up her true music with this other.

Three days? Another reprieve rescinded, a sort of Easter parody, after three days down under, Lally jumps up whole. Lally back machinating after his glorious subequatorial whirlwind thing. The cop, Navarro, looked at Hillary. Crossed his arms over his chest. And then actually crossed his eyes in his face. Good for you. In his sharply creased Sta-Prest sports garb, his acrylic turtleneck from which dangled the black shooting-range wraparounds, you’d pick him out instantly at any political picnic as one of the Secret Service. A nonvoter. He’d brought his moll. The waitress was all angles, cartoony, especially as she wore something on the silky side — or just as likely synthetic, what did he know? — a fakey Hindu pants suit, anyway it draped, looked tossed over wires. Fairchild glanced at her more and more often. And she was altogether pretty, the front of her head really just a location for her two immense eyes, quite blue and completely empty of harm. Only did later glances turn up anything else in the way of features, and the lips were full and small and the nose straight and deftly angled and poignantly disfigured by a tiny ring. She had a broad, quiet forehead. Her short haircut curled around forward beneath her ears, which were also lovely, shell-like and almost lobeless, not pierced, and their whorls, the routes to her brain, as he thought of them, not at all complicated. She had great hands, a bit knuckly and marked-up and on closer inspection actually tattooed, but all the better for that, shaped by days in a human life and promising to taste of the whole story. He wished he could lick them.

And kiss her eyes. Miracles had blessed her with lids big enough to hide those eyes. When she closed them they came down covering a great dark peace.

He couldn’t see Winona’s face. She kept herself at an occluding angle, as if one look would audit and judge her. But he’d come for love, not judgment…The session, meanwhile, had become an embarrassment.

Hillary went on her knees and rooted, at least in the bulging and shrinking candlelight it appeared she did, between Yvonne’s delicious thighs. Amid the smoky amber shapes and green shadows. “Shhh. It doesn’t involve you,” Yvonne consoled her.

“But—”

“It doesn’t involve you except by chance. You were there, and he used your body, came into you at a traumatic moment that left you vulnerable. He would have used you to kill your husband — would have made use of your resentments, your anger against him. We all have those feelings of rage and hate toward the ones we love most. But you found your own forgiveness. Thus did you thwart the demon.” A break for tea: the lights back up, another six pounds of hardwood fed frontways into the stove’s blank face. “We have to pay the bills around here,” Yvonne announced, tapping a wicker bowl on the bookshelf beside her. Despite her frankness, meant to disarm, the bowl skipped among them like a turd. Fairchild passed it on without touching his pockets. The others pitched in. Hillary deposited a check.

“What kind of tea have we got here, Yvonne?”

“Don’t you recognize it, Nelson? That’s Good Earth. Winona brought it.”

“I thought I recognized the spices. I’d forgotten about its existence.

Where is she?”

“Winona? She had to go.”

He set it down and headed out through the kitchen.

“Winona! Winona!” he shouted in the dark.

The old Dodge. It wouldn’t start but after six or seven tries. She’d parked off the drive, shoved right in amongst the scrub, where nobody blocked her exit. He clutched the door handle and looked up at her in the dark cab.

“I love you. Winona. I love you.”

She tried again and the engine caught. The forward axle thunked as she engaged the automatic transmission.

“I meant to tell you, sounds like a U-joint going out up front,” he said, “but that’s not important now.”

“Move!”

“I’m moving,” he said. “There, I’ve moved, but let me talk. I love you.”

She pulled onto the drive with her shock absorbers squawking. Gone on the highway, down the salt atmospheres. Hillary had parked her jeep behind the Porsche, or he might have chased after her.

By the windows’ glow he found his way back to the house and went in again to sit next to Melissa, amid the other idiots and their Idiot Chief.

“What are you going to change your name to?” he asked Melissa.

“I think maybe Music. I like folk music a lot.” 228 / Denis Johnson

“Am I interrupting?” he asked the others.

“We were just getting settled again,” Yvonne told him.

“What about something more specific? How about Polka?” Melissa laughed.

“I have thrilling news,” he told the others, who’d assembled now as before. “Melissa has changed her name to Polka.”

“I did not! He’s drunk. But I’m not drunk,” Melissa said.

“Have you seen me take one drink today?”

“Well,” Yvonne said, “let’s settle in and take—”

“Please assure these people of my sobriety.”

“—take a few deep breaths, to settle in—”

“Sobriety! To you that’s like Mars.”

The cop smiled broadly at this until Mo ran a fingernail along his sleeve. He crossed his arms over his chest and shut his eyes as they all got quiet.

Yvonne held a pair of eyeglasses in her left hand. “I want to read you something from this book, just a short paragraph. The Philosopher’s Stone by F. David Peat.” She put the glasses on and bowed her head above the volume in the lap of her skirt, from which she’d probably had to wring, Fairchild wouldn’t have doubted, a pint of Hillary Lally’s teardrops.

“‘Even the smallest region of space is filled with radiation from the extremely low frequencies of the Big Bang remnants, through the range of radio waves, from visible light and into ultraviolet, and so up to gamma rays of the highest energy. This radiation comes from stars, from supernovas, from quasars, from the event horizon of black holes, and from the twisting magnetic fields that stretch across vast regions of empty space. Moreover, all this light is carrying information — it conveys information about its origin in a nuclear process deep within the heart of a star or as matter hurtles into a black hole. Every volume of space is alive with electromagnetic radiation…’” She closed the book, removed her glasses and handed both to Ocean, who rose from her chair and placed them on the bookshelf.

“That’s beautiful,” Phil said.

“Does it bring anything to mind? About our particular environment.” Ocean said, “The radar domes.”

“Exactly.”

“The Tibetan dome also,” Melissa said.

Already Dead / 229

“Well, that, too. But they’re completely different. If everything is, at its heart and soul, electromagnetic radiation, then the radar in this area represents a serious environmental violation. And on a mystical level it violates us, too.”

“And what about the Tibetan dome?” Melissa said. “It’s big and fat and shiny. Like hell!”

“That dome calls to the soul,” Yvonne insisted. “It’s full of prayer and meditation. Clarity, not radiation. Emptiness. It’s not a threat. But the white domes send out messages, in a sense. Calling to people, messing them up. This should be a place of healing, but instead a great deal of energy is concentrated on looking for, anticipating, destructive intercontinental missiles.”

Phil said, “Russia’s on our side now anyway. Haven’t they heard?”

“Well, I suppose they help direct airline flights, too.”

“What if whales could fly?” Phil said. “Wouldn’t that play some games with their radar!”

“We should all hang a lot of crystals in every house,” Melissa said.

“Crystals won’t work.”

“They work! I cured my appendix yesterday! With a crystal!”

“Crystals won’t work for this.”

“What will?” Mo asked.

“Well, some real countereffect might be achieved by burning their commanding officer’s body and drinking his ashes in a potion. But it’s hard to anticipate where you end up when you engage that kind of negative energy.”

Hillary said, “Not his body.”

“Pardon?”

“It’s a woman. A she — the commanding officer.” Yvonne became quite still. “That would be most healing.”

“That would work,” Hillary said, “without getting too negative?”

“Yes. That kind of feminine sacrifice.”

“I’d like to put a query to this policeman,” Fairchild said. “Aren’t sacrifices of either gender sort of kind of like illegal? Nowadays I mean Officer?”

“So is drunk driving.”

Traitors on either hand…“Okay, Johnny Cop. I challenge you to a Breathalyzer test. Immediately, please.”

“Nelson,” Yvonne said. She was lighting a candle and turned from it. “What is this?”

230 / Denis Johnson

“A matchbook.”

“No. It’s this.” She tossed the matchbook at him and he batted it away beneath Melissa’s chair. Yvonne pointed at the candle’s flame. “And what are we seeing? This? No.”

She sat back and regarded them all and smiled. “You know of course that what we’re looking at is light. It strikes the eye, produces another impulse, which is also electromagnetic radiation, along a nerve. Cells receiving it discharge other impulses of light. And now we’re told the self, the life field on which this makes an impression, is also light…The radar domes mess this up. That’s why they cause cancer. The cancer is a result of effects on the life field. It stirs up negatives in our perception which we read as sickness. Sickness is anger expressing itself in our perceptions about our bodies.”

Fairchild felt his face descending, and put up his hands to catch it.

They smelled of Melissa and the Porsche’s leather. Of course he was sober! But he was dizzy. The prickly sensation in his blood and the vertigo derived, he was sure, not from the ridiculousness of these cos-mological assumptions, but from the fact that all his neighbors seemed to share them. At the same time an intense and accelerating episode of déjà vu, of having lived through this very moment, of being able to remember each frame of time in the process of its passing, seemed to narrow all perception, to focus it ruthlessly on the millisecond at hand.

Yvonne’s unintelligible voice sounded clearly against his soul, clearly: she was shamming for these people, all this talk of light and fields and dreams, but her voice was the voice of a witch, a vehicle of evil.

Seconds later he felt he may have fainted. The room had collapsed into the desolation of the candles’ auras, and it looked like they hadn’t got rid of this Randall person after all. She was at it again. The tip-off wasn’t in her manner so much as her speech.

“The world may seem to cause you pain. And yet the world, as causeless, has no power to cause. As an effect, it cannot make effects.

As an illusion, it is what you wish. Your idle wishes represent its pains.

Your strange desires bring it evil dreams.

“Salvation does not lie in being asked to make unnatural responses which are inappropriate to what is real. Instead, it merely asks that you respond appropriately to what is not real — by not perceiving what hasn’t occurred.”

“Yvonne.”

Already Dead / 231

“Randall.”

“Randall.”

“Yes, Nelson?”

“Could you boil that down for us, please?”

“Sure: life is a dream, and to take it as anything else is a form of madness. What you call sanity is just insanity to a less noticeable degree.”

“I’ve noticed much insanity in my life.”

“In your waking dream.”

“I didn’t dream it.”

“I’ll say it again. All is illusion, therefore all is just as you wish.”

“So I’m making the world up? That’s an old hypothesis.”

“An eternal fact. And when you see this fact, there are two possible responses: the first is to see that you’re making it up, and make up something you like. The second is to let God make it up, let him give it a single meaning, his meaning, and cling to that meaning—”

“Which is?”

“Peace and love.”

“That’s two meanings, if I’m counting right.”

“Peace and love, as opposed to war and fear.”

“Look. If I’m dreaming, then why should I have any control over my perceptions? I can’t control my sleeping dreams, can I? Otherwise they’d reflect my true corruption. Why should a bad man have happy dreams?”

“One day they’ll be dialing up these vibes on various monitors. The doctors will adjust our auras and send us home. It’ll all be quite nice, even the Christian fundamentalists will approve.”

“Look — Yvonne.”

“I’m not Yvonne.”

“You sound like Yvonne.”

“Why not? I’m speaking with her vocal chords.”

“Still, some indication — you know—”

“You’d like me to roll up the whites of my eyes and blow smoke out my nostrils?”

“Up my ass is where I think you’re blowing smoke, my dear.”

“And grant you three wishes”—this in a basso voice that raised ap-plaudatory laughter. “Spirit Guides, help from a higher realm — you don’t believe these things,” Yvonne-Randall said.

“Maybe I do. But I don’t have to like them.” 232 / Denis Johnson

“What’s the difference, if they’re true?”

“Well, it’s another world, dear. Don’t I have trouble enough with this one?”

“You’re saying you do believe in a spirit existence we can tap into?”

“Actually I find that I do — sometimes — in a very general way — but by ignoring it I find I live with a certain complexity and on several levels. If I participate in your cosmology, what am I left with? Rules.

Explanations.”

“Well, suggestions anyway. Even some answers, maybe.”

“Recipes for magic antidotes. And cheat sheets for deciphering the cosmic codes.”

“It doesn’t matter what you do. We have time in which to experience everything, belief, nonbelief, and in between.”

“Groovy.”

“Nelson Fairchild. I want you to get serious. I have a message for you, Nelson.”

He feared it concerned Winona. “Okay.”

“It’s important now that you take seriously what I’m going to say.”

“Yes. I’m trying.”

“Your father has recently died.”

“Is that supposed to be big news?”

“No, it’s not. But this is: your father’s death is part of something that concerns you deeply, that concerns your soul. There’s a term in use now in your world, in limited use— holocoenosis. It refers to the fact that each thing, everything, is affected by action on any single thing — kind of a cause-and-effect conduction throughout reality.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Would you by any chance be familiar with certain notions concerning bifurcations in dissipative structures?”

“I most certainly would not. In fact if I had to be I hope I’d kill myself.”

“You have a parallel. A soul whose path parallels yours very closely.

Kind of a doppelgänger.”

“Holy smokes. Kind of a doppelgänger, did you say?” Beside him, Navarro laughed and then tried to excuse himself with his eyes.

“He’s out to devour you. He is a devourer…” Nobody said anything now. Certainly not he himself.

Already Dead / 233

“A soul twin. Many of us have them. In our more comfortable lives we don’t meet them. In the lives where we do, the meeting creates cosmic fireworks. Legendary love affairs or strange hatreds…”

“For God’s sake, spit it out, ghost!”

“Nelson Fairchild. Listen.”

Her music had changed. Everybody’s music had changed.

“You bitch.”

“Are you listening?”

“What have you done with my wife?”

She spoke calmly, setting up no vibrations: “I think we should talk more privately, Nelson.”

It made him weak with dread, though it was what he wanted, and he said immediately, “Maybe even in this lifetime. I’ll pencil it in.” Later he stood with his keys in his hand, waiting for Hillary to get her rig backed out, and the cop stood next to him with his arm around the waitress’s tiny shoulders. Melissa waited in the Porsche. “I’m not drunk,” he told the cop.

“I realize that, man. I was just kidding.”

“She got me shook. I hate her.”

“She’s got a rare gift, Nelson,” the waitress said.

“Of one kind or another,” the cop added.

“I guess so. I don’t know. But I know she talks to the dead.”

“What if she does?” the cop said. “So what? Why should I believe some asshole just because he doesn’t have a body?”

“…There. There is a man with a complete cranium,” Fairchild told Melissa as they all drove off in two directions, “while the rest of us have these gauzy frayed places where bullshit keeps getting in.”

“Could you drop me at the hotel?”

“If we weren’t natural enemies, I’d want to befriend him and stay near him.”

“He reminds me of a picture,” Melissa said.

“What picture?”

“A picture. He’s holding still.”

“He’s steady inside. But he’s wrong about Yvonne. She’s not a fake.

She talks to demons. She works with evil. She can deal.” 234 / Denis Johnson

On his way to the apartment, having dropped Melissa at the hotel, Fairchild swung into the gas station. Nothing else in Gualala was open, nothing but the hotel bar, and that not visibly, stuck away on the building’s north side. But here was the Phillips 66, effulgent, clarified, and lonely, like a stage before a darkened audience. It wasn’t so much a need for fuel that drew him as the sight of it there, and of the attendant dumping out windshield water like a bucket of stars across the greasy pavement. The attendant stood still and watched with an air of uncertainty until the Porsche’s arrival was complete.

“Are you open?”

“Yeah. Sure. Hi.”

Fairchild got out of the car. “Should I fill it myself?”

“No, I’m happy to.”

“Too late for the windshield, huh?”

“I’ll get it. I’ve got some Windex.”

“Let me unlock the cap for you. It locks.”

He stood next to the attendant, looking right down on the top of his hatless head. A small young guy pumping gas on the weekdays, on the Sabbath he preached at the little church in West Point. He’d used to be a pitiful case, a drunken wreck and, it was generally assumed, an irre-mediable moron. Now here he stood, shepherd of a little pickup flock and purveyor of combustible oils. Holding the work of the Quality Nozzle Company in his grip.

“Tell me about demons.”

“I’d rather talk about the Savior.”

“What do you know about demons?”

“I don’t know anything I haven’t read in the Bible. You can read the same things, I guess you’re aware of that.”

“And what about spirit guides? You’ve heard of them. Do you believe in such guides?”

“Well, going by the Scripture, there’d only be two — the Holy Spirit, and the Devil Satan.”

“Channeling—”

“You’re only channeling Satan. Better cut it out.”

“So you definitely believe in the Devil.”

“Definitely. You want the Windex? You’re all bugged up.”

“Permit me to quote you something from Nietzsche: ‘Whoever has theological blood in his veins is shifty and dishonorable in all things.’” Already Dead / 235

“I’ll go along with that.”

“I’ve heard you pitch quite a sermon at the chapel of a Sunday.”

“You’ve heard it? Or heard about it?”

“Billy told me you’ve got the Spirit.”

“You remember what I was like.”

“I remember doing rum and coke with you one Fourth of July. Cocaine coke. Not the drink.”

“I don’t remember. So how could I deny it?”

“I remember you asking me if you could suck my dick, in fact.”

“That could be. There’s not an alky worthy of the name who hasn’t had somebody’s joint in his mouth some time or other.” The preacher smiled. “So the question is: How did I get all the way here from all the way there?”

“I don’t know. How?”

“Somebody prayed for me.”

“Yeah…So would you do me a favor, please?”

“I won’t blow you, no.”

“I was going to ask you to pray for me.”

“I do already. Every day.”

“Thank you.”

“You’d be welcome at the chapel tomorrow night. We have prayer meetings Thursdays, usually at somebody’s house. But we’re getting such a crowd we decided to use the chapel.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Nelson. Maybe we’ll see you tomorrow night.”

“I don’t think you will.”

“No, I won’t count on it.”

He turned north but drove past his fourplex building and pushed out of town, keeping the Porsche at a steady run, not slinging it around the curves, through the mute irrelevance of Anchor Bay, down the drop into the gully where the campground slept by the water, past Shipwreck Road and Shipwreck Rock and still northward, the double yellow lines wavering slowly ahead in a world denominated by his headlights. The landscape opened wide past Point Arena, and he continued through it in the general direction of Manchester, until the silvery pastures on his left ended in a grove of some dozen acres. Even in this hour of souls it looked like a friend. In the dark he couldn’t make out the fence, only the massive cypress, eucalyptus, and oak — the wrought, asymmetrical varieties…His

236 / Denis Johnson

high beams lit up the white arch and the rickety birthday-party lettering suspended across its apex identifying this Catholic graveyard. The trees and graveheads jumped sideways and slid backward as the illumination crossed them. He drove in far enough that his headlights wouldn’t draw the gaze of any late traveller, and got out leaving them on to see by and walked.

He left the pavement, started across the graves. Am I ashes? Have I come to scatter myself? The headstones like ruins, leavings. Past the older section and the names eaten up. Among the whiter crosses… Californian. So here we are. It’s Wednesday, do they tell you things like that, down there in California? But I didn’t pick up the Barron’s. Anyway it’s night and I can’t read because it’s almost as dark out here as it is in there. And is somebody praying for me?

Not likely.

But he said he was.

He pumps gas. He pumped you some.

I guess you know everything now.

I know more than I did.

You know—

I know you’ve walked your nose flat into a corner and you refuse to do the only thing.

Which is?

Turn around.

Excuse me, he said, walking across his father.

He knelt to the bucket of flowers by the gravestone and plucked from it a spongy toy, a ball. Standing upright he held it so as to catch what light he could. But its color was as indiscernible as its purport. He compressed it in his fist and shoved it into his back pocket. He touched his fingers to his father’s stone.

He said aloud, “I love you.”

September 13, 1990

Fairchild woke in an upstairs room of the Gualala Hotel in the afternoon. Melissa slept beside him: With your wings quivering…Around him the windows revolved, the white-hot windows.

His grogginess gave everything the quality of extremely old films in which the static hums steadily and the voices move softly and almost inaudibly inside it.

“What did you dream?”

“I dreamed I was sad.” Then she laughed. “But that’s funny — because I’m not! I’m happy!”

“Are you?”

“But you — you’re not. Nelson, why are you crying?”

“My brother. My brother is dead.”

“Oh, my God, but you can’t be serious! It was only dreaming.”

“My brother is dead, and my father is dead.”

“Oh, and it hurts — I know!”

“Tell me, baby, what were you sad about in your dream?”

“I was sad because I couldn’t be ice. And I woke up now, and now I find out I’m melting.”

“Oh! Melissa. Oh! I wish we were.”

“Don’t cry. Don’t cry. It’s one of those days.” 238

He was seeing things not in a decipherable, but in a perceiv-able, appreciable design — like snowflakes…

Van Ness left his car by the Pacific, on a bluff looking down toward the cove that had once, he assumed, harbored Carter’s Landing, and he walked from there across the Coast Highway and up to the forested end of Carter’s Landing Road. He passed through a neglected truck garden behind a neglected driftwood lean-to at the road’s end, some bikey’s hooch, some Deadhead’s last burrow, and then entered the woods below William Fairchild’s cabin, he didn’t know how far below, carrying in a pillowcase thrown over his shoulder Nelson Fairchild, Jr.’s.357 Magnum. He turned back, left the path, and from the covering foliage satisfied himself that the lean-to he’d just passed was indeed unattended before going on. The grade steepened, the path narrowed.

Probably only William Fairchild and wildlife ever made use of it.

In the deeper woods Van Ness came on a bear trap, corroded to the core and frosted with dry lichen along its jaws’ northern edges. The teeth lay wide, and though he judged its springs to have set down long ago, still his groin tingled when he put his hand to the trap’s tongue and pressed it.

The woods gave out on a gully to his right; the gully disappeared in vaporous eastward currents; in the currents he saw an entity fashioned of the vapor: an angel with great white wings uplifted from its shoulders, standing upright, an angel profoundly corrupted and profoundly feminine, drinking the blood of its young and turning to suckle strangers. Mother I have your diamonds. The prayers of the Inquisitors.

She trailed them in her tresses as dew.

He moved around a broken cedar and lost sight of her, and she was gone, and the roiling mist was gone.

Farther on he entered the big grove. He felt its silence long before he came into the cool hush and sourceless dim light among the trees. They had a peculiar sweet musty smell. Most of the ground had the combed and fertile uniformity of a riding arena’s floor. Nothing much grew between the widely separated house-sized trunks other than fern and fungus; no second generation competed with these ancients. Some of them lay fallen, suddenly occupying their astonishing dimensions, like downed airliners. The path divided to circumvent the base of one, the cake of its roots thirty feet in diameter. He Already Dead / 239

walked around the butt and alongside the deteriorating length of it for two hundred paces. He’d come farther into the grove now than he needed, he was certain of that. Ahead he made out shafts of light where the younger forest resumed.

He turned directly to his right, found the edge of the grove, and threaded along this border between two eras until he spotted the creek.

He followed the creek upstream to the cabin. Behind the house the grove maintained its immense twilight, though he himself stood amid a sunny thicket of sapling acacias, and in back of him the skyline opened all the way to the sea.

Through the cabin’s north window he saw William Fairchild sitting with his feet up on his dining table and his hands locked behind his head.

Van Ness set the pillowcase at his feet, opened it and removed the gun, and then looped the pillowcase through his belt so as not to forget it here. For these simple movements he could hardly find the strength.

The coursing of sugars unpent in his blood by adrenaline was turning him dizzy. His extremities fizzed and his ears rang. To decrease his intake of oxygen he opened his mouth and panted rapidly. Instantly as he thought he had the balance for it, he moved to the door and pushed it open. Though Fairchild’s shape was at rest, he’d screwed his mouth to one side, one eye squinting, in an expression of puzzled thought; from between his lips a pencil jutted. He removed it and lowered his hands and put his feet on the floor, but he seemed to require some effort to get his attention back to the time and place.

“Can I help you? Excuse me. Can I help you?” When he saw the gun he turned away in flat rejection as he might have turned from a dirty photo or a wicked gesture.

Van Ness walked close, leveled the Smith & Wesson at the back of the head, and depressed the trigger — Fairchild hunched and winced and bits of blood and bone slung like slobber from his jaw as Van ushered him, with fanfare and fireworks, into a neighboring actuality.

For a few seconds the killer held the gun aloft exactly as the recoil had positioned it. He put it to his own head. One.

Two.

Three.

The pin smacked the cap. The cartridge whispered irresolutely. He could hardly hear it for the deafness created by the first shot. He 240 / Denis Johnson

tossed the weapon down beside the corpse’s empty hands. It went on hissing.

Twenty seconds later the gun banged off, skipped across the table’s surface, whirled around facing him with smoke issuing from its muzzle.

He walked out — he thought he noted a certain breath-held quality to the Pacific, and because he was standing on a grade the very sea seemed to tilt downward from the horizon as he turned himself toward Carter’s Landing Road in yet another universe, laughing.

Taylor Merton noted that today even down by the water the weather felt almost tropical beneath the blue sky.

Weather you could feel between your fingers. One big cloud had caught in the hills northeast of the Safeway parking lot, where the demonstration was under way; otherwise they had a moment too hot for a policeman’s uniform. He wished he’d come undercover, in shorts and a baggy T-shirt.

All these people had stayed hidden since 1975, when they’d finally succeeded in getting America to lose in Vietnam. Not too many of them, about thirty dinosaur hipsters who appeared to have gathered in protest of the president’s policies, policies of which they had no understanding whatsoever, as well as a couple dozen shoppers just pausing as they cruised by, and a bunch of kids smoking cigarettes and riding skate-boards. Speakers croaking like frog after frog, speaking out against anything, now that a bullhorn was available. Everybody had a theory and nobody had a plan. Yelling now about the possibility of oil rigs going up offshore — well, he supposed that related, at least tangentially, as the Gulf trouble had started over oil.

A man in rags and a Rasta cap and a dozen yardlong blond braids with bells on the ends, his feet in slippers with the tips curling up, his eyes as empty and blue as outer space, danced heel and toe with his arms outstretched, danced like a Hindu god. He stopped still and smiled and pitched over directly backward, making a mysterious percussive sound on the pavement with his head. Merton was glad.

Two teenaged girls sang, “All we are saying — is give peace a chance,” three times and then stopped.

A crowd had closed around the blond Rastafarian. Among them Merton spied his own wife, Kimberly.

Like a flagstaff they upraised him to the vertical. Your coma, Already Dead / 241

Merton thought, is now public and recognized. But the man hadn’t stopped smiling. “That was a thing!” Kimberly came over. “He’s all right.”

“I doubt if that’s possible. What do you think you’re doing?”

“Doing?”

He’d made her mad just like that. He looked away.

The litter can was full and letting out little kites of jetsam into the wind. A kid whose mother’s boyfriend he’d once arrested skate-boarded past, smiling at Merton and scratching the tip of his nose with his middle finger.

He linked arms with his wife. “So you came.”

“They’re going to make war over oil.”

“Yeah. Well. Everybody’s out here squawking, but your real vote goes in your tank. We vote with our dollars.”

“You sound like a cop. I hate to say it, hon, but you do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Above it. Aloof. Seen it all, no more passion for you. People are monkeys.”

“Martians.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah. They are. Let’s get behind a bush and do it.”

“You’re on duty!”

“One Martian to another. I’d consider it an honor. I’m here to service the public.”

A man he’d arrested last month for assault with a beer pitcher stood in the pickup’s bed with the bullhorn dangling at his hip, speaking without benefit of its juice: “The president has one job. Lie. Lie like hell.

The Joint Chiefs have one job. Kill. Kill ’em all. I did a tour in the marines, and that’s what it’s all about, it is not about anything else, folks, it’s about killing. If we continue to let these assholes solve our problems then that’s what we’re gonna get for the rest of history — lying and killing, killing and lying. Away with government!” He raised the bullhorn to his fat beard. “ANARCHY! ANARCHY! ANARCHY! ANARCHY!” Nobody else took up the chant, and he smiled around and handed the device down to someone else — to Kimberly.

She stepped up to take the man’s place. She’d gotten heavy, ungraceful, particularly in the hips and thighs. Merton didn’t mind, not often, anyway, but now he minded. Kimberly raised the horn, 242 / Denis Johnson

spoke in a thin piping tone, examined the equipment, got the button right. “I JUST WANT TO ADD MY VOICE,” she said. “LET’S NOT

HAVE THIS WAR.” She lowered the thing, looked around at expectant neighbors, lifted it to her mouth. “I DON’T KNOW WHAT ELSE TO

SAY BUT THAT. THANK YOU.”

A few old acidheads applauded. They’d gotten up out of their graves to attend this thing. Around them orbited two kids on bikes, shot forward stiff-legged over the handlebars like gargoyles or bowsprits, hopping the curbs. He drilled them with a glance and waved his finger and shook his head, and at that moment elected, forever in his soul, to quit the police before much longer and run against the mayor. Kimberly could go to work. She had a nursing license.

Fairchild zigzagged the small room in the Gualala Hotel, holding up his whites by the waist. “Where’s my belt?

Where’s my belt?”

“You look like a monkey in his cage,” Melissa said.

“I’m happy to amuse you.”

“A chim pan zee.”

“Delighted you’re delighted.” He opted for getting his shirt on, snatched it from the floor, and uncovered the belt beneath it. Just these white socks — just these canvas shoes — these laces — these slow purgat-orial tortures. “I believe we’re way the hell past checkout,” he said.

She pulled the sheet up taut over her head.

The intimations of her shape and the blindness and innocence of her intimated face; and suddenly he wasn’t terrified anymore.

“I know everything.”

“Oh! My God! Are you starting again?”

“I just want you to know I know.”

“Then wonderful! Maybe you didn’t realize that I realize that you realize!”

Leaning against the door frame, he put his face in the crook of his arm and laughed.

“Get out!”

“Take off your shroud and look at me.”

“Get out!”

Downstairs he searched for someone at the desk whom he might Already Dead / 243

inform that he wasn’t paying for another day. But they were all out back gambling or in the john sniffing paint. Bills, requests, complaints might be dealt with also in the barroom; but he didn’t want to cross its border. He’d ended up in there last night, and even at this moment, standing before a vase of richly colored flowers, he heard the strains of his own laughter still ricocheting among its walls. And somewhere outside, a robot’s amplified voice crying, Anarchy! Anarchy! Anarchy! —Yesterday Yvonne in the middle of your phony seance the ground opened up. I saw the depth of my danger. I cried out my last words, I shouted my love to my wife. I went to the preacher. I went to my father’s grave. And then to the hotel bar, the cathedral of parched souls with its big screen of heaven and in every hand a cigarette smoking like a nightsome, griefly thurible. I dived deep into the woman I no longer love. And all the time it tasted and sounded like any other day, I went to sleep terrified and woke up falling forever, and only the sight of her beneath the sheet like half a thought, like a tentative scribble, saved me—

But only, he sensed, momentarily. The wooden floorboards boomed under his steps, and he stood outside under a hot blue stratosphere squinting and trying to recognize his car. Something was happening out back, in the region that passed for Gualala’s shopping mall. The fruit stand was trading briskly. Somebody was making a speech through a bullhorn from the back of a pickup truck. A crowd of several dozens had collected. People: shocks of straw, ready to break out in flames, disintegrate into ash. He was seeing too much. Before his eyes a kid on a bike ran over a quarter section of watermelon, turning it to bloody — There it is.

And how good its leather, and how it howls. All the way up to the ridge in second gear.

Off the ridge road he had to go carefully, passing two or three quiet, dusty homes before reaching his brother’s land. He coasted to the side of the drive where it deteriorated into its ruts and little washes, and left the Porsche and set out walking, easily, as it was all downhill. He muddied his knees at the spring halfway along, and continued, wiping the water from his mouth and the sweat from his eyes. When he heard a motor somewhere behind him, he climbed a few yards up the bank to his right, realized he couldn’t get out of sight quickly enough, clambered back down and across the road and huddled in back of a pungent bull pine as a jeep passed by: Billy’s 244 / Denis Johnson

International Scout, and it looked like Clarence Meadows at the wheel.

The vehicle blinked out around the next bend, and Fairchild resumed his own descent through its hovering exhaust. The sweetness of his exile, the shelter of these trees, their surrounding staunch idiocy, he took these things to his heart: he knew what Billy meant when he said the radar couldn’t get him here. He’d give the Porsche to Clarence, give it to him free. If Billy wouldn’t have him in the cabin then he’d camp right here for his lifetime, close by the clean trickling spring.

At the last bend Fairchild paused to watch Clarence, there below, where the path to the cabin joined the drive, walking backward out of the wood, and next standing still and looking at his own hands. He executed a series of dancelike, thwarted maneuvers, as if swarmed by stinging insects. He shouted, “Oh no you don’t!” and turned facing the head of the path and cried, “Bull— shit!” and then feinted to his right, feinted to his left. He turned and looked up at Fairchild, waving both his hands and showing such agony that Fairchild thought he must have burned them.

Fairchild let himself slowly down the road.

Clarence hurried to meet him. “Don’t go down there.”

“I’m not climbing up that hill again. I’ll get him to ride me.”

“Nelson, he’s gone. He’s dead. He’s face-flat on the table with his head shot in. Don’t go down there.”

“Billy?”

“I’m trying to figure out what to do.”

“Wait a minute.”

“No, there ain’t no waiting on this one, he’s dead.”

“No. Just a second.”

“Okay, yeah, I know.”

“Yeah. Wow.”

“Take a minute to get used to it. But get used to it.”

“Wow. Billy. Killed himself!”

“He didn’t kill himself. He wouldn’t do that. He was fighting off those sons of bitches, those rats in his head.”

“Fighting off? With a single-shot thirty-aught-six?”

“He went down with a three-fifty-seven in his hands.”

“God.”

“Either that or a thirty-eight, a revolver about that size, with about a four-inch barrel. That’s all I saw. Maybe five inches.” Already Dead / 245

“Maybe — you’re sure he’s dead? Maybe—”

“He’s dead.”

“Oh, my God. What a day for this world. The whole world.”

“Come on with me.”

“I can’t. I’m gonna…” He gestured downhill, down the snaking road through the quiet wood toward his dead brother.

“I guess you have to.”

“Oh yeah. I mean definitely.”

He went down to the cabin and entered.

Fairchild scurried humpbacked through the brush carrying a great hollow region of storms inside him, in fact a dark where new gods must work vast horrors, the dark that should have been his brother’s life. He had to keep shutting his jaw because his mouth hung open. He wasn’t breathing. He was stopped against a tree’s enormous muteness. A great hairy cedar with rot in its heart. He collapsed to sit at its feet and prayed to live forever in this anonymously peopled wordless place. He fell forward and threw his face against a root, wishing to break his teeth, and lay low as his blood drained downward and left his thoughts, white, skeletal and patterned, flaring before his mind’s eye like sunlight on snow. From it issued the irresistible star-hot purity of his brother’s and father’s deaths and burned every trivial thing to ash and then burned the ashes. The sigh of wind grubbing in the treetops and moving the shadows of clouds and the ocean’s far serrated thunder worked a swift metastasis over the land, and he suddenly experienced this dirt as the place of his life, and the outer world as something to be visited as with a ticket. That quickly his troubles divested themselves of his complicity.

He found his feet below him and watched them move, listened to the syncopation of his breaths and his steps. He shortened a dry stick of alder across his knee and hiked at a rapid march up the track toward the ridge road, and it began to seem as if he were turning the earth, dragging it toward and shoving it behind him with his staff. The more breathless and strengthless he felt as he climbed, the happier he became.

He consciously desired for his eyeballs to burst from his efforts. He wanted his lungs to rupture. When he gained the ridge road he tossed aside his walking stick and broke into a trot. At the sounds of an approaching vehicle he changed course, left the road, and tore at a sprint into a thicket of manzanita that grappled with 246 / Denis Johnson

him until he went down, scratched and punctured in his flesh, and couldn’t get himself up. He lay in this gnarled embrace with his left cheek in the dirt, inhaling and exhaling.

— That gun.

After a while, as much as half an hour, he turned onto his back and was surprised to identify his thoughts as his thoughts and to recognize himself as the same person he’d always been.

— Oh gun. I know you.

He sat up, located his shirttail, wiped at his face and neck. He wobbled to his feet and stood still, getting his balance on the earth.

— That was my gun.

Following his own course where he’d broken along through the chaparral, he took to the road again.

Some two miles north, at the intersection with Shipwreck Road, he turned left and commenced a mild curving decline toward the lowering sun, paralleling the panicked ascent he’d recently accomplished.

Within twenty minutes he’d reached Wilhelm Frankheimer’s driveway.

He crossed the yard beside an old VW van looking rather like the Sheep Queen’s, with its purple peace and yin-yang logos and its bristle-textured sunburst-yellow paint job; passed among the stacks of scrap lumber, the two rusted MG sports cars and the mangled Ford Econoline, a pile of half-tools, a mountain of rebar and cables and chains; and would have knocked at the door had he not heard Melissa gasping in her characteristic way somewhere in the house. He stepped away from the stoop and looked through the window, across the living room and beyond, through an open doorway into Frankheimer’s study, at the sight of them making love. And superimposed on it, his own reflection in the glass.

He brought himself into focus: translucent voyeur, like a ghost on his widow’s wedding night. A thing removed to clarity.

In the living room someone talked: the TV was running: two scrupulously finished men in conversation, each leaning into the camera when speaking so that he appeared to be gazing into the study at the male and female joined there. Beautiful how huge he was and she how small.

Reeling and rocking in the vampire light. They occupied the couch.

Frankheimer kept his left hand flat on the floor to support his weight and with his right hand gripped the windowsill, jamming his loins repeatedly against hers so that her frail legs flapped like ropes Already Dead / 247

and her little hands touched along his ribs as if seeking for something lost. Fairchild couldn’t see her face. Frankheimer’s head and shoulders stuck far beyond the arm of the divan, and she was somewhere under him, gasping, sobbing. Beyond them, past the end of the divan and Frankheimer’s fantastically large feet, stood a set of shelves, and on it some sort of small engine, ribbed and greasy. Nearer to Fairchild, the living room looked in process, half-assembled in its walls and floor, and he noted also the grimy raised fireplace near the dining room’s entrance, and on the dining room table a fat happy jar of peanut butter and a knife like a jaunty feather sticking out, and a plastic bag of bread, its ties loosed and the loaf unaccordioned onto the tabletop, a brand he surely recognized—“Ezekiel 4:9” it was called, after the biblical verse from which it took its recipe — wheat, barley, lentils, millet — a combination from which, Melissa was thus assured, emanated the finest nutrient powers. It was the prescription’s exotic antiquity that convicted her, having reached her here across the many ages in her twentieth-century skinniness. It wouldn’t have done to point out that her credulousness on this score unzipped the whole overstuffed question of the rightness of other biblical prescriptions — had they, or had they not, known what’s good for us? How about the stoning of adulterers? Should I be fingering around my feet for a big old rock? But her thoughts ranged on the same brief leash as anybody else’s anyway, such was the philosophizing of America, merely to survey its inconsistencies, its gaps and plunges, was to invite a bad dose of vertigo— and the man smothering her: he’d seen him just the other day, no more than a glimpse of looming strangeness as he, Fairchild, slowed for the curve before the gas station in Anchor Bay, and he, Frankheimer, had not looked well, looked like one to be shunned, untouchable even by the beauty of his surroundings, the sun piercing the moment, the fish-boats bobbing in a painful yellow glare, and the man’s music, even, seemed to follow him at a distance, catching up reluctantly as he tottered beside the pumps and stared, chewing both his lips, over the sea: the Violent Femmes—“Hallowed Ground”—warped-amerika music, oh those nasty lyrics invoking pat-riarchal sacrifice, lamb’s blood, weeks of psychotic purification in the desert, lonely murders at turnpike rest stops: Don’t you know nothing?

You never tell no one, don’t you know nothing? You never tell no one—

Frankheimer rose up, covered his exquisite body with a ragged robe of brown cloth, headed toward the dining room, shutting 248 / Denis Johnson

behind him the door to the study and closing the robe’s folds over the arc of his sesquipedalian dick. Now they were linked, Fairchild and this giant, Melissa the author of this union and in some sense its off-spring. Now in this woman they were mixed. Fairchild had known him as a plumbing contractor, the kind you’re sorry you hired, who sometimes had to be rousted out of this very house, where he sat surrounded by his weird books and theories, the kyrie eleison on his stereo, the cocaine and the channeling, the people inside his walls. Now they were married.

— I’m convinced of it, everybody’s dead inside. Jerking, empty carcasses. Their souls have gone out like lights.

Fairchild knocked on the door. He watched through the window as Frankheimer went about lighting his fire. He knocked again. Drew back a foot to kick at the door and then his guts subsided and he tapped on the window. Frankheimer must have made him out, if vaguely, beyond the glass. He raised one finger and crossed to the door and opened it.

“Well. Here’s somebody I don’t owe money to.”

“Can I come in?”

“That might be interesting. Sure.”

He left Fairchild to shut the door after himself and reached to pull the cord at the window and shut the drapes. Now it was nearly dark in here. Frankheimer perched on the stone lip of the fireplace and picked up a hurricane lamp and occupied himself with the business of getting them some light.

“A little early for curtains,” Fairchild said—“or a little late,” and sat some feet away in an easy chair with his hands in his lap.

Without having to stand up to accomplish this, Frankheimer set the lantern on the mantel. The living room wasn’t in process at all. It had served as ground for some manner of apocalyptic visitation. “Yeah.

PG&E resents me. The power’s off. I haven’t been functioning.”

“But didn’t I just hear the TV? Among other things?”

“It’s been off for two minutes. They don’t turn you off till you’re in the middle of a program.”

“Not that you were watching.”

From the study, no sound came. He might have confronted her then and there. But he had no curiosity about how she’d act.

Frankheimer said, “This is fun!”

Already Dead / 249

He regarded Fairchild, smiling, and moved away from the fire, as it was quite hot now.

A curious trick of Fairchild’s mind suddenly rendered the fireplace irrelevant, and he witnessed a man seated next to some burning wood.

The man’s eyebrows were arched in a fixed expression of curiosity, and when he leaned back into the shadows the sockets filled with darkness, making him look masked, giving his features the aloof inquisitiveness of a raccoon’s.

“Is your father living?” Fairchild felt moved to ask him.

The giant reached up with thumb and forefinger and removed from his mouth two widely spaced artificial teeth wired to a plastic upper plate. He replaced them and shut his lips around them. “My father’s alive. He’s a Southern Californian. I owe him money.”

“My father’s dead. Three days ago I attended his funeral.”

“Funeral for a snake.”

“For Christ’s sake, you’re talking about my father.”

“He was a snake before he was your father.”

“I’ll tell you something else.”

“Will you.”

“Billy blew his own head off. I just saw him with his brains coming out the back. Sitting at his own table. And I don’t understand it.” The sobs came up now. “I can tell you that much for goddamn sure.” Frankheimer scowled and coughed, but didn’t speak. He used a sliver of redwood to drag something from the fire’s edge. A cigarette butt. He skewered it and put its end into a flame.

“I want to find that friend of yours. And I know goddamn well he’s your friend or at least well known to you, so just fuck any attempt to fucking mislead me, just fuck that.”

“Okay. Consider it fucked.”

“Carl Van Ness. Where is he.”

“Unknown.”

“Give him up. He’s dead sooner or later.”

“Sooner’s fine with me.”

“You think I’m that gullible.” Fairchild raised his voice. “Hi, Melissa!” He stared at Frankheimer. “I know she’s there.”

“She won’t come out.”

“I know that too.”

Frank brought his cigarette butt to his lips, puffed up a glow. “Did Billy really kill himself?”

250 / Denis Johnson

“Billy. He really really did.”

“You saw him.”

“All messed up and completely dead, I mean it.”

“Shot?”

“Yes.”

“Did they say it was suicide?”

“They? The authorities? The authorities who authorize nothing? They don’t even know he’s dead.”

“Maybe it wasn’t him who pulled the trigger.”

“Maybe it was Carl Van Ness.”

“If that’s what you really think, don’t worry. I don’t care, pal, I’d roll over on him in a heartbeat, but I don’t know his whereabouts.”

“Is Van capable of that in your opinion?”

“Oh yeah. He’ll end up at Quentin. In the gas chamber.”

“Yeah?”

“No question. He’s all twisted up. He’ll see. Van worked this strange trick on himself a long ways back. I’ll tell you how to understand it.

He’s not psycho, not warped, wasn’t brought up bad, no. He’s not corrupted by this or that, like a politician, or a priest. But it’s like this. Did you ever get a thing going with yourself where, let me make up an example, you start to feel that if you tie the left shoe first, something bad’s gonna happen, so you tie the right shoe first? Then you’re about to catch the doorknob with your right hand, but no, that’s gonna fuck things up, so you have to”—he made a motion—“gotta use the left hand. Gotta pay with this dollar, leave this other dollar alone. Can’t scratch my head till I count to five. Stuff like that all day long?”

“Some days. Many days. Quite often.”

“So what do you do to keep from turning into one big neurotic knot?”

“Me? I resist.”

“Exactly, man. You say fuck it. You override the impulse as a general thing. That’s where Van is at, right there, but on another level, much further on down. He’s turned that inside out. It’s genius. He overrides any override, see boy? He actualizes every impulse. Years ago he started this — I knew him — we were comrades — I’m privy to this. Man. He’s made himself into a knife. Just cuts right on through. Do it, don’t think twice. That’s his idea of freedom.”

“You’re absolutely right. I recognize him there. You’re right.” Already Dead / 251

“I don’t admire it. Just on paper. No tragedies on paper. But life ain’t paper.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Yeah. He’s not a crook — he’s a demon. Transformed from the flesh.”

“He’s beyond good and evil.”

“Right, how many’s that — four words. He read four words of Nietzsche and ran out and built a life.” Frankheimer laughed now. “I was the one who made the mistake of introducing him to Nietzsche.”

“Nietzsche! I shit on Nietzsche. Have you ever tried to spell Nietzsche? Good luck!”

The door to the study opened. Melissa came out, looking at neither man, and sat by the fire staring into it. Fairchild leaned forward. He held out his hands for her to see. “I have been inauthentic. This isn’t me.”

She looked up at the ceiling and sang out, “Right now, it’s impossible!”

Fairchild wept. “Nothing can hide it from me now: I loved my father.

I love my wife. I know what love is. I see what it is—” Apologetically, with his dirty forearm, he wiped at his lips and nose.

Melissa and Frank were like two spectacularly unmatched andirons, he on the raised hearth and she on the floor.

“You don’t know how tiny you are,” Fairchild told her.

Frankheimer laughed. Melissa regarded her knees and very nearly smiled.

“Let’s think about this,” Frankheimer said. “You up for that?”

“Thinking?”

“About Van Ness. You really want him? All his life, he’s worked the water. Water is his element.”

At half past six, very near to sunset, Navarro turned onto the road down to Arena Pier with his stomach growling.

Mo waited up at her place with two ribeye steaks, but he had to take care of this thing — because Merton had received the call, taken his own pulse, and diagnosed himself with a headache, putting Navarro’s own status at on-call and unfed. Also pissed off. But as he rolled past the water-treatment facility and left behind its tainted atmosphere and felt himself dropping out of sight of the town itself, dropping into the twilight and into the quiet of an hour that truly felt like 252 / Denis Johnson

autumn, his irritation gave over, and he was surprised to find himself drifting with a sickly and fascinated heart in the big machine along the flanks of tattered homes. Where the hills on either side opened out toward the harbor, the haphazard rows of rootless dwellings, trailers founded on cinder blocks and unmatched rounds of timber, and the kennels with their wire fences bellied out or torn, and the trucks without tires or windshields, and the axles, engines, and appliances stashed under fraying plastic, and the wood smoke, and the bleary windows, all of it tugged at him as if he’d lived here once and missed it ever since.

In this light it looked like somebody’s idea of art, maybe his own. It all seemed all right — depressing, yet special — it all seemed out of reach.

At the road’s end the new pier, its wood still clean, strode out over the purple water. He drove down there and stood by the cruiser’s open door studying the harbor’s surface, but saw nothing floating on it other than dark quiet vessels, no more than a dozen of them. He got behind the wheel again.

The trailers had no numbers, but according to his directions it was only a matter of locating the one with an aluminum canoe out front.

This he managed, and got out of the car and stood listening to small sounds which, by their separateness, made everything seem all the more quiet: a voice; a faucet; another voice; a refrigerator door; a TV

hiccuping through the channels. A dog lived under the canoe, a small husky that didn’t bark at him but just pulled at its chain, panting. Its bucket had toppled and rolled beyond its reach. Navarro set it right, and the animal plunged its head into the dark to chop at the inch of water remaining.

He knocked on the door in anticipation of the usual tableau, a couple of sad angry women, a couple of terrified kids, a couple of exhausted drunks with ripped shirts and rug burns. Only this time one of them would be wet from the sea.

But when a woman in a long quilted robe opened the door, the space behind her undisturbed and almost somber, he sensed he may have awakened her from a nap.

“Katrina Wells?”

“Mom.”

“Okay. Mom. Who’s fighting, Mom?”

“Mom called it in.”

“Anybody requiring assistance inside your house?”

“Let me locate my slippers.” The woman turned away, keeping the Already Dead / 253

door open with her hand, and next came out wearing black rubber boots on her feet. “She’s over here.”

He made way for her and followed across the yard to the adjacent trailer, the door of which she slapped with the flat of her hand. “Mom!

Your police have arrived!” She opened the door herself and went through. Navarro stood at the threshold and looked inside to find no recuperating combatants, only a teenaged boy on a kitchen stool, and a woman standing beside the gas range and saying, “Hah! Hah!”

“Katrina Wells?”

“Hah!” She gestured toward the youngster with her cigarette, which she held in the V of her thumb and index, the palm of her hand cupped beneath it. He’d seen monocled Nazis in the movies holding their cigarettes like that.

“I tell him fix his hair, his hair is silly. So he put on a hat. But the hat is silly, too! You see?”

“You’re not my mother,” the boy said.

“What is this about?” Navarro asked.

“You take your time, hah?”

“Previous shift took the call.”

“Well, he left a long time. He go. He gone.”

“She looks sillier than me,” the boy said. His grandmother, if that was the relationship, wore baggy jeans and what Navarro guessed must be a Mexican vest, and those pug-nosed duck boots. She looked like anybody. And the boy’s hat looked like anybody’s hat.

“You reported a fight?”

“Fighting. Two men.”

“Two people,” her daughter said, “maybe two men.”

“Two people! Men are people!”

“Wait, now. Who witnessed this?”

“I witness this. I.”

“Just her,” the daughter said.

“Did you recognize them?”

“They stand on the pier. Fighting.”

“Were you on the pier at the time?”

“No. Just here, from the kitchen. He had a stick, a pipe, something.”

“Okay, you think two men. Probably.”

“He hit him like a baseball.”

254 / Denis Johnson

“Then what?”

“He fell in! Then he stand there waiting to see is he coming up or is he drown.” She clamped her cigarette between her lips, hunched her spine, and raised her clasped hands to the level of her right ear. “Like this. Batter up!”

“What is your nationality, Mrs. Wells, may I ask you?” She took a step closer, fixing him dead-on with a hooded gaze.

“I — em — a—United States.”

In order to keep from laughing, Navarro opened his mouth and breathed through it. His training had included this. “You a baseball fan?”

Mrs. Wells vigorously nodded, sucking at her cigarette, and spoke through her smoke. “Very much. Eighty-eight I saw Oakland sweep Boston. I was there in Candlestick. Game number four.”

“Are you Italian maybe?”

“She’s not Italian,” the boy said. “She’s Slavic, and she’s crazy.”

“My dad married her about five years ago. He brought her from Yugoslavia.”

“Yugoslavia! So what?” Mrs. Wells asked.

“So one guy knocked another guy off the pier with a pipe or a stick and waited to see if he came back up. Did he?”

“Who? What?”

“Did the man who fell in come back up?”

“What am I telling you? No! Please understand me — this description is a major crime. I witness a murder.”

“And the guy with a stick—”

“Him? He throws it away. And I don’t know after that. I called the telephone to report my findings.”

“Did you see him leave the area?”

“I didn’t see — no. But he left — yes. I heard a car.”

“But you didn’t see him get into the car, or see who was in the car that you heard, is that right?”

“God! I’m sorry, but how did they give you a job on the police? What am I saying to you? He’s drown in there right now! Go get him out!”

“I already had a look. There’s nobody floating in the immediate vicinity.”

“Hah! But what about if he’s far away?”

“Exactly. That’s just the thing. So listen to me now, Mrs. Wells. I Already Dead / 255

want to nail it down as to when this happened, because if there’s a chance somebody’s floating around out at sea who can still be rescued and revived, then I’m gonna have to call for an operation that’s gonna keep a lot of people up working all night and run the county and state about fifteen thousand dollars. How long ago did you see this fight?”

“Thirty minutes. Nobody came!”

“Thirty minutes at least?”

“Even forty-five minutes. You didn’t come! Then you came and had a nice long discussion! About Yugoslavia! About baseball!”

“Don’t anybody leave, please. I’ll take another look.” He drove back the hundred meters or so to the water’s edge and sent the spotlight’s shaft along the pier’s pilings. The water sent it back. He left it lighting the pier, lifted the mike from its cradle. Cleared his throat.

How would they be addressed? “Boats on the harbor”? He thumbed the button: “Boats on the harbor. Any occupants of boats in the harbor. Is there anyone on any boat out there? ” And then he added as if ashamed,

“This is the police.”

Among the trailers to his right he noticed doorways lighting up and one or two silhouettes in them; but the boats only floated in the dark.

Taking his flash, he left the car and walked to the phone booth in front of the Cove Restaurant, a large building that had been closed for some weeks in anticipation of an overhaul. He squinted at the water as he dialed Merton at his home.

“Mrs. Merton?”

“No. It’s me. Who’s that? Navarro?”

“Yeah. Look—”

“Did I sound like a woman?”

“No. I don’t know.”

“What’s going on? You get to the pier?”

“I’m at the pier right now. Look, can I get a boat out here with a good spot on it? Just a private boat, gimme a suggestion who to call. Somebody may or may not have witnessed a possible attack nearly an hour ago where a guy went in the drink, possibly unconscious.”

“I thought it was a trailer-court beef.”

“It is and it isn’t.”

“Man overboard, huh?”

“I wouldn’t want to call in the Coast Guard or whoever. I guess he’d be ashore by now or drowned, one of the two, huh?” 256 / Denis Johnson

“Unless he revived, and washed out past the easy water. So then he’d be swimming around out there.”

“Shit.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Goddamn it.”

“Did you check the shore?”

“I’m at the shore. I’m sweeping my flash around as we speak. A lot of rocks is all I see.”

“You better get me a corpse, or we’re gonna have a major production.”

“Could he last an hour? I mean, it’s pretty cold water.”

“It’s pretty cold, yeah.”

“Could he last?”

“I’d say no.”

Before he went back among the trailers he walked the pier, a solid and expensive structure some two hundred yards long, with a kiosk halfway down, and he burned the water with his light, but couldn’t break its surface. No ghostly hand ascended. The rocks all looked like rocks. The tide’s edge came not much closer than beneath the kiosk.

Katrina Wells stood on her doorstep when he drove up. He rolled down his window and motioned her over. “I’m gonna go right back down there,” he said, “but let me just check this with you. The two guys fighting. They must have been this side of the cabin, am I right?”

“The cabin?”

“The hut there, I guess it’s the harbormaster’s office?”

“They were this way.”

“Yeah, or you couldn’t have seen them. Less than halfway down the pier.”

“Close to the cabin. This side.”

“Okay. Don’t disappear on me, I’ll be back.” He left his window down and drove back to the pier with the varied aromas of dinnertime coming in to torture him, and he got back on the phone to Merton.

“You do sound like a woman.”

“Who’s this, please?”

“It’s me again.”

“What is it now?”

“What do you mean, what is it? It’s the same damn thing.”

“Are you loving it, John?”

“Listen. Which way is the tide going?”

Already Dead / 257

“It’s against us, as usual.”

“I’m serious. If it’s going out, I don’t know. But if it’s coming in, then the guy couldn’t have hit the water because there’s no water there. And if he didn’t hit the water, then he must’ve boogied on his own steam, because he’s for sure not down there now.”

“John, all this is terribly confusing. Just call in the cavalry, will you?”

“Is that your decision?”

“Get them all out there. I want frogmen and airmen and everybody else. The fire volunteers and everybody.”

“How much is this gonna cost the township?”

“Okay, don’t call the volunteers. They’re the only ones we have to reimburse in real money. Just call me back on the unit so they can pick it up on the scanner, and they’ll turn up. They’ll be all over the pier inside of thirty minutes. And better call the cafe.”

“The cafe’s closed.”

“Not the restaurant. The cafe on Main. Tell them to stay open.”

“Jesus, man.”

“Folks gotta eat. And jot down your every thought, word, and deed, because the town council is gonna grill you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. Till you’re crispy and tasty and just right.”

“What about you?”

“They love me. They hate you.”

“I’ve ascertained that he didn’t hit the water.”

“He didn’t hit the water.”

“Nobody hit the water. We do not have a water emergency.”

“That’s excellent. All I can say is I’m glad you didn’t call me on the unit.”

“I may be stupid, but I’m not insane.”

“John, are you loving it?”

“I’m ejaculating quarts.”

“Call me back on the unit. I wanna play with the druggies.” Merton took no small pleasure in discussing, for the benefit of growers he felt were scanning the police band, fictitious impending federal sweeps and searches.

This case was closed. Navarro wanted his supper and he wanted his lover. He determined that his best course was to call Mo on the pay phone and ask her to fire up the steaks. He thanked Mrs. Wells and assured her that everything had been taken in hand.

258 / Denis Johnson

“You found somebody? I told you!”

“Well, if there’s somebody out there waterborne, he’s floated out of sight. We’ve alerted the Coast Guard.”

“But you have to get out there, you must look.”

“Mrs. Wells,” he said, “my car don’t float. We’ve alerted the Coast Guard.”

About eight, just as they were sitting down with two steaks and two candles between them, he had to dress and leave Mo for a noise call. In a house not a hundred yards from the station, he found teenagers rioting happily among fumes of hashish and spilt liquor. The parents of the two brothers hosting this affair were in Missouri at a funeral.

Finding for once a little justice in his job — they’d spoiled his evening, he’d spoil theirs — he delivered a speech, took down names, made the young girls cry. By the time he’d phoned all the homes and the children had bent low to sit in cars beside silent, angry fathers and be taken away to hell, it was past eleven. The chance to mistreat young idiots had snapped the day’s grayness. He returned to Mo’s place jovial. He felt too hungry to bother changing until he’d had some food. Mo put the steaks in her microwave and poured him a glass of wine, but before he could sip of it even once, the beeper blew. He had to go down to the Coast Highway for a vehicle-pedestrian accident not far north of Shipwreck Road.

CHP had it well in hand when he arrived, and in a dewfall that sparkled in the crimson billows of road flares two patrolmen and four EM techs were just raising a big man in the cradle of their arms onto a gurney.

Navarro pulled to the shoulder with the cars of stalled travellers and let the ambulance pass, then gave the cherry a spin and blinked his headlights. One of the patrolmen waved while the other stalked the pavement, letting out tape from a measure. Navarro chose to interpret these signs as his dismissal. He turned the cruiser around and drove back to Mo’s, thinking to himself that he was almost certain the large victim had been Wilhelm Frankheimer.

In his sleep Fairchild turned over, and water poured into his mouth. He’d experienced dreams of such terrors. Yet this seemed like waking. Not sleep, but numbness. A vast stampeding liquid clucked about his head and dragged at his right sleeve, turning Already Dead / 259

him over again and smothering him again. In order to wake himself he screamed: a distant sound, played back at reduced RPM, a slowmotion voice that suddenly he heard quite loudly as his head surfaced.

His eyes opened on the brilliant coast of Mendocino County a quarter-mile distant, brilliant for its springing up into view, but actually washed in the sunset. Bald-faced cliffs, and the flat scalp of trees raked over toward the ocean, and — as again the currents upended and released him — a sky without planets or stars, and the moon no more than a rind, all this too daylit to be a dream. Facing the empty horizon now. Any strength frozen out of him. Echoing off to his right, the sound of water sucking at rock. He willed to swim his way to the sound, but his hands stirred around his hips only by the action of the seething liquid. His ear raked against something painful, and an unaccountable spasm sent his left hand flying toward it. He draped his arm over an outcropping and thus kept his breath above the eddies. Let the motion lift him.

Moving, it seemed, entirely by the power of a visceral desire. Virtually without the ability even to raise his foot. Slowly took himself aboard.

Rested in the lee of the rock and the shadow of its brow. Spray coming around the corner made a rainbow. The sun slowly found him. He lay back on the rock and his flesh felt for any amount of warmth where the late light touched it. No other sensation reached him.

The left side of his head began to feel warmer than any other part of him, and before long it produced a pulse that became an unbearable black booming in his skull. His legs and back began hurting, and all this he took as a signal that some kind of life had been granted him. By rolling onto his left side and clutching at a knob of stone, he raised himself slightly and took his bearings, anxiously mindful of the sun’s descent, of the coming darkness in which he’d be stranded. This rock lay not too far off Schooner Beach, south of Point Arena — he’d come half a mile along the water and hardly participated in the process. On the shore stood a palomino pony, bareback and free, alternately staring off toward the sunset and nodding at tufts of grass. From here three rocks made a line generally southeast toward it. He could flounder from one to the next and deliver himself back to the shallows. From there he didn’t know. His legs might move him toward the land, or he might be carried back strengthless into the swells.

260 / Denis Johnson

He put his face to the flat, glimmering debouchment and sucked until his lips were numb, then got upright and vomited weakly and went on climbing the steady rise alongside Schooner Creek to the Coast Highway. The exertion warmed him, but the hires of this incredible day came final as he reached the lay-by at the road, and he closed himself in a sturdy government outhouse, sitting on the cessbox, leaning sideways into the corner, pulling his feet up out of the ventilating draft across the floor, sleeping while the chill worked back into his bones and later waking aghast, baffled, in this chamber like an upright coffin.

He fought to his feet, banged out into the blustery dark and oriented himself. Rather than use the facilities, he stood next to the cubicle working at the zipper of his damp whites, and urinated at length on the ground before setting out south along California 1. When he heard a vehicle approaching he stood still with his thumb raised, but as the lights topped the rise he took himself into the roadside trees and hid while it passed by. A half mile along, a raincloud caught him coming up the coast. It blew over in minutes.

Just north of the property he came on the site of a recent accident, long white painted lines intersecting with skid marks, designs of blood on the pavement, the scattered stub ends of highway flares. A secret aftermath. None of it easily discernible in the night. The lights turned off on a party where everyone’s been arrested. A party where the child has died. The birthday a deathday, the roman candles deranged by the wind and dribbling brimstone.

He veered from the path to the front door and stood in the slight illumination of the living room window, looking in; warm now from his hike of several miles, overly warm, and breathing hard. Still wet and stinking of the sea. Smelling of brine and spilt diesel. His reflection a mist-like darkness in the glass. — I’m the Coast Silky now. He put his face against this faceless other’s. Saw nobody in the dim living room.

He heard her voice inside, talking low, and sensed by its tones the presence of an evil guest. Then he saw her pass the window, silhouetted in the aura from a candle. Just a shadow. This was now absolutely the way of all. — I’ve made a world in which the men are Already Dead / 261

sinister and the women completely opaque. In the shifting dark now shapes stir.

He tapped the glass with his fingertips. “Yvonne.” If she wasn’t alone he would leave. Again he tapped, and the shape came close. “Yvonne. It’s Nelson.”

“Nelson?”

“Nelson Fairchild. I want to see you. Is anybody there?” She turned and went to the front door. He sighed and tapped against the glass again, but she didn’t hear.

He met her where she stood in the doorway looking right and left into the dark. “Nelson—”

“Who’s with you?”

She backed away into the house as if she thought he’d do her violence.

Stood in the center of an oval rug of Persian design in the center of the room, her legs silhouetted in billowy pantaloons and her midriff bare, like the denizen, the chief wife in fact, of some pampering seraglio. She looked strained, even woozy, to the point that his own condition went unmentioned now.

Ah, your true music: a tuneless keening in the woods.

He followed her in. “Who’s here?”

As he shut the door against the night she sat on a hassock by the woodstove and hugged herself and sighed, averting her face.

“Where’s Ocean?”

“Ocean.”

“The young friend. I thought she lived here.”

“Ocean is gone.”

“There’s something wrong here.”

“It doesn’t involve you.”

“Maybe it does.”

“No.”

“I think it does.”

She sighed once again, left off embracing herself and held her palms out toward the stove. She turned her face from it to gather in the sight of him at last.

“You’re wet.”

“I walked here from — from where I fell in. From where I got out.” She stood up, beckoning. “Sit here.” He took her place on the hassock and understood none of this. He put the heels of his hands against the sockets of his eyes and lowered his elbows to his knees.

262 / Denis Johnson

Thus he held his head up. He became aware of a cedary incense around him. Maybe sandalwood.

He heard her leaving. Heard drawers in the kitchen. He thought he heard her weeping in there and raised his head.

She came out with a white, flowered dishtowel and draped it gently over the back of his neck and raised its corner to press against his scalp.

“You’re bleeding. Or you were.”

“God, that hurts.”

“I’m just wiping away the blood. Your ear is terribly swollen.”

“I was out, unconscious. I should have drowned.” She sat next to him and with tenderness applied the towel against his wound. “Did you by any chance see the kelpie?”

“Kelpie who?”

“The kelpie. A water sprite. Usually she takes the form of a horse.

She comes to drowning sailors.”

“I saw a horse. Not a sprite. Just a horse. I’m cold.”

“Move closer, then.” She opened the stove’s door a crack and a draft began thrumming up the chimney. She helped him scoot the hassock nearer the stove, and he hunched beside the steadily increasing heat while she draped about him a fancy saddle blanket, blue and purple and scarlet, and held it in place with an arm about his shoulders, a hand on his arm. “The fire has a voice,” he said. He breathed deeply through open, quivering lips. “I’m going to cry.” He tried to urge the sobs along, but his emotion expressed itself in a series of coughs and a fit of shivering.

“No, Nelson. It wasn’t just a horse.”

He was glad of her closeness. The minty currents of her breath.

“I was invited to a prayer meeting tonight.”

“Perhaps that’s where you should be then.”

“Because nobody invited me here, you mean.” She deflected this with a gesture of her hand toward her face.

“Yvonne — what has happened?”

With a graceful turn of her form she left the hassock and lit on the chair it served. She curled her fingers around its arms, but forcefully, until her knuckles bumped up and her hands look gnarled. “What about you? Should I ask what’s happened to you?”

“More than I can tell. That’s why I’m here.”

“I’m not understanding. Why are you here?”

“To make a deal. Any deal. Make a deal for me.” Already Dead / 263

“With whom?”

“Well — your spiritual cohorts. Your angel friends, your demons, I don’t care.”

Apparently in weariness, maybe irritation, she shut her eyes, and at this moment his own sight widened to engulf their surroundings: the three candles in corner nooks giving them what light there was, beside each a brass snuff dish, the wall of bookshelves, the wide venetian blinds, on the facing wall a lamb’s skin dyed red.

As if talking in her sleep she asked, “How did you get wet? Is it raining that hard?”

“I was wet before it rained.”

“Where did you come from? Where’s your car?”

“Nobody knows I’m here. Nobody must ever know I was here.” She opened her eyes on him. “Okay. However you want it.”

“I’m the victim, the object, of not one but two quite separate plots to murder me.”

“And you’re thinking you can — what are you thinking you can do?”

“Whatever can be done.”

“There’s such a thing as karma, you know. You can’t cheat the past.”

“So the future is set, do you mean? I don’t think so.”

“Not the future. But fate.”

“Einstein didn’t think so.”

“Ein stein. Did you ever consider how contradictory you are? I mean self-contradictory in your whole system?”

“I’m confused, desperate and confused. I don’t apologise for it.”

“We live in a universe of space-time. Einstein mapped it to his partial satisfaction. But just like the rest of us, he lived his fate. We know our fate. On some level we know it perfectly. What we can’t foresee is the way our fate conjoins with other fates.”

“And our fate is terrible.”

“Oh, no. It’s beautiful. Only our illusions are terrible. And it’s inevitable that they’ll fall away. But first we have to pierce them. And be pierced by them”—Her voice was shaking, and her hands. “Why didn’t you come to me sooner?”

“Because I don’t like you.”

“You don’t like anyone.” She clutched her hands together. “It’s a mess now. You’re not the only one doomed.”

“You’re scared. You’ve toyed with God, or Satan, or somebody like that—”

264 / Denis Johnson

“You’ve toyed with them—”

“What can I do?”

“Shall I call Randall?”

“Look at me. I’m willing — I’m desperate, I said I was.” She settled back in her seat, shut her eyes and opened them. “Nelson Fairchild — hello. I am Randall MacNammara.”

“Just like that.”

Yvonne’s face smiled. “It’s easy once you know how.” The trouble had left her. Her hands, resting on either arm of the chair, were beautiful again.

He began his dialogue with the void. “You indicated we might speak in private.”

“And here we are.”

“What have you done to my wife?”

“She’s not your wife anymore.”

“What have you done with Winona? Whatever she is to me.”

“She’s nothing to you. She’s no one you’ve ever known.”

“Well then, who is she?”

“Are you familiar with the term ‘walk-in’? Do you know what a walkin is?”

“A closet? A freezer? Come on, will you?”

“Your wife,” Randall said, “is dead.”

“My wife is dead.”

“The person you’ve been dealing with is not your wife. Forget her.”

“Not possible. She’s trying to get me murdered, I think.”

“She may be trying, but she hasn’t contracted to be a killer this life around.”

“And she’s not the only one. I’ve got real hit men on my ass, Mr.

Ghost. And I want you to understand I have no desire to get like you.

Today I swam when I might have drowned. I drank water when I was thirsty. I slept when I was tired. Also I took a great piss. I wish I could go on doing things like that forever.”

“Well, the vocation of hit men is to deny your wish.”

“Can you help me? Can you operate somehow on these — types — these entities—”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Look, can you or can’t you work some changes in our little realm?”

“Nelson Fairchild, I don’t know. It’s never occurred to me. Do you care about changing the dream you had last night?” Already Dead / 265

“Oh, the god damn dream thing! Great!”

“When you’ve been caught in the world of perception you’re caught in a dream. That’s simple enough.”

“Yesterday, you were talking to me about a doppelgänger.”

“A soul twin. Your twin is in error. This error has led your twin into danger of a peculiar kind.”

“Who is it? It’s Carl Van Ness.”

“Your twin makes a basic error in mistaking the self for the universe.

We all use the self as the basic referent. He fails to use any other.”

“You mean he’s self-centered.”

“As long as you don’t mean merely selfish. We’re talking about a failure of perception that amounts to total spiritual blindness and soul-sickness. This person compounds his basic error by believing that the universe started with his birth and ends with his death. If he believes in reincarnations, he believes in reincarnations of the whole universe.

That eliminates karma, relearning, and the law of compensation — since each universe is a closed system, bounded by his lifetime. Through all these universes one after another, the only thread, the only continuity, is his identity. And the thread is endless. He has no destiny.”

“And is that actually true?”

“It’s as he makes it. He’s condemned himself to an unimaginable interval on the current plane.”

“To hell with him, then. But there are two others, two men, out to kill me.”

“And so they will. But they’re not important.”

“I beg your fucking pardon?”

“They’re merely completing a design you began — you yourself began — in an earlier existence. You killed in a previous era, in this one you experience the other side of that. The lesson begun in one life is finished in another.”

“That’s just — ugly! Justice should be rounded off in a single life, if you’re going to have it at all. Otherwise it’s so unfair, so unpoetic.”

“It’s a game, Nelson Fairchild. First you learn offense, now you learn defense.”

“I’m not a gamesman. I look on things as serious.”

“Well, things aren’t serious. But this one thing is. This Devourer.”

“Van Ness.”

266 / Denis Johnson

“The Devourer has possessed a body at the moment of death, and you took it home with you. You invited it in. Now it eats.”

“And I’m lunch.”

“At least you keep your sense of humor.”

“Sure thing. Yes I do.”

“He’s the one to take seriously. The others are just figures in your waking dream.”

“I take my waking experiences as facts. They have a certain logic, anyway. Meanwhile, dreams are jumbles. I know the difference.”

“What you seem to wake up to is just another form of the same world you see in dreams. All your time is spent in dreaming. Your sleeping and your waking dreams have different forms, that’s all…Nelson Fairchild: Do you believe in God?”

“When you get right down to it? Yes. Because I’m nuts.”

“Then let me ask you this: Would God have left the meaning of the world to your interpretation?”

“I assume so. Of course he did. It’s a stupid question, actually.”

“If he did, then it has no meaning. Meaning can’t change from person to person, and still be true. No. If God means something by all this, then only one set of interpretations will suffice. God looks upon the world as with one purpose, changelessly established. And no situation can affect its aim. Everything is in accord with it. Everything.”

“Is there really a God, then?”

“Well, actually, I don’t know. But I believe it more strongly than you possibly can in a chaos of perceptions like a funhouse.”

“I call it reality. I’m stuck with it.”

“Is it real? And are you stuck with it?”

“Randall MacNammara, Ghost Man, I’m ready to make a deal with you — offer you something. Just tell me what.”

“I’ll employ the same analogy again. What could somebody from last night’s dream offer you? Riches and gold? Riches and gold in a dream aren’t riches. They’re just dreams. And the people, places, and things you fear are dreams too. Don’t fear them.”

“Easy for you to say. Couldn’t you stop them?”

“Couldn’t you face them?”

“No! Could you stop them.”

“It’s possible to work some effect.”

“So do it. Hey — just for fun!”

“I’m sure you could locate a wandering bitter entity somewhere Already Dead / 267

between the realms. They like mischief. Mischief and hurt.”

“Then I will. I’ll get me a spiritual vandal.”

“I’m not interested in helping you.”

“Why not? What’s the difference — come on! You can’t, can you?

You’re just a gig, a trick. Yvonne!” he shouted.

She closed her eyes. A minute of silence wore away in the room, which he realized had become unbearably warm. Fairchild shrugged away the blanket and wrapped a corner of it around the stove’s porcelain door handle, and shut it tight. Yvonne said, “I’m tired.”

“Don’t fade on me just yet. What were you just talking about — about mischievous entities.”

“There are such.”

“Get me one on the line, then, how about. Whether I’m sure about all this working or not, I’m out to get these bastards done, okay? I’m out of options.”

“But we don’t know what bargains the two men have made. All their promises will be kept. All their mistakes will be corrected. Whatever they were sent here to fulfill will be fulfilled.”

“Just cast a fucking spell, will you?”

“I don’t cast spells. I can open a channel that leads to their guides. I can make a bargain with their guides — arrange to have them take a shortcut.”

“Which means?”

“Help them reach their destination sooner.”

“Destination?”

“Whatever their fate may be. Probably not a happy one this time around.”

“You mean hire a cosmic hit man?”

“You have to understand. Whatever they’re on this earth to do will be accomplished. If it’s something you fear, then maybe we should leave it alone.”

“Just make a deal. Any deal.”

She put a hand to her forehead, let her touch fall to a gilded lampstand and fingered its intricacies — its cups, its capitals and its flowers. Her fingers found the switch and she turned it on with a spasm of her hand and let down an unflattering light over half her face. Her mouth worked in bewilderment. Then she gave him a tiny, angry smile.

He said, “Randall.”

268 / Denis Johnson

“The tap-in is not Randall.”

“We gonna talk to Randall again?”

“No.”

“No?”

The one he’d sensed from the first, the guest whose presence he’d felt all along, had come into the room with them.

“I am Miran.”

“And who is Miran?” The question hovered unanswerable in the aether.

October 30, 1991

The blind people in prison. Suddenly I think about them, suddenly after all this life, the prisoners who are blind.

How many are there? What’s it like? Does my mother know some blind prisoners? At the facility she works in, they like to call it a facility, it amuses them to call it a detention center, at the ladies’ pen a few dozen miles out of San Francisco, at the north edge of Marin County — at their prison, the gun towers are not the tallest things. They see pines climbing up mountains another nearly two thousand feet, ascending to the peaks and turning around and looking back at them. I’m not sure what I am getting at here but I think it must be important because I got out of bed just as I was at the verge of sleep to write to you about it, Winona.

There is something else. I know you made love to Glen Bolger, John Marks and at least one other person, I don’t know which person, after we were married. You call me weak but if you in your lack of wisdom define strength as the ability to suffer worthless pain, well, all I have to say is oh, fuck you. I can see there’s no real need here to finish sentences or pretend to be articulate. It’s another one of those letters. You start out to do something sane and the next thing you know you’re threatening the mayor’s life or taking hostages in a supermarket.

270

Sometimes on these gray days the past just comes rolling armylike through the fields toward my naked heart. There was a certain person, one man in particular. I was that man. Now I’m not. I’m writing you only in order more terribly to feel

Officer Navarro set the pages aside and took a look at his wristwatch, an Omega designed to work underwater to a depth of several fathoms, though he wasn’t a diver, and he wasn’t pressed for time — had about sixteen hours, if anybody was counting, to burn until work tomorrow morning — but was just interested in how long the dryer might run.

Another three minutes. Or four.

Impatient with the whole process, with repetitions in general, he opened the dryer’s hatch in midcycle and watched the collapse of this galloping carousel. He took out his handkerchiefs and white jockeys.

They’d dried, but his uniform and jeans had not. He let fall another dime and watched them go, his outer garments, these things of cloth all in a whirl and completely absurd.

He thought: I’m going up there. One of them sits two hundred yards from this spot.

He replaced the pages in their envelope and went out to his car, a muscular ’76 Pontiac from whose hood he’d burnished away the gangster Firebird tattoo. Such signifiers he considered a little bit too glorious, a little bit too Mexican. But he liked the power, and he liked the handling. Tossing the white envelope into the child-sized backseat, he got behind the wheel and discovered on the floorboard on the passenger’s side a small green plastic garbage bag containing, as he knew, his three bath towels and two washcloths. He yanked the bag up across his shoulder, and with a sense of struggle, with a sense these repetitions were overcoming him absolutely, with weakened steps, he went back into the Laundromat to start another washer before driving the short distance through the neutral dusk up the hill to the giant’s home.

Wilhelm Frankheimer had recently moved, had rented a small house, a cedar-shake cottage quite familiar to Navarro, just up Anchor Bay’s only east-west street. It looked pretty much the same, but had tipped detectably toward decline. The lawn was shaggy, the drive unswept.

Somebody had broken the flagstones splitting wood out front.

Navarro picked up a headless axe handle and knocked it against Already Dead / 271

the old ship’s bell posted out by the path. He went on to the front door and knocked several times but had trouble getting Frankheimer to acknowledge. Yet he had to be there, the chimney was smoking and he almost never got out, and when he did he got no farther than the store or the cafe.

Somebody inside shouted, “Roll on in.”

Navarro found Frankheimer stretched out near the fire on a plastic deck recliner, wearing an old brown bathrobe and drawing a blanket around his shoulders.

“Take a seat. Mind bringing me a glass of water first? In the fridge.” Navarro obliged him. On the refrigerator, held up by magnets, the school photos of two children fronted his gaze, a little blond girl and a smiling blond boy with a lot of tension in his face.

“Ignore the magic mushrooms in there.”

“I wouldn’t know what they look like.”

“They look like mushrooms.”

He brought Frankheimer the water jug, but Frankheimer only held it in the grip of his big hands. His legs went longer than the chair so that his shins draped down, scarred and lumpy and shiny, like worn wood, and his jaundiced feet rested at delicate angles on the floor. His metal crutches lay on either side of him.

Navarro sat himself in the bay window and, for no reason he could name, savored the ridiculousness of his presence here in this room where he’d lived some of his finest moments. This scene of some of his worst behavior. Mo had kept it beautiful; now the place felt cheap and close and smelled of stubbed-out cigarettes and dirty laundry — smelled as a matter of fact like his own place. He really didn’t care about the psychedelic goddamn mushrooms or, when you got right down to it, any of this man’s crimes.

“You here about the junk I left up there?”

“Not exactly,” Navarro said. “But it was mentioned to me.”

“I’ll get around to it. It was a sudden move. I lost the house.”

“Too bad.”

“No. It’s all for the best. I’m taken care of.” He flung a white gym sock into the fireplace and it started to smoke thickly and then burned.

“You’ll see me dancing tomorrow,” he said.

“At the big fun wedding? What makes you think I’m going?”

“Not you specifically. I was speaking to the whole world.” 272 / Denis Johnson

“Yeah. I’ll be there. On duty though.”

“Dancing on aluminum legs. Stay tuned for that.”

“What caused this?”

“Wheels ran over me.”

“I know. I meant what was the cause of the accident?”

“You didn’t do the report?”

“CHP took care of it.”

“The cause was I was fucked up. More or less sleeping when I was supposed to be awake. Can’t do that, man. You end up in the road. Cars run you down. You spend nine months in plaster. You get six opera-tions.”

“Were drugs involved? Is that what—”

“What did the fucking? Well, ultimately, primarily, it was Yvonne.

Principally it was her although a car is what apparently ran over me.

You know Yvonne? Chiefly it was her.”

Shame and sudden sweat shut Navarro up, and he changed around in his seat.

“So you got stoned. Didn’t look both ways.”

“You currently on duty?”

“No.”

“Is this an official visit?”

“I don’t know.”

Frankheimer grimaced like an ape and put his finger back between his jaws. “I have a sore under my tongue.”

“Well, no, I don’t think it’s really official.”

“Okay. What is it? Social?”

“Maybe we could talk off the record.”

“You’re a cop. I’m a critter.”

Navarro sighed, placed his hands over his knees. “I’m thinking I might resign the first of the month. I’m pretty sure.”

“Gonna stick around? Maybe in some other capacity?” Navarro realized he’d given it no thought — none.

“So what is the subject of our inquiry?” Frankheimer said.

“Carl Van Ness.”

“There’s a name.”

“You guys pretty good friends?”

“Friends? Not by any means.”

“Then what’s the connection?”

“It’s mystical.”

Already Dead / 273

“Yeah?”

“An energy thing.”

“Yeah? How about aside from all that?”

“There’s no connection on this level.”

“What level?”

“The level of this which you call reality.”

“Yeah?” Navarro said. “I don’t call anything reality anymore.”

“I don’t know him.”

Navarro raised his eyebrows at this nonsense.

“I’m telling you the truth, but in a language you don’t understand.”

“Try this. When did you meet him?”

“Oh, man. Lemme see, that’s gotta be twenty-one, twenty-two years ago. We shipped together a couple years, three or four years. He kept in touch, maybe one letter per year, or just a card. Just a card addressed to Frankenstein. Then, when he showed up — that was it. It wasn’t the same guy.”

“You had a falling-out.”

“It was not the same person. It was a walk-in.”

“A walk-in what?”

“Sometimes a person dies, and before the soul’s hardly out, another one walks in. A wandering soul. A sick soul, too weak to make it across the realms. A psychotic soul, referred to in most mythologies as a demon. It takes over completely. Sucks at the vital energy. It’s Van Ness’s body, and Van Ness’s brain, even Van Ness’s ideas. But it’s not Van Ness. When people do evil things repeatedly without compunction, man, that ain’t people. That’s demons.”

Navarro, who had crossed his arms over his chest during this dissertation, let them drop. He hung his head.

“Do you believe in such things?”

Navarro couldn’t look him in the eye, but he found he could tell the truth.

“Yes,” Navarro said.

This October had seen plenty of rain — a dozen inches since the first. And now a bit more along the cliffside pastures and over the highway, wisps of it stretched on intermittent gusts. He turned the Firebird’s wipers on and set the timer for the longest interval. Passed along the wide fields where a yearling pinto stallion bucked and hopped by himself a quarter-mile distant from the rest of 274 / Denis Johnson

the string, who stood bunched under trees on dirt they’d trampled lifeless over the months. They’d rubbed up against and killed half the little bull pines back there too. He knew it was a yearling because he’d seen it last September as a rickety foal. The animal stopped still, looking out to sea, then lowered its head as the sky tore open, and Navarro saw the rain dripping from its curved neck as he passed, turning up the wipers full-speed—

Navarro disliked horses, and any species of animal of whom it was said, “They smell your fear.”

Just five days ago, when he’d found the pages written in Fairchild’s hand, the sun had blazed hot enough to burn away the puddles in a steam. Perhaps it had been the last clear day of Indian summer, the last beautiful day, as Navarro drove the coast alone, his heart reaching out toward the goodness of the world. A hot day, in fact. He had the windows closed. He had the climate control on and it blanketed him — cool air and thin warm sunlight and the ocean shredding itself silently on the rocks. He was supposedly on patrol but had kept on going, out of town, south, through Anchor Bay and then Gualala and past the green sign — SAN FRANCISCO 114—on the river’s far side, and clear out of the county. If you just stay loose and cool and steady in your breath. Stay away from the spiral’s edge. He’d kept them behind glass in L.A., but here he’d failed. He’d whirled right down into it with them, never even known he’d been in the soup till he was nine-tenths drowned. Slide along the coast. Keep these windows closed.

At the Stewart Point Store he decelerated, drawn by the vision of a soft-drink machine in the parking lot, and pulled in next to a Highway Patrol car and went inside to change a five. The customers in the quiet establishment were already getting plenty of the law, what with the active presence of the CHP: a patrolwoman in a white, visored helmet whom Navarro, if he hadn’t seen the cruiser out front, would have taken for a fake, an impostor, nosing over everybody’s shoulder in the place and giving one traveller the lowdown on parking, or the placement of the registration sticker on the license plate or some such petti-ness — Navarro didn’t quite hear, didn’t want to. There were such charlatans, he’d arrested one himself one day in Englewood, an LAPD-uniformed high school music teacher directing traffic skillfully, but without authority…Navarro thought, Lady, I don’t wanna know you ever, as she came toward him

Already Dead / 275

nudging the brim of her helmet back with her baton, and he continued by thinking, You pompous bulldyke. He was embarrassed by, but nevertheless loyal to, such officers. We all started out okay. Citizens did this to us. “You from Mendocino County?” she asked.

“Point Arena. Just getting a Coke,” he explained.

“I’ve got an abandoned vehicle reported on the west side of the West Point — Gualala road. Fifty yards north of Pepperwood Creek, about a hundred yards into the brush.”

“You going up to check it out?”

“It’s just your side of the Mendocino boundary.”

“Well, I never did know where they put that line.”

“Beg pardon.”

“I don’t know one county from another, Officer, except where you cross the river. Can you point me on a map?”

“Let’s get out on the porch where I can spread her out,” the patrolwoman said.

The Gualala River constituted the county line for a distance of some four miles, to where the river jogged south along the San Andreas Fault and the boundary hooked straight east, crossing Big Pepperwood Creek and continuing on into the hills. Several creeks, none of them marked by signs, descended over the north-south ridge. Navarro kept count of the culverts passing beneath the road and drove directly to the spot and found the Silverado as it had been reported, obviously intentionally hidden, driven deep into the tangled chaparral, the camper’s aluminum roof just visible above the overgrowth. The low scrub it had broken through on the way to its parking place had grown back almost entirely; he locked up at the roadside and followed the ancient traces of entry beside the Pepperwood, finding it tough going along this way. The spot lay in the calm and the heat, several miles inland and a good half mile, he guessed, above the sea. The creek ran full and fresh. Just to be near it cooled him.

The fisherman who’d come across the vehicle had marked the way with shreds of his red bandanna, and with his last marker had unnecessarily draped the camper’s latch itself. The truck hadn’t been vandalized, but had waited here untouched for quite a while — peering into the driver’s window Navarro saw a ball of twigs and grasses, mustered here by some rodent, he assumed, down among the pedals.

The camper too was full of such nests, and spiderwebs, and piles of 276 / Denis Johnson

grain collected by mice, and a military-style rucksack and a duffel and assorted gear for outdoor living, and many curled gray marijuana leaves, and the carcasses of two dogs. The animals had perished of thirst or exposure. The heat had baked and dried them. Critters had gone at their innards. Papier-mâché dogs, half-molded and abandoned, their muzzles shrunken and baring all their teeth back to the last dry brown molars.

He shut the camper’s door and latched it. To get at the doors in the cab he had to break and trample down a lot of branches that had grown against them.

In the cab, on the passenger’s side, he found the white California Board of Franchise envelope. The mice had gotten to one corner. He realized he shouldn’t be handling it. Standing beside the open door, he used the bit of signifying bandanna to shield the dashboard from his own fingerprints as he supported himself by a hand on the dash and jabbed the glove box’s button with his ballpoint pen. He took the docu-ments there by the corners, one at a time and gingerly, between the tips of his thumb and finger, pushed the door shut with his pen, and went back through the brush to the road.

He intended merely to transfer these papers — the truck’s registration and a mileage log of some sort — to his cruiser’s front seat and then return to complete his investigation. But I’m no woodsman, he suddenly remembered, considering that an exploration of the whole scene was probably in order now. The vehicle had been hidden for a purpose.

Whatever had developed for its occupants had been unforeseen, and maybe permanent. Dogs, live ones, would have to nose around now before the truck itself was again disturbed. They might turn up blood-stains or bullet casings or a grave scratched in the dirt. He didn’t go back.

The camper had waited there for many months, and probably, judging by the way the manzanita had overgrown it, at least since the previous winter. Not much could come of a search for witnesses, not so long after the fact, whatever the fact might be. To his knowledge the small population of this area all lived in the Buddhist monastery up the road and never ventured out. But if only in the interest of covering his ass, he supposed he’d better talk to some of them.

Heading up that way he left his window down and breathed the heat of the day, which smelled of its stillness even as it drove in against his face. He wondered if he had his bearings right — he drove Already Dead / 277

a quarter of an hour and saw no sign of habitation anywhere — and then the order’s immaculate grounds opened wide, like a chasm in history, as he came around a curve. On his left a golden pagoda shone way back in a pasture, looking willowy in the thermals. Farther around the bend he found the entrance, and just behind it a temple with a tremendous copper dome, an almost extraterrestrial sight, a spectacle that wrenched him. He rolled to a stop before this vision. Barbed wire, a steel gate twenty feet tall, a quiet like a deep well into which poured all his childhood. He touched the key in the ignition. But he didn’t turn it off.

Years ago on an ex-wife’s street he’d paused like this, before the driveway of her new home. He in his cruiser with his twelve-gauge shotgun and gold-enameled badge.

Now, as then, he felt sadness even in his hands. He let it run and pushed the pedal down and blew out of there with his own smoke.

Since then, five days had passed. He’d mentioned none of this to anyone.

Navarro’s Firebird possessed dual exhausts. Moving slowly along Main Street it chugged like a boat, and it splashed like one, its tires cutting three troughs along the flooded pavement as he executed, in violation of California statutes, a U-turn that put him in front of his building. He left his laundry in the car. The downpour wet him as he hot-footed across the sidewalk among small white explosions random-izing on a layer of rain, on the reflection of the cafe’s neon logo like shattered candy, on the reflected light from its window filled with cutout happy-face jack-o-lanterns and the black silhouettes of hags riding thatch brooms. He dripped on the stairs going up. But under his crazy batik sport shirt the envelope had stayed dry. He tossed it flat on the table in the kitchen area and shed his clothing fast, trembling with the chill as he draped his shirt and pants across the only dining chair, but raising the window, because he liked the sound of the rain, before stretching himself out on the couch and dragging the blanket from the floor to cover himself…Then he guessed he’d been asleep. When he found his thoughts again the quiet had returned. Through the open window came the fresh breath of the world after a storm and the corrupt breath of the sea. Mo had slept here a time or two. He’d been smelling her perfume ever since.

278 / Denis Johnson

He stood naked beside the sink and, raising a fifth gently by its neck, downed a couple shots of Cuervo, and then a third, before shutting the window, getting on his robe, lighting a burner under the cold coffee.

He was off all day, but it wouldn’t do to spend it whipping up a hangover. Double duty tomorrow — tomorrow was a big day in a cop’s year. He’d arrest drunken women in hula garb, break up fights between men in bridal gowns, answer reports of shadows dancing in the graveyard and find nobody there. And the day after, too: the trees abloom with toilet-paper streamers, obscenities on the windows of the high school. Burst pumpkin rinds on the mayor’s Nissan ZX and corky desiccated seeds and strings of pulp. All this would have to be written up. They always wanted fingerprinting done, and you had to illuminate for them the mysterious difference between Class One felonies and Halloween.

He’d go among them with his cheerless smile, his uniform right from the cleaners. And his badge hardly tarnished, as his first one had worn out suddenly. He’d tried a little target practice with it and had actually managed to hit the thing. The replacement, just about thirteen months old, he’d paid for from his own pocket.

And also, tomorrow afternoon, he’d be working in uniform as a kind of rent-a-cop, getting overtime for attending a wedding to which he’d received no invitation: the celebration of the marriage of Winona An-drews, formerly Winona Fairchild, to Carl Van Ness.

He sat at the table and held the white envelope in his hands. Maybe soon he’d confront them both. After all, this thing had their names on it. Deliver a copy to each and watch their faces and see — see what? No possible reaction could fool with the fact that he believed this story.

Nothing could confirm it any harder. But nothing would give him hard evidence either — he worked at the clasp and took out the rubbishy pages — plus, he didn’t really care. He’d changed. Before, he’d seen all decisions as simple: One thing was good and the other thing wasn’t.

The idea was to choose the good one. In times of confusion, follow the mood of the moment. Overall, count on the extremes, the clear choices, to navigate you in the right direction.

But the realm of confusion had expanded way past any horizons.

The whole solar system now constituted one big gray area.

He could probably get samples of Nelson Fairchild’s penmanship, Already Dead / 279

could probably get a handwriting expert to call it a match. He could probably take soil samples from inside the rig and finish out the year trying to get analyses from forensics labs with higher priorities, driving to San Francisco on his days off and hanging around begging favors.

And then finish out the century searching every spot the camper might have visited, including, probably, the Lost Coast — that region alone about thirty square miles in area, if his map read true — looking without anyone’s help for the bones of Nelson Fairchild, or any sign of him. But the letter was sign enough. It satisfied Navarro.

He hadn’t mentioned the letter to anyone because to be alone with it seemed the fair, the disciplined thing. The kindest thing. Unless he wanted right now to make a case against someone — and he could think of several likely people and numerous charges, including homicide — a case that would eventually be dropped, or so he would have guessed.

But he wasn’t supposed to guess. He was supposed to take his thoughts to the county attorney, a guy named Ronniger — or a woman maybe, that’s how little Navarro knew about things on the county level — and let Mr. or Ms. Ronniger be the one to anticipate the legal outcome.

But Navarro didn’t want those Martians in Ukiah considering this case. He was convinced they’d proceed entirely out of a failure to understand the most important things about all this, which could hardly be spoken of or even thought about and had to do mainly with a gigantic silence at the center of everything—

fact I heard an automobile engine outside this very motel idling for quite some time that Christmas we vacationed here in the Trinities to get the snow. Then one car door made the sounds of opening and slamming. Your footsteps on the icy walk, key in the door — Oh, hello darling, asleep? No? Guess what? I walked back (you’d been at a film, or the library) — followed by several convincing details of your walk home, a piece of ice fell off a branch, how cold, are my lips purple, nearly slipped twice, et cetera, capped by a breezy explanation for extreme lateness of arrival in the clammy boudoir. You lied to me. This evidence wouldn’t do in a court of law, but you know and I know, and now you know I know. That’s the unidentified person. As for John Marks he foolishly confessed out of shame and asked me to forgive him. I am working on it. Glen Bolger I actually saw. I am ashamed to say I just followed you around for two days jealous and 280 / Denis Johnson

crazy. You went to Glen Bolger’s house, you went in, I went back and forth at five-minute intervals between the bedroom window and the telephone pole at the corner and within twenty-five minutes I saw you with him crawling through the seas of passion in his bed, the Hawaiian-print silken seas. I went home feeling I had caused your adultery somehow by my own lack of faith — remember when I went to a couple of therapists and tried to make you feel responsible for it? That was just afterward, just after the night of the Glen Bolger Show.

(Yes, I invite adultery, I probably create it for myself, but that’s an insight on a minor note because those betrayals were nothing, no, not even prototypes or the crudest sketches for your gigantic accomplish-ment. And if you’d planned all this you could never have made it work — no, I’m the one who did all the planning!) Now for two or three minutes I’ve written nothing, staring at my face in the glass of this motel room (our old room in Weaverville, I can tell you that because you’ll never read this), staring at my face which has always seemed too long, it’s the face of a sad liar. And I was thinking about the dream last night, remembering the dream that woke me. Revising it to make it seem less pleasant. Wasn’t it, rather than joyful, actually gruesome? In this dream I should have felt untimely, inadequate, resented. I should have had the terrible sense I get so often in this waking world that somebody important is about to burst through the door and denounce me. In this dream I find myself waiting tables in a really crowded fast-food sort of place, completely unable to keep up with the orders. Nobody seems angry about it however. We’re all friends, no hurry here, we’re all

Dear Win and Van,

“Win and Van”—how cute. First, congratulations for having killed all three of us and wiped out the Fairchild line. Billy and Dad are down, one to go. My blood’s still ticking but I’m as good as finished too. I don’t mind. I really don’t. And now I’ll open a liter of crummy sulphur-tasting Sonoma blanc and sit down (still standing at the moment) and put all my thoughts before you. — Wine, wine, wine — I’m not dead yet!

Incidentally, this is the only letter I’ll send — don’t think I’ll turn you in, don’t think for a second I’d alert the authorities, I mean, fuck them, and certainly, of course, fuck you, but above everything fuck them. I’ve always stood for that. Admittedly not much else.

Already Dead / 281

Ah Win here’s to California, the stuff pressed from its breasts — from one suckled on its grapes — in vino veritas—

The truth! It’s actually quite relaxing. Once you’ve wrestled with it.

When it’s finally whipped you. Beyond that it’s not so much like wine as water — clear and empty. Water, air, fire. You might compare it to anything elemental, always something concrete — never to some other abstraction because it’s not like any other — never mind what Keats says, he had a meter to contend with, meters can make you say anything.

“Truth is beauty, beauty truth”—it scans but it makes no sense. I feel all right, feel pretty good. I wish I could float indefinitely along on this intoxicated gratitude, but I get mad too. My little dirigible bumps up against big cliffs of hate.

I’m monstrous, okay. But so are your deeds. I mean it takes something like you to keep me from believing the world has some good in it.

My father! All right, that was practically a gift of mercy, you could rationalize that one while playing tennis. And maybe you didn’t kill him. He’d sent you a note warning you you’d be cut out of the will — I saw the note in your kitchen — so you had what the detectives call a motive. But we all have motives, don’t we, what we lack are the will and the blindness. Maybe his death just occurred, and presented you with an issue: the old man’s dead, you inherit half his holdings, which, under California law, belong equally to your husband, whom you’re divorcing; if your husband dies before the divorce, you get your half complete. If his brother dies, everything’s yours.

Did the demon tell you he planned to kill my brother? I doubt it, not then. But he persuaded you eventually — or did you persuade him?

Anyhow you knew. Whom else could he have asked for directions to the cabin? Van Ness I entered there just minutes after you — an hour, two hours after, not more. I went in there because I’d been told he was dead and I wanted to ascertain it, but — My brother…In films you shake your brother, you can’t believe it, you shout, Billy! Billy! but not in life.

Not with his blood jelled right over his open eyes. Not with his brains spilling out his mouth like he choked on them. There’s no shaking and shouting in that case. There was nothing to ascertain. Do you understand? There was nothing to ascertain, nowhere to ascertain it, nobody to ascertain it about. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. That’s what I found in there. That’s what you created.

282 / Denis Johnson

May I tell you something? I fired that.357 Magnum only once and I found it difficult to hit anything.

Ah, Van: cutthroat, backstabber, unbelievable wondrous psychic betrayer—

Often I think, repeatedly I think, relentlessly I dream of you in my arms, my mouth on your mouth, the floodlit raindrops bursting the skin of the pond, the mud trickling out of your mustaches, your glasses sideways on your cheek, your eyelashes wet as if with weeping. And thinking it over I’m tempted by every sort of intellectual wildness — I’d like to bring to their safe harbors thoughts that are really feelings, and place a frame around images that are, in fact, fears: how I’d like to drag up by the hair something drowned, something classical and remote, like the Old Man of the Sea, who can be forced to read the future by anyone who holds him while he shape-shifts where he’s risen above the waves at noon, and compare him helplessly to this man. But you, you’re slicker than the sea’s Old Man. You’ve activated everything. You haven’t just predicted my future, but set it playing. And now you believe in fate. Now we all believe in fate.

I know what drives a man like me, I’ve felt it even if I’ve never had its name, but what produces a Van Ness, a man psychotically committed to his every fantasy, the inflicter of reality on dreams? She wouldn’t have let you realize hers if I hadn’t already let you realize mine. I wouldn’t call you the Devil. Frankheimer called you that but I say no.

We’re the devils, she and I, tempting you with fantastic schemes while you, you are the attempter, the Adam, you’re the man.

Like all men you have a religion — at least a way of looking at yourself and the universe both at once, which is all I’d hope a religion to be, for me, if I could only have one, if I were only a man…I’d call you a Zarathustrian.

But I mean, you know, I’m like Nietzsche. Aren’t I? I feel deep suspicion of the mensch, of the reasonable, dutiful man. He knows what he’s doing and it’s identical to the doing of the other guy, the one who doesn’t know. The mensch walks lockstep with the robots, in a long line of hooks hangs his soul on a hook next to theirs. But my father!

But my father was no mensch. He hated the reasonable, dutiful man.

My father was the enemy of your enemy — can’t you see my father was your friend?

Already Dead / 283

Now, look here, you people. A man decides to kill his wife. What’s so unusual? E = MC2, now that’s an unusual thought, and Newton’s cogitations, et cetera, and Shakespeare never bothered a page with them therefore. But wishing to kill your wife, it’s as basic as thought itself—“I want her dead; therefore I am”—it’s why they invented divorce. But this man, our man — me — he can’t get divorced. So he plots in detail.

He’ll find a Dying Person, enlist his services, let him take the blame — after the deed, the killer’s a corpse anyway — it’s a fantasy, and fantasies are harmless in a man without will or blindness. But then comes a man of will, a man blind to the border between the thought and the act. The bargain is sealed, but the Dying Person decides not to die. Determines to kill the plotter’s father, kill the plotter’s brother, make the wife the winner.

You left my wife alive, asleep. You turned from the place and went into the night. You went to my father’s house. You walked right in through the kitchen, ascended the stairs in the darkness, put your ear to the doors in the hall, and behind one you heard my father hard at work breathing. You turned the knob and went in, and I wish I’d been there to witness the two of you: the one I conjured, and the one who conjured me.

Dad in purgatory exploding I imagine the balloons of little girls with your cigar-end: If you were here you’d know how to handle the sheriff, the cops, the judges, Harry Lally. By their tenderest parts you’d hoist up the pig-men and deliver a bitter lecture. You’d line up the lawyers on a spit like shish kebab, you’d drive Winona into the sea. They nourished you, those types. You could handle them all.

All but Van Ness, creeping up beside your bed.

Did my father fight? That I doubt, or he’d have bit your face off.

They’d have found him with his fingers in your windpipe.

No. He stood up to meet you coming, but his legs gave way. He fell unconscious, pissed his pants, and dreamed. In his dream the forest stood still. The sky turned black. A funnel cloud tore down out of heaven and wrapped him down to the roots. Twisted the great tree slowly. And slowly the roots loosed their grip in the duff and my father for whom I am named, one of the giants of this earth, is dead.

And then you raised the window. And then you climbed into the dark. And then you hung by your fingers from the sill. And you won-284 / Denis Johnson

dered where your fall would take you. And then Van Ness, you dropped, and then in its every detail I envision it…

…You held the match till your fingers spasmed.

You two lovebirds! I’m sure you believe you’ve killed me, but I’ve survived. Probably to deepen my exile. Possibly to die at other hands — you’re ignorant of the pig-men. The pig-men are my own fault.

Speaking of pigs, the huntsman in the fairy tale brought back the heart of a boar as proof that he’d murdered Snow White. Heart of a pig.

I keep waking in the middle of the night, around three o’clock. It looks as if a curtain of plastic has been laid over the moment to protect it. Neighborhood of kindness in the hour of moonlight…If ever I get back to you I’ll touch your skin…listen in the holiness to your pink words…I’ll wipe my feet, I’ll never scream I’m a genius at you again. I don’t believe I really killed you, that you lay dead and then rose up alive, the possession of a vagrant soul. In the scientific method there’s much to trouble me, its smugness and myopia, its lofty forgetting of the fact that it’s a method, not a model of the world, its upturned nose at roundnesses till they come back squares, but — what was I saying?

Oh — that I shouldn’t believe in ghosts, in walk-ins. You’re you. I’m me.

We’re all of us us—not suits with souls zipped up inside. Yet I saw you, you looked dead. Then I saw you alive. I saw your face. It was yours but you weren’t wearing it.

Neat! Okay! You bet! Wait—

Let me slow up, allow me to get a grip, “My fit is mastering me,” as Whitman says. All right. Van Ness didn’t kill you as we’d planned. But he came to the house, didn’t he?

You were always one to take in odd animals — Winona, I’m talking to you. I know you invited him in, the mystery man.

And you, more mystery than man, was she The One? And did you pledge yourself silently without so much as a gesture? Follow and find her and float forward out of the pasture and put one foot up on the deck?

— Get out.

— First show me your pills. Your yellow pills.

— My what?

Already Dead / 285

— Your bottle of Nembutal. Bring it here.

You brought him the bottle. He poured them into your palm. You touched the pills and tasted the dust of horse dope on your fingers.

…And you told her the plan and dried her tears and made love to her in your strange way and waited as it got dark for her to say it:

— I should kill him.

— Then do it.

— I will.

— You don’t have to. Let me.

And letting him kill me wouldn’t poison your conscience. After all, I started it, I deserved it, it was practically self-defense. Then after I’m dead Dad dies, and you get my share of California, the land of dreams and light and rippling and thundering mounts, the land of gold.

But it turned out, didn’t it, that Father had to die first, before he crossed you off his one-woman list of heirs. And die he did.

I know full well now where my book of Nietzsche got to that night.

Right there beside your bed, on the floor, am I right? And later Van Ness handed it to me in the dark.

Got it right here. I see the parts he marked. I hate people who make marks in books:

We do not wish to be spared by our best enemies, nor by those whom we love from the very heart.

You are not great enough not to know hatred and envy. So be great enough not to be ashamed of them!

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I tell you: it is the good war that hallows every cause.

The two of you! You read the Zarathustra together in bed and laughed.

I can surmise a few surmises. For one he got there in the sunset. Drove that car of his which I’ve never seen except in the dark down the drive with the redwoods taking on exactly that color in the late light and living into their names. The windless hush, the boards creaking as the stables cooled, old Red kicking up the dust in a slow circle and everything. The sun going down into the sea of clouds and turning their steel to wine, then to blood.

286 / Denis Johnson

The man John who wrote the Bible’s last book — on the isle of Patmos he envisioned just this, smoke flooding out of God’s censer and a third of the moon and sun and stars darkened and a burning mountain cast into the sea and turning a third of the water to blood: envisioned coastal California in the evening…And you came into view. Ambled around the corner of the house, put one foot up on the deck.

— You don’t belong here.

— Yes I do.

— How did you find me?

— It was no trick to find you here. The trick was finding you on the boardwalk that day.

No trick but one of fate. Fate along the scoured pier. Coming off the beach with your tennies grainy, whacking out the sand on a benchback and sticking them back on and he’s watching the brown little simian feet with the blond hairs on the knuckles of your toes. And drifting from his eyes the smoke of stars.

She pulls her parka hood back and floats there like an ark in the de-luge of the sun, this California with its fugitives and windmills and ar-tichokes and clouds like thighs. Its vacancies at pink motels. Modesto in the dust. Walnuts shaken down early by quakes. Spanish razors. And here you come with your gypsy blood and your secret suit, feeling like fuck on fire. Straight out of Carmel. They couldn’t touch you in Carmel.

Not with their skin in shirts like skin. Their fingers in gloves like hands.

And these others in Santa Cruz, they can’t touch you either. Not in Santa Cruz this day. Dressed in your ragged bulletproof sweat suit or down-home beachside grubbies heading along the sandy asphalt past the stands followed a little ways and then abandoned by their chat, their jazz, their machine-sounds, jukebox whomp, nineties computer rock, fifties dead-teenager songs. I know how you moved. I know how you stared. How you smiled and failed to smile — smiled inappropriately, failed to when you should. Ran your finger around in the bits of spilt sugar on the dirty counter, couldn’t resist licking at it, ordered your coffee among creaky robots with their faceless oval heads. I know what they told you—

— Hey. You look just like that guy who got shot last night.

— What?

Already Dead / 287

— They had his picture on TV.

— No, that was the guy who shot him.

— Yeah.

— Yeah. You look like the guy who shot the guy.

— know how it runs for you generally in those places with their sensors clicking over you Mr. Roentgen and a series of Most Wanted pics fluttering past their minds. You stink. You fuck. You murder blandly. Everybody wants to ram you with a pitchfork. They just need a reason. But not you. You reach out and flip a switch. You burn up their innards. You do it without a thought.

She knew it a hundred miles away. She felt you click into place. She knew you made it happen. You had her by the cunt. She didn’t even say hello. You didn’t even look at her. The motel was pink.

She got on her knees by the toilet and held your penis for you while you pissed.

Ah, Winona…Long mustaches pale glassed-in eyes gritty cafe huge fans that stroke a wind like breath — naturally you had coffee in his eyes, in his hands in the park, in his room where the mirror was so small all you could see in it were your breasts. Your breasts saw your face.

Tired. Tired. Where am I? The two of you spent and sweaty and the odors of the Pacific in the pink motel. But what then?

Nothing comes to mind because I’m in pain. Lewd exotic California pain.

Marauders, have you turned back in the rain?

Sleep comes, roaring like a train. When it arrives it’s going slow, slow, and the roaring isn’t a sound anymore, but a sort of brown shadow in which you were about to find a thought…Then you’re waking up. Lying in bed like a page torn in the middle of a word. Waiting for the fish to move, the fish on the wall. Waiting like a dog for the start of another broadcast day.

Okay Winona you stepped to the air conditioner and it chilled then dried your sweat. And as it evaporated from your skin, your skin evaporated too. You stood there immaterial and unaware. You slicked aside the curtains and in the dusk it was still out there sucking and stroking and worshiping the sand. Please if you see my friend 288 / Denis Johnson

Clarence. Tell him something for me will you. Tell him I understand surfing. The sea wants to take shape. The wave promises some great birth, a monster’s emersion, but it’s only a flowing, only a flowing among many, and completely dies away. Changing sameness, changeless change. Our expectations fly to meet it and aren’t jilted, but inexplicably satisfied. It’s so right, it’s so right.

And there you strolled, sockless in your tennis shoes, naked under your parka and your jeans. Watched the shabby surf finding and losing the shore. No: Immaterial and unaware, you walked out without clothing yourself. Stood on the vermillion beach stark naked and invisible, the boardwalk’s clanks and whooshes and screams and tootly music blown near and far on the wind. They’re paying in strange coins to ride the hurtling fever train, rolling up to heaven on the Ferris wheel, boys and girls released from life and dragged back down, G-force flattening their orange and purple Mohawks, mouths like wounds — it’s terrible when somebody laughs, more obscene and revealing than anything they could say with words…

Past the boardwalk onto the street, the gauntlet of shops and beachside people, the quantum dregs, the never-ending pavement in their sighs, and always that music: dark rock. And you kept going, beyond the seaside part of town. Homes of stucco in the ashy twilight, the street no longer dabbed with sand. Past the edges, way way past, out into the big place east of town, they call it America. Through the vandalized areas you wandered like a voice.

All the world is sleeping. The sea is sleeping. The sand is sleeping.

One last form besides yourself invested with any waking. Fat black woman on a stool against a wall in a shadow with an accordion across her chest and a silhouetted, spiky ’do. Her skirt drapes empty below her thighs.

— Don’t ask me to play. This thing don’t play.

—

— I don’t have any legs.

—

— You know where you are, don’t you?

—

— California.

—

— You like where you are?

—

Already Dead / 289

— You came a long way to get to California.

—

— You in California now.

—

Why couldn’t you speak? Where in fact was your throat? Why did you have no hands? How could it be you saw right and left and backward — without turning? Had he killed you? He had killed you. Had he stopped your breath, your heart? He had. But you won’t believe me because you I write to are gone. And you who replaced her: you don’t love me.

Okay then Van Ness you murdered her. Strangled her for three minutes in the cool dim amber room while her face turned russet, purple, chalky blue, and the bewilderment evaporated from her eyes and her gaze went upward like a priest’s, an ecstatic’s. Unhooked your cramped fingers from her neck and thumbed wide her eyelids and shone a penlight at her pupils — no reaction — held a mirror to her nostrils — no pinpoints of mist — and pricked her flesh with a needle, and the hole didn’t close — found no pulse in her wrists, none beneath her jaw…

And you sat by the bed in a chair until another demon tickled by you, entering Winona Fairchild’s naked corpse.

290 / Denis Johnson