Already Dead: A California Gothic (11 page)

“G’night, John.”

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

“Don’t know him.”

“By sight I think you would.”

“What does he look like?”

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

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

“About seven feet.”

“I’m sorry?”

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

He laughed. “I’ve seen him around.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

The lesbo is a Witch

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

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

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

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

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

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

66 / Denis Johnson

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

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

“What’s your name?”

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a matter of life and death.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Already Dead / 67

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Van Ness. First name Carl.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m tired.”

“You don’t believe in destiny?”

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

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

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

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

Van stood up and turned over the table.

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

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

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

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

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

Already Dead / 69

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

“Meaning who?”

“You’re a true man of action.”

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

“Act from it, no matter what.”

“No matter what.”

“Overriding everything.”

“That’s right, everything.”

“Then you act in boldness.”

“Can I be given a little cereal?”

“A man of true courage.”

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

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

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

70 / Denis Johnson

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

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

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