Already Dead: A California Gothic (15 page)

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

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

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

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

“I’d rather not.”

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

“I don’t think so.”

“Two thousand.”

“So these aren’t Nembutal.”

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

“What’s in them?”

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

“Will it kill her?”

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

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

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

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

“You won’t have to remind me.”

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

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

Already Dead / 93

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

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

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

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

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

94 / Denis Johnson

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

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

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

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

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

We’ll see if our eyes are open
.

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

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

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

Already Dead / 95

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay. Okay.”

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

“I’m leaving,” I said.

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

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

96 / Denis Johnson

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

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

“Right, I’m sorry.”

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

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

“With the dogs? Such happy dogs!”

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

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

“Who? The dogs? The men? Yesterday?”

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

“Oh my God.
Yesterday?
”

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

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

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

“And they accepted that?”

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

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

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

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

“Sure. I wasn’t so drunk.”

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

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

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

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

“Clarence the surfer? I saw him last night.”

“I’ll cut out your tongue!”

“In the Safeway I saw him buy bread, and beef jerky, and magazines.

And for that you want to cut my tongue?”

“Forgive me,” I said.

Take it all around, life showed every troubling sign of having sunk to its usual clammy depth. Clarence! I’d have to get honest with him, fill him in truthfully, face his disappointment.

I’d just dragged my jogging shoes onto my feet when she asked me,

“What are you thinking?”

I was always flattered when she asked after my thoughts. I always gave her the truth.

“I’m thinking how nice it would be for us if most of the people I’m supposed to love would drop dead.”

W
ilhelm Frankheimer sat on a stump beyond the sheep pen, bending far over toward the ground, going to almost acrobatic extremes to attack small scurrying ants with an old saw blade while Melissa moaned and sighed and sometimes laughed inside the trailer. Frankheimer was still naked.

After a while, Fairchild came out and drove away.

It sounded to Frank as if the little heap, a rickety Porsche, stood in need of potent ministrations. But it got Fairchild up the hill and out of sight and that was all Frankheimer cared about. He strolled back inside.

Melissa sat on the bed’s edge shivering. The whole business turned him on.

He stood in front of her until she took him in her mouth. In seconds, he came—he’d been screwing her for half an hour and hadn’t even been all the way erect; now the low-rent quality of the moment gave him ecstasy.

She turned her head, leaned sideways, and spat sadly onto the floor.

It made him feel like marrying her. This underfed wench he could usually take or leave. Women did, he seemed always to forget, have moments like stilettos. No telling when you’d be stabbed.

98 / Denis Johnson

“Why did you make me hide?”

“I told you to
leave
!” she said. “Not to hide!”

“Where am I gonna leave to, with no pants on?”

“Obviously to no-place. And then you come back inside and make me suck your cock!”

“Why did you make me hide?”

“Because,” she said, “he’s important to me. Now do you want to lie down with me? He won’t come back. Do you want something cold to drink?”

Frankheimer reached down under the bed, feeling around close to the wall. “I just came back in here for my clothes.” He was standing there buttoning his trousers and looking at Melissa’s very white features, her small, pretty mouth, when it hit him again—the astonishing persistence of the Yvonne problem. That hurt kept swimming up. He looked at his reflection melting in the cheap mirror and declared out loud: “Maybe I just need sincerity. I think that’s all I need.” All of a sudden, he understood that he was going to shoot up.