Already Dead: A California Gothic (20 page)

Or someday soon somebody, maybe one of his sons, would come downstairs like this and in answer to that question say, “Donna…” and right away she’d know.

Meanwhile the old man would probably be up there pretending to be still alive. If there’s one thing he’s been desperately hiding, it’s the terminal nature of his sickness. This love of lying, I don’t share it. I hate my lies, they oppress me. But I did inherit one of the tenets of his strange faith: I believe in boldness. Believe that boldness makes things happen, makes the unlikely possible. Therefore, don’t hedge. Bet your stack.

Wager half on a long shot, you lose. But you win if you wager all.

“He’s sleeping.”

“That’s good.”

“Good for the Coastal Commission,” I said, and she smiled.

Outside I put the top up on the Porsche. I was shivering.

I have the belief in boldness. What I generally lack is the boldness itself.

Because boldness doesn’t feel bold. It feels scared, not brave. The explorer feels more and more lost, the prophet hears himself unintelligibly blaspheming.

Already Dead / 125

Naturally I’m thinking about the dare I’ve taken with Carl Van Ness.

But we are, at this point, just—still, at this point—just hypothetical, surely. With Van Ness out of town the reality seems to have diminished.

What we’ve done up to this point is possibly only a rehearsal. I started the Porsche and, as the sound covered my voice, realized that I was talking to myself out loud, saying, “That we’ll do it seems still likely but with, how shall I put it, an
ethereal
likelihood…” But how can I talk of boldness, when it’s Van who’s taking the dare?

Well, yes, because, as we know, I’m a liar, mine the kind of dishonesty that can cherish two beliefs at once, opposing ones. I can act the coward while telling myself I’m testing the limits of boldness by the same puzzling mechanism whereby we sometimes know, for instance, that it’s Tuesday, September 4, and that we have an appointment Tuesday, and yet fail to understand the appointment is therefore for
today
.

On the other hand, making it happen is making it happen. If I shoot the gun, am I somehow a coward because I don’t happen to be the actual bullet?

Van does his part, I do mine. We’re a lethal combo. And if Van Ness is back, and means what he says—then that’s it. Because my part’s done already.

This afternoon, while Winona helped a friend break a horse at the Say-When Ranch, I traded her bottle of Nembutal for the Zielene.

She’ll have come home tired from the stables, turned in early with two little red capsules. She’ll be out. And I’m out too. I have stepped out in boldness. Boldness. Out into dreams made real.

Each move I made now was one I’d invented months ago and played along in my head many times. How drab the real thing felt!

Driving the mile into Gualala’s little strip of shops and restaurants just made me tired. The light and aromas from the pizzeria next door to the big old wooden hotel bored me, and a certain not totally unfamiliar neurotic symptom developed as I pulled in beside the hotel, the convic-tion that something oily had got all over my steering wheel. Inside the reeking barroom I made straight for the toilet, wiping my hands on my pants over and over. A dozen or so people drifted down the loud canyon of certain hilarities, lifting their steins or whatever. The Gualala Hotel has stood across the road from

126 / Denis Johnson

the Pacific for close to a century, and for some decades of that period stood miraculously, on the brink of falling flat on its face, but in recent years through a jag of remodellings has managed to recast itself as no longer a place where men might spit on the floors in the hallways; but men still do spit on the floor in the bar. Going into the bathroom I had the experience you have at least once a night in such a place, that of ramming up against somebody, some derelict masturbator, coming out of the stall. “Pardon,” I meant to say, and meant to step back, but my jaw went tight, the words jammed, and I leaned forward. I tasted murder in my throat, I shoved past, staring at his eyes—the same rage showed in his face, it all flared unbelievably. It was Carl Van Ness. He shouldered me aside. He stumbled away. We couldn’t stop staring at each other. He never glanced anywhere else as he straightened himself and left the bar. I was breathing hard, my chest full of a lion’s roar.
Then
we’ll see if our eyes are open
. His were. It was abundant in his eyes: he’d been to Winona’s house. He’d done something terrible.

Van Ness thought himself a traveller through eternity, and whatever he did to negate himself—suicide, murder—it’s all fuel for the journey, so why not? And to the mystifying question “why murder?” isn’t “why not?” just as good as a whole constellation of answers? But I have a theory why he agreed: I just bring out the killer in people, that’s all. Spend a little time with me, I’ll work on you like Dr. Jekyll’s potion—the man a few months back, for instance, in this very bar here among, I wouldn’t doubt, these same rough drinkers, the character who started out lecturing me in a peaceable way on the stages of woman-hood, the progressions of marriage, and so on. But after thirty minutes inside my aura the man got hostile. As if somebody had flipped a switch and turned out the spark in his mind. What a darkness, nothing more than that. Only, I swear it, the pinpoint reflections of the jukebox in his eyes, and images from the oversized TV screen. Nothing from inside, just a lot of light bouncing off. The scene ends there in my memory, with him in his animal state being restrained while I beat it with I hope dignified haste. But how can you be dignified when you’ve just shown yourself and everybody else this puzzling trick you have of stirring up the preconscious evil muck at the bottom of one of mankind, some guy you never saw before—clink!—somebody you were toasting ten minutes before?

Already Dead / 127

And here I am in the same Gualala Hotel bar and the same thing has just happened with another man, with Van Ness—and I realize it’s all that’s been happening between the two of us since the moment I watched him drown himself.

I went on with the plan, though now that it had started, going on with it seemed almost impossible. I yanked at the pay phone by the bathroom, forced a coin on it, pressed Winona’s phone number…
Hello
, her voice machine said in its laboring parrot-cum-gramophone falsetto,
I can’t
, it explained,
talk in person right now…
“Winona, it’s Nelson, eight P.M. Tuesday. I wanted to pick up my fishing rod. I’ll just stop up tonight and grab it”—this errand my excuse for appearing there.

I hung up the phone, got through the press of idiots, put my elbows on the bar. Immediately the tavern’s breath soothed me. I expect always to be a small child in this place. That I can see over the tables surprises me briefly. In here I spent the most comfortable moments of my sonship, when Father was tipsy and told me stories and tossed me quarters, and I knew, at least, how to sit in a chair without disappointing him.

I ordered a glass of Carte Blanche, absolutely the world’s cheapest sherry.

Till well after 1:00 A.M. I sat at a little table in front of the forty-inch TV screen, sipping drinks and watching baseball and rerun comedies and news bulletins—the world was falling apart around me as well as inside; the president was emphatic that he wanted a war with Iraq, if fuzzy as to
why
, precisely, and refugees poured into Jordan, and the New York Mets left the field with their heads down—but I’d gone crazy and didn’t care who won or who lost, not in baseball, not in warfare.

And then around half past one I stood up, not the least bit drunk, and went to find out whether or not I’d committed a murder.

Aren’t they always saying, “I’ll never know how I got through the next few minutes, hardly remember,” et cetera? The hell with them.

They don’t know what they’re talking about. I remember the exact length of my fingernails, the sherry’s sweetness, the bill I paid with—a five, face up, our beloved Abraham Lincoln—the give in the wooden floorboards under my shoes walking out, the wet smell of the air and the shine of moisture on my car, and two finger streaks in 128 / Denis Johnson

the dust that made an ideogram, unintelligible and scary, on the Porsche’s dashboard; and I remember driving in the moonless dark and passing through the streetlamp’s glow at the head of Winona’s drive as through the spongy boundary at the end of the universe, remember realizing, at the moment I stepped from the car in front of her house, that it would almost certainly rain tonight, remember feeling the laces flap on one of my Invader-brand jogging shoes, remember pausing to deal with it, remember deciding not to. The kitchen light burned. Otherwise the place was shrouded. Winona’s customized jeep, formerly mine, a Japanese jeep, a Subaru, waited by the walk. Out in the dark, Red bumped against his stall and snickered. I felt my left hand go out, palm up, in a gesture I often make in conversation. I was talking to nobody: I’ve come home to look for my wife, don’t know what I expect. Maybe I’ll warn her she’s about to be murdered. I don’t really want to go through with this. I’ll give Harry Lally the pot plants, Clarence will break some of my bones, that’ll be okay, then they’ll heal, that’ll be neat. No need for anyone to die.

—All the while humming with excitement in the center of my heart, because I’ve stumbled onto an explanation, correct me if I’m wrong, for the tendency of our race to grope toward tragedy: in order to ponder the imponderable—war, murder, our power to mutilate the planet—in order to concentrate our thoughts on these matters, we have to
plan
them. We have to be mapping out, not merely contemplating, the un-thinkable. Or we can’t think about it at all. And I reflected, forgiving my own delirious pun, that designs just lead naturally to executions.

I put my head inside the door as any nosy neighbor might. I called:

“Dear?”

No answer.

I willed this. Yes. But I’m not sure that’s why it’s happening. I think I willed it in order to ponder it more deeply. I’m not a doer, I’m a dreamer. Ask anyone! This isn’t me!

Had Van Ness stood here in this room?

Did something of his aura linger by the couch where I’d told him about the plan and read to him from
Thus Spake Zarathustra?
Nietzsche’s wisdom on sleep was somewhat on the order of this: to sleep well, stay awake. Winona would have done right to have read that!

Already Dead / 129

When I’d showed Van Ness the Zielene and Nembutal, I’d read to him from Nietzsche on sleep—“Avoid all those,” Nietzsche’s Wise Man warns convulsively, “avoid all those who sleep badly and are awake at night.”

“I might apply that to you,” I’d pointed out to him.

“And vice versa,” he’d said.

Yes, yes, yes, I agreed with him tonight, half-aloud, running my finger along the spines of books…Oh yes. We should have avoided each other.

We’d talked about things other than sleep—he’d quoted at some length from
Zarathustra
—but what we’d read I couldn’t quite—fumbling among the shelves beside the couch for the book, which wasn’t there, scattering books to the floor in a spasm of irritation—couldn’t quite recall.

Where was my book of Nietzsche? Winona never would have touched it.

Had Van Ness come here, and found my wife comatose, and put the pillow over her face? And held it there for a long time, until she was dead, and then gone on to violate something—please be sensitive to this, it’s not absurd, please
feel
this corrupt truth—and then descended the stairs to violate something delicate and precious by stealing my Nietzsche?

I called out: “Winona?”

I looked around the living room. Nothing seemed disturbed. In the kitchen half a cup of coffee on the table and a scattering of mail, junk mail, and off by itself an envelope with a folded card jutting from it, a Hallmark card presenting the portrait of a little girl cuddling a dog.

Inside on the left-hand page a printed cursive read “Just Thinking of You” and on the facing page in my own father’s weak hand: Since you don’t have the care or interest it would take to pay me a visit, here’s a letter for you. I mean to cut your name from my will and testament. Everything goes to my boys but they can’t hack up the redwoods. Meeting my lawyers next week. You might as well clear out of that house, it’s Junior’s. And don’t come sniffling around here at this late date. Once I say a thing it’s solid.

I’d hardly begun to make sense of this communication before another one caught my eye—a postcard, the same kind Van Ness had 130 / Denis Johnson

mailed me—“Greetings from Santa Cruz,” where the ferris wheel meets the ocean and seems ready to glide into that gigantic blueness.

I turned the card over. The message read
Now we’ll see
. No postmark.

He’d carried this card here in his pocket, and laid it down with his hand.

The spasm that wrenched me knowing that he’d actually entered this house set loose a spray of images inside me, bits and pieces blown above the forest, the forest of dreams—I’d walked in a dream through these rooms, but their walls had given onto other places, a ramshackle barn full of strangers who claimed I should know them, and I lied, saying that I did, and in that place this very tabletop had upheld a pile of fruit.

It was impossibly strong, nauseating, violently so, the sense that I was both remembering and experiencing this, that I could, if I just stood still and collected myself, predict the next thing to happen in this kitchen.

According to the plan, the point of my being here was to discover the body. But I hadn’t considered that I’d actually have to
discover
the
body
. This was no theory. I was living it.

“Winona?”

The silence sank me. Told me that Van Ness had lived it too. And Winona had felt his hands on her throat—or, no, the pillow against her face—or dreamed a cloud had come down and drowned her. What had Winona dreamed? What had Van Ness felt? What is it like? Who are we really?

Had she known it was someone, a person, doing this to her? It seemed only right that even in a dream, even in total blackness, even in drugged dreams, we’d know the truth if we were dying.