Already Dead: A California Gothic (21 page)

A man walks into the house where his wife may lie murdered. And realizes that he’s twisted his life so badly that only this, the worst thing he’s ever done, could twist it back the other way.

“Winona!” I scream, and it echoes beyond the window, puny and garbled, down the arroyos and out to sea. I can’t bring it back. The name just disintegrates over the waters and that’s that. It’s impossible to bring it back!

Through this feeling of helplessness suddenly burst a piercing nostal-gia for the lost world of childhood. The way it came right up against the heart, that world, and against the face. No indoors or outdoors, only everything touching us, and the grown-ups lumbering past overhead like constellations. I can feel the big silence upstairs Already Dead / 131

getting bigger. There’s nobody there and I’m not going up to see. Because I can’t move. I’m small and my hands and feet are too large. Tonight’s music was the moans of Gyuto monks and their smashed cymbals and rattling broken instruments and the unearthly squalling of their horns. Madness at first, adrenaline nightmare, nothing to grip, zooming madness, voices, a hundred thousand feelings, grief and regret chief among them. I’ve plunged into the water and I’m sinking, sinking.

Memories roll over me. Italy—Rome, above all, Rome—pigeons lit up in the sunlight—and I saw the buildings in their dirty greatness but I kept thinking Keats, Keats died around here someplace…In Italy I felt closest to Winona, particularly in the churches, where I felt the farthest from heaven. In the cathedral in Milan I looked upward through twenty leagues of failure to the beautiful dome above. A bomb going off couldn’t have hurt that silence. Everywhere dripped the blood of stained-glass martyrs, too many of them, we’ll never get them sorted out. When we toured the duomo’s basement, a region that seemed to pre-date even its stones, something in the ripe, must-filled cloisters seemed to have gone out—not a light, but a time. And something about those skinny moldering rooms of deteriorating jewelry made the whole cathedral somewhere above our heads seem a lie, the pomp dissembling over the darker miracle worked in the streets, in the spermy churches of apartment flats, where lovers in their beds were getting high, or spilling toward the Sea of Love with eyes grown soft and blind in loused-up situations. Miracle!—your incense followed the blond American woman to Sicily, to the town of Monreale in the altitudes, and I, her husband, followed you. And felt myself erased by the cathedral…fading beside the flowers…This church in Monreale was smaller and more to the point. On the walls and ceilings, from the making of our wild, tearful earth to the martyrdom of Saint Paul, they’ve laid out Christian history in a billion tiny tiles…You have to drop money in a slot to get the lights to go on—as grand as all this is, it operates on the principle of the honky-tonk jukebox. The electric lights brighten and darken according to the random coins the faithful feed the meter box, and in the dome Christ’s concave face, the world’s second-largest mosaic portrait, lights up overhead, looks down awhile, blacks out again. It doesn’t matter that the church’s curators are niggardly. Nobody goes there who isn’t crushed by its beauty. In those vast religious places, as here, now, in life’s deepest abyss, we feel a plunging 132 / Denis Johnson

sexual vertigo. Is it any wonder that later, exploring secret passages in the church’s eaves, when we came out onto a parapet and found ourselves staring at half of Sicily and the ocean and the sky, I suddenly wanted to make love, right there in the daylight, to Winona? She said no. But later said she wished she
had
let me take her, in that high place overlooking a Palermo that seemed dreamed, with underneath us the massive mosaic Christ going on and off, Christ blooming and failing—

All right. In my breast pocket, a phial of Nembutal—replacement for the phony stuff, the Zieline. I turned, walked steadily through the house and up the stairs to the open door of Winona’s bedroom.

A man climbs the stairs toward the room where his wife lies motionless. His feet tread the vacancies of starlight…I flipped the switch at the top of the stairwell.

She lay on her right side, her back turned, her right arm flung behind her as if reaching toward me. Not Winona, but a corpse, a thing. Nothing worth looking at. I stepped into the room and stood beside the body but I was still alone.

I pushed open the double windows and looked out onto the dark pasture. No stars, no moon, no wind. Just the head’s unbelievable racket.

Something, a leaf or an ash, drifts down in front of my vision. No.

Have I just seen a night bird drop dead out of the sky?

It strikes me suddenly that birds must actually, sometimes, die in midair. I’ve never seen this truth before—that sometimes they must enter heaven having lifted themselves halfway there. It seems such a little thing to understand, but I start shaking. I’m afraid if I try to touch something I’ll pass my shimmering hand through the mirage of my life.

I moved the chair from her desk and sat down beside the corpse and closed my eyes and looked at blindness. I would do anything to undo this.

I have made a mistake.

What could be more trivial and irrelevant than this true fact? A few plain words—over all of this the phrase came floating like a sports headline, FLYNN HURLS SEVENTH STRAIGHT, on the destruction of a maelstrom: steeples and living rooms and drowned puppies and little dolls, whole lives washing down out of sight, then a line of old news turning in the current:
I have made a mistake
.

Already Dead / 133

I’m sorry
, meaning,
I want another world
. Give me a different world.

I leaned over the bed and looked down at her for a moment, an incomprehensible moment, trembling, hollow, insane. Not a moment, but a life. Not a sentence to prison, but a prisoner’s life, not a moment of slavery, but the life of a slave. Converging darknesses like black cotton clouds…I hadn’t taken her life, but my own.

I have never done anything real. There is nothing to get back to.

Everything I am is shit. Everything to do with me. Everything I’ve made.

All I have.

I touch her arm. She
is
substantial—I look down at her face in profile.

But this is nobody I know. I’d never seen her before. No mistaking it.

I’ve thought often that this person, this Winona, couldn’t possibly be my wife. Now I know.

I’m not going to do anything wrong. I can’t have done anything wrong. I have not done anything wrong.

Before this moment I’d lived as a mind. Body, heart, soul, intellect, so we carve ourselves into parts. But the whole of us, what can it be?

We’ll never name it. Before this moment I’d depended on the head, on thinking my way out of trouble, and when there was no way out depended on the head to tilt and revolve and distort until it found a new, a transcendent perspective, or a cheap rationalization for my shames, I didn’t care which.

Intellect rampant on a field of ice, now it plunged through and froze and sank down to the heart in its cage under the North Pole. Will you believe me please if I tell you that the nameless whole of me had arranged all of this—just to break my heart?

A man walks into the room where his wife lies murdered. And begins to realize that only this could have saved him. That this, the worst thing he could possibly have done, was his only hope.

And then something stuns him like a blow to the neck. What is it?

The phone! It rings and rings…

He won’t respond. Won’t touch it. Won’t,
ring
, won’t,
ring
, won’t—two more and the machine would answer.

But
she
answers. Turns over. Reclaims her outflung arm. Fumbles with the telephone. Clears the death from her throat with a rasping sound.

“Hello?” my dead wife says.

Then says my name: “Nelson?”

134 / Denis Johnson

Then lies back on her pillow, lets loose of the receiver and says,

“Dear?”…This time she’s calling out the word. Groggy, sightless, calling out because she thinks I’m far away. Calling me dear because under the water of dreams she’s forgotten that I don’t live here, that we’re not close.

Dear
—it can mean cherished, beloved, close. It can mean expensive, hard-won.

A man arranges to have his wife killed. (These things actually happen, tragedy does sometimes turn one particular night in people’s lives into a crashing metallic thing, and sometimes that this tragedy has been
willed
makes all of it majestic.) He walks into his former home because he’s arranged to be the discoverer of the body. Then the telephone rings.

Then the corpse answers it, holds the phone out to the murderer, and calls the murderer dear.

He fakes it, takes the phone, clutches it in his hand.

She’s fallen instantly back to sleep. Out cold, not a muscle twitching.

You can’t see her breathe. You could easily think she was…but yes.

You certainly could.

He puts the receiver against his ear.

The voice of his brother says, “I have terrible news.”
A
small fierce rain began. Van found himself standing in it beside the Volvo’s open door, looking into the dark leather interior, completely distracted, his heart thudding with after-shocks. He’d looked right into the man’s face: his eyes like tunnels and a wild animal lurking in a stench of fear way back in there.

The joke had cosmic dimensions. But who was the joker? The trickster.

Van made a mental note to get hold of a tarot deck, he seemed to remember a jester or some similar figure among its symbols, and then he forgot all about it as he supported himself by hanging on to the car’s open door and a wave of nausea and hilarity crashed over him.

Threads, only threads, nothing more than threads—the curtain between this life and the sweet core, he could nearly push through it, it was down to threads.

The physical sensations accompanying all this—blasting, shaking, wrenching—had a completely unexpected intensity: he’d do it again soon.

Already Dead / 135

N
avarro was stark naked, Mo was, too; still he could feel the badge.

Mo’s place lay above Anchor Bay, up the hill and overlooking the stores. It was damp and chilly out, but they had a fire going and a sleeping bag wrapped around them.

He liked her because she was happy. “Jolly,” even. It remained to be seen, though, who Mo really was. Sometimes people pulled out a whole new personality after sex happened. He’d been known to do it himself, and in fact he felt this might be one of those times. He was drug-out and lonely around here, starve-hearted. It was too easy in that frame of mind to start yanking on her like a security blanket. The worst thing about being a cop was the fear of disgusting somebody if you acted like a scared child. You get naked, and that’s when you really start to feel the burden of the invisible badge.

They’d finished making love and were just lying around, halfway watching a porno flick. “Black women don’t do it for me, usually,” he said. “She’s okay though.”

“Are you against black people?”

“Me? Hell no. I’m more against Mexicans, if you want to know the truth.”

“Isn’t Navarro a Mexican name?”

“A lot of Americans have foreign-type names.”

“I’m wondering. Why’d you decide to be a cop?”

“
Dragnet
,” he said. “They show the reruns every day in L.A.” They watched two couples humping in the same bed and listened to their soft, unconvincing cries.

“Brunettes turn me on,” he said.

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“I could do without all these dicks, though.”

“The dicks aren’t there for you, hon. They’re there for me.”

“I know where there’s a real one.”

“So do I.”

Her thinness worked better when she had all her clothes on, but he really didn’t mind either way. She had the laughter and the sweetness of a fat girl. “I like your muscles,” she said.

“They come in handy.”

“Did you ever beat on anybody? Are you that kind of cop?”

“Not around here,” he said.

136 / Denis Johnson

“What about down in L.A.?”

“I was never accused of excessive force.”

“What does that mean?”

“I thumped a few, yeah.”

“But that’s illegal.”

“A couple per week, probably. Thump ’em if they jiggle…I’m not talking about attempted murder. Just a shot with the truncheon. It’s kind of like punctuation. Makes it so you’re understood.” He drew her closer and then with one mind they decided to open the sleeping bag and let the fire’s dry warmth play over their sweaty bodies.

He turned his attention to the TV, to camouflage the sweetness he was feeling.

“Everybody does what they have to do. Sometimes you’ve gotta stab your sister and get sent to Quentin and get kicked to shit by the guards and raped by guys with diseases, you know, and shut down in the hole for sixty days and nights. And if that don’t do it, the poor sonofabitch’ll just have to go get some more for himself somewhere, because this is what I believe, everything you get laid on you you asked for it, because you want it, because you need it.”

“You just don’t ask for it right out loud in your mind,” she said,

“yeah.”

“But most of us don’t get half the hits we need. One life won’t hold that much horror-show, sometimes I think.”

“That’s what the next lives are for. And the ones you had before.” He got up on one elbow and jostled the coals with the poker. “I think we’re leading into some nonsense here,” he said.

“Then what are you saying?”

“I’m just improvising,” he said, “to be polite.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t like to screw somebody and then just lay there quiet.”

“Oh.”

“Like I’m sulking or I don’t like you or something.”

“I’m sorry. Did I fuck up?”

“No. No. No.”

“Oh.”

“All that’s happening is I’m hanging around in your bed, because I like you.”

She made an attractive circle of her mouth, opening it around a word that couldn’t be spoken or something like that, a certain hesita-Already Dead / 137

tion in the feelings before she said, “Oh. I like you, too”—liked him more than she wanted him to know, he could see that.