Already Dead: A California Gothic (35 page)

In the lull as the wind blew by and old Hillary whuffed as if foal-226 / Denis Johnson

ing, 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 Another reprieve rescinded, a sort of Easter parody, after three days down under, Lally jumps up whole.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 Already Dead / 227

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.”