Already Dead: A California Gothic (40 page)

The left side of his head began to feel warmer than any other part of him, and before long it produced a pulse that became an unbearable black booming in his skull. His legs and back began hurting, and all this he took as a signal that some kind of life had been granted him. By rolling onto his left side and clutching at a knob of stone, he raised himself slightly and took his bearings, anxiously mindful of the sun’s descent, of the coming darkness in which he’d be stranded. This rock lay not too far off Schooner Beach, south of Point Arena—he’d come half a mile along the water and hardly participated in the process. On the shore stood a palomino pony, bareback and free, alternately staring off toward the sunset and nodding at tufts of grass. From here three rocks made a line generally southeast toward it. He could flounder from one to the next and deliver himself back to the shallows. From there he didn’t know. His legs might move him toward the land, or he might be carried back strengthless into the swells.

260 / Denis Johnson

He put his face to the flat, glimmering debouchment and sucked until his lips were numb, then got upright and vomited weakly and went on climbing the steady rise alongside Schooner Creek to the Coast Highway. The exertion warmed him, but the hires of this incredible day came final as he reached the lay-by at the road, and he closed himself in a sturdy government outhouse, sitting on the cessbox, leaning sideways into the corner, pulling his feet up out of the ventilating draft across the floor, sleeping while the chill worked back into his bones and later waking aghast, baffled, in this chamber like an upright coffin.

He fought to his feet, banged out into the blustery dark and oriented himself. Rather than use the facilities, he stood next to the cubicle working at the zipper of his damp whites, and urinated at length on the ground before setting out south along California 1. When he heard a vehicle approaching he stood still with his thumb raised, but as the lights topped the rise he took himself into the roadside trees and hid while it passed by. A half mile along, a raincloud caught him coming up the coast. It blew over in minutes.

Just north of the property he came on the site of a recent accident, long white painted lines intersecting with skid marks, designs of blood on the pavement, the scattered stub ends of highway flares. A secret aftermath. None of it easily discernible in the night. The lights turned off on a party where everyone’s been arrested. A party where the child has died. The birthday a deathday, the roman candles deranged by the wind and dribbling brimstone.

He veered from the path to the front door and stood in the slight illumination of the living room window, looking in; warm now from his hike of several miles, overly warm, and breathing hard. Still wet and stinking of the sea. Smelling of brine and spilt diesel. His reflection a mist-like darkness in the glass.—I’m the Coast Silky now. He put his face against this faceless other’s. Saw nobody in the dim living room.

He heard her voice inside, talking low, and sensed by its tones the presence of an evil guest. Then he saw her pass the window, silhouetted in the aura from a candle. Just a shadow. This was now absolutely the way of all.—I’ve made a world in which the men are Already Dead / 261

sinister and the women completely opaque. In the shifting dark now shapes stir.

He tapped the glass with his fingertips. “Yvonne.” If she wasn’t alone he would leave. Again he tapped, and the shape came close. “Yvonne. It’s Nelson.”

“Nelson?”

“Nelson Fairchild. I want to see you. Is anybody there?” She turned and went to the front door. He sighed and tapped against the glass again, but she didn’t hear.

He met her where she stood in the doorway looking right and left into the dark. “Nelson—”

“Who’s with you?”

She backed away into the house as if she thought he’d do her violence.

Stood in the center of an oval rug of Persian design in the center of the room, her legs silhouetted in billowy pantaloons and her midriff bare, like the denizen, the chief wife in fact, of some pampering seraglio. She looked strained, even woozy, to the point that his own condition went unmentioned now.

Ah, your true music: a tuneless keening in the woods.

He followed her in. “Who’s here?”

As he shut the door against the night she sat on a hassock by the woodstove and hugged herself and sighed, averting her face.

“Where’s Ocean?”

“Ocean.”

“The young friend. I thought she lived here.”

“Ocean is gone.”

“There’s something wrong here.”

“It doesn’t involve you.”

“Maybe it does.”

“No.”

“I think it does.”

She sighed once again, left off embracing herself and held her palms out toward the stove. She turned her face from it to gather in the sight of him at last.

“You’re wet.”

“I walked here from—from where I fell in. From where I got out.” She stood up, beckoning. “Sit here.” He took her place on the hassock and understood none of this. He put the heels of his hands against the sockets of his eyes and lowered his elbows to his knees.

262 / Denis Johnson

Thus he held his head up. He became aware of a cedary incense around him. Maybe sandalwood.

He heard her leaving. Heard drawers in the kitchen. He thought he heard her weeping in there and raised his head.

She came out with a white, flowered dishtowel and draped it gently over the back of his neck and raised its corner to press against his scalp.

“You’re bleeding. Or you were.”

“God, that hurts.”

“I’m just wiping away the blood. Your ear is terribly swollen.”

“I was out, unconscious. I should have drowned.” She sat next to him and with tenderness applied the towel against his wound. “Did you by any chance see the kelpie?”

“Kelpie who?”

“The kelpie. A water sprite. Usually she takes the form of a horse.

She comes to drowning sailors.”

“I saw a horse. Not a sprite. Just a horse. I’m cold.”

“Move closer, then.” She opened the stove’s door a crack and a draft began thrumming up the chimney. She helped him scoot the hassock nearer the stove, and he hunched beside the steadily increasing heat while she draped about him a fancy saddle blanket, blue and purple and scarlet, and held it in place with an arm about his shoulders, a hand on his arm. “The fire has a voice,” he said. He breathed deeply through open, quivering lips. “I’m going to cry.” He tried to urge the sobs along, but his emotion expressed itself in a series of coughs and a fit of shivering.

“No, Nelson. It wasn’t just a horse.”

He was glad of her closeness. The minty currents of her breath.

“I was invited to a prayer meeting tonight.”

“Perhaps that’s where you should be then.”

“Because nobody invited me here, you mean.” She deflected this with a gesture of her hand toward her face.

“Yvonne—what has happened?”

With a graceful turn of her form she left the hassock and lit on the chair it served. She curled her fingers around its arms, but forcefully, until her knuckles bumped up and her hands look gnarled. “What about you? Should I ask what’s happened to you?”

“More than I can tell. That’s why I’m here.”

“I’m not understanding. Why
are
you here?”

“To make a deal. Any deal. Make a deal for me.” Already Dead / 263

“With whom?”

“Well—your spiritual cohorts. Your angel friends, your demons, I don’t care.”

Apparently in weariness, maybe irritation, she shut her eyes, and at this moment his own sight widened to engulf their surroundings: the three candles in corner nooks giving them what light there was, beside each a brass snuff dish, the wall of bookshelves, the wide venetian blinds, on the facing wall a lamb’s skin dyed red.

As if talking in her sleep she asked, “How did you get wet? Is it raining that hard?”

“I was wet before it rained.”

“Where did you come from? Where’s your car?”

“Nobody knows I’m here. Nobody must ever know I was here.” She opened her eyes on him. “Okay. However you want it.”

“I’m the victim, the object, of not one but two quite separate plots to murder me.”

“And you’re thinking you can—what are you thinking you can do?”

“Whatever can be done.”

“There’s such a thing as karma, you know. You can’t cheat the past.”

“So the future is set, do you mean? I don’t think so.”

“Not the future. But fate.”

“Einstein didn’t think so.”

“
Ein
stein. Did you ever consider how contradictory you are? I mean self-contradictory in your whole system?”

“I’m confused, desperate and confused. I don’t apologise for it.”

“We live in a universe of space-time. Einstein mapped it to his partial satisfaction. But just like the rest of us, he lived his fate. We know our fate. On some level we know it perfectly. What we can’t foresee is the way our fate conjoins with other fates.”

“And our fate is terrible.”

“Oh, no. It’s beautiful. Only our illusions are terrible. And it’s inevitable that they’ll fall away. But first we have to pierce them. And be pierced by them”—Her voice was shaking, and her hands. “Why didn’t you come to me sooner?”

“Because I don’t like you.”

“You don’t like anyone.” She clutched her hands together. “It’s a mess now. You’re not the only one doomed.”

“You’re scared. You’ve toyed with God, or Satan, or somebody like that—”

264 / Denis Johnson

“
You’ve
toyed with them—”

“What can I do?”

“Shall I call Randall?”

“Look at me. I’m willing—I’m desperate, I said I was.” She settled back in her seat, shut her eyes and opened them. “Nelson Fairchild—hello. I am Randall MacNammara.”

“Just like that.”

Yvonne’s face smiled. “It’s easy once you know how.” The trouble had left her. Her hands, resting on either arm of the chair, were beautiful again.

He began his dialogue with the void. “You indicated we might speak in private.”

“And here we are.”

“What have you done to my wife?”

“She’s not your wife anymore.”

“What have you done with Winona? Whatever she is to me.”

“She’s nothing to you. She’s no one you’ve ever known.”

“Well then, who is she?”

“Are you familiar with the term ‘walk-in’? Do you know what a walkin is?”

“A closet? A freezer? Come on, will you?”

“Your wife,” Randall said, “is dead.”

“My wife is dead.”

“The person you’ve been dealing with is not your wife. Forget her.”

“Not possible. She’s trying to get me murdered, I think.”

“She may be trying, but she hasn’t contracted to be a killer this life around.”

“And she’s not the only one. I’ve got real hit men on my ass, Mr.

Ghost. And I want you to understand I have no desire to get like you.

Today I swam when I might have drowned. I drank water when I was thirsty. I slept when I was tired. Also I took a great piss. I wish I could go on doing things like that forever.”

“Well, the vocation of hit men is to deny your wish.”

“Can you help me? Can you operate somehow on these—types—these entities—”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Look, can you or can’t you work some changes in our little realm?”

“Nelson Fairchild, I don’t know. It’s never occurred to me. Do you care about changing the dream you had last night?” Already Dead / 265

“Oh, the
god
damn dream thing! Great!”

“When you’ve been caught in the world of perception you’re caught in a dream. That’s simple enough.”

“Yesterday, you were talking to me about a doppelgänger.”

“A soul twin. Your twin is in error. This error has led your twin into danger of a peculiar kind.”

“Who is it? It’s Carl Van Ness.”

“Your twin makes a basic error in mistaking the self for the universe.

We all use the self as the basic referent. He fails to use any other.”

“You mean he’s self-centered.”

“As long as you don’t mean merely selfish. We’re talking about a failure of perception that amounts to total spiritual blindness and soul-sickness. This person compounds his basic error by believing that the universe started with his birth and ends with his death. If he believes in reincarnations, he believes in reincarnations of the whole universe.

That eliminates karma, relearning, and the law of compensation—since each universe is a closed system, bounded by his lifetime. Through all these universes one after another, the only thread, the only continuity, is his identity. And the thread is endless. He has no destiny.”

“And is that actually true?”

“It’s as he makes it. He’s condemned himself to an unimaginable interval on the current plane.”

“To hell with him, then. But there are two others, two men, out to kill me.”

“And so they will. But they’re not important.”

“I beg your fucking pardon?”

“They’re merely completing a design you began—you yourself began—in an earlier existence. You killed in a previous era, in this one you experience the other side of that. The lesson begun in one life is finished in another.”

“That’s just—ugly! Justice should be rounded off in a single life, if you’re going to have it at all. Otherwise it’s so unfair, so unpoetic.”

“It’s a game, Nelson Fairchild. First you learn offense, now you learn defense.”

“I’m not a gamesman. I look on things as serious.”

“Well, things aren’t serious. But this one thing is. This Devourer.”

“Van Ness.”

266 / Denis Johnson

“The Devourer has possessed a body at the moment of death, and you took it home with you. You invited it in. Now it eats.”

“And I’m lunch.”

“At least you keep your sense of humor.”

“Sure thing. Yes I do.”

“He’s the one to take seriously. The others are just figures in your waking dream.”

“I take my waking experiences as facts. They have a certain logic, anyway. Meanwhile, dreams are jumbles. I know the difference.”

“What you seem to wake up to is just another form of the same world you see in dreams. All your time is spent in dreaming. Your sleeping and your waking dreams have different forms, that’s all…Nelson Fairchild: Do you believe in God?”