Already Dead: A California Gothic (53 page)

caught at his hand, and released it as he started moving after her. In the living room he sat down quickly on the hassock by the stove and rested his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, staring at the incomprehensible designs in the weaving of a throw rug. His blood flushed against his skin, as if it might burst out. The sensation ebbed away, and he realized he was breathing in rapid gasps and brought it under control. He was aware that she stood by the window, that she lowered the blinds, that she turned and sat across from him in the chair.

He began to feel almost normal except for his eyes, which were teary and molten. “What are you going to say?” he whispered because he couldn’t stand waiting any longer for her voice.

“Did you get a hot rush. Did your skin flush.” He tried to nod.

“That’s only vitamin B-twelve. It passes. Is it past?”

“You gonna scrape off my sweat now?”

“You’re okay,” she said.

He nodded. “This was a mistake,” he said.

She took his hands. “It’s not a mistake. You and this woman have business.”

“What woman?”

“The woman Yvonne.”

“But you.”

“I’m Randall MacNammara. You remember.”

“I remember.” His eyes were feeling better. Except for a slight distancing of events, he’d come around. The little lethargy didn’t seem anything worth fighting. He might have drunk a strong martini.

“John, every moment of life has a lesson to teach. But most of us would rather just daydream our way past them.”

“Ah, yeah. Potions.” He sighed. “Witches and demons. I’ve put the cuffs on a few. I’m not interested in those lessons.”

“This isn’t school. It’s life. What life teaches us is responsibility.” I’m all for that, he thought, but didn’t bother saying it. He only said,

“Snafu and tofu,” and heard himself or remembered himself laughing.

“Sooner or later we take responsibility,” she says, “for having created our world.” Certainly, the demons were in his head. Gumdrops in a dream were not gumdrops, but a dream. But as long as you don’t wake, they’re candy. You can eat them. If they’re poison they kill you. Then you wake, still alive. But in the dream you’re dead.

352 / Denis Johnson

“I had a purpose here,” he reminded them both, or all three of them.

“What was your purpose?”

“I’m looking for Nelson Fairchild.”

“He’s dead.”

“I…Why do you say that?”

“He died this morning.”

“Uh,” Navarro said. He looked around, but at nothing. “Was this on the news?”

“You’re one of the few on earth who know.”

“Well, but…where’s the body?”

“That’s irrelevant. The question is, where is his soul?”

“Okay…Hey, would there be any chance of—talking to him?”

“Not at the moment. Down the line there certainly would.”

“Wow. Reserving the right to call Bullshit—how did he die?”

“I’m not in possession of that information, but it seems he was probably murdered. For some lifetimes now he’s been caught in a drama that keeps turning out that way, I’m afraid. But it’s over now. He’s free.”

She reaches her hand to his jaw and traces the line with her fingertip.

Her own lips tremble as she breathes through her open mouth. He was hard. But the flesh of it felt tired, or cold. As did his lips and fingers.

“Do you like her?”

“Who?”

“Yvonne. The woman.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Especially because you like danger, and trouble, and getting off the track. And that’s why she likes you too. Because you enjoy defending yourself.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s the kind of responsibility you believe in.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“But there’s someone who wants to talk to you if only you’ll put aside your defenses. Your moves, your programs, your John Navarro act. It’s all out there waiting to resume, but none of it’s here, in this house. Your certainties, your stock responses. It’s like parking your car by the road someplace and just getting out of it. It’s there, it’s yours, but you shut the door and walk away. You come down the

Already Dead / 353

path to this house. The woman opens the door. You come inside, you come in alone, carrying nothing, you shut the door behind you. You’ve come here alone, you’re alone in here with the woman.

“Come in.” It was Yvonne again. “Come here.” He thought he was in, he thought he was here, but she brings him slowly in.

“You are the holy Son of God himself. Say it.” Turning the light down from someplace, narrowing the light, blacking things down till there’s just the two of them.

“You are the holy Son of God himself.”

She tuned them in, the two of them, until they were very sharp and nothing else was.

“I am the holy Son of God himself.”

She let out a long breath and took in a long breath. A great warmth came off her, an easy welcoming sensual joy. Then she looked pained, her face swimming at him and a series of bad thoughts working on her loveliness. She covered her eyes with her hand and said, “
Oh
?” and it broke him like the song of an old love. She slumped back in her chair and her hand dropped away.

He remembered now. “‘Jeremiah was a bullfrog.’” He spoke the words. He couldn’t sing.

“I am Miran.”

“And who is Miran?”

“There are deeper levels, or higher levels if you prefer. Or lower, if you like it like that.”

“You’re getting us into a different darker Babylon-type thing. I can feel it. I don’t feel good,” he said. In fact a prickly nausea overwhelmed him right along the blood in his veins.

“You’ve never felt good. Your suffering protects you. Pain is the ransom you have gladly paid not to be free.” She didn’t appear to be looking at him, or anywhere else. But she rolled her shoulders slightly and seemed aware of him, electrically aware.

“Use her body.”

With both hands delicately she raised her hem above her thighs. Beneath her shift she went naked.

“Feel between her legs.”

It was like putting his hand into molten iron and finding it only pleasant.

354 / Denis Johnson

“Isn’t she wet? Take her.”

Darkness all around them and particularly behind her almost like a light that put her in a gray silhouette.

“What are you?”

“I am Miran.”

“Are you male or female?”

“Both. Neither. Both…Take her.”

He couldn’t see if her mouth was moving.

“Take her. Anything. She’s ours.”

He freed his fingers from the slick locks of auburn hair between her thighs. He took her by her forearm’s flesh and then he was on his knees and pulling her forward.

“Throw her on the floor.”

He’s on top. He can almost see her eyes.

“Tear her up.”

He was inside her but he was numb to any pleasure. He wrestled the shift up, covering her head, and raised himself stiff-armed and looked down at this white body in a light that was suddenly falling all over him. It was hotter than physical pleasure, more shivery, more melting.

He raised his vision to where the walls had fallen away to reveal a sort of moving picture, a creature with a gargoyle’s face, but it was her face, too—an angel, a cruel and glorified monster with Yvonne’s iron-colored eyes, looking off, and a mist accompanying her. Great white powerful wings, but scaled, not feathery. Looking off, communicating with someone her satisfaction, the righteous, glutted quality of her content-ment. Sharing it with someone he didn’t want to see.

You want to, Miran said, you want to, it’s hers, make it yours, take it in your hands. He dragged her clothing from her face. Put his fingers around her throat. Touched his thumbs together beneath the larynx and felt it buzz. A little harder, put her out, put her out. He pushed his thumbs against the beat. The lovely face began to fatten and suffuse with the colors of plums and the shut eyes slanted and looked like a happy baby’s, who cooed and wheezed and gurgled. His own life filled him and spilled out of his pores and ears and nostrils, tore through the top of his head. It lit up the air, unbearably bright, burned rapidly all around him and went out. Only the glow of candles now, and it seemed veiled, remembered. He loosened his hands on her throat, and instantly the face blanched and almost disap-Already Dead / 355

peared, as if its shadows were sketched on the rug. Give the woman her breath, give it back, keep it. He moved his hands to her jawline and it divided slackly at his touch. He kissed her open mouth. Yours now, keep it, give it back, something said.

L
ying out in the garden patch watching the stars, Meadows swam in the wasted confusion and panic he’d felt during childhood illnesses—the true understanding of the scene: no doctor, no medicine, nobody’s mom or dad can help you.

He tried to tune in to its physical sensations, tried to stay still inside and wait for things in there to come right. It got down as usual to discipline: be with this. It was an art. Like surfing, it wedded the mind to the muscles.

He concentrated his mind on the heavens. There was Orion’s tristar belt, and the stiff dangling sword. This far from any artificial light source the Milky Way’s rim stood prominent, snaking among the suns. One day he’d see one of those things go nova. He just had to live long enough and watch. Many of the ancients had believed that a nova, no matter how far-off, signaled God the Dragon’s most intimate incinerating touch on the feathers of history. The magic man called Takinsata, or Doctor Snake, had witnessed such a thing in the sky two thousand years ago from this coast—the same herald-star of Christ in the unimaginable East—and been fixed with such power that afterward he melted rocks with his breath and with his claws raked scars in the surfaces of the lakes. He strode the coastal forests tearing and scattering the red hairs from his head and they grew into the redwoods. Where he sprinkled his urine rhododendrons grew up. His eyes were so strong and so beautiful that fish from the sea swam up into the fresh streams to find them, and the steelhead and salmon and cutthroat still do so to this day, and there they find his eyes, which look to us like their births, spawning, and deaths. Doctor Snake gave the coast people their language, their skills, their legends. Eventually a god of the White Darkness, one of the Athabascan progenitors from five mountain ranges north, came and gave him a red mushroom with shiny speckles and he ate it and flew away.

But Doctor Snake had witnessed the very moment of a nova’s birth.

Thus his power.

Meadows watched the constellations wheel above. A probing visitant illumination edged his sight: silent heat lightning stuttering up 356 / Denis Johnson

from too deep a place to be audible, the hills around flickering and failing as if trying to kindle themselves out of the empty dark. He wept.

He fell asleep.

Later something shocked him awake. A gigantic voice. An agony at the foundries of the real. The slap of it drove down his flesh, but then it was only thunder, small and lowing, rolling down and gone away.

He sat up; the hair tickled all over him. A wind had been working, and he tasted dirt. Bright veins scintillated to the east, real lightning, though he didn’t smell a bit of rain. He watched the dry storm. It struck just across the canyon once, twice, an election designated by crippled-looking talons—the flash, the black catch between, and then thunder to tear your skull away, first an incomprehensible fact, then a sound, then a voice, rushed and elderly, fading at the brink of intelligibility.

The lightning started a fire in the hills. For hours it seemed covert and unlikely, signaling at great intervals as a struck log, he guessed, was fanned intermittently. But eventual gusts drove it into the brush, and then it woke up and raced around with the breezes until on the tindery hillside a riot of flames was under way.

He crouched beside his sleeping bag over the lantern and got it lit, pulled on his boots, broke down his A-frame and weighted the tarp, flattened on the ground, at its corners—with his bag, his rifle, a rock, a chunk of firewood—but he set the lamp aside and worked beyond the perimeter of its light, because he needed both hands. He walked the garden, tore out each plant and beat it viciously against the earth, clearing the rootwork of clots, and lay each across the plastic. The tarp, ten by twenty feet, barely accommodated this premature harvest. He rolled the tarp up from one end as tightly as he could, appreciating sadly that he was producing, in fact, one gigantic mother of a joint. Ten feet long and two yards in diameter and weighing above a hundred pounds, laced around with yellow nylon rope. He cached it behind the spring box and sprinkled its blue bulk with bits of manzanita and rhododendron. By now it was well past dawn, by now the atmosphere to the east was full of brown smoke and carried a noise like a distant locomotive. Two spotter planes, small Cessnas, plied the sky like fish in a tank.

Already Dead / 357

September 22–24, 1990

S
hortly after ten o’clock in the morning, Meadows stood finishing a can of Colt .45 in the grave site behind the Gualala Lutheran Church. The chapel and its residence were fifties-era buildings, both of them, though out back on a bluff which, but for evergreens, would have looked down a short drop onto the Gualala Safeway, lay this little inexplicable fenced plot of graves from the turn of the century. One of the saddest and most satisfying places he’d ever stood in.

That it probably belonged to the Lutheran churchyard was news to him. He’d come on it from below, climbing up here one day to watch—was it fireworks?—something out over the sea. He couldn’t remember. Now he’d stumbled onto them again, these seven wooden markers, not crosses, but listing and reeling blades of cedar too weathered to be legible.

Today his awareness fixed itself toward the upward slope, toward the two Lutheran buildings. The daughter would be at school. But Mrs.

Connor ran a bookshop that didn’t open till eleven or so. He waited among the graves until he heard her car fire up and get away, and then walked around the church’s left side, the side farthest from the residence.

358

None of the churches had any size to them in these parts. This one was no larger than the one he’d blundered into and out of in West Point.