Already Dead

by Denis Johnson

  Denis Johnson

  Already Dead

  A California Gothic

  for Cindy Lee

  In nightmares, which are no more than intensifications of some worry through anxiety, the terrible expectation is always fulfilled: the bull catches you, the knife reaches you, the axe whistles about your ears—but at this point, when you have given yourself up for dead, you wake up. (Though I once actually felt the cold steel of a sword thrust into me.)

  —PEDRO MESEGUER, S.J.

  THE SECRET OF DREAMS

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Book One

  August 7, 1990

  August 8–10, 1990

  August 9–10, 1990

  August 28, 1990

  August 11-September 5, 1990

  October 30, 1991

  Book Two

  September 2–5, 1990

  September 4–12, 1990

  September 13, 1990

  October 30, 1991

  Book Three

  September 13, 1990

  September 14, 1990

  Sept. 21–23, 1990

  September 22–24, 1990

  September 14–25, 1990

  October 31, 1991

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by Denis Johnson

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Book One

  August 7, 1990

  Van Ness felt a gladness and wonder as he drove past the small isolated towns along U.S. 101 in Northern California, a certain interest, a yearning, because he sensed they were places a person could disappear into. They felt like little naps you might never wake up from—you might throw a tire and hike to a gas station and stumble unexpectedly onto the rest of your life, the people who would finally mean something to you, a woman, an immortal friend, a saving fellowship in the religion of some obscure church. But such a thing as a small detour into deep and permanent changes, at the time, anyway, that he was travelling down the coast from Seattle into Mendocino County, wasn’t even to be dreamt of in Van Ness’s world.

  The side trip he took off 101 into Humboldt County only proved it. He deserted his route at Redway, went five miles west to Briceland and from there a half dozen miles to the Mattole River and past an invisible town (he saw only a one-room school in the corner of a field) called Ettersburg, and then switched back and forth along mountainous terrain another few miles to a dirt road that cut through the King Range National Forest.

  Bucking slowly in his Volvo down the steep zigzag track among dusty redwoods, Van Ness glimpsed the sky above the sea but not the sea. He stopped for two minutes at an elbow of the road overlooking the decline and ate a pack of cheese-flavored crackers and whisked the crumbs from his long mustache—handlebars arcing down into a monstrous Fu Manchu and serving, along with thick rimless spectacles, almost to obliterate any personality from his face. The crackers were the last of his food. He tossed the wrapper onto the floorboard and drove on.

  Vaguely he wanted to accomplish some small cleansing of himself in this remote area known as “The Lost Coast,” wanted to fast beside the Pacific and lie on his back all night within hearing of the ocean’s detonations and look up at a meteor storm: between ten and thirty-five stars were expected to fall every minute that night, according to the weather report on his radio.

  But when he reached the shores of the Pacific, he realized he’d only managed to find the back way into a place called Shelter Cove, a vast failed housing development on the isolated coast, hundreds of tiny empty lots set among asphalt streets with green signs on poles—CLAM AVENUE, BEACH DRIVE, and so on—shaken and speckled by the sandy wind. Half a dozen actual homes fronted the beach, and a few overturned runabouts, and a delicatessen, but really almost nobody had ever lived here. The sea burned in its heartless blueness while overhead flew helicopters filled, according to news flashes on his radio, with National Guardsmen and agents of the federal government conducting a massive raid on the marijuana patches in the unpeopled hills he’d just driven through. Van Ness bought his lunch in the deli and complained silently to himself about the weak coffee and the gull droppings on the picnic table. The only person he talked to was a pretty woman who swore at him because, as he walked past her table to the trash can, she dropped her sunglasses, and he stepped on them. The glasses were unsalvageable. He gave her fifteen dollars, although she claimed they’d cost twice that. Van Ness was back on the main highway again just a few hours after leaving it. He’d circled back to the town of Redway, the point where he’d turned off. The whole pointless excursion had a way of sealing his mind even further against any notion that great changes might beset him unexpectedly. And yet later he encountered the woman, Winona Fairchild, again, more than once; and eventually these encounters forced him to acknowledge the reality of fate, and the truth inherent in things of the imagination.

  A California Highway Patrolman pulled him over on a stretch of 101 he had to travel before he would reach Leggett and turn west again toward the coast. Van Ness knew he’d been speeding; he did it habitually, compulsively. He carried a passenger at the time, a teenaged girl dressed after the style of Lithuanian peasants, in a long skirt, bright scarf, and sharply pointed purple shoes, her name a poetic creation possibly designating a flavor or a scent, like Rainbow Day or Temple Jasmine, but it had escaped his memory even as she’d said it. Except for the introductions, she and Van Ness hadn’t traded ten words since he’d picked her up hitchhiking by the Texaco in Redway, at which time he’d said to her, “Welcome, Fantasy Lady.”

  Now he wished he hadn’t said it. When the young patrolman stooped down beside the driver’s window to peer within and ask for the license, the hippie girl leaned toward him over Van Ness’s lap: “Is it about another ten miles to Leggett?”

  “Yes, ma’am, little over eight miles,” the patrolman said.

  “He’s really scaring me,” she revealed suddenly.

  “Who?” the patrolman said.

  “This man,” she said. “He made remarks. He touched my thigh.”

  “When?” asked Van Ness. “When I was reaching to the radio? That was an accident.”

  The policeman concentrated intensely, irrelevantly, on Van Ness’s license. “Are you friends, you two people?”

  Van Ness said, “No,” and the girl said, “I was hitching.”

  “Go stand beside my car,” the patrolman told the young woman.

  Van Ness turned off the ignition. “I feel sick about this,” he told the officer as they watched the girl walk, slightly pigeon-toed, toward the spinning lights of the squad car in her purple shoes. “I really feel confused. I didn’t do a thing. Look, I know I’m no Casanova.”

  “Were you watching your rate of speed?”

  “Yes, yes—I mean,” Van Ness agreed, “I was definitely speeding, yes, sure. But this? No.”

  “I have to write up a ticket,” the patrolman said. “Then I have to see about her. Then I have to see about you. If all you did was talk dirty and touch her thigh, I couldn’t care less.”

  “I didn’t talk dirty.”

  “If you grabbed, if you left a bruise or mark—”

  “I didn’t. I wouldn’t.”

  “I’ll talk to her.”

  “She’s crazy.”

  “I meet very few who aren’t,” the patrolman assured him. “Not in this job.”

  “Okay.”

  “You probably are too,” the officer said.

  “Yes,” Van Ness said.

  As he waited for the officer to interview his victim, Van Ness felt the pent-up needs, sorrows, rages, in the cars speeding past them through Humboldt County, the passions walled up behind transparent windows.
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  Nothing came of it all, and he was on his way within a few minutes. He hadn’t even been cited for excessive speed. The patrolman relieved him of his passenger, and Van Ness drove alone through Leggett and then over the hills on California 1 until he reached the coast again. Now he was in Mendocino County.

  For eighty miles or so he followed the Coast Highway without stopping, testing his tires on the innumerable curves and wishing he had a sports car. Occasionally a house row or hamlet popped up and was gone, nothing substantial or even really provable aside from the towns of Fort Bragg and Mendocino. The terrain reminded him of Ireland, or of his idea of that country, which he’d never visited: the open fields strange and blue-gray in the oblique illumination, fields that everyone called palomino when the sunlight bleached them, but in a clutch of horses shading among evergreens at a pasture’s edge he saw two palominos much more uniformly pale. Coastal moisture kept the grasses vital through the droughts; the potentiality of rebirth visible in the—

  A right angle in the highway had him slamming on his brakes. Suddenly he was in Point Arena. He reacted with shock to the echo of his own car’s engine off the buildings. Just before the place, three blocks ahead, where the town abruptly ceased as if coming up against a window onto the fields, Van Ness turned right and continued toward the harbor only because he enjoyed the look of things in that direction. Van had known many such communities, some that had included shabby houseboats. He liked the seafarers and the little clubs of progeny they brought with them from harbor to harbor. The land descended through a flat wandering valley, once perhaps some great diluvial watercourse, but not so much as a creek remained of it that he could see. Still the line of trailers and junk heaps might have been floated and abandoned here by a flood. Not a soul in sight, and the ocean was enormous. Before he turned back to the highway he sat in the idling car a minute looking down at it all. Here were homes, a large half-built restaurant, a fine new pier, boats at anchor. Everything waited to be touched, explored—fingered, broken.

  Van Ness’s lethargic pilgrimage—he was meandering south ostensibly to look for work in the marinas of the L.A. basin, though actually he had other plans—broke off at the southwestern corner of Mendocino County in Gualala, a town once named among the California coast’s top ten ugliest communities. But Gualala wasn’t so awful, not to his eye, merely aimless, its stores and motels strung along the oceanside cliffs in complete unconsciousness of the beauty they inhabited, of the hills above them massed with redwoods and the waves beating themselves to pieces in the mist below.

  Frankenstein, an old friend from the merchant marine, lived a mile back in the complicated terrain above Gualala, on a long ridge accommodating another north-south road and another string of buildings, these more residential and much more widely scattered—a second, elevated Gualala. Frankenstein’s was a small house on half an acre with a distant view, maybe a view of the ocean, it was hard to say: with the clouds lying down on the Pacific today, there seemed to be nothing left of California but the sky.

  Nobody came to the door when Van Ness drove between the redwood slabs that marked the drive and alongside heaps of junk and stacks of unidentifiable salvage, the accumulations of a clearly eccentric personality—nobody answered when Van Ness went to the door and knocked, though Frank himself was visible through the picture window, sitting next to the dark mouth of his fireplace with his legs stretched far out in front of him, a long man, six feet, nine inches tall.

  “It’ll be dark out here pretty soon,” Van Ness called through the windowpane, “but I won’t leave.”

  In a minute the giant stood in the doorway looking down at him. “I don’t answer anymore. There’s never anybody there.”

  “I’m here.”

  “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.”

  Already Van Ness wished he hadn’t come. His friend had been released only recently from a drug or psychiatric ward. Over the last few years he’d suffered setbacks and disarrangements.

  Inside, Van felt even more uneasy. Frank had evidently torn apart his living room with a heavy tool, a crowbar, possibly, working in his surroundings a lot of zany perforations from which insulation puffed like yellow smoke. Much of the flooring had been ripped away down to the plywood.

  Before he sat back down, the host yanked a plug from the wall socket, saying, “I was just listening to the radio. Did you hear? We’re sending one zillion deranged Marines to the Gulf.”

  “I heard they were considering it.”

  “Considering no longer. It’s an accomplished thing. This is a war, man.”

  “Isn’t it a little early to say?”

  “The Pequod is there right now.”

  “Right now?” The Pequod was their nickname for the Peabody, the merchant vessel they’d served on together some years before, a small freighter making ports in the Arabian Gulf and the Indian Ocean.

  “Oh yeah, right now. Benhurtz cabled his wife, and she called me last week. Just after Iraq crossed the border.”

  “Just before you hit the unit.”

  “I was very fucked up, but I understood the conversation. Benhurtz is on the Pequod. Pequod’s on the Gulf. They’re worried Iraq’s going to pop mines out around there, dive-bomb the shipping, et cetera.”

  “It’s hard to believe we were ever there.”

  “We could be there now. Smack up against a war.”

  “Do I sit down?” Van Ness wondered.

  “Hey, take my chair,” Frankenstein said, jumping up.

  Van Ness dragged a chair away from what must have been the dining table and set it beside the cold hearth. Candy wrappers filled the fireplace, and the splintered lengths of oaken floorboards.

  “The fog is here,” Frank said, moving closer to the window.

  “It was sunny all the way down the coast.”

  “We had twenty-one straight days of fog last month. Usually it licks up this high and then the morning backs it down a few yards. But last month it stayed.”

  “How many days have you been back?”

  “I wasn’t counting.”

  “Six.”

  “Okay,” the giant said, “six.” He turned and took a can of lighter fluid from the mantel and started squirting down the wood in his fireplace. He lit a cigarette and, discarding the match, set the kindling ablaze. The front of him turned orange and the room filled with purple shadows. “I was only there for three days,” he said.

  They’d been shipmates for nearly a decade. Van Ness had left the merchant marine after ten years. A “career move,” a phrase covering a plenitude of small failures. Frankenstein had been drummed out a bit earlier for striking an officer. Van Ness had been a harbormaster in Florida, sold boats on Lake Champlain and most recently on Puget Sound. Frankenstein had taken up a trade and still owned, but did not operate, a plumbing business.

  “During that whole time, I was in here with Yvonne,” Frank said, “that entire twenty-one days of fog. Every morning we looked out that window and saw nothing but the truth—formless uniformity, the fullness of emptiness. Wow, it made my dick hard! We couldn’t stop fucking! Then the thermodynamics altered off the coast, and the whole monkey dance began again, the universe: relations, progressions, transactions. The designation they give that is fair weather. They say it’s clear. They call it good.” As he spoke he was opening the front door, grabbing chunks of wood from a stack just outside and throwing them on the blaze. He sat down breathing hard, knocking over his ashtray, puffing on his cigarette, coughing. “Makes weird noises, don’t it?” he said of the fire. “Whines and squeaks, clanks and moans. You should’ve been here two weeks ago. Unprecedented acoustics.” He cleared his throat raggedly and spat at the flames. “Our happy little thing went sour.”

  “Whose thing?”

  “Her real name isn’t Yvonne. She invented a new name to devalue the memory of her parents, castrate her father.”

  “Weren’t you doing therapy with her?”

  “That’s what was so beautiful, th
at combination—lover, therapist, goddess. Primal foe.”

  He’d struck the fellow, a recently commissioned ensign, a single blow with a closed fist; and squatted for thirty-six hours in the gangway outside the infirmary waiting to learn whether the ensign would live or die. They hadn’t confined him because he’d been well liked by the captain and considered too large for the brig.

  “She was victorious,” he said, “in trying to destroy me with lingerie.”

  “She split,” Van said. “Is that illegal? What’s her crime?”

  “What’s her crime, right. The theft of sacred objects.”

  They’d had no problem dumping him from the service, because he’d lied about his height in the first place; had wilted somehow for the measuring. No formal hearing had been required. It had simply been a matter of correcting the figures and having him cashiered as unacceptably tall.

  Frankenstein had been the Peabody’s resident intellectual, at least belowdecks—maybe an officer or two had been more widely read; maybe the officer he’d struck—studying, reciting, often getting passionate about things that didn’t matter to most people. The others had always given space to the tall man, a natural leader because of his size, intelligence, and sweetness.

  “I came here,” Van Ness said, trying to speak carefully, “because I thought you might have something further to teach me.”

  “Teach you? Did I ever teach you? We read a couple books. Then what?”

  “I don’t know—what?”

  “Do you think we’re educated men? I haven’t spoken to a college professor in my life. I could have done UCLA on a basketball thing, but I just skated on by. What did we really understand of Wittgenstein?”