Already Dead

by Denis Johnson

  “You mean it’s no crime to yank on a man’s mind? To cut a person’s hoses? Assault him with chemical mists? I’m telling you, they’re stretching me out about yay tight. This is tension”—showing the cables of muscle in his forearms. Jutting his chin and turning it, like a man shaving, to display the tendons in his neck—“this is tension.” It was only prudent to map out the moves for restraining this remarkable specimen should that become necessary. Shit, Navarro thought, I’ll shoot him in the knee. Nothing less would do it.

  “What was your name again, please?”

  “Wilhelm Frankheimer.”

  “Wilhelm. I gotta tell you. Do you have anything physical to show me? Something that’s been damaged? Because it’s all sounding very unreal.”

  “Just stake the place out,” Frankheimer insisted.

  “Again, I’d have to say we’re dealing with suspicions here. Probably not too rational ones.”

  Frankheimer executed an abrupt shift in his focus. “Now there’s something for you, Officer.” He swung his head around slowly, following the progress of a pale convertible sports car as it passed.

  “I’ll stick with General Motors,” Navarro said.

  “That’s Nelson Fairchild. I just got a message that that guy is plotting something nefarious. Do you know what he’s doing right now?”

  “He’s going to the store.”

  “He’s picking up the Barron’s financial weekly for his dad, I bet.”

  “I gotta do something similar, Wilhelm—errands and such. We’re always available if something specific turns up. Until then—”

  “Was it his dad who died? Was it old Fairchild?”

  Navarro flashed him a false smile. “Nobody dead around here lately.”

  The tall man raised up one finger in front of Navarro’s face. “By way of a simple farewell: don’t get your lips frozen on me. And don’t run over my foot.”

  “Great,” Navarro said, and started across the street thinking that anybody who hung out in a Laundromat deserved exactly this.

  The kid he’d caught peeping the other night was also on the scene. He stood over by the gas station, his gaze avoiding Navarro’s, trying to look as if the man with him, obviously his dad, was no acquaintance at all. Navarro decided to let him shape his own zone, and crossed to the cafe without looking back.

  He thought he’d better not start with the Coors. Better get a piece of pie, check out the cafe’s fragile-looking waitress, avoid having to arrest himself later. It was warm inside, and the place smelled good. The waitress was a little older than he’d thought. Or at least not too well made-up.

  He’d talked to her before and had felt, at that time, that he was getting somewhere. In fact she’d practically agreed to host an orgy. “How’s the pie?” he asked her.

  “I wouldn’t lie about it,” she said. “I don’t own the place.”

  He hadn’t stopped in again, so he guessed she’d put them back at square one. But she smiled halfway when she set down his pie and coffee.

  She had a tattoo on her right hand, a tiny peace symbol. And it looked like one nostril was pierced, though she didn’t have a ring in it. In L.A., cops didn’t date such women.

  Here they did. Here he was opening up to aberrations, transforming under the unrelieved stress of these absurd people and their New Age ideas, which seemed less and less outlandish beside the genuine psycho driveling of the Wilhelm type, not to mention the pounding surf, squawking seals, laughing crows, and the aliveness of all these monster trees. In L.A., it—these people, this scene—would all fit, all of it and much, much more, into the category of senseless Martian crap, this category a kind of fishbowl in which almost everything swam except you and a few other cops. You had to cut yourself off in L.A., stay outside the glass. But here the majority of these thousands of lives are only big, slow trees. Slow isn’t even right, the concept probably hasn’t got a word, it’s just that the aliveness of these millions of cedars and redwoods is hardly happening. So you find yourself dropping your defenses, opening up, breathing things in.

  He sat at the counter jabbing with a fork at his apple pie. When the waitress came down to his end of things with the coffeepot, he lifted his hand to detain her wordlessly while he wiped his lips with his napkin and swallowed. She was svelte. Okay, bony. But definitely beautiful. “What’s your name?”

  “Mo. But everybody calls me Maureen.” She laughed wildly. “I’m sorry!” she said quickly. “Cops make me nervous. I mean, it’s the other way around, they call me Mo.”

  Her smile hit him right in the gut. She definitely had the face. He’d always been a face man, come to think of it. “Mo,” he repeated.

  “And you’re Officer Navarro.”

  “But everybody calls me Off.”

  “No. But really.”

  “John.”

  “Okay, John. Cops make me nervous, John.”

  She left him and went to take care of a young couple way over by the window, the only other customers.

  And of course every once in a while you breathe something of these people into you, their kinky exhalations. You don’t breathe in anybody in L.A. Breathe? Breathe people in? Christ. He was starting to think like them. Which only proved he was breathing them in, a concept which, itself, he had breathed in. It was a vague deal, but then too he sensed that if he had to shoot somebody around here in the line of duty, if he killed one of these types, he’d stop turning into one of them.

  What about the big man and his lurching accusations? What had he said? Anything real? Maybe drawing attention to himself, maybe trying to get himself some help or just his way of saying, Stop me before I do something too uncontrolled? Sometimes the twisted ones accused everybody else of doing what they really, in their hearts, wanted to do themselves. These berserkers were infants in big bodies, that’s what the condition chiefly consisted of. Imagine a six-month-old with manual dexterity and an arsenal. He’d get his bottle all right. Then the SWAT people, and everybody dead and nobody knows why.

  “Mo—”

  She brought over the coffeepot.

  But he covered his cup with his hand and said, “Remember when we talked before?”

  She didn’t answer. Because they were virtually alone she was, he could see it, reluctant to be flirtatious now.

  “I’d still like to see you sometime. Tonight, even.”

  She wouldn’t quite look at him, not directly.

  “What do you think about that?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” she said, and suddenly her loneliness stank all over the room.

  He told himself: let’s get out of here.

  “Save my seat,” he said to her. “I gotta move my clothes around across the street.”

  He left a five by his plate. Because he wasn’t coming back.

  “Wait a minute,” she said when he had his hand on the doorknob. He could feel his shoulders hunching and knew she could see it—he’d be looking yanked back, stopped against his will. “You left too much,” she said.

  “No—keep the change.”

  “This is a five.”

  “I’ll be back in a second.”

  “It doesn’t seem like you will.”

  He had to go back and break it.

  “If you’d really like to get together sometime,” she said.

  “Sure,” he agreed, revolted with himself.

  “I get off at nine.”

  “Okay. Yeah. Fine.”

  The look in her eyes was friendly and not that stupid. “You sure you’re up for it?”

  “I said so, didn’t I?”

  “You look like you’re under arrest.”

  Navarro got back up the coast with his laundry before 5 P.M. to check in with Merton, nominally his boss but no one’s boss, really, before Merton headed home or wherever he headed each day at five. Navarro in truth didn’t mind the drive between Anchor Bay and Point Arena, a stretch of coast that opened into breezy emerald meadows where an occasional bunch of cows or horses just stood stil
l, apparently thinking. Here the coast jutted westward, farther westward, he’d been told, than any other part of California, and well out into the clouds and fog of the ocean’s weather systems. Point Arena was generally sunless, damp, depressed, a scrawny community gathered around a fishing harbor whose pier had been wrecked by a great wave some years back and only very recently rebuilt. Now the revival was on, however: other renovations had started along the main street, and Navarro only hoped they crept up the hill a couple blocks to include his own territory. The police station didn’t quite rate the designation—it was a moveable structure meant for use as a temporary classroom in overburdened schools. Certainly it was big enough for the two-man department, but it felt wrong. In a workspace this size they needed dividers, which they’d had briefly but which had been commandeered—by the school, as a matter of fact—and which would have given it less this air of a hovel crouched in a universe of chaos. Everything was everywhere, and the three desks, his, Merton’s, and the part-time clerk’s, seemed to be rising on a tide of stuff, mostly paper: fliers, notices, findings of the county and state attorneys, things that should have been taken out and burned.

  Merton greeted him only by raising his eyes while lowering his head to drip Skoal snuff out of his mouth into a Styrofoam cup.

  Judging by Merton’s silence, nothing was happening today. The office closed at five, and after that the two men could be summoned by beepers—Navarro would take the calls tonight.

  In fact he’d had it in mind to ask Merton to switch with him because he felt he might get lucky with Mo, the tall waitress, but now he decided against it because, in the event he was wrong about his luck, he didn’t want to be loitering around and lamenting the fact.

  He paused at the file cabinet to check the mail, which had obviously lain all day in its wire basket undisturbed. Jenny, the part-time clerk, did not actually open mail for fear of creating confusion. Merton didn’t open mail either, but as today’s included a stack of half a dozen brown envelopes bearing a familiar, earnest scrawl, he might have been expected to. Merton enjoyed these little communications—the first one Navarro opened started right out PS: Now I am mad as shit kicking in Hell… Their correspondent wrote and sealed and stamped them on different days, but dropped them in the box all at once like this, in a batch. Two or three times before they’d come, and Merton always got a kick out of reading them out loud. Today’s sampling looked basically illegible.

  “Anything up?”

  “Nah,” said Officer Merton. “Another perfect day.”

  Merton was a large battered handsome man on whom a police uniform looked like something he’d wear doing yard work. He kept his boots next to his desk and worked in his stocking feet. Good clean white socks. Nothing untoward there. In fact to a degree they offset the effect of the snuff, and the spitting. He’d been employed by the Sheriff’s Department in Ukiah for one year, in the county jail; then he’d been out of work for quite a long time before moving over here for this job. In Navarro’s opinion his colleague showed a flair for law enforcement though he lacked experience in basic police procedure. The truth was he navigated the local waters more skillfully than Navarro could ever hope to. Merton had found great success in viewing Point Arena as a large jail—there were good and bad prisoners, some serving sentences and some not yet proven guilty, and he anticipated nothing much to do unless called upon to crush a mass disturbance. “What?” he often said into the phone, “I’m not going out for that. I just had my feet up and was reading the newspaper. Dogs are supposed to bark. And if your neighbor calls me tomorrow and says his dog’s been poisoned,” he might add, “I won’t go out for that either.”

  Without a word right now, though, Merton pulled on his boots, stood slowly, winked, touched a few things on his desk in a secret, superstitious way, hefted his Styrofoam spittoon and then pitched it into the wastebasket, gathering himself to leave the building as usual with great informality, even haste. Navarro suspected him of some arcane habit or vice. He pictured Merton in a smoky den gambling with Chinese guys.

  Opening another of the day’s brown envelopes, Navarro noticed that it was addressed to him by name. He discovered they all were.

  Last May, the second of his three ex-wives had written to him, sounding strange and sentimental—he’d wondered if she’d lost her looks or fallen prey to booze. Otherwise, these collected lunatic ravings were the closest he’d come to receiving any personal mail. He got lots of ads, that was about it, and he wished he could take a cut on the money people made selling him off to mailing lists, mostly for companies offering high-tech law-enforcement gadgets. All the cops were buying plastic Clock automatics now. He wouldn’t have minded owning a ten-millimeter himself, 649 foot-pounds of knockdown power in every one of fifteen shots, and all that. To what purpose? Well, for the hell of it. I have activated brain power, the second letter began without salutation or heading—

  I have activated brain power to 85% brain capacity and using every inch, every drop so help me GOD in anti-beaming these rays as mentioned, but had to move at 4.14 PM to here behind the hill which contains zinc, zirconium compounds, and combinations not to be revealed despite CIA efforts, including almost getting that girl to intercourse with me, under the alieas or alien name of Miran. 4.14 PM on March 12, 1985, this is the day fateful indeed that I gave up the battle but it remains to be seen if only temporary as a disguise or strategy or, in the end, really. If you examine any leading author on electric, magnetic, physics, thermodynamics, also related to evolution, solar, exc. You find that positive and negative equals out. Not so as mystic authors tell us, even the Bible if original translation could be released by CIA from the library of Congress and Smithsonian Institution, but which would destroy their ruthless, magnificent plan to CRATE A FALSE UNIVERSE. Therefore mathematicalmystically it turns out the two domes do NOT cancel or neutralize out and what is breaking my heart is the tragedy of this and its effect on anything metal, even trace elements, in our brain, our endocrine, our everything. But wait. The mind is bigger than that. Ultimately we are safe. But how absurd and it bends me low to be the only one to say, look, just turn off the radar and see! Paradise in ten seconds! As soon as the beams stop, and a few of us activated up to 85% brain capacity like me, not to mention many over that, not too many but say 1200 on planet earth. We’re tired! I am anyway. Let us heal the sick and teach you to activate to high and even higher than that, so you can do it. Then you get UNIVERSAL HARMONY, and I mean ten seconds! Put an injunction on them at 1.21 PM and ten seconds later, Paradise in ten seconds. I cannot stress how good that would be. No exageration. And I’m tired, my whole head gets overheated and burning, THERMONUCLEAR I might as well say from the pity of it. And it’s stupid. You turn left off the ridge rd. where the picture of a boat used to be. I hope you stop off for coffee. Drive two miles down dirt rd. there. That is if I just don’t put an end to it by joining the army and turning over my capacity and teach them how to jump the radar beams for the purpose of destruction instead of harmony like I am now, God be praised.

  Not to offend anyone but I choose you for reasons not to be revealed in this letter, which is being read by satellite and analyzed in Pentagon, exc. They won’t kill me but it’s just for your sake. I think it’s all through computers and radar but who knows with these unscrupulous men twisted by their own MENTAL-DESTRUCTIVE MACHINES, they might drain your brake fluid or something to fake a wreck. Rays, or off the coast road—your just as dead either way, so tread lightly with prayer on your lips and understanding of GOD ALMIGHTY and infinite love. I Am sorry to involve you. I am sorry to involve you “but”! Remember the goodness you feel is not God’s goodness it is actually God. And so your feeling God. And remember STOP THE RADAR and best wishes.

  W. Fairchild

  Navarro bent to stash the envelopes in the “Federal” file, where letters from W. Fairchild were kept because they sometimes came close to constituting threats against the Air Force radar station atop Arena Ridge. He didn’t like Merton
reading them out loud and making fun. Navarro agreed you had to keep your distance, but he respected crazy people. He more than just sometimes felt a little crazy himself.

  Navarro had visited the radar station once, just driving around. Kind of an imaginary place, a hot, windless island surrounded by an absolutely stationary sea of silver stratus cloud. Nobody had challenged him, in fact he’d seen not a soul that day, and he’d wondered if the radars actually operated—that is until he’d pulled up near the forty-foot-tall twin domes and heard static spitting from his radio, although it was switched off…

  The “Federal” file stayed pretty thin—mostly these crackpot pleas and a few others tattling on tax evaders and campsite vandals in the national forests. Vague bureaucratic nightmares had made these messages a harbor here, some incompletely imagined disaster that had everyone destroyed for failing, when Congress demanded, to produce one of these letters. PS—

  PS just to mention as proof they don’t know their stuff microwaves made me a eunuch before 1985 (brain capacity doesn’t count) but they still sent Miran, an alieas or alien name for an implanted agent of surprising disguise (real name Yvonne) who said I’m lost, please, help, and tried to intercourse with me (which they told her just get him alone and broadcast mentally, his brain capacity will pick up mentally what you’re beaming.) Pretty stupid, huh? Just to show you they have no protection from their own mental-destructive beams, can’t think straight till they get the compounds analyzed in this and a few other hills not to be revealed. No way, not by me!

  Sincerely, W. Fairchild.

  Navarro’s hamstrings burned. For some minutes he’d been crouching before the file cabinet’s open bottom drawer with these letters in his hand. He stood up to make sure that Merton’s car was gone from its parking space out front. He took the letters to his desk and sat down.

  AUG 8

  Since coming behind or also down this hill which contains zinc, zirconium compounds, and other precious compounds (or trace elements compounds, not to be revealed) at 4.14 PM March 12, 1985, where spirits can be interacted, God is king, and operating at 85% brain capacity without anti-beaming, I am definitely resting, getting ready, and my final decision is YES. I will network up with those of such capacity to mentally anti-beam as long as the fight is necessary, UNTIL THE DOMES GO SILENT. Then wouldn’t they be beautiful things? The round white knees of some giant sunbathing up there is what I saw when I thought of them quiet.