Already Dead

by Denis Johnson

  I know what drives a man like me, I’ve felt it even if I’ve never had its name, but what produces a Van Ness, a man psychotically committed to his every fantasy, the inflicter of reality on dreams? She wouldn’t have let you realize hers if I hadn’t already let you realize mine. I wouldn’t call you the Devil. Frankheimer called you that but I say no. We’re the devils, she and I, tempting you with fantastic schemes while you, you are the attempter, the Adam, you’re the man.

  Like all men you have a religion—at least a way of looking at yourself and the universe both at once, which is all I’d hope a religion to be, for me, if I could only have one, if I were only a man…I’d call you a Zarathustrian.

  But I mean, you know, I’m like Nietzsche. Aren’t I? I feel deep suspicion of the mensch, of the reasonable, dutiful man. He knows what he’s doing and it’s identical to the doing of the other guy, the one who doesn’t know. The mensch walks lockstep with the robots, in a long line of hooks hangs his soul on a hook next to theirs. But my father!

  But my father was no mensch. He hated the reasonable, dutiful man. My father was the enemy of your enemy—can’t you see my father was your friend?

  Now, look here, you people. A man decides to kill his wife. What’s so unusual? E = MC2, now that’s an unusual thought, and Newton’s cogitations, et cetera, and Shakespeare never bothered a page with them therefore. But wishing to kill your wife, it’s as basic as thought itself—“I want her dead; therefore I am”—it’s why they invented divorce. But this man, our man—me—he can’t get divorced. So he plots in detail. He’ll find a Dying Person, enlist his services, let him take the blame—after the deed, the killer’s a corpse anyway—it’s a fantasy, and fantasies are harmless in a man without will or blindness. But then comes a man of will, a man blind to the border between the thought and the act. The bargain is sealed, but the Dying Person decides not to die. Determines to kill the plotter’s father, kill the plotter’s brother, make the wife the winner.

  You left my wife alive, asleep. You turned from the place and went into the night. You went to my father’s house. You walked right in through the kitchen, ascended the stairs in the darkness, put your ear to the doors in the hall, and behind one you heard my father hard at work breathing. You turned the knob and went in, and I wish I’d been there to witness the two of you: the one I conjured, and the one who conjured me.

  Dad in purgatory exploding I imagine the balloons of little girls with your cigar-end: If you were here you’d know how to handle the sheriff, the cops, the judges, Harry Lally. By their tenderest parts you’d hoist up the pig-men and deliver a bitter lecture. You’d line up the lawyers on a spit like shish kebab, you’d drive Winona into the sea. They nourished you, those types. You could handle them all.

  All but Van Ness, creeping up beside your bed.

  Did my father fight? That I doubt, or he’d have bit your face off. They’d have found him with his fingers in your windpipe.

  No. He stood up to meet you coming, but his legs gave way. He fell unconscious, pissed his pants, and dreamed. In his dream the forest stood still. The sky turned black. A funnel cloud tore down out of heaven and wrapped him down to the roots. Twisted the great tree slowly. And slowly the roots loosed their grip in the duff and my father for whom I am named, one of the giants of this earth, is dead.

  And then you raised the window. And then you climbed into the dark. And then you hung by your fingers from the sill. And you wondered where your fall would take you. And then Van Ness, you dropped, and then in its every detail I envision it…

  …You held the match till your fingers spasmed.

  You two lovebirds! I’m sure you believe you’ve killed me, but I’ve survived. Probably to deepen my exile. Possibly to die at other hands—you’re ignorant of the pig-men. The pig-men are my own fault.

  Speaking of pigs, the huntsman in the fairy tale brought back the heart of a boar as proof that he’d murdered Snow White. Heart of a pig.

  I keep waking in the middle of the night, around three o’clock. It looks as if a curtain of plastic has been laid over the moment to protect it. Neighborhood of kindness in the hour of moonlight…If ever I get back to you I’ll touch your skin…listen in the holiness to your pink words…I’ll wipe my feet, I’ll never scream I’m a genius at you again. I don’t believe I really killed you, that you lay dead and then rose up alive, the possession of a vagrant soul. In the scientific method there’s much to trouble me, its smugness and myopia, its lofty forgetting of the fact that it’s a method, not a model of the world, its upturned nose at roundnesses till they come back squares, but—what was I saying? Oh—that I shouldn’t believe in ghosts, in walk-ins. You’re you. I’m me. We’re all of us us—not suits with souls zipped up inside. Yet I saw you, you looked dead. Then I saw you alive. I saw your face. It was yours but you weren’t wearing it.

  Neat! Okay! You bet! Wait—

  Let me slow up, allow me to get a grip, “My fit is mastering me,” as Whitman says. All right. Van Ness didn’t kill you as we’d planned. But he came to the house, didn’t he?

  You were always one to take in odd animals—Winona, I’m talking to you. I know you invited him in, the mystery man.

  And you, more mystery than man, was she The One? And did you pledge yourself silently without so much as a gesture? Follow and find her and float forward out of the pasture and put one foot up on the deck?

  —Get out.

  —First show me your pills. Your yellow pills.

  —My what?

  —Your bottle of Nembutal. Bring it here.

  You brought him the bottle. He poured them into your palm. You touched the pills and tasted the dust of horse dope on your fingers.

  …And you told her the plan and dried her tears and made love to her in your strange way and waited as it got dark for her to say it:

  —I should kill him.

  —Then do it.

  —I will.

  —You don’t have to. Let me.

  And letting him kill me wouldn’t poison your conscience. After all, I started it, I deserved it, it was practically self-defense. Then after I’m dead Dad dies, and you get my share of California, the land of dreams and light and rippling and thundering mounts, the land of gold.

  But it turned out, didn’t it, that Father had to die first, before he crossed you off his one-woman list of heirs. And die he did.

  I know full well now where my book of Nietzsche got to that night. Right there beside your bed, on the floor, am I right? And later Van Ness handed it to me in the dark.

  Got it right here. I see the parts he marked. I hate people who make marks in books:

  We do not wish to be spared by our best enemies, nor by those whom we love from the very heart.

  You are not great enough not to know hatred and envy. So be great enough not to be ashamed of them!

  You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I tell you: it is the good war that hallows every cause.

  The two of you! You read the Zarathustra together in bed and laughed.

  I can surmise a few surmises. For one he got there in the sunset. Drove that car of his which I’ve never seen except in the dark down the drive with the redwoods taking on exactly that color in the late light and living into their names. The windless hush, the boards creaking as the stables cooled, old Red kicking up the dust in a slow circle and everything. The sun going down into the sea of clouds and turning their steel to wine, then to blood.

  The man John who wrote the Bible’s last book—on the isle of Patmos he envisioned just this, smoke flooding out of God’s censer and a third of the moon and sun and stars darkened and a burning mountain cast into the sea and turning a third of the water to blood: envisioned coastal California in the evening…And you came into view. Ambled around the corner of the house, put one foot up on the deck.

  —You don’t belong here.

  —Yes I do.

  —How did you find me?

  —It was no trick to find you here. Th
e trick was finding you on the boardwalk that day.

  No trick but one of fate. Fate along the scoured pier. Coming off the beach with your tennies grainy, whacking out the sand on a benchback and sticking them back on and he’s watching the brown little simian feet with the blond hairs on the knuckles of your toes. And drifting from his eyes the smoke of stars.

  She pulls her parka hood back and floats there like an ark in the deluge of the sun, this California with its fugitives and windmills and artichokes and clouds like thighs. Its vacancies at pink motels. Modesto in the dust. Walnuts shaken down early by quakes. Spanish razors. And here you come with your gypsy blood and your secret suit, feeling like fuck on fire. Straight out of Carmel. They couldn’t touch you in Carmel. Not with their skin in shirts like skin. Their fingers in gloves like hands. And these others in Santa Cruz, they can’t touch you either. Not in Santa Cruz this day. Dressed in your ragged bulletproof sweat suit or down-home beachside grubbies heading along the sandy asphalt past the stands followed a little ways and then abandoned by their chat, their jazz, their machine-sounds, jukebox whomp, nineties computer rock, fifties dead-teenager songs. I know how you moved. I know how you stared. How you smiled and failed to smile—smiled inappropriately, failed to when you should. Ran your finger around in the bits of spilt sugar on the dirty counter, couldn’t resist licking at it, ordered your coffee among creaky robots with their faceless oval heads. I know what they told you—

  —Hey. You look just like that guy who got shot last night.

  —What?

  —They had his picture on TV.

  —No, that was the guy who shot him.

  —Yeah.

  —Yeah. You look like the guy who shot the guy.

  —know how it runs for you generally in those places with their sensors clicking over you Mr. Roentgen and a series of Most Wanted pics fluttering past their minds. You stink. You fuck. You murder blandly. Everybody wants to ram you with a pitchfork. They just need a reason. But not you. You reach out and flip a switch. You burn up their innards. You do it without a thought.

  She knew it a hundred miles away. She felt you click into place. She knew you made it happen. You had her by the cunt. She didn’t even say hello. You didn’t even look at her. The motel was pink.

  She got on her knees by the toilet and held your penis for you while you pissed.

  Ah, Winona…Long mustaches pale glassed-in eyes gritty cafe huge fans that stroke a wind like breath—naturally you had coffee in his eyes, in his hands in the park, in his room where the mirror was so small all you could see in it were your breasts. Your breasts saw your face.

  Tired. Tired. Where am I? The two of you spent and sweaty and the odors of the Pacific in the pink motel. But what then?

  Nothing comes to mind because I’m in pain. Lewd exotic California pain.

  Marauders, have you turned back in the rain?

  Sleep comes, roaring like a train. When it arrives it’s going slow, slow, and the roaring isn’t a sound anymore, but a sort of brown shadow in which you were about to find a thought…Then you’re waking up. Lying in bed like a page torn in the middle of a word. Waiting for the fish to move, the fish on the wall. Waiting like a dog for the start of another broadcast day.

  Okay Winona you stepped to the air conditioner and it chilled then dried your sweat. And as it evaporated from your skin, your skin evaporated too. You stood there immaterial and unaware. You slicked aside the curtains and in the dusk it was still out there sucking and stroking and worshiping the sand. Please if you see my friend Clarence. Tell him something for me will you. Tell him I understand surfing. The sea wants to take shape. The wave promises some great birth, a monster’s emersion, but it’s only a flowing, only a flowing among many, and completely dies away. Changing sameness, changeless change. Our expectations fly to meet it and aren’t jilted, but inexplicably satisfied. It’s so right, it’s so right.

  And there you strolled, sockless in your tennis shoes, naked under your parka and your jeans. Watched the shabby surf finding and losing the shore. No: Immaterial and unaware, you walked out without clothing yourself. Stood on the vermillion beach stark naked and invisible, the boardwalk’s clanks and whooshes and screams and tootly music blown near and far on the wind. They’re paying in strange coins to ride the hurtling fever train, rolling up to heaven on the Ferris wheel, boys and girls released from life and dragged back down, G-force flattening their orange and purple Mohawks, mouths like wounds—it’s terrible when somebody laughs, more obscene and revealing than anything they could say with words…

  Past the boardwalk onto the street, the gauntlet of shops and beachside people, the quantum dregs, the never-ending pavement in their sighs, and always that music: dark rock. And you kept going, beyond the seaside part of town. Homes of stucco in the ashy twilight, the street no longer dabbed with sand. Past the edges, way way past, out into the big place east of town, they call it America. Through the vandalized areas you wandered like a voice.

  All the world is sleeping. The sea is sleeping. The sand is sleeping. One last form besides yourself invested with any waking. Fat black woman on a stool against a wall in a shadow with an accordion across her chest and a silhouetted, spiky ’do. Her skirt drapes empty below her thighs.

  —Don’t ask me to play. This thing don’t play.

  ——

  —I don’t have any legs.

  ——

  —You know where you are, don’t you?

  ——

  —California.

  ——

  —You like where you are?

  ——

  —You came a long way to get to California.

  ——

  —You in California now.

  ——

  Why couldn’t you speak? Where in fact was your throat? Why did you have no hands? How could it be you saw right and left and backward—without turning? Had he killed you? He had killed you. Had he stopped your breath, your heart? He had. But you won’t believe me because you I write to are gone. And you who replaced her: you don’t love me.

  Okay then Van Ness you murdered her. Strangled her for three minutes in the cool dim amber room while her face turned russet, purple, chalky blue, and the bewilderment evaporated from her eyes and her gaze went upward like a priest’s, an ecstatic’s. Unhooked your cramped fingers from her neck and thumbed wide her eyelids and shone a penlight at her pupils—no reaction—held a mirror to her nostrils—no pinpoints of mist—and pricked her flesh with a needle, and the hole didn’t close—found no pulse in her wrists, none beneath her jaw…

  And you sat by the bed in a chair until another demon tickled by you, entering Winona Fairchild’s naked corpse.

  Book Three

  September 13, 1990

  Billy, Billy, Billy,” Billy said a few minutes before his death at the hands of Carl Van Ness, “you my man Billy are something of a genius. No,” he said, “I’m not—yes, you are,” he said. “No,” he said, “it’s just inspiration.” He cut the corner on a switch-back, raced to the crest of a bare knoll and stood still at half the height of the surrounding chinkapins, looking at their sickly branches and the tantalizing mist caught almost like confetti in the underlight, his hard breath the only sound until as it abated he heard the woods again, the birds and the currents and the leaves, and felt the noises almost as if they touched his flesh. Maybe they did. After all, these were vibrations. The laughter of the soul of this place. Maybe too in this way the vibrations of the Mercedes had communicated to his brain, shortcutting past his cogitations, the fact that not the manifold but the dipstick was the source of the runaway oil. The dipstick wasn’t stock, but a changeling, an impostor, its cap just slightly too small for the aperture, and thus at high RPM’s you get oil spraying so bad all through the compartment it drips down onto your head when you raise the hood.

  “I have solved the problem.”

  He got back to the cabin with a desire to put on a little tea. Black tea, if he had any. Coffee, even. He
had some coffee somewhere. Actually he had some Kenya coffee in the bean, in a bag, in the shed. He’d have to get after those beans with a hammer, though. As he thought about it he plucked a pencil from a knothole in the kitchen counterboard and dug in the wood box for some paper, an old San Francisco Examiner he could use the margins of. Sat at the table and forgot about the coffee, tearing the front page into quarters and beginning a note to Clarence. He got the first sentence down, across the top margin—the good news. He took off his new hat with its special message, adolescent, obscene, kind of funny, and set it aside and skimmed the sweat from his hairline with his hand. He sat back and put his pencil in his mouth, put his feet up on the table, locked his hands behind his head, and began to consider the list of things they’d need to get the Mercedes saleable, a short list of inexpensive things, now that he’d solved the oil problem. He heard the door behind him opening.

  Meadows thought: What are you trying to do to me? Thinking thus he gassed the rocking Scout over the rise past the Gualala dump and onto the unpaved portion of Shipwreck Road, shortly afterward took a right onto the logging track of the Mendocino Redwoods Company and trespassed through their lands alongside the Gualala River’s Little North Fork, in the bed of the San Andreas Fault, fording the stream several times and stopping finally in a wreck of dust and shade where the lumber corporation’s holdings, and the road, gave out. He was now within two miles of the coast. He pulled the Scout onto the uphill side and fixed it with its rear to the descent, a position made necessary by its lack of any reverse, and made sure of his equipment: a memo pad and something to write with. The government-run Gualala Campground lay near enough by that he could smell a bit of cooking on the currents of the afternoon. Meadows left the jeep and made his way on foot along the river’s western bank until he sighted camp smoke two hundred meters off, across the water, in the same spot where he’d last seen the Silverado and had talked with Harry Lally’s delegation, the two piggers from Del Norte County. Walked downstream nearly to the bridge, just a few hundred meters above where the river jogged back west and widened, over the course of a mile or so, to make its marshy estuary on the Pacific. Crossed here at the last narrow place, wetting his boots to the cuffs of his jeans. With his back to the water he crouched for several minutes, listening but hearing nothing, and then reconnoitered warily above the embankment’s edge. Smoke strung itself through the boughs, but nothing of the Silverado or its owners showed itself. Climbing over the bank and taking to the drive, he located Carrie’s site; her yellow wagon wasn’t around, but he gathered from the presence of a Styrofoam cooler and a gay plastic deck chair that she and her son still camped here.