Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

joke. Anyway wherever I am it doesn’t matter, I’m already dead. But how have I ascended to this alpine autumn, to the Trinity Alpine Lodge?

Leave it at this: I crawled from the sea and next day retrieved my car (if only you’d known, Van Ness: it sat just back of the Cove Restaurant, you could have pushed it into the ocean after me) and beat it out of town with Harry Lally’s pig-men right behind. Heigh! ho!

390 / Denis Johnson

they’re a couple of reasy blokes, I’d love to throw you all in a bear pit together and watch. But those boys don’t know the coastal ins and outs the way I do, and they don’t have a Porsche, and I’m afraid I rather goofed them. Took 20 east out of Fort Bragg, slept in the car in the mountains, came in the height of noon thru the inland town of Willits, through the xeric mystery of its baking Mexico silence, all the little shutters swung to, the main street cherishing the parade of identical summers, the summers of ugly young girls who kiss the ice cream from their fingers, the innumerable virgin mothers of God, the bigamist wives of flesh and doubt. Hey—

How did you know I went to prep school? Anybody around Gualala could have told you, I suppose. But I think my wife told you.

And you, Van Ness, graduate of nothing, uncomprehending memor-izer of F. W. Nietzsche — one passage you didn’t underscore with your dull pencil:

There are the dreadful creatures who carry a beast of prey around within them, and have no choices except lusts or self-mortification. And even their lusts are self-mortification

and then Route 20 to Interstate 5 and around to Redding and up and over and down to this room made of logs, every inch of it a personality, knots and grains and adjustments, with the trophy trout and the bear emerging from its floor, to study the facts about you two, but it comes down, really, to the facts about me:

I tore up Harry Lally’s packets of coke.

I have consumed what was intended for sacrifice. Hell to pay.

Then I made an arrangement with a demon. Why did I do that?

And to the inane, null, phatic, garbled question “why?”—the answer

“why not?” will do just as nicely.

You know I don’t believe I ever mentioned to you young lady that when we visited Palermo I made something along the lines of a coke deal. Me and Harry. I muled it as far as Rome but no farther.

I flushed Harry Lally’s philtres of powders. I attacked him in his substance. Old Harry. He couldn’t forgive me.

That’s what it’s about now, attacks against the substance, the calling down of the Fates. The facts are spiritual facts now, that’s what this letter is telling you, it’s all about gigantic crimes and gigantic forgiveness.

Already Dead / 391

Nietzsche-boy, you framed me good. I suppose I can never go back to Gualala, nothing lined up for me in the village of my birth but a short shrift and a taut cord. But you who read this, you confess me, you give me shrift.

Then you will soon forget me who am a wretch.

The most horrible things we’ve done feel the best because they were things we absolutely had to do. The best things, the good things, have a richness the horrible things don’t have — but a difficulty and an alien-ness and at times even a wearying absurdity.

I don’t dare speak of God. But let me point to a glacial patience overarching everything. I join with it, ally myself. You Are Loved — Home Sweet Home — Expect A Miracle — have you seen those bumper signs and badges? I embrace them all. It’s all I can do. I can’t revolutionize myself. But I’m out of the loop, I reject your desperation.

Whatever happens now, I stand aside from evil. This beautiful planet of violence and love. At last I’m a citizen. Love and violence — not to conquer one with the other but to live with both, that’s what I’ve learned. Each pulling me a different way. If I relax my struggles they don’t tear me in two, but lift me up. Here I am in some mountain motel, tears behind my venetian blinds, man in a wood room. Me I live in this chamber with the clean torture of the truth. Exemplar to dark acolytes.

Come poke the creature’s cage.

So many demons! And I’m happy to see them, and speechless with gratitude for the others I’ve met along the way. Surely if we have these demons we have the rest of it.

I’ve been here for days, can’t remember what I was saying, but I think — So you see, when you two met each other in Santa Cruz I was actually not so far away, in the city. San Francisco and its cascading streets. I ate some popcorn and watched a woman raised from the dead.

Meanwhile you pressed against Winona sweating, your heart a black hole. The reverberation of your touch: funeral in flames. And that motel.

I bet it was a pink one. With or without the sunset a torturing pastel.

If I’d had any real, any little bit of slightly real contact with my life I would, at that moment on that street, Army Street, have seen that I’m fucked by forgiveness. Fated to achieve it.

All these tragedies. What do they spell, these threads that cut us, in the great tapestry?

392 / Denis Johnson

Ah Winona let me stop now for reasons having mainly to do with our sighs.

PS, (Next Morning) Man I just got happy. I’m thinking for some reason of lucky Clarence — Clarence waking up in a friendly warmth with a woman who smells like Italy. I wouldn’t mind a brief vacation in his simple universe. A world wherein all that might eat me is extinct.

I like Clarence. I like simple men.

Can’t say how many days I’ve hid out here now but it’s getting to be a few. I have to go back to the coast, to the ocean, I must. I’m developing a sense right now of the hugeness of the neighbor Pacific as another universe of space with its own laws of light and dark but also as very much a universe of time, and transience (the ocean washing its terrible histories toward us, always its terrible histories, because the happy ones, the stories of safe arrivals, briefly hesitate then unroll onward, inland, while at the shoreline nothing stays but the wrecks and deaths.

So I belong there: I envision it: the Lost Coast: extra green the shallows this morning, like county jails), anyway a sense of these legends over-taking and enfolding us, the old stories backgrounding and enveloping the new ones. Yes, like waves. The Lost Coast.

The clouds are low today in these mountains, and the window is just a gray blank. I don’t see the trees or the pale lakes. There’s nothing left of the sky. Nothing. Why is that so beautiful? I don’t know. I don’t know.

He paid his bill in cash, and then stood before the counter with his wallet cupped in his hands like a prayer and gouged at it with his thumbs. Down to forty-three dollars and a credit card. The card hadn’t cleared for months. He needed a gas-up without a computer link, maybe in Redway or one of these hamlets well back from the lanes of commerce. He smiled at Ames. Ames hadn’t uttered a word beyond those desperately necessary for checkout. Fairchild said, “You think I sneer at you.”

This startled the man. He shaped himself to deny it; but then said matter-of-factly, “It’s because I’m short.” He turned his face toward the television.

On Route 36 down out of the mountains, Fairchild met with a piggyback logging truck, empty, rushing upward. The pavement seemed Already Dead / 393

hardly wide enough for the Porsche alone, but when this collision was suddenly on him something stretched in the weft of physical reality itself, and they were past each other, apparently having occupied the same point in space-time. It happened again not fifteen minutes later, and by the time the mountain road had come down out of its turbulent hunting back-and-forth and found the easier slope, he’d passed through several such ghost trucks harmlessly.