Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

Although entirely alone he was embarrassed at the literalness with which he’d taken it all lately, allowed almost a whole afternoon and evening to swim through him uninterpreted. His was not a mind to permit such things. No unsupervised swimming. His soul never took its clothes off — Melissa said it ruined him in bed. Winona might have said it too if she’d been granted the sensitivity ever to have figured it out.

Then he heard the schoolmarm, the humming of almost intelligible words. A song and a voice reminiscent, decidedly so, of an Indian flute.

And now the low strangled death moan of a man, these sounds more frightening, for their being daylit, than they’d seemed last night.

He moved again, jolted along by his alarm but swiftly powerless, and sat down right beside the sea. The Ocean, the source of life, the place of death, he intended to write, the Ocean behaving like a deity, but he forgot. Sitting in the wet sand he apprenticed himself to the sea’s infinite pitiable preoccupation with the shoreline.

As I write this this morning in a camp in coastal Humboldt County, the sun touches the canyon and absolutely ignites the path leading out of here. But I doubt very much I’ll be walking that path.

I feel in fact as if I live here, on the main thoroughfare of ghosts, in a traffic of nonentities. I hear their shuffling steps in the grass—

And the moans of the man. He could make out a couple of animals, seals — maybe some kind of bird — or otter perhaps — rummaging after gull eggs — scrambling over the rocks with oologic obsessiveness. Ah, here were the seals offshore, balneating with their snouts up like French intellectuals.

The shuffling feet went past. Fairchild kept his eyes down and saw only the man’s waterlogged shoes and the laces’ aglets licking at the sand. But had to look up. The rapist priest of Schoolmarm Cove — clutching his rat-gnawed Holy Bible.

He’d written, he saw, nothing at all. He wrote: I am dying in Wheeler, California, a village by the Pacific around forty miles straight up the coast from Fort Bragg. I’m the only person in town. In fact, to call it a town or a village, or anything like that, is Already Dead / 419

misleading. There are three or four walls standing around here in a little dell the old maps call “School Marm’s Cove,” and two or three big rusty pieces of last century’s logging machinery turned out lopsided under the oaks; otherwise this place is just a place — a creek, a grove, a meadow. The thing is, it’s still called Wheeler. There are two or three campsites in the grove maintained by the Forest Service. I’m the only person within miles. Except for the pig-men.

I’m here to decide whether to let my life go, or fight to stay inside it.

To face the music, or stay dead.

Or — I’ve come here to be alone for the rest of my life with the tension, the beautiful tension, between those two alternatives. I may decide nothing. May stay here forever with my alternatives. May take them both out of here with me.

I just want to let myself be guided, in this solitude, by my truth.

He wrote some lines, trying to remember the whole paragraph, but failing, lines from Hermann Hesse’s Demian—”…because of my evil and misfortune I stood higher than my father and the pious, the righteous… ” I almost wrote “eveil”—I wrote “eveil” and crossed it out — as if evil veils something that is not evil as we understand it — a gift — live — evil — veil—

He rested, looking out at the flotsam and haughty seal-snouts in the water. Looked down at the page. He could find only three words: I am dying

Though he sat in a shadow, a darker shadow fell across him, and he leapt up. The schoolmarm in her pale torn dress with its empty neckline.

She left no footprints, but the priest’s shoes dragged shallow troughs in the sand as he followed. The Moor followed the priest.

Fairchild came last with his pen behind his ear, clutching his papers.

The four kept to the water’s edge with a good distance between each of them, paralleling the brazen horizon, the populous cloudscape. Offshore the gulls dove upward against sudden atmospheric walls, the wind sawing and gusting, the sea jagged but unflecked. His hair felt greasy, and the skin of his face. He tasted salt on his lips.

They drifted into the creek’s wide flat mouth and he followed. His strength gave out as the water narrowed. He sat down beside it at a 420 / Denis Johnson

second campsite table scattered with leaves and watched the water’s movement. A sense of passing and staying.

I want to die like this river. I want to drift away and I want to be clear and cold. And underneath my passing I want a cruel bed of stones.

Where was Father?

He called “Father?” but his throat let out only a breath shaped like Father.

The Old Man wouldn’t show. No phantasms visited him other than the schoolmarm passing headless by. She was surprised by smugglers or, some said, Pomo Indian renegades, but Fairchild liked the version in which she was surprised by the priest, a Spaniard ruined by mescal or syphilis. The priest and his Moorish boatman had escorted her here from San Francisco to take up her duties, and when they discovered nobody around, the three had hiked four miles north to pick blackber-ries, known to them as roundberries, beside Bear Harbor, where the priest and the Moorish boatman fell upon and raped her, then chased her all the way back to this town of Wheeler. She was young and frail, it was said of her she looked hardly strong enough to carry her auburn hair’s beautiful abundance, but she fought back against them, disem-boweling the Moor with a scythe, which the priest wrestled away and used to behead her, and then he hung himself. And now the two rapers live here as ghosts, in earshot of her singing in heaven.

I can’t remember , he wrote, if I’m remembering this or learning it just now .

He looked up because he heard the dogs, the dogs.

Some people we glimpse as chasms, briefly but deeply, even to the death of us. Others are shallow places you never seem to get across.

He examined the page. Still only three words had appeared.

The wonderful fountain pen. The pen had run out of ink. To get its halves uncoupled one-handed, he took its butt end in his teeth. He filled it from the dark red puddle of himself he was sitting in on the bench.

Already Dead / 421

Up in the forest, the dogs bayed. The wind in and out of boughs like the suspiration of organs, I am no longer passionate for Melissa who lit up my bones, but for solitude, more and more in love with solitude . His left arm laid his blood all over the margin of the pages.

Oh, but he understood now: I am the schoolmarm of School Marm’s Cove.

The demons roiled in her belly and exited through her heart as sobs and sighs. Worst were the slow stirrings of frozen emotions waking up, astonishingly delayed responses, the putrid dregs of childhood traumas, old griefs clawing their way up out of her, bursting from her throat, nothing connected with any memories at all, only the feelings themselves.

The dogs. The dogs. She heard them baying. Saw them come like leaves blown down the hill among the trees. Then again, lower down the hill. Their music was the song of dogs, full of joy, tamped down and flowing over. And offshore the seals, some yipping like pups and others saying, Heart? Heart heart? Heart? When she saw the men she felt explosive incommunicable gratitude.

I’ll probably never leave , the schoolmarm wrote in her own blood. Is this strange? Yes, wonderful and strange. The blades of the pasture stopped in the sun have had all the life cooked out of them by the drought — all the hope, the strength to grow, to suffer — and now and now they are God. I’m standing barefoot on the grass, writing these words. And I must keep it a secret. I can show this only to the people I’ve failed, and to those I’ve had the privilege of betraying.