Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

California!

Suddenly and often in this strange land, there opens before the dreamer the Golden Gate. In this case the Tibetan Buddhist temple with its raging copper dome, five stories high, and the hundred-foot-54 / Denis Johnson

tall pagoda, gilded with actual gold, standing up through the mist above the green pasture — better than one square mile of pasture, and all of it surrounded by chain-link and sparkling concertina wire. This is not a dream, illusion, or metaphor. This is California. There really is such a place. It is not a mistake of the imagination, it doesn’t disappear like a mirage or back away like a rainbow.

Anything, anything, anything! — that’s what California offers.

This day, the one I’ve been thinking about, when I woke at Winona’s, when the men came after me and I visited my brother, was also the day the drought broke and we got two inches of rain.

It had been dry all spring and all summer. The Spanish moss turned brittle, broke away from the boughs and lay on the roads like ash.

Meanwhile dust hung over the world like smoke from a gigantic fire.

“Brown heat,” Bill said as if noticing it for the first time. And this may, after all, have been his first trip above the mist in months.

“Look,” I begged him when he dropped me off at Winona’s ranch,

“don’t tell Clarence about this.”

He and Clarence were buddies and pals, of a sort. They worked on cars together.

“Clarence?” he said. “Clarence isn’t like you think.”

“We have differing interpretations of Clarence. Only one of us can be right.”

We dropped the subject and didn’t bother fumbling around for another. When I got out of the car and rapped on its hood, he put it in gear and headed down the tiny road rapidly until he went around a curve. I heard him making a turnaround in a wide spot, and here he came again past the gate peering ahead intrepidly, speeding off toward wherever. And there I stood in front of my troubles without anybody to help me, not even my brother.

I noticed right away that the bogus sportsmen had strung a filament of fishing line waist-high between the gateposts, a trick to find out if a car had entered — more use to me, once I’d ducked under it, than to them: flanking me as ably as any moat.

Just the same that night I was crazy with fear, cowering inside the house with all the lights out, maybe drinking. Not a fear of men. They’d only check their trip wire, they wouldn’t come all the way in. They couldn’t reasonably expect me ever to return anyway. In fact I was only here because I couldn’t have stood another minute in the Already Dead / 55

car with my brother, who smelled bad, who smelled like shit, who smelled crazy. To think of him as healed was exaggeration; he’d merely gentled down to a precarious strangeness. Anyway, no, that night the fear was of the earth and the moon. Of the abeyance in the air that signaled a storm. Of the silence, of the silver light, of the wolf spiders’

webs I could suddenly see in the meadow, the reflecting dew strung on every strand. Now the spider is a stranger in its nest, the wren confused by these miracles. In this perfection of lifeless things, this steely inanimate loveliness, everything alive is sordid, unwholesome. To live is evil, the word itself is evil spelled backwards. What a relief when the breeze picked up, stirring pockets of warm air, bringing noises in through the screen doors and windows — I heard things, and then one set of sounds was real — an engine, and a car’s headlights passed along the ridge road. They didn’t slow down.

I’m remembering now that it was after midnight when the shower began. But first we had the moon and the mist. The big ones blow past from the north, well offshore, and then twist back around to lash at us from the south, driving the coastal fog up into the inland heights. And yet the warm front, giving way before the coastal cool, keeps the heavens clear until just seconds before the rain falls. So we get the mist over the ground and the piquant irrelevancies of a moonlit sky and slashing meteors above.

And then it rained. I went out to the deck to take the hammock down just as the first drops started, tremendous things, exotic, glittering, cold.

I had a sense of them crashing into the dust on my skin. The breeze had an animal smell. The empty hammock rocked. There was jazz in the little race to get it untied, a happy feeling in getting there just in time.

The feeling of a poetic moment, a mingling of California and nostal-gia — on the air a forbidden, a religious scent, an intuition of the summers of other people’s lives, — airy summers, pleasant people, unfettered lives — of the land from which I was exiled. A moment of tenderness, the smell of rain overpowering, as thick and unbreathable as smoke, and almost sentimental, not just the atmosphere’s pregnancy and ripe-ness, but the strains of grief rising up from somewhere — from within.

The simplicity of certain pleasures bursts in my heart. I’m weeping, and asking a ludicrous question: will my life ever be like this?

For a few seconds everything was brushed with just a single quick stroke of moonshine. The deck chairs and spool tables and potted suc-culents stood out like negatives. Then I lost the moon. Vagueness 56 / Denis Johnson

came up over the ridge in billows. I’d had PG&E put a streetlamp at the head of the driveway, it cost less than seven dollars a month, and they took care of the thing. Its glow a quarter-mile off seemed unattain-able, seemed imaginary. A large creature, an owl probably, in this atmosphere it looked white, swept up from under the edge of the hill behind me and passed directly over my head. I could hear its wing-strokes like desperate breaths. I followed around to the front of the house and watched it moving off toward the front gate and the street-light, where its shadow opened out from behind it like a tunnel through the lamp-lit fog. The tunnel closed to nothing as the bird passed over the source, and now there was only the iridescent mist. Everything looked so much like the cover of a science-fiction comic book it hardly seemed possible to be inside it and not to be able to turn a page, impossible to be breathing the weather and the mix of rain and dust and sea-damp and tasting a little of my own sweat, washed to the corners of my mouth with the rain.

And then suddenly another tunnel opened in the light, the tunnel of a man, a ghost treading the backlit moonwater, drifting through the increasing storm.

I tried to convince myself it was the owl coming back, making another pass. Even if I’d been able to believe it my skin knew different, tighten-ing all over me so that my scalp prickled and my scrotum actually shrank. But I didn’t run, didn’t even take a step, just stood there with my arms around the bundled hammock and waited, getting rained on.

The figure coming up the driveway was clearly a thing too sorrowful to be alive, it was a black absence, the ash of grief, a lost, wounded soul, but was now clearly, as it came even with me, heading right for the pond, a man walking. He got within ten yards of me. I could almost see his face. Still he seemed unconnected with our earth, had nothing to do at the moment with our violent dramas, not even with the taste of rain on the wind changing to a drink, not even with the strands of it thrown against the side of the barn and the sheds as he passed. There was something special about his stroll, as if he were exploring a place once thought familiar but now completely new — like a youth on his first day of hooky, for whom simply walking inside this stolen holiday is exotic and monstrous, and everything — this is what it is about hooky, and about this figure’s emanations — everything is original because it’s been chosen. Yes, he gave the