Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

Funny how the pictures were always right side up. Yes, he got it — the King of Hearts, stabbing himself, for some reason, in the side of the head. The Suicide King.

Fairchild said, “You’re silent. Stunned by the coincidence.”

“I’m tired.”

“You don’t believe in destiny?”

Van swallowed with some pain, happy to answer. “The concept is almost always misused.” Anxious to answer, even with his throat all torn up.

“The one real road, the signs at the turnings?”

“I make the road. I draw the map. Nothing just happens to me.” He swallowed, trying not to grimace. “I’m the one happening.”

“How can you say that? I just pulled you back from death. You’ve been lying there virtually not happening for ten, twelve hours. For over fourteen hours,” Fairchild said, checking the clock on his electric coffee-maker.

Van stood up and turned over the table.

“React,” he said amid the noise of breakage and the sound of fragments singing over the Spanish tile.

Fairchild said nothing, righting the table and kneeling to scoop up two or three pieces of china pointlessly. Van could see he experienced his anger from the outside in, first in his skin. In twenty minutes the guy’s guts would start burning and he’d freeze it out with a shot of his wine.

“My point still holds,” Fairchild said finally, setting down on the bare table one dripping shard.

“Theoretically it holds. But life isn’t a theory, not mine anyway. I have to live it.”

Fairchild seemed to make up his mind not to clean up the rest of this mess just at the moment. He sat back down.

Already Dead / 69

“You’re exactly the person I thought you were,” Fairchild said.

“Meaning who?”

“You’re a true man of action.”

“Not a man of action,” Van said, swallowing hard after every three or four words, but feeling compelled to speak, dizzy with the necessity of speaking. “I’m a man of will. But I can’t believe in my will, can’t feel it, unless I act from it.”

“Act from it, no matter what.”

“No matter what.”

“Overriding everything.”

“That’s right, everything.”

“Then you act in boldness.”

“Can I be given a little cereal?”

“A man of true courage.”

“Just feed me. I won’t hurt your table.”

It wasn’t night yet but as Fairchild walked among the rooms on the lower floor, speechifying — Van assumed for his, Van’s, benefit — he turned on all the lights, every last one. “When I saw you heading into the pond! Unforgettable. I’m telling you, you banished the storm. We would all hope to accomplish a moment like that in our lives. You accomplished it in mine…” At one point he put a record on the stereo, a Sonny Rollins thing. Van tried to let it soothe him while the madman talked: “Last month I went down to the main San Francisco library.

They know me personally, I’m famous, my obsessive queries. I drove down there I don’t know when — three weeks ago. I won’t go south of here again, not on that Coast Highway. The cliffs beckon. If you were really trying to kill yourself in our pond, I know the desire. But when I’d turned inland after Jenner, I was safe. You head through the Russian River valley, then you’re in the other California — sunshine, vineyards, windmills, small motels…” He went on without the benefit of Van’s attention until the music ended and then he made a segue, lurching, into talk about some movie…No, he wasn’t telling about the movie as much as the experience of having gone to the thing, of being in a theater, darkness—“big people. Gargantuan busts, I mean their heads and shoulders, not their titties. Although also titties. Now: something quite out of my experience happened in there, Mr. Van Ness. A panic got hold of the people in the theater.”

70 / Denis Johnson

Fairchild had gone pale; the work of speaking and remembering had pinched the blood out of his flesh, perhaps concentrated it all in his brain; his energies didn’t make him lively, Van thought — just incredibly tense, his fibers humming to the point where levitation seemed immin-ent. A deep vibration jiggled the cups and saucers on the table.

“The floor,” he said, “ rumbled . There were rapid footsteps down the aisles, a lot of people moving all in a bunch, and all with the same thing in mind, whatever it was, and I had the sense that some group was playing a prank. Something made you feel that it was all rehearsed, like a fraternity stunt, and I expected these people to kidnap a freshman and carry him out on their shoulders or something like that. Then I thought, but there are dozens of them. The rows were emptying in waves, starting at the back, and we, those of us down front, we turned around to see that everybody was leaving fast, through every available exit.” Fairchild himself was in motion now, looking around for something in the kitchen. “Now let me tell you,” he said, rummaging abstractedly in the refrigerator, delighted with this memory, “nobody screamed, nobody yelled. Nobody loosed even a tiny exclamation, Mr. Van Ness.

There was only a little muttering as people wondered what was going on and then decided not to stay to find out. The only sounds were the tremendous rumbling of everybody’s feet, and the actors on the screen continuing their dialogue. Mute, terrorized people pouring out of the place! By this time we in the very front were able to guess what was happening, but we were also able to feel sort of removed and safe from whatever was scaring them so much up there in the back — a crazed killer , whatever. So the people in the first three rows didn’t run. We just waited. An usher, a young woman, entered from the lobby and we heard her talking to somebody, but she didn’t make an announcement until one of us up front yelled, ‘Tell us what’s happening!’ Then she starts screaming, ‘It was just a shoebox! A man with a shoebox! There isn’t any bomb!’ All this while, the giant… heads of actors are conversing up on the wall — moving pictures, talking pictures, without any power of illusion left to them. But do you know what? We sat down, those of us who’d stayed around, and in a couple of minutes we were completely consumed again by the drama, which wasn’t a very compelling one to begin with anyway. Cereal, cereal, cereal,” he said, “it’s all we seem to have.” Van watched him dump flakes into a bowl.

Already Dead / 71

“Afterwards I recognized a famous man, a television star, standing there in the lobby with a red and orange sack of popcorn in his hand.” Van had no idea how to respond to this stuff. The sun was lowering into the clouds, a deep rosy light filling the kitchen window, Nelson Fairchild staring out. Tears shone in his eyes. He rode a roller coaster, all right. The emotional Tilt-A-Whirl. Van watched him fashion a face out of all this sadness before he turned full on and started laying fresh places at the table. “And you’re feeling all right?” Fairchild asked him.

“I’ve never saved anyone’s life before. You’re okay?” Van said, “Thanks,” only because he pitied the man.

“Did you walk here?”

“My car’s by the road up there. It’s out of sight I think.”

“Is there somebody who should be called?”

“No.”

“Nobody?”

Van felt a panic of his own beginning to stir. “Listen. You didn’t call the paramedics? Or the cops?”

“No.”

“Nobody knows I’m here.”

“No,” Fairchild said, “and that’s how it should be. You’re here, you’re a secret, I’m giving you cereal. Your appetite’s back. You look better.”

“Just assure me you’re harmless, and we’re fine.”