Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

“She split,” Van said. “Is that illegal? What’s her crime?”

“What’s her crime, right. The theft of sacred objects.” They’d had no problem dumping him from the service, because he’d lied about his height in the first place; had wilted somehow for the measuring. No formal hearing had been required. It had simply been a matter of correcting the figures and having him cashiered as unacceptably tall.

Frankenstein had been the Peabody ’s resident intellectual, at least belowdecks — maybe an officer or two had been more widely read; maybe the officer he’d struck — studying, reciting, often getting passionate about things that didn’t matter to most people. The others had always given space to the tall man, a natural leader because of his size, intelligence, and sweetness.

“I came here,” Van Ness said, trying to speak carefully, “because I thought you might have something further to teach me.”

“Teach you? Did I ever teach you? We read a couple books. Then what?”

“I don’t know — what?”

“Do you think we’re educated men? I haven’t spoken to a college professor in my life. I could have done UCLA on a basketball thing, but I just skated on by. What did we really understand of Wittgenstein?”

“I know what we liked about him—”

“That he rejected his whole order of thought, yeah, and started fresh halfway through his life.”

“His independence even from his own truths—”

“But we didn’t understand those truths. On the Pequod we were just two assholes who collected big words. Everybody knew we were full of shit but us.”

Van Ness was astonished. “That’s very sad.”

“No. It has no value one way or the other.”

“I’m sick,” Van told him.

“Sick?”

Van Ness said, “I’m not well.”

“Not well…That sounds even worse.”

“It is.”

“That sounds like ‘a lengthy illness.’”

“That’s right.”

“‘Has died after a lengthy illness.’”

10 / Denis Johnson

Van Ness put his face in his hands.

“Dying, huh? That’s a very animal thing to do.”

“Is that all you can think of to say to me?”

“All? No. I can bullshit till Christmas. I can spew reams, man.” Frankenstein looked nervous, bopping his foot, rubbing his fingertips rapidly with his thumb, chewing his lip. Van Ness recognized these as Frank’s signs of anger. Intimidated by his own size, he denied himself any wilder expressions.

There was nothing here for Van, but he couldn’t stop himself, not after five hundred miles spent rehearsing these thoughts. “Maybe we were posing, sure. But you opened the door for me. Wittgenstein, Spinoza—”

“Nietzsche.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah? And why not Hobbes, and Locke? Why not Marx?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because they were pointed toward the depersonalized robot zombie Earth we now inhabit. I’m pointed toward the personal, the subjective, the much more deeply real. And I’ve gone on travelling in that direction.

You — you cry, you weep, you want a theory to eat like a pill and make it all go away.”

“You misunderstand me. Fuck you.”

“If you’re dying, then what you really have to do, man, what you’re really gonna have to do most deeply now, is go ahead and die. Just animal right on out. Nice knowing you.”

Van Ness said nothing for a few minutes while the giant chain-lit another Camel and smoked it away with a series of little convulsions, going into and out of the firelight repeatedly to flick the ash.

“I’ve had those golf clubs for years. I took a nine iron to the walls because I heard the mothers inside there scurrying around and whispering. Part of this, yeah,” Frankenstein said, “was psychotic bullshit.

But there are actual people involved, too, taking advantage, you know, of the chemical dementia. I wanted to split their heads open. I know who they are, some of them. They’re shooting some kind of mist, some kind of spray, into the windows at night. I can hear it leaking into the car, man, when I’m driving. Oh yeah! Oh yeah! I can feel it on my skin.

I yanked the guts out from under the hot tub, let the water out, turned the bastard upside down — okay. Nothing there. I took that nine iron and smashed through the floorboard in the panel Already Dead / 11

truck, the Chevy, and I got one, man! I stabbed its face to shit with a screwdriver, blood all over my hands, my shirt, it was like a waterfall.

Got up the next morning, the blood was gone. Not a trace. They washed it all off me while I was asleep. And they’re shooting microscopic darts at me.”

He paused to light up.

“I’m not a golfer,” Van Ness said.

“Ninety percent of this is psycho bullshit, I realize. But ten percent of it is real.” Frank pointed a finger at Van Ness’s throat. “And that’s the ten percent we have to watch out for.”

The burning redwood hummed steadily. The fire was in its middle age. Rocking back and forth to dip his cigarette ash with his large hand, Frank seemed to enter and exit the changing torchlight of a primitive incarnation, in one of the smoky grotto shelters he liked to claim had been forgotten by his mind but imprinted on his spirit.

Frank had always preached a personal creed fixed, in a scholarly way, to the migrations of the human soul. Maybe, Van thought now, he was right, maybe Frank’s own soul had checked out, simply left a TV babbling somewhere in this big, ruined hotel.

And yet two decades before, Frank had been the one to lead Van, the twenty-two-year-old, into the light of philosophy, the one to guard him while he grew.

Among the sailors belowdecks Van Ness had been seen as the large man’s personal creation, a kind of pet — thus the nickname: Van Ness had had to struggle to remember, when asking for his friend’s number from Directory Assistance, that Frankenstein’s true name was Wilhelm Frankheimer.

Frank asked, “What have you got?”

“You don’t understand, do you?”

“What’s your disease?”

“Shit, man. Call it radiation poisoning.”

“You haven’t got anything. You’re not dying.” Van told him, “I’ll be dead within forty-eight hours.”

“A short ride.”

“Still: I could easily outlive you.”

Driving south back into Gualala’s town proper, Van Ness encountered a straight stretch on the coast route and pressed the acceler-ator pedal down all the way. And found himself, what with the fog 12 / Denis Johnson

and his headlights, driving into a wall of brilliance. He had no idea how far out in front of his windshield the pavement stretched before it hooked left or right and his own trajectory hung out over twenty-five fathoms of air. Within a quarter mile the machine was topping out at around 105, he believed, although the speedometer’s needle came un-moored and whipped back and forth deliriously between 120 and nothing, and the Volvo itself shivered rhythmically awhile, then shuddered so hard he had to clench his teeth, and soon it shook like a crow’s nest in a bad gale, threatening to break loose and fling itself to pieces in midair. Van eased his grip on the wheel until he was not quite touching it, warming his hands on the fires of out-of-control; then something in him — not his will — slapped his hands back onto the steering and pointed him at a legal velocity down the middle of the fog.

Van made it a habit to be friendly wherever he went; while he contemplated a late supper in the bar of a cliffside restaurant later that night, he bought a drink for a man who was also a visitor to the area, a wild-pig hunter. They’d started out by kidding the barmaid together and then got to talking. “Make it a double,” Van urged the man. “I can’t drink myself. I’ve got pancreatitis.”