Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

sexual vertigo. Is it any wonder that later, exploring secret passages in the church’s eaves, when we came out onto a parapet and found ourselves staring at half of Sicily and the ocean and the sky, I suddenly wanted to make love, right there in the daylight, to Winona? She said no. But later said she wished she had let me take her, in that high place overlooking a Palermo that seemed dreamed, with underneath us the massive mosaic Christ going on and off, Christ blooming and failing—

All right. In my breast pocket, a phial of Nembutal — replacement for the phony stuff, the Zieline. I turned, walked steadily through the house and up the stairs to the open door of Winona’s bedroom.

A man climbs the stairs toward the room where his wife lies motionless. His feet tread the vacancies of starlight…I flipped the switch at the top of the stairwell.

She lay on her right side, her back turned, her right arm flung behind her as if reaching toward me. Not Winona, but a corpse, a thing. Nothing worth looking at. I stepped into the room and stood beside the body but I was still alone.

I pushed open the double windows and looked out onto the dark pasture. No stars, no moon, no wind. Just the head’s unbelievable racket.

Something, a leaf or an ash, drifts down in front of my vision. No.

Have I just seen a night bird drop dead out of the sky?

It strikes me suddenly that birds must actually, sometimes, die in midair. I’ve never seen this truth before — that sometimes they must enter heaven having lifted themselves halfway there. It seems such a little thing to understand, but I start shaking. I’m afraid if I try to touch something I’ll pass my shimmering hand through the mirage of my life.

I moved the chair from her desk and sat down beside the corpse and closed my eyes and looked at blindness. I would do anything to undo this.

I have made a mistake.

What could be more trivial and irrelevant than this true fact? A few plain words — over all of this the phrase came floating like a sports headline, FLYNN HURLS SEVENTH STRAIGHT, on the destruction of a maelstrom: steeples and living rooms and drowned puppies and little dolls, whole lives washing down out of sight, then a line of old news turning in the current: I have made a mistake .

Already Dead / 133

I’m sorry , meaning, I want another world . Give me a different world.

I leaned over the bed and looked down at her for a moment, an incomprehensible moment, trembling, hollow, insane. Not a moment, but a life. Not a sentence to prison, but a prisoner’s life, not a moment of slavery, but the life of a slave. Converging darknesses like black cotton clouds…I hadn’t taken her life, but my own.

I have never done anything real. There is nothing to get back to.

Everything I am is shit. Everything to do with me. Everything I’ve made.

All I have.

I touch her arm. She is substantial — I look down at her face in profile.

But this is nobody I know. I’d never seen her before. No mistaking it.

I’ve thought often that this person, this Winona, couldn’t possibly be my wife. Now I know.

I’m not going to do anything wrong. I can’t have done anything wrong. I have not done anything wrong.

Before this moment I’d lived as a mind. Body, heart, soul, intellect, so we carve ourselves into parts. But the whole of us, what can it be?

We’ll never name it. Before this moment I’d depended on the head, on thinking my way out of trouble, and when there was no way out depended on the head to tilt and revolve and distort until it found a new, a transcendent perspective, or a cheap rationalization for my shames, I didn’t care which.

Intellect rampant on a field of ice, now it plunged through and froze and sank down to the heart in its cage under the North Pole. Will you believe me please if I tell you that the nameless whole of me had arranged all of this — just to break my heart?

A man walks into the room where his wife lies murdered. And begins to realize that only this could have saved him. That this, the worst thing he could possibly have done, was his only hope.

And then something stuns him like a blow to the neck. What is it?

The phone! It rings and rings…

He won’t respond. Won’t touch it. Won’t, ring , won’t, ring , won’t — two more and the machine would answer.

But she answers. Turns over. Reclaims her outflung arm. Fumbles with the telephone. Clears the death from her throat with a rasping sound.

“Hello?” my dead wife says.

Then says my name: “Nelson?”

134 / Denis Johnson

Then lies back on her pillow, lets loose of the receiver and says,

“Dear?”…This time she’s calling out the word. Groggy, sightless, calling out because she thinks I’m far away. Calling me dear because under the water of dreams she’s forgotten that I don’t live here, that we’re not close.

Dear —it can mean cherished, beloved, close. It can mean expensive, hard-won.

A man arranges to have his wife killed. (These things actually happen, tragedy does sometimes turn one particular night in people’s lives into a crashing metallic thing, and sometimes that this tragedy has been willed makes all of it majestic.) He walks into his former home because he’s arranged to be the discoverer of the body. Then the telephone rings.

Then the corpse answers it, holds the phone out to the murderer, and calls the murderer dear.

He fakes it, takes the phone, clutches it in his hand.

She’s fallen instantly back to sleep. Out cold, not a muscle twitching.

You can’t see her breathe. You could easily think she was…but yes.

You certainly could.

He puts the receiver against his ear.

The voice of his brother says, “I have terrible news.” Asmall fierce rain began. Van found himself standing in it beside the Volvo’s open door, looking into the dark leather interior, completely distracted, his heart thudding with after-shocks. He’d looked right into the man’s face: his eyes like tunnels and a wild animal lurking in a stench of fear way back in there.

The joke had cosmic dimensions. But who was the joker? The trickster.

Van made a mental note to get hold of a tarot deck, he seemed to remember a jester or some similar figure among its symbols, and then he forgot all about it as he supported himself by hanging on to the car’s open door and a wave of nausea and hilarity crashed over him.

Threads, only threads, nothing more than threads — the curtain between this life and the sweet core, he could nearly push through it, it was down to threads.

The physical sensations accompanying all this — blasting, shaking, wrenching — had a completely unexpected intensity: he’d do it again soon.

Already Dead / 135

Navarro was stark naked, Mo was, too; still he could feel the badge.

Mo’s place lay above Anchor Bay, up the hill and overlooking the stores. It was damp and chilly out, but they had a fire going and a sleeping bag wrapped around them.

He liked her because she was happy. “Jolly,” even. It remained to be seen, though, who Mo really was. Sometimes people pulled out a whole new personality after sex happened. He’d been known to do it himself, and in fact he felt this might be one of those times. He was drug-out and lonely around here, starve-hearted. It was too easy in that frame of mind to start yanking on her like a security blanket. The worst thing about being a cop was the fear of disgusting somebody if you acted like a scared child. You get naked, and that’s when you really start to feel the burden of the invisible badge.

They’d finished making love and were just lying around, halfway watching a porno flick. “Black women don’t do it for me, usually,” he said. “She’s okay though.”