Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

As his therapist, a healer, a shaman, Yvonne had been dealing with the dream part of him. Yanking me in a Jungian way…She had the husk of me open — Jesus, it’s not beautiful now, the memory of it is nauseating, it’s obscene—

So, Van, you’re going to kill yourself. Good. Everybody’s agony twists in me, but yours hurts more than most. The only person whose 16 / Denis Johnson

suffering I don’t touch somewhere on the searing surface of it is Yvonne.

I thought it was because we were special, our connection blessed, banishing pain. But there was never any pain in her to start with. Her center’s a pinpoint, a microscopic star, burning without any life at Absolute Zero. She sucked it out of me, the stuff I get back by inhaling the fires of this forge — the heat. She took my heat. Traded it to the devil for some bauble.

An ache had coiled itself around his arm from wrist to shoulder. His perspiration dripped, hissing, onto the hot steel. What were these things in his hands? The anvil rang as he pounded the orange tip of the rein-forcing bar, the kind used in concrete construction, flattening it. What kind of fireplace tool was this? Maybe another knife. A sword. The anvil’s cries were feminine, operatic.

Was there somewhere another noise? he stilled himself, head hanging, the hammer dangling from his fist — the beating of mighty wings? The future tattering his walls with its beak. Something flared beyond this room, headlights, possibly, stroking the fog. Although many of these sparks and vibes signaled nothing, and most meant less and less as he evened out after those many days and nights spent flying in the talons of a wondrous beast, some sounds were real, some were seeds, blossom-ing into events.

This one, for instance, quickly placed: somebody from the barefoot welfare life was in his driveway. That toylike Volkswagen rattle. VW

vans from the sixties survived in this county inexplicably, like frail kites in an attic. The noise of the little engine stopped.

He stood at the door of his shop holding the hammer tightly in his right fist, reaching with his left hand to cut the overhead light.

A small voice cried Help! when the light went out.

“What do you want?” he asked loudly, and in the dark moved away from where he’d just let himself be heard.

“I can’t see — and so I want to see!” A woman — one with a foreign accent. “Please light your door for me or I can’t take one step or I’m going to fall.”

By the uncharted logic of his wars, anybody openly approaching had to be neutral, and he flipped the switch again.

“Thank you, yes!” Who was this turning up out of the foggy dark?

She came at him at a kind of diagonal, like a little dog. “I was just driving by,” she said, “and I saw you. I saw you glowing.” He recognized her now. The Iron Curtain chick — immigrant from Already Dead / 17

the tortured lands. Skinny, devoutly New Tribe — ethereal, yes. She had a beautiful face. She wore a white turban on her head.

Once or twice, but not lately, he’d dealt with her. The van she’d driven up in would be the Sheep Queen’s.

She looked a little wrecked, her mascara descending in streaks. Maybe she’d come from a party, left suddenly after a disastrous scene. Mussed and tearful. She was appealing like that. He wanted to participate in her fugitive chemistry.

“Oh my God,” she said, “you’re beautiful! Sweating, half naked, torn clothing!”

“Yeah? Maybe I should tear your clothes, too.” He hadn’t wanted anybody since Yvonne.

It was not unprecedented for women to walk up to him like this, right out of the void — his size and power, his rippling beauty. Van Ness had explained it years ago: they were drawn to him exactly as they were drawn to horses standing in the sun.

“It stinks inside here. This is a bad pollution,” she said, although she was smiling.

“It’s sulfur smoke.” He sensed no need for delay. “I think I’ll rinse off in the hot tub,” he said, and took off his shorts. He was wearing only his big work boots now, his Wolverines.

“There’s no fat,” she said. “Your physique is perfect.” Her clinical tone was a disappointment. “Why are you here?”

“I heard it’s no more Yvonne. You’re lonesome.” She took a step in his direction, and he thought he might as well lift her up and hold her against him so they were face-to-face.

“Are these silk?” he asked, fingering the waist of her baggy slacks.

Wagging her feet, she kicked off her thongs. “They’re silk from India,” she said, and kissed him very softly. Her second kiss was ardent, needy.

He tasted lemon and tequila.

“Yeah,” he said, “your name’s Melissa. I kind of remember us getting it on one time last winter, at the hot springs.”

“And now again!”

Melissa lived with the Sheep Queen close to the Garcia River and was known to be screwing Nelson Fairchild, an alcoholic pot-grower, very rich. She probably did drive by this house every day, back and forth from the sunken barnyard where the Sheep Queen kept her bleating ragged flock.

She clutched him tightly around the neck, hanging two feet above 18 / Denis Johnson

the dirt floor, onto which he tossed her Indian silk pantaloons after stripping them from her legs. He let her keep the white T-shirt and turban.

“Your light in here makes a dome in the fog. It’s soft.” She kissed him again. “I want to float inside.”

The Sheep Queen made a practice of rescuing these types and taking them in and looking after them until they died or went completely crazy. Well, he was going to jane this psychotic skinny waif. She probably had two dozen diseases but we’re none of us born to perfection.

In order to get hard he had to think of Yvonne. He pictured her naked in the lotus position. It was pornographic when she did that. Arousing not because it was obscene, but because he himself was obscene. He moved Melissa up and down on himself and right away she started, it seemed, to climax repeatedly. For his part he sensed with despair that he wouldn’t come, no matter how long they kept at it. But this activity made him happy, he could stand here all night and offer pleasure to this other human being, this creature of form and flesh crying like an anvil. Not, however, in this atmosphere. The forge’s draft had failed and the place was thick with sulfurous clouds and heat. His eyes burned with the fumes. Melissa was crying out but also coughing. She leaned back in his embrace. Tears ran down her cheeks. “We’re screwing in hell! We’re screwing in hell!” she screamed. But Frankenstein was thinking of Yvonne. Why didn’t she love him anymore? Why did he love her more than ever?

He carried Melissa outside into the dampness and dark. “I can breathe!” she said, and did so several times deeply. She put her face against his chest, and he felt her lick some sweat from his nipple. She offered her opinion: “It tastes like madness.” He put her down. She yipped when her feet touched the dewy lawn, and then she stood trembling in the yellow light from the shop’s doorway.

He stepped back inside for a second and brought her her pants all bunched up. “Matter of fact,” he said, “the hot tub isn’t functioning.”

“Oh? Does it have a hole?”

“I thought some enemies of mine were hiding inside it.”

“Oh, those crazy old enemies,” she said as she got on her pants, bending over and diminishing in the bit of light, looking like small ivory.

“What’s that accent? Where are you from?”

“I’m Austrian.”

Already Dead / 19

“Like Hitler.”

“Yes. And many great poets and philosophers.”

“Wittgenstein?”

“I don’t know their names.”

She put on her thongs, kissed him, and left right away. For that he was grateful.