Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

— I borrowed a book to read.

— The goddamn Nietzsche. The fucking Zarathustra .

— I borrowed it off Winona.

— What happened?

— Nothing happened.

— But you were there, right there .

— Nobody home it seemed.

— She was asleep, you son of a bitch, asleep as planned.

— I’m getting in.

You came around the car. The inside smelled of leather and gasoline and mildew. The other shrank and reared like a viper as you sat beside him.

— Do I gather my father being dead doesn’t interest you very much?

— I knew about it.

— Who told you?

— Perhaps some asshole in the hotel bar.

— You are a mutated strain.

— I’m just one station farther down the way. I’ve shed just one more shape than you.

— Bullshit. You’re crazy is all.

— Don’t let a little earthquake shake you off. You’re moving to a new stage of yourself. The caterpillar and the butterfly — they can’t imagine each other. An intellectual like you, naturally your own metamorphosis is gonna scare you to the jams — it’s a process beyond the grasp of your mind.

— And what am I metamorphosing in to , professor?

— The lion.

200 / Denis Johnson

— Really? Which one?

— You know. The camel. The lion. The child.

— Oh… Zarathustra .

— First the spirit is a camel, taking on great tasks and reveling in its strength.

— Also sprach Van Ness . What a bore.

— Then it turns into a lion, fighting against the dragon of convention, rule, law, even morality — killing all that shit.

— And how does he turn into a child?

— How? According to Nietzsche it just happens, it’s inevitable. The spirit breaks the rules and then experiences another birth. The child — (and you quoted now as if reading aloud) — is a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes…

— Enough. Okay. I get it and it bores me. You bear the burdens as a camel, you break the bonds as a lion, you’re born again as a child.

— Yeah. But Nietzsche’s wrong.

— Of course he’s wrong. How could anybody with five successive consonants in his name be right?

— There’s no child stage. Why would there be? Child of whom?

Nurtured and cared for by what?

— I don’t know, boss.

— There’s no child stage. Once you become a lion, a spirit acting from will and making its freedoms, that’s the end of it.

— Your beliefs make you deranged. If you’re a lion, your beliefs make you a rabid one.

— Relax. Isn’t this better now that your father’s gone? As soon as Winona’s crossed off, you get all the money.

— Nothing I say can have any meaning to somebody as completely crazy as you.

— Let’s give it another try.

— Nothing I’ve ever touched has ever been touched by you.

— Let’s hit that little honey. Make her dead.

— I wish I could tell you, get through to you, one thing, the following thing: that you couldn’t say anything like that right now unless you were the complete personification of evil.

— Evil? I thought we were way past that. Let’s have another go.

— Just waltz on in.

— She’ll fall asleep again.

— Fucking A. Probably does it nightly.

Already Dead / 201

— One more time.

— Listen. Those Nembutals. It’s not easy to make a switch. The capsules fall apart, the tweezers dent the little things, you have to be very gentle or they look plainly battered. Plus the powder gets all over them on the outside — enough to make a reasonable person wonder.

That’s when you knew…

You struck a match and lit up the damnation in his eyes: the self-defeat, the foregone failure. A queazy self-righteousness translated through his face like oil. And you said:

— Here. Your book. Keep it.

(Carl Van Ness: I sixth-sense, telepathize and soothsay what you saw in my jutting ears and big gaze — the shocked naivete of a fawn picked up by the headlights. Oh yes my eyes had been opened. That everything would play as you wanted, that’s what you saw. That this creature had worked out his own destiny at a table in a void with unthwartable agencies. You saw your own efforts like a spoon in a maelstrom and helping no more than that to stir it. You saw me. And I saw only Carl Van Ness with his nowhere face behind those thick specs, moving along our ridges like an empty wolf, preexisting and reexisting endlessly. As I see right now vividly and too late looking up out of the well of my own death with what fine velvet you played me. How you greased me along to stop me breaking to the cops. And what an idiot I was. I believed I was playing you until I’d have them trap you in some final way — catch you square by rights with your teeth in her neck and drag you down to dungeons, boy. I never should have tried to swap our roles. My mistake was thinking you the tempter. But it was I. All along you were Adam moon-naked and I was the baffled snake.)

— We’ll give her another spin — you said.

— It would have to be after the funeral. My father’s funeral.

You held the match till your fingers spasmed.

She leaned against the car a second and jumped back, swiping at her arm and squinting at where it burned.

Clare was weary and giving her the business. She put him down with a comic and went in to sit at a table near the videos the truckers played.

Eleven empty chairs before as many games — one farmer boy about sixteen dipping a quarter down into the cleft and the colored light changing over his face while a hand of poker snicked out across the screen — a waitress retying her apron while she watched the images from behind the boy’s shoulder — the cook pressing meat down on the griddle so it spit — one old man and his old woman sunk to the bottom of marital silence in a vinyl booth.

“Any work?”

The waitress stared at the game and said, “A position you mean? Or just for a meal?”

“Position I guess.”

“No, sorry.”

“Swindling old monster,” the farmhand said and fetched the machine an openhanded blow.

“Or maybe just for a meal, did you say?”

203

The waitress looked her over.

“I got a little boy travelling too.”

She changed out of her dress to wash out empty lettuce crates by the Dumpster, spraying the asphalt to keep it cool beneath her bare feet.

She drove the sad torn leaves against the wall and scooped them together into one big mess between her hands. She dumped them in…The tang of Dumpster rot…She rinsed and throttled her bandanna and scrubbed herself up to the fringes of her cutoffs.

Clarence came and joined her, though he should have been taking his nap. He seemed in a trance and broke down grieving when she sprayed him. “You got it wet .”

“Well, you had to walk right at the hose, didn’t you?”

“Shit anyway,” he said.

“Don’t foul your mouth over a goddamn comic book.”

“I don’t care what I do,” he said.

She took him back to the car. He lay down and stared up at the comic until the drawings fell over his face, and later he seemed vague and content while they ate hamburgers by the cafe’s big eastern window and watched the colors of the empty sky and ripe fields swiftly deepen and the building’s shadow stretch out over the concrete-curbed row of walnut trees and the four parked cars. She listened to the farm boy and the waitress recite slowly, like bingo callers, lists of pregnancies and car wrecks. The Lord had banned her from smoking some months ago, and right now, with the day used and the coffee in front of her, she felt that old demon running just a feather along her throat. Clare caught up on his fingertips the last crumbs from his plate and fed them to his tongue. She said, “This is the most loveliest time of day.” She bedded him down up front and lay in the cargo space listening while the breeze felt around the cracks.