Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

Before dawn the fire in the forge had died, and Frank lay in his small bedroom sleepless, or worse, lay dreaming that he couldn’t sleep.

He listened carefully to the walls…Nothing. Tonight he had fashioned, from six pounds of rebar, a small flat three-ounce paperweight.

Two visitors in one day, each of them arguably more batshit than himself. The German, or whatever she was, was goofy. But he liked her, and maybe he’d see her again if he didn’t perish first of cocaine or Yvonne. As for Van Ness: just another ghost in another dream. And uglier than ever with his magnified eyes and that Kung Fu mustache like jungle vines. Frank felt sure that Van Ness had materialized here in the role of a demon — but not, thank goodness, one of mine, he thought. This time it’s somebody else who’s conjured him. I was fed up years ago, weary and sick of the power the world gives us to create entities like Van Ness.

His own demons whispered from behind the walls and underneath the floorboards. They had a special slyness, and their cowardice was devastating. Van Ness bore quite other markings. He might have been bodied forth out of some Eastern parable or Buddhist fairy tale, in particular one that Frank now recalled concerning a pilgrim and seeker in the North Country. Tired of his travels, this man sat one day in the shade of a tree in the heat of the afternoon to meditate on the changing emptiness of life. The air tasted good in his throat, but after a while he was thirsty, and he couldn’t drink the air. He wished he had a cool drink. Immediately a big urn full of fruit nectar appeared on the ground in front of him — because this tree he’d stopped to rest beneath happened to be the legendary Wishing Tree. He took a long, delicious drink, and then he felt his hunger and thought how good some food would taste.

Instantly, he had a plate of wheat cakes in his lap. He ate and drank his fill. What a great spot I’ve come to! he thought. It occurred to him this would be exactly the right place for a little home. And there it was, sunlight pouring

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down around it, a cottage made of white stones. Now, he thought, if only I had a wife…A completely beautiful woman strolled up, sat down beside him, and took his hands in both of hers. They made love and then nestled in the grass together, he with his head in her lap. As the man started to drift off to sleep he suddenly wondered with alarm if these wishes weren’t being granted, perhaps, by some sort of devil.

Sure enough, a terrifying devil, red as anger, huge and stinking of rot, appeared before him. And right in front of his wife and his gorgeous home, the monster tore him to pieces and ate him.

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My wife is a lovely woman, and we’ve built one of this area’s most beautiful homes.

It’s a new house, of true adobe brick, with redwood interiors, solar heating, a fireplace, two bedrooms, all on forty acres. Certainly no mansion but perfect for a childless couple providing they love each other. But we don’t.

Winona loves California. Winona loves her westward, golden dream.

And I love Melissa.

Melissa: your eyes: the gravities and winds across those skies…

I saw Melissa drifting up the rutted drive. Her music was sad. But as I saw her walking in her alien softness, squinting under the indelible blue sky, I vowed again as I had at my first glimpse of her that for this woman I would throw everything away. All of you: if you make it necessary, I will.

“How’d you get up from town?”

“By begging rides.”

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“No. Melissa — you can’t do that. Someday somebody’s going to kidnap you.”

“And what will they do to me?”

“Things,” I said.

“The things you like to do.”

She was a nature’s child of the drug-demented sort, always living without power or running water and dressing from the rummage sales, but just for me she sometimes wore dark eye shadow and painted her lips a pale disheveled pink. Just for me she’d put on long blazing rags and fake jewels and high-heeled sandals and no panties and we’d whiz in my convertible to someplace up the coast where you could get a freezing margarita by the sea. We’d get smashed and kiss on the open wooden decks of these restaurants while the sun went down and the whole world blushed and trembled. Do you get it? Do you think I could do that with Winona? Thoughtful, muscular, artistic Winona? No — with her I stayed up through the first nights of our romance talking about Europe, and we said everything there was to say about Europe, where I’d never been. Later I did visit there, and it was a fantastic, an inspiring region. But I like Melissa even better than Europe.

Let me tell you about this girl. Her eyes are brown and wet. Her mouth twists from the effort of hiding her bad teeth when she smiles.

But when she’s drunk she laughs widely and her gold bridgework flashes. Bartenders like to lean forward to light her cigarettes and in the match-glow examine her as closely as a lover would. It’s all exactly there. The punished child in the stolen makeup. Eyes that are never going to look at anyone again. And then she leans back, receding into that wonderful posture, her left hand in her lap. Sometimes she wilts, and sits hunched over a drink drumming her fingers on the bar, and then she looks like a whore. She’s capable of sneering. A woman this vulnerable and perverse is usually taking time out from being tortured to death slowly by a man who looks exactly like her father. Things come to me in images. I see the image of a man strangling an orchid. Oh, flowers!

Up and down the Coast Highway you drift, orchids and azaleas, your petals smeared underfoot.

She was looking too hard at the busboy — blue-eyed, ponytailed, shirt open wide under his strong Adam’s apple. His music was Asian flute and hollow sticks knocked together. Ah, she probably knew Already Dead / 23

him. He’d had her, probably, on the wood table of his shack with orange crates full of garbage stinking by the windows, had her on the sand at Schooner Gulch in a chilly wind, he’d torn at her gooseflesh with his beautiful teeth.

“What’s the matter?” she asked me.

“Did you screw that guy? No”—I ran over her sudden, fearful laughter—“but you’re going to. Before your life is over you’ll have every last one.” The tequila was mixing badly, my brain glinted like a knife, I wanted to make a famous speech now, to tell her how much I hated her for being a woman, for being able to open up and receive , but all that came out was, “The whole world will be inside you, you’re like the ocean— ”

And then I’m driving fast in the open, yellow Porsche, head clearing in the blasting atmosphere, searching my heart for apologetic words while beside me Melissa cries, “Burst apart, explode, fly, galactic, starburst, asunder!..”

For three generations my family has belonged to Northern California, living in the shadow of its ways — nature’s big moves, the colossal, twisted gestures of cypresses along the bluffs — bluffs, there’s something about that word that rings right, you can hear the grunts of God shoving these massive cliffs into place.

And to this natural grandness the best, the finest people are drawn, people just trying to touch life with awareness and kindness.

But it’s also a land of interminable rains, baffling droughts, and, in July and August, the thick, cloying fog banks. For twenty-one successive days they clung to the North Coast this summer, like…like the American Dream plowed up against the freezing sea. Now we mean to set up oil rigs out there and dig our dreams from under the ocean’s bed, our black, dripping dreams, so that we’ll remain at liberty to drive our dream-deals faster and faster along these tight roads. I myself drive not only the secondhand Porsche but also an open jeep with a high-speed rear end, both very fast. Or I did. Winona’s got the jeep now.