Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

Folks seemed to be taking up positions. He returned to the seat he’d just been prodded from while Yvonne put herself in a tall straight-backed kitchen stool facing them all in their various chairs, his own a deep-sinking type he’d probably be napping in soon, despite his alertness in these surroundings. What he’d at first believed to be distant chimes in the breeze he located now as low-volume New Age from a stereo, the speakers stashed up high in the corners.

Yvonne closed her eyes for ten seconds, opened them up wide, and smiled at each one of her guests in turn. “Everybody, let’s introduce ourselves.”

“Mo. Maureen.”

“John Navarro.”

“Melissa. But I want to change it.”

“To…?”

“Something, I don’t know, but it should mean a word.”

“Winona Fairchild.”

The carpenter said, “Is that gonna be too hot?”

“I’m Ocean,” said the young girl in overalls.

Yvonne said, “Ocean lives here.”

“I’ll fix the draft.” The carpenter knelt beside the stove.

Nelson junior just sat there, staring at his wife, until Yvonne said,

“And this is Nelson Fairchild.”

Mrs. Fairchild didn’t look back. Navarro dedicated himself to catching her at it, but she never glanced at her husband, not once. And generated thereby an impression of obsessive awareness of the guy, kind of a retina-burn threat, Fairchild’s status that of hot spot or solar eclipse.

One more came in, the woman he’d seen in the kitchen with Mo, a flustered person with plain strong weathered hands but painted toe-nails, in sandals, and her meaty neck wrapped in a gypsy scarf.

“Sit. Sit. Everybody knows you but John.”

Already Dead / 219

Navarro nodded, and noticed as she sat across from him that she didn’t shave her legs. When she crossed them, he glimpsed her yellow underpants.

“Hillary Lally.”

“Like the nursery rhyme.”

“What nursery rhyme?”

“Just kidding around.”

She scowled and smiled and looked hurt. He’d meant Hickory Dickory Dock.

Suddenly Melissa let out a bright laugh, like change falling in the street. Gold bridgework in her mouth. She shrugged, and waved at everybody with her fingers. She’d chewed her nails down. She pulled her lips shut over a tilted smile and again she looked like a roughed-up, invalided child.

The carpenter hadn’t introduced himself by name. “Where’s Billy?”

“I wouldn’t count on Billy getting here.”

Yvonne smiled. “I’m a little surprised you turned up even, Nelson.”

“Actually, honey, the entire world has been peeled away. Anything can happen now if you ask me.”

“That’s a tremendous juncture. You know the Chinese character for our word crisis is a combination of the characters for danger and opportunity , danger plus opportunity, did you know that?”

“I know I’d like a cigarette.”

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

“Just to fuck you up.”

She laughed in a charming way and then looked around the group, a long look that inaugurated a certain seriousness. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply several breaths in through her wide nostrils and out between her lips, and most of the others did the same, but Navarro didn’t, and neither, he saw, did Fairchild. Yvonne opened her eyes and smiled at them both, as if recognizing without condemnation their resistance, and then addressed them all: “One of the things we’ve come together for is to celebrate the life and afterlife of Nelson Fairchild, Sr.

He’s between lives now, and we’re here to thank him for his recent one and wish him well on his next.

“Something of great importance that we can do is just come together and let our perceptions of him smooth out. Let his deeds and personality, as we perceived them, sink back into the unruffled 220 / Denis Johnson

pool of time. Where he’s without any earthly individuality. Beyond experience, beyond perception. He’s not a villain. Not a bad guy. We’ll do everything he’s done and experience everything, maybe even work the kind of horror Hitler worked ourselves before this journey through a billion lives is over. Don’t put anything past yourself. We let him go now. What we thought we saw is gone. None of that was real. What remains is pure. What remains is real. We say good-bye…we say hello.” They waited there in some sort of reverie for a while until Yvonne let out a long, pleased, somewhat phony sigh, and the group settled its attention on her again. She turned to Hillary Lally. “How was South America?”

“We were there three days and then we left.”

“Oh.”

“There was an accident.”

“I heard.”

“A young girl died.”

“Was it when the car hit you? Hit your car?”

“Not then. Later. It was — she was a pedestrian.”

“But was it the car that did it?”

“We didn’t know. And then we left and — we’ll never know.”

“I think this is a good time to call Randall in.” This proclamation doused the house in silence. Yvonne put her chin on her chest and you could have counted no more than five before she lifted her face to them again.

“Hello. Good afternoon. I’m Randall MacNammara.” Her eyes weren’t rolling in her head, her voice stayed exactly her voice, nothing about her had changed in any way. Nobody was playing spooky tapes or blowing fog. It showed taste and style, Navarro decided, to let the marks run their own grift.

Mo put her hand over his and something happened in his head, but nobody seemed to have noticed, so he wasn’t sure. He was probably in love.

The witch had a true skill. This had to be one of the region’s more elegant scams. But he’d showed, and something was working on him.

Yvonne was all touch. No push or pull. She’d slipped off her sandals and bared her feet, draped her shift’s hem across her thighs. She had great legs; Navarro could see himself throwing cheap vodka on her and then licking it off.

Already Dead / 221

“Let’s look back,” she said, or Randall did, “to our past lives…Relax completely. Start at the top of your head. Let the tension flow out into the void. Relax the muscles of your neck. Relax, let it all flow out…the shoulders…now the back…torso…hips…thighs…calves…Let every bit of tension drain now through the soles of your feet and into the grounding center of the earth beneath us…And as that energy drains away, the energy that we’ve taken in from all the daily influences outside us, what’s left is a kind of very softly glowing pulse within, our true energy, the real, eternal, unchanging, unquenchable, quiet and irresistible truth that we are…Let’s pause now and just be that truth.” Nothing happened for a while beyond the rearrangements of the wood burning in the stove. Navarro did his best, he believed, to envision this bit of swamp gas ignited inside him somewhere, either in his chest or his head, he couldn’t quite determine which, and kept switching between the two.

“Now let this true self travel. It wants to take your vision somewhere, to share with you the sights and sounds of an incarnation you’ve forgotten. Keeping your eyes closed, become aware of the eyes within your eyes. Keeping your eyes closed, open the eyes within your eyes.

Keeping your eyes closed, look around you with the eyes within.” Navarro engaged the game and envisioned a place, a kind of dormit-ory, the lowest floor in a honeycomb of indestructible lightweight cubicles, and he lived there. Lived as a cog, nothing more, with a sturdy suit and a weapon and no thinking past these limits, no desires. In another minute he became aware of Yvonne’s voice again and realized he’d fallen briefly asleep.

“…not to reveal any secrets about ourselves, but just to share where we’ve been, if that seems shareable. Any volunteers? Okay, Ocean.