Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

“Goddamn Harry,” Hillary said, still crying like a child. “Oh, Harry, I hate you…”

“Shhh. Shhh. Hush. You and I, we’ll end up doing everything, tasting every fruit, whether good or evil. There can be no penalty, no purgatory, no hell. Only a relearning after error. There’s no banishment, only wandering. No torture, no retribution for our deeds, no need for forgiveness except our own forgiveness of others. And of ourselves.” Hillary wept, drawing long jagged breaths and giving up her misery in short, interrogatory-sounding outbursts, and Yvonne said, not only to her, but to them all: “Shhhhh…It’s Eurus…” Shh. It’s Eurus: Shhhh…” and her susurration blended with that of another flurrying past from offshore. “It’s Eurus, god of the east winds.” Out the window the runty bull pines and knotted cypresses hardly moved, they had built themselves against exactly such gods. Arboreal contortions, sculpted into agony. Topiary likenesses but likenesses of what? Some grotesque and lovely inner churning.

In the lull as the wind blew by and old Hillary whuffed as if foaling, Fairchild heard again Yvonne’s Electronic Obvious in the air.

Covering up her true music with this other.

Three days? Another reprieve rescinded, a sort of Easter parody, after three days down under, Lally jumps up whole. Lally back machinating after his glorious subequatorial whirlwind thing . The cop, Navarro, looked at Hillary. Crossed his arms over his chest. And then actually crossed his eyes in his face. Good for you. In his sharply creased Sta-Prest sports garb, his acrylic turtleneck from which dangled the black shooting-range wraparounds, you’d pick him out instantly at any political picnic as one of the Secret Service. A nonvoter. He’d brought his moll. The waitress was all angles, cartoony, especially as she wore something on the silky side — or just as likely synthetic, what did he know? — a fakey Hindu pants suit, anyway it draped, looked tossed over wires. Fairchild glanced at her more and more often. And she was altogether pretty, the front of her head really just a location for her two immense eyes, quite blue and completely empty of harm. Only did later glances turn up anything else in the way of features, and the lips were full and small and the nose straight and deftly angled and poignantly disfigured by a tiny ring. She had a broad, quiet forehead. Her short haircut curled around forward beneath her ears, which were also lovely, shell-like and almost lobeless, not pierced, and their whorls, the routes to her brain, as he thought of them, not at all complicated. She had great hands, a bit knuckly and marked-up and on closer inspection actually tattooed, but all the better for that, shaped by days in a human life and promising to taste of the whole story. He wished he could lick them.

And kiss her eyes. Miracles had blessed her with lids big enough to hide those eyes. When she closed them they came down covering a great dark peace.

He couldn’t see Winona’s face. She kept herself at an occluding angle, as if one look would audit and judge her. But he’d come for love, not judgment…The session, meanwhile, had become an embarrassment.

Hillary went on her knees and rooted, at least in the bulging and shrinking candlelight it appeared she did, between Yvonne’s delicious thighs. Amid the smoky amber shapes and green shadows. “Shhh. It doesn’t involve you,” Yvonne consoled her.

“But—”

“It doesn’t involve you except by chance. You were there, and he used your body, came into you at a traumatic moment that left you vulnerable. He would have used you to kill your husband — would have made use of your resentments, your anger against him. We all have those feelings of rage and hate toward the ones we love most. But you found your own forgiveness. Thus did you thwart the demon.” A break for tea: the lights back up, another six pounds of hardwood fed frontways into the stove’s blank face. “We have to pay the bills around here,” Yvonne announced, tapping a wicker bowl on the bookshelf beside her. Despite her frankness, meant to disarm, the bowl skipped among them like a turd. Fairchild passed it on without touching his pockets. The others pitched in. Hillary deposited a check.

“What kind of tea have we got here, Yvonne?”

“Don’t you recognize it, Nelson? That’s Good Earth. Winona brought it.”

“I thought I recognized the spices. I’d forgotten about its existence.

Where is she?”

“Winona? She had to go.”

He set it down and headed out through the kitchen.

“Winona! Winona!” he shouted in the dark.

The old Dodge. It wouldn’t start but after six or seven tries. She’d parked off the drive, shoved right in amongst the scrub, where nobody blocked her exit. He clutched the door handle and looked up at her in the dark cab.

“I love you. Winona. I love you.”

She tried again and the engine caught. The forward axle thunked as she engaged the automatic transmission.

“I meant to tell you, sounds like a U-joint going out up front,” he said, “but that’s not important now.”

“Move!”

“I’m moving,” he said. “There, I’ve moved, but let me talk. I love you.”

She pulled onto the drive with her shock absorbers squawking. Gone on the highway, down the salt atmospheres. Hillary had parked her jeep behind the Porsche, or he might have chased after her.

By the windows’ glow he found his way back to the house and went in again to sit next to Melissa, amid the other idiots and their Idiot Chief.

“What are you going to change your name to?” he asked Melissa.

“I think maybe Music. I like folk music a lot.” 228 / Denis Johnson

“Am I interrupting?” he asked the others.

“We were just getting settled again,” Yvonne told him.

“What about something more specific? How about Polka?” Melissa laughed.

“I have thrilling news,” he told the others, who’d assembled now as before. “Melissa has changed her name to Polka.”

“I did not! He’s drunk. But I’m not drunk,” Melissa said.

“Have you seen me take one drink today?”

“Well,” Yvonne said, “let’s settle in and take—”

“Please assure these people of my sobriety.”

“—take a few deep breaths, to settle in—”

“Sobriety! To you that’s like Mars.”

The cop smiled broadly at this until Mo ran a fingernail along his sleeve. He crossed his arms over his chest and shut his eyes as they all got quiet.

Yvonne held a pair of eyeglasses in her left hand. “I want to read you something from this book, just a short paragraph. The Philosopher’s Stone by F. David Peat.” She put the glasses on and bowed her head above the volume in the lap of her skirt, from which she’d probably had to wring, Fairchild wouldn’t have doubted, a pint of Hillary Lally’s teardrops.

“‘Even the smallest region of space is filled with radiation from the extremely low frequencies of the Big Bang remnants, through the range of radio waves, from visible light and into ultraviolet, and so up to gamma rays of the highest energy. This radiation comes from stars, from supernovas, from quasars, from the event horizon of black holes, and from the twisting magnetic fields that stretch across vast regions of empty space. Moreover, all this light is carrying information — it conveys information about its origin in a nuclear process deep within the heart of a star or as matter hurtles into a black hole. Every volume of space is alive with electromagnetic radiation…’” She closed the book, removed her glasses and handed both to Ocean, who rose from her chair and placed them on the bookshelf.

“That’s beautiful,” Phil said.

“Does it bring anything to mind? About our particular environment.” Ocean said, “The radar domes.”