Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

“Exactly.”

“The Tibetan dome also,” Melissa said.

Already Dead / 229

“Well, that, too. But they’re completely different. If everything is, at its heart and soul, electromagnetic radiation, then the radar in this area represents a serious environmental violation. And on a mystical level it violates us, too.”

“And what about the Tibetan dome?” Melissa said. “It’s big and fat and shiny. Like hell!”

“That dome calls to the soul,” Yvonne insisted. “It’s full of prayer and meditation. Clarity, not radiation. Emptiness. It’s not a threat. But the white domes send out messages, in a sense. Calling to people, messing them up. This should be a place of healing, but instead a great deal of energy is concentrated on looking for, anticipating, destructive intercontinental missiles.”

Phil said, “Russia’s on our side now anyway. Haven’t they heard?”

“Well, I suppose they help direct airline flights, too.”

“What if whales could fly?” Phil said. “Wouldn’t that play some games with their radar!”

“We should all hang a lot of crystals in every house,” Melissa said.

“Crystals won’t work.”

“They work! I cured my appendix yesterday! With a crystal!”

“Crystals won’t work for this.”

“What will?” Mo asked.

“Well, some real countereffect might be achieved by burning their commanding officer’s body and drinking his ashes in a potion. But it’s hard to anticipate where you end up when you engage that kind of negative energy.”

Hillary said, “Not his body.”

“Pardon?”

“It’s a woman. A she — the commanding officer.” Yvonne became quite still. “That would be most healing.”

“That would work,” Hillary said, “without getting too negative?”

“Yes. That kind of feminine sacrifice.”

“I’d like to put a query to this policeman,” Fairchild said. “Aren’t sacrifices of either gender sort of kind of like illegal? Nowadays I mean Officer?”

“So is drunk driving.”

Traitors on either hand…“Okay, Johnny Cop. I challenge you to a Breathalyzer test. Immediately, please.”

“Nelson,” Yvonne said. She was lighting a candle and turned from it. “What is this?”

230 / Denis Johnson

“A matchbook.”

“No. It’s this .” She tossed the matchbook at him and he batted it away beneath Melissa’s chair. Yvonne pointed at the candle’s flame. “And what are we seeing? This? No.”

She sat back and regarded them all and smiled. “You know of course that what we’re looking at is light. It strikes the eye, produces another impulse, which is also electromagnetic radiation, along a nerve. Cells receiving it discharge other impulses of light. And now we’re told the self, the life field on which this makes an impression, is also light…The radar domes mess this up. That’s why they cause cancer. The cancer is a result of effects on the life field. It stirs up negatives in our perception which we read as sickness. Sickness is anger expressing itself in our perceptions about our bodies.”

Fairchild felt his face descending, and put up his hands to catch it.

They smelled of Melissa and the Porsche’s leather. Of course he was sober! But he was dizzy. The prickly sensation in his blood and the vertigo derived, he was sure, not from the ridiculousness of these cos-mological assumptions, but from the fact that all his neighbors seemed to share them. At the same time an intense and accelerating episode of déjà vu, of having lived through this very moment, of being able to remember each frame of time in the process of its passing, seemed to narrow all perception, to focus it ruthlessly on the millisecond at hand.

Yvonne’s unintelligible voice sounded clearly against his soul, clearly: she was shamming for these people, all this talk of light and fields and dreams, but her voice was the voice of a witch, a vehicle of evil.

Seconds later he felt he may have fainted. The room had collapsed into the desolation of the candles’ auras, and it looked like they hadn’t got rid of this Randall person after all. She was at it again. The tip-off wasn’t in her manner so much as her speech.

“The world may seem to cause you pain. And yet the world, as causeless, has no power to cause. As an effect, it cannot make effects.

As an illusion, it is what you wish. Your idle wishes represent its pains.

Your strange desires bring it evil dreams.

“Salvation does not lie in being asked to make unnatural responses which are inappropriate to what is real. Instead, it merely asks that you respond appropriately to what is not real — by not perceiving what hasn’t occurred.”

“Yvonne.”

Already Dead / 231

“Randall.”

“Randall.”

“Yes, Nelson?”

“Could you boil that down for us, please?”

“Sure: life is a dream, and to take it as anything else is a form of madness. What you call sanity is just insanity to a less noticeable degree.”

“I’ve noticed much insanity in my life.”

“In your waking dream.”

“I didn’t dream it.”

“I’ll say it again. All is illusion, therefore all is just as you wish.”

“So I’m making the world up? That’s an old hypothesis.”

“An eternal fact. And when you see this fact, there are two possible responses: the first is to see that you’re making it up, and make up something you like. The second is to let God make it up, let him give it a single meaning, his meaning, and cling to that meaning—”

“Which is?”

“Peace and love.”

“That’s two meanings, if I’m counting right.”

“Peace and love, as opposed to war and fear.”

“Look. If I’m dreaming, then why should I have any control over my perceptions? I can’t control my sleeping dreams, can I? Otherwise they’d reflect my true corruption. Why should a bad man have happy dreams?”

“One day they’ll be dialing up these vibes on various monitors. The doctors will adjust our auras and send us home. It’ll all be quite nice, even the Christian fundamentalists will approve.”

“Look — Yvonne.”

“I’m not Yvonne.”

“You sound like Yvonne.”

“Why not? I’m speaking with her vocal chords.”

“Still, some indication — you know—”

“You’d like me to roll up the whites of my eyes and blow smoke out my nostrils?”

“Up my ass is where I think you’re blowing smoke, my dear.”

“And grant you three wishes”—this in a basso voice that raised ap-plaudatory laughter. “Spirit Guides, help from a higher realm — you don’t believe these things,” Yvonne-Randall said.

“Maybe I do. But I don’t have to like them.” 232 / Denis Johnson

“What’s the difference, if they’re true?”

“Well, it’s another world, dear. Don’t I have trouble enough with this one?”

“You’re saying you do believe in a spirit existence we can tap into?”

“Actually I find that I do — sometimes — in a very general way — but by ignoring it I find I live with a certain complexity and on several levels. If I participate in your cosmology, what am I left with? Rules.

Explanations.”

“Well, suggestions anyway. Even some answers, maybe.”

“Recipes for magic antidotes. And cheat sheets for deciphering the cosmic codes.”

“It doesn’t matter what you do. We have time in which to experience everything, belief, nonbelief, and in between.”

“Groovy.”

“Nelson Fairchild. I want you to get serious. I have a message for you, Nelson.”

He feared it concerned Winona. “Okay.”

“It’s important now that you take seriously what I’m going to say.”