Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

“Yes. I’m trying.”

“Your father has recently died.”

“Is that supposed to be big news?”

“No, it’s not. But this is: your father’s death is part of something that concerns you deeply, that concerns your soul. There’s a term in use now in your world, in limited use— holocoenosis . It refers to the fact that each thing, everything, is affected by action on any single thing — kind of a cause-and-effect conduction throughout reality.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Would you by any chance be familiar with certain notions concerning bifurcations in dissipative structures?”

“I most certainly would not. In fact if I had to be I hope I’d kill myself.”

“You have a parallel. A soul whose path parallels yours very closely.

Kind of a doppelgänger.”

“Holy smokes. Kind of a doppelgänger, did you say?” Beside him, Navarro laughed and then tried to excuse himself with his eyes.

“He’s out to devour you. He is a devourer…” Nobody said anything now. Certainly not he himself.

Already Dead / 233

“A soul twin. Many of us have them. In our more comfortable lives we don’t meet them. In the lives where we do, the meeting creates cosmic fireworks. Legendary love affairs or strange hatreds…”

“For God’s sake, spit it out, ghost!”

“Nelson Fairchild. Listen.”

Her music had changed. Everybody’s music had changed.

“You bitch.”

“Are you listening?”

“What have you done with my wife?”

She spoke calmly, setting up no vibrations: “I think we should talk more privately, Nelson.”

It made him weak with dread, though it was what he wanted, and he said immediately, “Maybe even in this lifetime. I’ll pencil it in.” Later he stood with his keys in his hand, waiting for Hillary to get her rig backed out, and the cop stood next to him with his arm around the waitress’s tiny shoulders. Melissa waited in the Porsche. “I’m not drunk,” he told the cop.

“I realize that, man. I was just kidding.”

“She got me shook. I hate her.”

“She’s got a rare gift, Nelson,” the waitress said.

“Of one kind or another,” the cop added.

“I guess so. I don’t know. But I know she talks to the dead.”

“What if she does?” the cop said. “So what? Why should I believe some asshole just because he doesn’t have a body?”

“…There. There is a man with a complete cranium,” Fairchild told Melissa as they all drove off in two directions, “while the rest of us have these gauzy frayed places where bullshit keeps getting in .”

“Could you drop me at the hotel?”

“If we weren’t natural enemies, I’d want to befriend him and stay near him.”

“He reminds me of a picture,” Melissa said.

“What picture?”

“A picture . He’s holding still.”

“He’s steady inside. But he’s wrong about Yvonne. She’s not a fake.

She talks to demons. She works with evil. She can deal.” 234 / Denis Johnson

On his way to the apartment, having dropped Melissa at the hotel, Fairchild swung into the gas station. Nothing else in Gualala was open, nothing but the hotel bar, and that not visibly, stuck away on the building’s north side. But here was the Phillips 66, effulgent, clarified, and lonely, like a stage before a darkened audience. It wasn’t so much a need for fuel that drew him as the sight of it there, and of the attendant dumping out windshield water like a bucket of stars across the greasy pavement. The attendant stood still and watched with an air of uncertainty until the Porsche’s arrival was complete.

“Are you open?”

“Yeah. Sure. Hi.”

Fairchild got out of the car. “Should I fill it myself?”

“No, I’m happy to.”

“Too late for the windshield, huh?”

“I’ll get it. I’ve got some Windex.”

“Let me unlock the cap for you. It locks.”

He stood next to the attendant, looking right down on the top of his hatless head. A small young guy pumping gas on the weekdays, on the Sabbath he preached at the little church in West Point. He’d used to be a pitiful case, a drunken wreck and, it was generally assumed, an irre-mediable moron. Now here he stood, shepherd of a little pickup flock and purveyor of combustible oils. Holding the work of the Quality Nozzle Company in his grip.

“Tell me about demons.”

“I’d rather talk about the Savior.”

“What do you know about demons?”

“I don’t know anything I haven’t read in the Bible. You can read the same things, I guess you’re aware of that.”

“And what about spirit guides? You’ve heard of them. Do you believe in such guides?”

“Well, going by the Scripture, there’d only be two — the Holy Spirit, and the Devil Satan.”

“Channeling—”

“You’re only channeling Satan. Better cut it out.”

“So you definitely believe in the Devil.”

“Definitely. You want the Windex? You’re all bugged up.”

“Permit me to quote you something from Nietzsche: ‘Whoever has theological blood in his veins is shifty and dishonorable in all things.’” Already Dead / 235

“I’ll go along with that.”

“I’ve heard you pitch quite a sermon at the chapel of a Sunday.”

“You’ve heard it? Or heard about it?”

“Billy told me you’ve got the Spirit.”

“You remember what I was like.”

“I remember doing rum and coke with you one Fourth of July. Cocaine coke. Not the drink.”

“I don’t remember. So how could I deny it?”

“I remember you asking me if you could suck my dick, in fact.”

“That could be. There’s not an alky worthy of the name who hasn’t had somebody’s joint in his mouth some time or other.” The preacher smiled. “So the question is: How did I get all the way here from all the way there?”

“I don’t know. How?”

“Somebody prayed for me.”

“Yeah…So would you do me a favor, please?”

“I won’t blow you, no.”

“I was going to ask you to pray for me.”

“I do already. Every day.”

“Thank you.”

“You’d be welcome at the chapel tomorrow night. We have prayer meetings Thursdays, usually at somebody’s house. But we’re getting such a crowd we decided to use the chapel.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Nelson. Maybe we’ll see you tomorrow night.”

“I don’t think you will.”

“No, I won’t count on it.”

He turned north but drove past his fourplex building and pushed out of town, keeping the Porsche at a steady run, not slinging it around the curves, through the mute irrelevance of Anchor Bay, down the drop into the gully where the campground slept by the water, past Shipwreck Road and Shipwreck Rock and still northward, the double yellow lines wavering slowly ahead in a world denominated by his headlights. The landscape opened wide past Point Arena, and he continued through it in the general direction of Manchester, until the silvery pastures on his left ended in a grove of some dozen acres. Even in this hour of souls it looked like a friend. In the dark he couldn’t make out the fence, only the massive cypress, eucalyptus, and oak — the wrought, asymmetrical varieties…His

236 / Denis Johnson

high beams lit up the white arch and the rickety birthday-party lettering suspended across its apex identifying this Catholic graveyard. The trees and graveheads jumped sideways and slid backward as the illumination crossed them. He drove in far enough that his headlights wouldn’t draw the gaze of any late traveller, and got out leaving them on to see by and walked.

He left the pavement, started across the graves. Am I ashes? Have I come to scatter myself? The headstones like ruins, leavings. Past the older section and the names eaten up. Among the whiter crosses… Californian . So here we are. It’s Wednesday, do they tell you things like that, down there in California? But I didn’t pick up the Barron’s . Anyway it’s night and I can’t read because it’s almost as dark out here as it is in there. And is somebody praying for me?