Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

“I saw a horse. Not a sprite. Just a horse. I’m cold.”

“Move closer, then.” She opened the stove’s door a crack and a draft began thrumming up the chimney. She helped him scoot the hassock nearer the stove, and he hunched beside the steadily increasing heat while she draped about him a fancy saddle blanket, blue and purple and scarlet, and held it in place with an arm about his shoulders, a hand on his arm. “The fire has a voice,” he said. He breathed deeply through open, quivering lips. “I’m going to cry.” He tried to urge the sobs along, but his emotion expressed itself in a series of coughs and a fit of shivering.

“No, Nelson. It wasn’t just a horse.”

He was glad of her closeness. The minty currents of her breath.

“I was invited to a prayer meeting tonight.”

“Perhaps that’s where you should be then.”

“Because nobody invited me here, you mean.” She deflected this with a gesture of her hand toward her face.

“Yvonne — what has happened?”

With a graceful turn of her form she left the hassock and lit on the chair it served. She curled her fingers around its arms, but forcefully, until her knuckles bumped up and her hands look gnarled. “What about you? Should I ask what’s happened to you?”

“More than I can tell. That’s why I’m here.”

“I’m not understanding. Why are you here?”

“To make a deal. Any deal. Make a deal for me.” Already Dead / 263

“With whom?”

“Well — your spiritual cohorts. Your angel friends, your demons, I don’t care.”

Apparently in weariness, maybe irritation, she shut her eyes, and at this moment his own sight widened to engulf their surroundings: the three candles in corner nooks giving them what light there was, beside each a brass snuff dish, the wall of bookshelves, the wide venetian blinds, on the facing wall a lamb’s skin dyed red.

As if talking in her sleep she asked, “How did you get wet? Is it raining that hard?”

“I was wet before it rained.”

“Where did you come from? Where’s your car?”

“Nobody knows I’m here. Nobody must ever know I was here.” She opened her eyes on him. “Okay. However you want it.”

“I’m the victim, the object, of not one but two quite separate plots to murder me.”

“And you’re thinking you can — what are you thinking you can do?”

“Whatever can be done.”

“There’s such a thing as karma, you know. You can’t cheat the past.”

“So the future is set, do you mean? I don’t think so.”

“Not the future. But fate.”

“Einstein didn’t think so.”

“ Ein stein. Did you ever consider how contradictory you are? I mean self-contradictory in your whole system?”

“I’m confused, desperate and confused. I don’t apologise for it.”

“We live in a universe of space-time. Einstein mapped it to his partial satisfaction. But just like the rest of us, he lived his fate. We know our fate. On some level we know it perfectly. What we can’t foresee is the way our fate conjoins with other fates.”

“And our fate is terrible.”

“Oh, no. It’s beautiful. Only our illusions are terrible. And it’s inevitable that they’ll fall away. But first we have to pierce them. And be pierced by them”—Her voice was shaking, and her hands. “Why didn’t you come to me sooner?”

“Because I don’t like you.”

“You don’t like anyone.” She clutched her hands together. “It’s a mess now. You’re not the only one doomed.”

“You’re scared. You’ve toyed with God, or Satan, or somebody like that—”

264 / Denis Johnson

“ You’ve toyed with them—”

“What can I do?”

“Shall I call Randall?”

“Look at me. I’m willing — I’m desperate, I said I was.” She settled back in her seat, shut her eyes and opened them. “Nelson Fairchild — hello. I am Randall MacNammara.”

“Just like that.”

Yvonne’s face smiled. “It’s easy once you know how.” The trouble had left her. Her hands, resting on either arm of the chair, were beautiful again.

He began his dialogue with the void. “You indicated we might speak in private.”

“And here we are.”

“What have you done to my wife?”

“She’s not your wife anymore.”

“What have you done with Winona? Whatever she is to me.”

“She’s nothing to you. She’s no one you’ve ever known.”

“Well then, who is she?”

“Are you familiar with the term ‘walk-in’? Do you know what a walkin is?”

“A closet? A freezer? Come on, will you?”

“Your wife,” Randall said, “is dead.”

“My wife is dead.”

“The person you’ve been dealing with is not your wife. Forget her.”

“Not possible. She’s trying to get me murdered, I think.”

“She may be trying, but she hasn’t contracted to be a killer this life around.”

“And she’s not the only one. I’ve got real hit men on my ass, Mr.

Ghost. And I want you to understand I have no desire to get like you.

Today I swam when I might have drowned. I drank water when I was thirsty. I slept when I was tired. Also I took a great piss. I wish I could go on doing things like that forever.”

“Well, the vocation of hit men is to deny your wish.”

“Can you help me? Can you operate somehow on these — types — these entities—”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Look, can you or can’t you work some changes in our little realm?”

“Nelson Fairchild, I don’t know. It’s never occurred to me. Do you care about changing the dream you had last night?” Already Dead / 265

“Oh, the god damn dream thing! Great!”

“When you’ve been caught in the world of perception you’re caught in a dream. That’s simple enough.”

“Yesterday, you were talking to me about a doppelgänger.”

“A soul twin. Your twin is in error. This error has led your twin into danger of a peculiar kind.”

“Who is it? It’s Carl Van Ness.”

“Your twin makes a basic error in mistaking the self for the universe.

We all use the self as the basic referent. He fails to use any other.”

“You mean he’s self-centered.”

“As long as you don’t mean merely selfish. We’re talking about a failure of perception that amounts to total spiritual blindness and soul-sickness. This person compounds his basic error by believing that the universe started with his birth and ends with his death. If he believes in reincarnations, he believes in reincarnations of the whole universe.

That eliminates karma, relearning, and the law of compensation — since each universe is a closed system, bounded by his lifetime. Through all these universes one after another, the only thread, the only continuity, is his identity. And the thread is endless. He has no destiny.”

“And is that actually true?”

“It’s as he makes it. He’s condemned himself to an unimaginable interval on the current plane.”

“To hell with him, then. But there are two others, two men, out to kill me.”

“And so they will. But they’re not important.”

“I beg your fucking pardon?”

“They’re merely completing a design you began — you yourself began — in an earlier existence. You killed in a previous era, in this one you experience the other side of that. The lesson begun in one life is finished in another.”

“That’s just — ugly! Justice should be rounded off in a single life, if you’re going to have it at all. Otherwise it’s so unfair, so unpoetic.”

“It’s a game, Nelson Fairchild. First you learn offense, now you learn defense.”

“I’m not a gamesman. I look on things as serious.”