Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

“Well, things aren’t serious. But this one thing is. This Devourer.”

“Van Ness.”

266 / Denis Johnson

“The Devourer has possessed a body at the moment of death, and you took it home with you. You invited it in. Now it eats.”

“And I’m lunch.”

“At least you keep your sense of humor.”

“Sure thing. Yes I do.”

“He’s the one to take seriously. The others are just figures in your waking dream.”

“I take my waking experiences as facts. They have a certain logic, anyway. Meanwhile, dreams are jumbles. I know the difference.”

“What you seem to wake up to is just another form of the same world you see in dreams. All your time is spent in dreaming. Your sleeping and your waking dreams have different forms, that’s all…Nelson Fairchild: Do you believe in God?”

“When you get right down to it? Yes. Because I’m nuts.”

“Then let me ask you this: Would God have left the meaning of the world to your interpretation?”

“I assume so. Of course he did. It’s a stupid question, actually.”

“If he did, then it has no meaning. Meaning can’t change from person to person, and still be true. No. If God means something by all this, then only one set of interpretations will suffice. God looks upon the world as with one purpose, changelessly established. And no situation can affect its aim. Everything is in accord with it. Everything.”

“Is there really a God, then?”

“Well, actually, I don’t know. But I believe it more strongly than you possibly can in a chaos of perceptions like a funhouse.”

“I call it reality. I’m stuck with it.”

“Is it real? And are you stuck with it?”

“Randall MacNammara, Ghost Man, I’m ready to make a deal with you — offer you something. Just tell me what.”

“I’ll employ the same analogy again. What could somebody from last night’s dream offer you? Riches and gold? Riches and gold in a dream aren’t riches. They’re just dreams. And the people, places, and things you fear are dreams too. Don’t fear them.”

“Easy for you to say. Couldn’t you stop them?”

“Couldn’t you face them?”

“No! Could you stop them.”

“It’s possible to work some effect.”

“So do it. Hey — just for fun!”

“I’m sure you could locate a wandering bitter entity somewhere Already Dead / 267

between the realms. They like mischief. Mischief and hurt.”

“Then I will. I’ll get me a spiritual vandal.”

“I’m not interested in helping you.”

“Why not? What’s the difference — come on! You can’t, can you?

You’re just a gig, a trick. Yvonne!” he shouted.

She closed her eyes. A minute of silence wore away in the room, which he realized had become unbearably warm. Fairchild shrugged away the blanket and wrapped a corner of it around the stove’s porcelain door handle, and shut it tight. Yvonne said, “I’m tired.”

“Don’t fade on me just yet. What were you just talking about — about mischievous entities.”

“There are such.”

“Get me one on the line, then, how about. Whether I’m sure about all this working or not, I’m out to get these bastards done, okay? I’m out of options.”

“But we don’t know what bargains the two men have made. All their promises will be kept. All their mistakes will be corrected. Whatever they were sent here to fulfill will be fulfilled.”

“Just cast a fucking spell, will you?”

“I don’t cast spells. I can open a channel that leads to their guides. I can make a bargain with their guides — arrange to have them take a shortcut.”

“Which means?”

“Help them reach their destination sooner.”

“Destination?”

“Whatever their fate may be. Probably not a happy one this time around.”

“You mean hire a cosmic hit man?”

“You have to understand. Whatever they’re on this earth to do will be accomplished. If it’s something you fear, then maybe we should leave it alone.”

“Just make a deal. Any deal.”

She put a hand to her forehead, let her touch fall to a gilded lampstand and fingered its intricacies — its cups, its capitals and its flowers. Her fingers found the switch and she turned it on with a spasm of her hand and let down an unflattering light over half her face. Her mouth worked in bewilderment. Then she gave him a tiny, angry smile.

He said, “Randall.”

268 / Denis Johnson

“The tap-in is not Randall.”

“We gonna talk to Randall again?”

“No.”

“No?”

The one he’d sensed from the first, the guest whose presence he’d felt all along, had come into the room with them.

“I am Miran.”

“And who is Miran?” The question hovered unanswerable in the aether.

The blind people in prison. Suddenly I think about them, suddenly after all this life, the prisoners who are blind.

How many are there? What’s it like? Does my mother know some blind prisoners? At the facility she works in, they like to call it a facility, it amuses them to call it a detention center, at the ladies’ pen a few dozen miles out of San Francisco, at the north edge of Marin County — at their prison, the gun towers are not the tallest things. They see pines climbing up mountains another nearly two thousand feet, ascending to the peaks and turning around and looking back at them. I’m not sure what I am getting at here but I think it must be important because I got out of bed just as I was at the verge of sleep to write to you about it, Winona.

There is something else. I know you made love to Glen Bolger, John Marks and at least one other person, I don’t know which person, after we were married. You call me weak but if you in your lack of wisdom define strength as the ability to suffer worthless pain, well, all I have to say is oh, fuck you. I can see there’s no real need here to finish sentences or pretend to be articulate. It’s another one of those letters. You start out to do something sane and the next thing you know you’re threatening the mayor’s life or taking hostages in a supermarket.

270

Sometimes on these gray days the past just comes rolling armylike through the fields toward my naked heart. There was a certain person, one man in particular. I was that man. Now I’m not. I’m writing you only in order more terribly to feel

Officer Navarro set the pages aside and took a look at his wristwatch, an Omega designed to work underwater to a depth of several fathoms, though he wasn’t a diver, and he wasn’t pressed for time — had about sixteen hours, if anybody was counting, to burn until work tomorrow morning — but was just interested in how long the dryer might run.

Another three minutes. Or four.

Impatient with the whole process, with repetitions in general, he opened the dryer’s hatch in midcycle and watched the collapse of this galloping carousel. He took out his handkerchiefs and white jockeys.

They’d dried, but his uniform and jeans had not. He let fall another dime and watched them go, his outer garments, these things of cloth all in a whirl and completely absurd.

He thought: I’m going up there. One of them sits two hundred yards from this spot.

He replaced the pages in their envelope and went out to his car, a muscular ’76 Pontiac from whose hood he’d burnished away the gangster Firebird tattoo. Such signifiers he considered a little bit too glorious, a little bit too Mexican. But he liked the power, and he liked the handling. Tossing the white envelope into the child-sized backseat, he got behind the wheel and discovered on the floorboard on the passenger’s side a small green plastic garbage bag containing, as he knew, his three bath towels and two washcloths. He yanked the bag up across his shoulder, and with a sense of struggle, with a sense these repetitions were overcoming him absolutely, with weakened steps, he went back into the Laundromat to start another washer before driving the short distance through the neutral dusk up the hill to the giant’s home.