Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

“Truth is beauty, beauty truth”—it scans but it makes no sense. I feel all right, feel pretty good. I wish I could float indefinitely along on this intoxicated gratitude, but I get mad too. My little dirigible bumps up against big cliffs of hate.

I’m monstrous, okay. But so are your deeds. I mean it takes something like you to keep me from believing the world has some good in it.

My father! All right, that was practically a gift of mercy, you could rationalize that one while playing tennis. And maybe you didn’t kill him. He’d sent you a note warning you you’d be cut out of the will — I saw the note in your kitchen — so you had what the detectives call a motive. But we all have motives, don’t we, what we lack are the will and the blindness. Maybe his death just occurred , and presented you with an issue: the old man’s dead, you inherit half his holdings, which, under California law, belong equally to your husband, whom you’re divorcing; if your husband dies before the divorce, you get your half complete. If his brother dies, everything’s yours.

Did the demon tell you he planned to kill my brother? I doubt it, not then. But he persuaded you eventually — or did you persuade him?

Anyhow you knew. Whom else could he have asked for directions to the cabin? Van Ness I entered there just minutes after you — an hour, two hours after, not more. I went in there because I’d been told he was dead and I wanted to ascertain it, but — My brother…In films you shake your brother, you can’t believe it, you shout, Billy! Billy! but not in life.

Not with his blood jelled right over his open eyes. Not with his brains spilling out his mouth like he choked on them. There’s no shaking and shouting in that case. There was nothing to ascertain. Do you understand? There was nothing to ascertain, nowhere to ascertain it, nobody to ascertain it about. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. That’s what I found in there. That’s what you created.

282 / Denis Johnson

May I tell you something? I fired that.357 Magnum only once and I found it difficult to hit anything.

Ah, Van: cutthroat, backstabber, unbelievable wondrous psychic betrayer—

Often I think, repeatedly I think, relentlessly I dream of you in my arms, my mouth on your mouth, the floodlit raindrops bursting the skin of the pond, the mud trickling out of your mustaches, your glasses sideways on your cheek, your eyelashes wet as if with weeping. And thinking it over I’m tempted by every sort of intellectual wildness — I’d like to bring to their safe harbors thoughts that are really feelings, and place a frame around images that are, in fact, fears: how I’d like to drag up by the hair something drowned, something classical and remote, like the Old Man of the Sea, who can be forced to read the future by anyone who holds him while he shape-shifts where he’s risen above the waves at noon, and compare him helplessly to this man. But you, you’re slicker than the sea’s Old Man. You’ve activated everything. You haven’t just predicted my future, but set it playing. And now you believe in fate. Now we all believe in fate.

I know what drives a man like me, I’ve felt it even if I’ve never had its name, but what produces a Van Ness, a man psychotically committed to his every fantasy, the inflicter of reality on dreams? She wouldn’t have let you realize hers if I hadn’t already let you realize mine. I wouldn’t call you the Devil. Frankheimer called you that but I say no.

We’re the devils, she and I, tempting you with fantastic schemes while you, you are the attempter, the Adam, you’re the man .

Like all men you have a religion — at least a way of looking at yourself and the universe both at once, which is all I’d hope a religion to be, for me, if I could only have one, if I were only a man…I’d call you a Zarathustrian.

But I mean, you know, I’m like Nietzsche. Aren’t I? I feel deep suspicion of the mensch, of the reasonable, dutiful man. He knows what he’s doing and it’s identical to the doing of the other guy, the one who doesn’t know. The mensch walks lockstep with the robots, in a long line of hooks hangs his soul on a hook next to theirs. But my father!

But my father was no mensch. He hated the reasonable, dutiful man.

My father was the enemy of your enemy — can’t you see my father was your friend?

Already Dead / 283

Now, look here, you people. A man decides to kill his wife. What’s so unusual? E = MC2, now that’s an unusual thought, and Newton’s cogitations, et cetera, and Shakespeare never bothered a page with them therefore. But wishing to kill your wife, it’s as basic as thought itself—“I want her dead; therefore I am”—it’s why they invented divorce. But this man, our man — me — he can’t get divorced. So he plots in detail.

He’ll find a Dying Person, enlist his services, let him take the blame — after the deed, the killer’s a corpse anyway — it’s a fantasy, and fantasies are harmless in a man without will or blindness. But then comes a man of will, a man blind to the border between the thought and the act. The bargain is sealed, but the Dying Person decides not to die. Determines to kill the plotter’s father, kill the plotter’s brother, make the wife the winner.

You left my wife alive, asleep. You turned from the place and went into the night. You went to my father’s house. You walked right in through the kitchen, ascended the stairs in the darkness, put your ear to the doors in the hall, and behind one you heard my father hard at work breathing. You turned the knob and went in, and I wish I’d been there to witness the two of you: the one I conjured, and the one who conjured me.

Dad in purgatory exploding I imagine the balloons of little girls with your cigar-end: If you were here you’d know how to handle the sheriff, the cops, the judges, Harry Lally. By their tenderest parts you’d hoist up the pig-men and deliver a bitter lecture. You’d line up the lawyers on a spit like shish kebab, you’d drive Winona into the sea. They nourished you, those types. You could handle them all.

All but Van Ness, creeping up beside your bed.

Did my father fight? That I doubt, or he’d have bit your face off.

They’d have found him with his fingers in your windpipe.

No. He stood up to meet you coming, but his legs gave way. He fell unconscious, pissed his pants, and dreamed. In his dream the forest stood still. The sky turned black. A funnel cloud tore down out of heaven and wrapped him down to the roots. Twisted the great tree slowly. And slowly the roots loosed their grip in the duff and my father for whom I am named, one of the giants of this earth, is dead.

And then you raised the window. And then you climbed into the dark. And then you hung by your fingers from the sill. And you won-284 / Denis Johnson

dered where your fall would take you. And then Van Ness, you dropped, and then in its every detail I envision it…

…You held the match till your fingers spasmed.

You two lovebirds! I’m sure you believe you’ve killed me, but I’ve survived. Probably to deepen my exile. Possibly to die at other hands — you’re ignorant of the pig-men. The pig-men are my own fault.

Speaking of pigs, the huntsman in the fairy tale brought back the heart of a boar as proof that he’d murdered Snow White. Heart of a pig.

I keep waking in the middle of the night, around three o’clock. It looks as if a curtain of plastic has been laid over the moment to protect it. Neighborhood of kindness in the hour of moonlight…If ever I get back to you I’ll touch your skin…listen in the holiness to your pink words…I’ll wipe my feet, I’ll never scream I’m a genius at you again. I don’t believe I really killed you, that you lay dead and then rose up alive, the possession of a vagrant soul. In the scientific method there’s much to trouble me, its smugness and myopia, its lofty forgetting of the fact that it’s a method, not a model of the world, its upturned nose at roundnesses till they come back squares, but — what was I saying?