Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

Oh — that I shouldn’t believe in ghosts, in walk-ins. You’re you. I’m me.

We’re all of us us —not suits with souls zipped up inside. Yet I saw you, you looked dead. Then I saw you alive. I saw your face. It was yours but you weren’t wearing it.

Neat! Okay! You bet! Wait—

Let me slow up, allow me to get a grip, “My fit is mastering me,” as Whitman says. All right. Van Ness didn’t kill you as we’d planned. But he came to the house, didn’t he?

You were always one to take in odd animals — Winona, I’m talking to you. I know you invited him in, the mystery man.

And you, more mystery than man, was she The One? And did you pledge yourself silently without so much as a gesture? Follow and find her and float forward out of the pasture and put one foot up on the deck?

— Get out.

— First show me your pills. Your yellow pills.

— My what?

Already Dead / 285

— Your bottle of Nembutal. Bring it here.

You brought him the bottle. He poured them into your palm. You touched the pills and tasted the dust of horse dope on your fingers.

…And you told her the plan and dried her tears and made love to her in your strange way and waited as it got dark for her to say it:

— I should kill him .

— Then do it.

— I will .

— You don’t have to. Let me.

And letting him kill me wouldn’t poison your conscience. After all, I started it, I deserved it, it was practically self-defense. Then after I’m dead Dad dies, and you get my share of California, the land of dreams and light and rippling and thundering mounts, the land of gold.

But it turned out, didn’t it, that Father had to die first, before he crossed you off his one-woman list of heirs. And die he did.

I know full well now where my book of Nietzsche got to that night.

Right there beside your bed, on the floor, am I right? And later Van Ness handed it to me in the dark.

Got it right here. I see the parts he marked. I hate people who make marks in books:

We do not wish to be spared by our best enemies, nor by those whom we love from the very heart.

You are not great enough not to know hatred and envy. So be great enough not to be ashamed of them!

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I tell you: it is the good war that hallows every cause.

The two of you! You read the Zarathustra together in bed and laughed.

I can surmise a few surmises. For one he got there in the sunset. Drove that car of his which I’ve never seen except in the dark down the drive with the redwoods taking on exactly that color in the late light and living into their names. The windless hush, the boards creaking as the stables cooled, old Red kicking up the dust in a slow circle and everything. The sun going down into the sea of clouds and turning their steel to wine, then to blood.

286 / Denis Johnson

The man John who wrote the Bible’s last book — on the isle of Patmos he envisioned just this, smoke flooding out of God’s censer and a third of the moon and sun and stars darkened and a burning mountain cast into the sea and turning a third of the water to blood: envisioned coastal California in the evening…And you came into view. Ambled around the corner of the house, put one foot up on the deck.

— You don’t belong here.

— Yes I do.

— How did you find me?

— It was no trick to find you here. The trick was finding you on the boardwalk that day.

No trick but one of fate. Fate along the scoured pier. Coming off the beach with your tennies grainy, whacking out the sand on a benchback and sticking them back on and he’s watching the brown little simian feet with the blond hairs on the knuckles of your toes. And drifting from his eyes the smoke of stars.

She pulls her parka hood back and floats there like an ark in the de-luge of the sun, this California with its fugitives and windmills and ar-tichokes and clouds like thighs. Its vacancies at pink motels. Modesto in the dust. Walnuts shaken down early by quakes. Spanish razors. And here you come with your gypsy blood and your secret suit, feeling like fuck on fire. Straight out of Carmel. They couldn’t touch you in Carmel.

Not with their skin in shirts like skin. Their fingers in gloves like hands.

And these others in Santa Cruz, they can’t touch you either. Not in Santa Cruz this day. Dressed in your ragged bulletproof sweat suit or down-home beachside grubbies heading along the sandy asphalt past the stands followed a little ways and then abandoned by their chat, their jazz, their machine-sounds, jukebox whomp, nineties computer rock, fifties dead-teenager songs. I know how you moved. I know how you stared. How you smiled and failed to smile — smiled inappropriately, failed to when you should. Ran your finger around in the bits of spilt sugar on the dirty counter, couldn’t resist licking at it, ordered your coffee among creaky robots with their faceless oval heads. I know what they told you—

— Hey. You look just like that guy who got shot last night.

— What?

Already Dead / 287

— They had his picture on TV.

— No, that was the guy who shot him.

— Yeah.

— Yeah. You look like the guy who shot the guy.

— know how it runs for you generally in those places with their sensors clicking over you Mr. Roentgen and a series of Most Wanted pics fluttering past their minds. You stink. You fuck. You murder blandly. Everybody wants to ram you with a pitchfork. They just need a reason. But not you. You reach out and flip a switch. You burn up their innards. You do it without a thought.

She knew it a hundred miles away. She felt you click into place. She knew you made it happen. You had her by the cunt. She didn’t even say hello. You didn’t even look at her. The motel was pink.

She got on her knees by the toilet and held your penis for you while you pissed.

Ah, Winona…Long mustaches pale glassed-in eyes gritty cafe huge fans that stroke a wind like breath — naturally you had coffee in his eyes, in his hands in the park, in his room where the mirror was so small all you could see in it were your breasts. Your breasts saw your face.

Tired. Tired. Where am I? The two of you spent and sweaty and the odors of the Pacific in the pink motel. But what then?

Nothing comes to mind because I’m in pain. Lewd exotic California pain.

Marauders, have you turned back in the rain?

Sleep comes, roaring like a train. When it arrives it’s going slow, slow, and the roaring isn’t a sound anymore, but a sort of brown shadow in which you were about to find a thought…Then you’re waking up. Lying in bed like a page torn in the middle of a word. Waiting for the fish to move, the fish on the wall. Waiting like a dog for the start of another broadcast day.

Okay Winona you stepped to the air conditioner and it chilled then dried your sweat. And as it evaporated from your skin, your skin evaporated too. You stood there immaterial and unaware. You slicked aside the curtains and in the dusk it was still out there sucking and stroking and worshiping the sand. Please if you see my friend 288 / Denis Johnson

Clarence. Tell him something for me will you. Tell him I understand surfing. The sea wants to take shape. The wave promises some great birth, a monster’s emersion, but it’s only a flowing, only a flowing among many, and completely dies away. Changing sameness, changeless change. Our expectations fly to meet it and aren’t jilted, but inexplicably satisfied. It’s so right, it’s so right .

And there you strolled, sockless in your tennis shoes, naked under your parka and your jeans. Watched the shabby surf finding and losing the shore. No: Immaterial and unaware, you walked out without clothing yourself. Stood on the vermillion beach stark naked and invisible, the boardwalk’s clanks and whooshes and screams and tootly music blown near and far on the wind. They’re paying in strange coins to ride the hurtling fever train, rolling up to heaven on the Ferris wheel, boys and girls released from life and dragged back down, G-force flattening their orange and purple Mohawks, mouths like wounds — it’s terrible when somebody laughs, more obscene and revealing than anything they could say with words…