Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

between them, and caught up a length of two-by-four and stood waving it back and forth in an arc. Van stopped out of reach of the club. He circled to his left until each waited on the boardwalk almost opposite the other, and each with his back to the water.

Fairchild stretched his arms forth and sighted along his weapon at Van’s face. “Let me ask you something, maestro. If you come back to life in a future universe after dying in this one, why should it be a universe you’re accustomed to? Why this same one with the single difference being that you didn’t die?”

“You thinking about dying? Good. It’s time you did.” Van Ness went into a crouch. To his left, out of arm’s reach up the pier, the end of a length of one-inch metal pipe jutted from a pile of ropes and guys. Yet if he moved the necessary yard or two in its direction, he wouldn’t be able to cut off Fairchild’s escape down the pier.

Fairchild lowered the tip of his weapon to rest, like the head of a golfer’s driver, between them.

Van said, “I feel hungry when I look at you. I wanna tear you up with my teeth and eat you. I really do.”

“I make some people feel that way. It’s my fate.”

“You’re being flip. But fate is. It is. It’s vast — the pattern threads through the whole succession of universes. Take a swing at me, and see.”

“You know what Wilhelm Frankheimer told me today? Not one hour ago? He described you as free.”

“You’re stalling.”

“And when I first met you, you were full of talk — big talk about being a man of will.”

Van stepped once to his left and Fairchild raised his cudgel and hexed him with it.

“A man of will,” Fairchild said. “But now you go on about fate. Like it imprisons you.”

“You have to see fate as a design, a pattern, and the will as the knife, the blade, the thing slicing through the fabric. If I like the design, then I follow the warp and the woof. When the pattern doesn’t suit, I’m free to die.”

“You don’t come at these ideas in the context of world thought.”

“You mean I didn’t go to prep school.”

Van leapt sideways atop the heap and grasped the pipe and pulled it free. Fairchild, rather than running, seemed to think it best to keep Already Dead / 315

his weapon pointed at his foe and only pivoted, following the movement.

He faced Van and Van’s metal pipe, a sturdy staff, shorter but heavier than his own, and more easily wielded.

Fairchild sighed. His lips trembled. “What now?” he asked.

“A fight to the death. One of us dispatches the other one to another realm.”

Van shifted his feet for purchase amid the ropes and rubble. He bent at the waist and craned to present his jaw as if to a barber’s razor. “Take your best shot.”

“No, no, you didn’t answer my question. If there’s some future world in which you didn’t die, then why isn’t everything else different too? — in the future universe. A different president, a different population, different history altogether? Why not a universe where elephants rule the earth and all the trees are purple?”

“It usually is. Most realities differ vastly. You just don’t know it. The one you resume in is the one you were born into. It’s the only one you know, the only one you recognize.”

“So the one you died in is gone.”

“Surely.”

“So a universe dies when you die.”

“There’s also a thread that is this universe, identically, changed only enough to account for your continuing presence, and no more changed than that. Eventually you get every conceivable universe and every conceivable variation of each, including the variation of the tiniest action of a single molecule. Listen, sport, we’re talking about quite a few universes here. And in every one? — you’re miserable .” Fairchild charged him. Had his sights on, was driving toward, the man’s midriff when his leftward field of vision exploded in a great light. His feet rolled out from under him and the sea approached, touched, engulfed him, and he went blind. He said,

“This is bullshit,” but in somebody else’s voice.

People wanted to get up close. They filled the front pew of the Holy Cross Chapel before any of the other pews, a sign, as Carrie interpreted it, of their enthusiastic belief. Carrie sat on the left aisle seat in the second row with little Clarence tucked 316 / Denis Johnson

against her ribs. Well before the designated hour the building had filled with fellowshippers of all sorts, in T-shirts and flannel shirts and long denim skirts like her own, with large Bibles prayerfully ruined and swollen with bookmarks like her own; old ladies and young women and big fat men in overalls with beards and men in ten-gallon hats lacking nothing to be cowboys except spurs on their boots; people who stank of sweat, some with whiskey-breath, some sorrowful, some perplexed, some suffused with self-congratulation and gratitude, others drunk on grace. Men carried in folding chairs and set them up in back, men in rubber boots and some in thick socks who’d left their spiked logging calks in the vestibule.

The preacher, Mike, was young and awkward and short but seemed to know, much less than Carrie knew of herself, how he’d got there exactly, in front of everyone and responsible now for guiding this medley as one body. He welcomed them and led them in a prayer of thanks with his hands clenched together and his eyelids fluttering.

“Psalm twenty-two sixteen,” he said, and the Bibles whispered as everyone turned to the passage, “Dogs are round about me…twenty-two twenty. Deliver…Do you see it? Deliver my life,” he read, his voice ascending to magisterial registers, “from the power of the dog!” He set his Bible on the podium behind him and stood at the head of the aisle, almost between the two front pews. “Family that had a big, a great big dog,” he said, and paused, put his left hand to his mouth and coughed, cleared his throat—“part Saint Bernard, part husky — not a Doberman, I don’t want to bolster any prejudice. Not a pit bull. Big dumb friendly dog. Well, he was one of the family, romped with the children, had his own bed right inside the back door under the coat-hooks with everybody’s name on ’em, Sally and Sam and Mom and Pop and little Joe. You get the picture? Friendly, friendly dog. But he took a tumor in that big old dumb happy head of his, a tumor nobody knew about until it put pressure on his cranium and his signals crossed all around and he — suddenly — turned— mean . He had that family, family that raised and loved and trusted that dog, cornered in a bedroom for an hour till the sheriff got out there and put that dog down. Shot him right in the house. Otherwise that beloved family member would have torn, them, up . Because a few cells went haywire, blitzed out — made PRESS-sure on his CRANE-ium and he ROSE UP AN ENEMY.

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“This is the deal, you see, this is the absolute deal. That dog the psalmist is scared of is the same one that feels like a friend most days.

Lot of you knew me just three years ago. Lot of you saw me sleeping on the beach with sand on my face, in my ears, in my hair, wandering around all the time with one shoe on looking for the other one. Boy, that booze was good to me! That bottle was my only friend. When my neighbors on Sunday morning were heading down the walk to church, I was alone in my living room scrambling around on the floor after that bottle, down on my knees, and I’d raise it up before my eyes and say — I, love, you. And down in the city while the church-bells rang on Sunday there were other guys, still are, walking into those X-rated movies and sitting all hushed and quiet in the pews. And when that screen lights up they find their only comfort. Oh yeah, you know — you know — I see by your face, Jim knows, don’t you Jim? Jim: ever look around and notice that everybody was about three feet taller than you? Because you were down on your knees? Begging? Begging on your knees for a fix of heroin? Yeah, Jim knows. He knows. My buddy James knows. He knows too well — and when you got it, when you got that fix, you felt like Mommy just took you in her arms. Felt like your friend was beside you, that kindly old dog who’s always there and always understands.