Denis Johnson - Already Dead - A California Gothic

“Why not?”

“I’m in love.”

“Yeah. I guess…me too.”

Outside he opened the driver’s door of Billy’s Scout. He guessed now it was his. He released the handbrake and pushed the vehicle backward into the road.

Clarence passed the Phillips 66 station, the mall, the offices of competing realtors strung together, gift shops, each with a philosophy, the Safeway’s long glass windows. Citizens of the Empire stopped and went, blinded slaves, beautiful slaves, moving down the laser lines tuned to every electronic thing. With their tattooed pensions. Their chains and memberships. On the straightaway crossing the Gualala bridge he looked at the maniacs charging him in monstrous vehicles at better than a mile a minute: great, blimplike motor homes, and others parked by the sea, stuck among the driftwood sculptures of beach-combers. He had in him the power to lengthen his touch right through the walls and into their minds where they lay propped up with their TVs turning them to ghosts. Whatever else he himself might be accused of, at least he’d managed to stay out of their world. He couldn’t truthfully be demonstrated even to be a citizen of this planet.

At the Stewart Point Store he turned left and followed the close, switching asphalt road upward. The weather clung but there was dust on the feathers of the redwoods. Rhododendrons bloomed in sunlit patches back among the trees. He crossed a tiny bridge over a gorge and thirty feet below a tributary of the Gualala compressed and bowed into white falls. Down there it was dark. The shadow of the planet’s curve tracked him uphill as the sun went down.

At the ridgetop the road switched back south toward a bluff and a view and then north again alongside some properties and buildings.

The name of this locale, West Point, referred not to some coastal spur, but to this promontory some miles inland.

Clarence rolled past the church and parked uphill of it at somebody’s gated driveway and got out to hear, from the chapel, the sounds of a lamentation that he presumed to be very bad singing. Down the slope for miles. Out to sea. And the trees attending it with perfect concentration.

Twilight had caught him by now. He walked among a lot of cars and trucks past a couple of structures too darkened to be intelligible, cabins or sheds, and another possibly a workshop or garage. The 322 / Denis Johnson

chapel itself seemed to be howling out music, less like song than like the agonies in a hen coop at laying-time, two lit windows either side of its doorway making an astonished face.

He climbed the steps and stood in an entryway full of groans and the smell of old wood. In the vestibule he paused as he came against the cloud of their human warmth. He stumbled among miscellaneous footwear. Am I supposed to kick off my boots? Everyone was giving voice in a scary way. He saw netters and woodmen and professional poachers; lost beatniks, grandmothers, people who might have been in real estate, rocking forward and backward in the pews, not singing, all suffering terribly…Mike Rose, who worked at the Phillipps station in Gualala and was known formerly to Clarence as Shakey Mikey, a rehabilitated rumdum now, with some history also as a cocaine demon, stood at the head of the room shouting amid the uproar: “And the dawg!

Shall rise up a human. And kiss! The lips! Of his master—

“Pray for the ones still out there. Pray for the ones still seeking but, Lord, they just don’t know what. They don’t know it’s you, Lord, so help them, help them, help them.”

In the crowded space the mob’s colossal voice had a flat, concussive quality. It slapped against Clarence’s head and he received rather than heard the preacher’s desperate instructions: Psalm fifty-one! Psalm fifty-one! The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit! A broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise!

The gales of misery came up out of their vitals and whirled around their heads. It drove over him the dense stifling vapours of their intimacy and stopped him there, sucked from him all the cursing and left only blankness, silence, a question mark.

He didn’t see Carrie among them until she leapt into the aisle crying Jesus! Jesus! Her little boy clutched at her sweater’s hem but she brushed his hand away. The assembly’s roar diminished and broke into scattered urgent praise.

“Jesus save me! God forgive me! Please! Please!” she begged. She wobbled on her feet, feeling around with her fingertips like the blind.

Clarence moved toward her. Others tumbled from the aisle seats and converged on her. Mike began his groaning again and they all took it up along with Carrie’s hysterical cries.

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He saw the blaze of Yvonne in the West.

Trees shorter than himself — hunched excited

trees — muttering like monks as he approached the house. He looked in through a window at the quiet kitchen. Through the living room’s glass he saw her stock-still inside, occupying a leather chair. Dead…

— Not dead, but emptied. Where had she gone, leaving this flesh? A suspicion — that same terrible feeling — as if he floated on a bubble’s skin above a poisonous bath: Yes, she’d come around behind him. He felt on the hairs of his nape the fire-breath of her astral self. She’d out-flanked him astrally, now large as a comet, making noises like a great jet engine, her light flooding and ebbing in the treetops. Bowed in fear, he turned around. She flared beyond the trees, orbited over the ocean, which had come around behind him in some cataclysmic shifting of the earth. He went forward toward the cliffs and surf. Breaking from under the treetops he knelt at her shores and raised his eyes toward the sun dawning behind her and her wings opening out and the heartrending beauty of her face and the blood-red darkness in her skull as her mouth opened. He didn’t want to touch her. He only wanted to see her feet. He wanted to understand this vision in its details, to glory in it by transacting with its minutenesses. He shuffled forward on his knees…

Wheels ran over him.

Let this be the place, Lord. The start. Or the end. Or whatever. But the place,” Mike prayed.

Others came to help. She looked up at the faces of love and joy, faces of welcome, and beyond them the face of the man whose child she would bear in sin, a stunned, confused, and violent man backing away.

“Jesus save me! God forgive me! Please! Please!” she begged.

As Mike prayed, she wept entirely without control. A purple veil fell down over all things. She fell backward into the robes of Christ.

And the preacher stood over her with his arms parting the jungle of faces, his own mouth moving: The Lord just broke her heart. Stand back. Give her room. It’s beautiful. The Lord has broken her heart. Let her heart pour out. It’s beautiful, it’s beautiful.

Meadows craned to see over their heads to the center of the throng. Carrie stood still among them, perceptibly vibrating, looking right at him. Then her eyes rolled upward to the 324 / Denis Johnson

whites. A spasm pitched her backward onto a soft buoying sea of wor-shippers. He would have got closer but a tremendous force, a great breath, propelled him out of the place and he found himself standing in the parking lot. The cabins next door stood mute, looked neutral.

The wind spat rain on their siding.

He retraced his steps as far as the porch’s gable and got under it.

The storm started out a scattered rain but blew harder by the minute.

He sat on the porch with his back to the door and his arms around himself. This cold rain had him by the bones. From inside he heard one voice above the others, wilder than all the others.

Water fell on Frank’s face. And then he stopped feeling its wet, stopped tasting it.