Already Dead: A California Gothic (18 page)

JANUARY 15, 1991 BUT GOD IS WITH US. Repeat daily.

P.S. Fear not, it’s all for the best.

AUG 8 IN THE PM

PS: Now I am as mad as shit kicking in Hell, buddy boy. Not at you, but I forgot what’s going on! Networking is for the purpose of anti-beaming radar domes. But I forgot to stress you must get an injunction to stop the beams at the source so that those of us with 75% brain capacity or higher (I changed the number due to the enormous danger of the situation bearing down on planet earth like an enormous asteroid, planet-size…). Could be as many as 2000 of those. If we are free from anti-beam duties and terrible energy-drain we can heal the sick, teach others to activate up to high capacity—all within ten seconds of shut-off on those radars. Please read the Bible.

Sincerely
.

112 / Denis Johnson

P.S. Something important, a woman of surprising disguise was sent to mentally attempt intercourse with me, alieas or alien name Miran, code unknown, origin unknown, on a date not to be revealed. Real name Yvonne. May still be in area. Current alieas or alien name unknown. In my loneliness result of protection from radar, preventing me from connecting mentally, zinc-zirconium compounds and others not to be revealed basically a blessing and a curse, I don’t know. But I’m getting vibes that she’s still in area. Still practicing witchcraft.

AUG 9

I believe there is now a situation I can’t straighten out. I am attempting to work on it mentally but it’s torture, I think the suffering and exhaustion may be letting in some laser rays or things I can’t deal with, only lie down and let them cut me up in AGONY, TOTAL AGONY. This torment has got me about ready to JOIN THE ARMY. My brother came down behind this hill. He was implanted long ago, it’s not his fault. But he speaks in code. Please as your HIGHEST PRIORITY interview with recording device and decode by reverse playback over police frequency at designated code. Bible does not work to decode this one, but don’t let that stop you from reading the Bible and prayers on your lips. WHAT

CAN I SAY. Too bad, you were chosen? I know, I know. Just all will be well and fear not, that is all.

PS I have mentally boxed in a black box all messages, thoughts, hallu-cinations from before March 12, 1985. But the information that my brother was implanted (Nelson Fairchild, Jr.) comes from both eras of from before said date and also SINCE then. So don’t be confused.

Sincerely, W. Fairchild

AUG 10 IN THE PM

Dear Sir

What is really fooling them is completely organic surroundings around here. They figure the beams have to penetrate. They forgot two things: zinc, zirconium compounds, and certain compounds, mainly trace elements not to be revealed, not even to you. (not your Already Dead / 113

fault, it’s all mental, you’re not activated up yet) Then there is the question of floorboards in my house, which started out organic but absorbed beams in Pt. Arena (alieas, alien) bowly alley, reversing mo-lecular structure to nonOrganic radarium. This keeps anything from getting up from under. I don’t care if they tap in mentally on you and get that one, there’s nothing they can do really.

PS. The Bible is mistranslated but all you have to do is touch it. It’s still there, gets decoded even on the way to your head. God’s power. Ultimately we are safe. Just HANG IN THERE BUDDY. You’re all I’ve got, your mission the fate of planet. But don’t get nervous.

P.S. If it gets bad go inside Pt. Arena (alieas, alien) movie theater. That has been absorbing rays a long time. Molecular structure of organic materials reversed to make radarium. Bring others, espec. women and children, if DIAMOND GRIDS or anything like lasers appear in the sky.

PS. Advise you to pick out survivors in advance of January 15, 1991, as per coded messages coming fast and furious. For some its just in one ear and out the other, but for you, pick who you want and shelter in Pt. Arena (alieas, alien) movie theater. I forgot to tell you that if DIAMOND GRIDS or laserlike things appear in the sky it’s probably too bad. Your fried. So be alert and get in there 1/14/91. How do you like this weather we’re having? Very nice. All peace is available in this eternal present.

Sincerely, W. Fairchild

PS.—This is being read by satellite and analyzed at the Pentagon by CIA, FBI, exc. I don’t code it because they just put it in their decoders anyway. If we remain simple and true they cannot help but defeat themselves. UNSCRUPULOUS, SATANIC, INSANE, EVIL. There’s no fighting that. Remain simple and true. Fear not. Resist not evil. All will be well. Infinite love. God says so. STOP THE RADAR. God says so.

W. Fairchild

114 / Denis Johnson

AUG 11—

Dear Sir

Up till now I have been too tired anti-beaming to explain about implants. It’s hard to explain. How did they get even the idea of a third lifeform? How did they discover processes for structural disintegration-reintegration? Was it through study of RADARIUM post-WWII? A lot of radarium turned up then. But in fact I cannot use my powers to see behind this hill protecting me by GOD’S STAR-BURSTING GRACE

into their dastardly minds to tell you. Anyway—

Anyway they continue in pentagon, CIA, FBI, exc. (some presidents know, most don’t, and others get assassinated) to continue to pose nuclear threat as a ruse. Had you fooled, huh?

Third lifeform SPERMS destroy and reintegrate inside the womb (don’t worry, this doesn’t happen every day, it costs 17–19 trillion U/S

money for each attempt, which is successful one in a million. That’s why my brother may be one of the only ones and may explain why I’m involved. Or were we just chosen? Like you?) (Again I can’t see.) When the implant population reaches critical mass, LOOK OUT. But look at me. Do I look worried? Sometimes I’m not sure if I should be taped, reverse-played over police frequency at designated code. Oh God in Heaven I hope and pray please NO! But if you suspect me at all then you must do so in the name of all that is holy and spiritual and standing between our human hearts and the complete total DESTRUCTION OF

THE UNIVERSE. Take the left turn where there used to be a picture of a boat. The sign still says HILD and the rest is broke off. 2mi down dirt rd. to cabin with RADARIUM floors. Peace and tranquillity all your blessed days.

AUG 11 (CONT. LATER LATER

All will be well. The goodness that you feel is not God’s goodness, it is actually God. So you are feeling God right now. Thanking you for your broadcasts, which I cannot pick up mentally living now since 1985

(March 12, 4:14 PM) under protection of subteranean compounds in this hill, mostly zinc, zirconium-compounds, and others mostly trace elements (not to be revealed). I have been resting mentally. Peace in the valley. Spirits, deer, hilarious rodents with a small capacity but telepathic and humorous, squirrels, woodchucks,

Already Dead / 115

chimpmunks, all warming in the sun. What a pitiful sharp joke it is because my very protection cuts me off in loneliness. But it must be that the networking has begun, the miracle is at hand, I just wish I could lead the way. But it’s my fate, IMPRISONED, MISUNDERSTOOD, FORGOTTEN, half the time I’m screaming until the trees fall over and some other times I cry until the TEARS MAKE MUD AROUND MY

FEET. Now possibly soon from happiness, lonely happiness but happiness. Thank you for your broadcasts, Officer Navarro! I am sorry I chose you but now you know. All was always going to be well.

All was always going to be well.

Sincerely. W. Fairchild

I
nevitable” and “dreaded”…“Bloodshrinking”…What other words describe our visits with our mothers and fathers?

How I look forward to visiting their graves.

Each Monday
Barron’s
financial weekly came in at the Anchor Bay store. I usually delayed till Tuesday, sometimes Wednesday, but in the months since he’d taken to his bed I had never completely avoided picking it up for my father and paying him this horrible regular visit.

I drove over directly from the store that afternoon, Tuesday, September 4, a week after I’d left Winona’s and six days after Winona’s return—the day Carl Van Ness would show us all what he was made of.

We’ll see if our eyes are open
. Maybe I believed his note. Maybe I was looking for an alibi for murder. But few folks hereabouts would imagine Nelson Fairchild, Sr., as an alibi for anything.

I’d come from an unhappy interview with Clarence—vaguely unhappy, not violently. Yes, he’d come back to town and found me and I’d told him about Harry Lally’s henchmen. He didn’t thump me—in fact he raised my spirits, but not before making it clear that he hadn’t cultivated the marijuana just to ransom me from my fate, which he called “the just punishment of a fuck-up.” I had a little bit of hope, just a feeling, that he wouldn’t abandon me to those killers. He wanted time to ponder this mess, but he didn’t know how to say, “Let me think.” He was a doer, not a thinker.

Oh well, the day had been a long one, that was all—Melissa resonating strangely, then giving me the horrible news that my pursuers were back on the scene, and after that I’m afraid I told her too much. Also possibly we had Carl Van Ness bumping up on the horizon, and 116 / Denis Johnson

because I thought he might already be in town I’d gone to Winona’s ranch while she was out and—done something; a little thing I’d probably later regret. Could thirty minutes with Father make the day any longer?

The old man lived north of Gualala, on an acre looking out at the Pacific from the highway’s west side. Two stories, three bedrooms, a two-car garage and a workshop, like the home of almost every other sixty-two-year-old person in Mendocino County.

The door from the garage stood open, so I knocked while stepping through it into the kitchen, and Donna Winslow asked me if I would like some tea.

“Thank you, no,” I said, “but what about a glass of wine?” I generally found Donna here in the wifely regions, with her stretch pants and long-sleeved yellow dish gloves and her failure to connect, in certain important ways, with her surroundings. Willful failure.

Cheaper by a long shot than tranquilizers. But it made her seem a little scary, even if her face was pale and kind. Eva Braun might have turned out like that. “We’ve got some open,” she said of the wine, “is that okay?”

“Open’s fine. Poured is better.”

Father had refused to let her move in before the stroke and after that had probably just failed to prevent her. I thought it was fine that she lived here. Particularly I admired her ability to survive without cheap conversation. She never bothered me with that stuff.

I stood there sipping red table wine from a too-small glass while she climbed the stairs to tell him the elder son had turned up with his
Barron’s
. I don’t just bring it here each week; I also read it to him. It is the strangest thing I do.

I heard Donna’s voice from above. But not his. Maybe he’d snuffed it, and I’d be spared.

His partner, Willis Winslow, had suffered a run of strokes and been laid up for months when my father started sleeping with his wife. The story they tell now is that Father hefted Donna across his shoulders and carried her upstairs to the master bedroom one night right out from under Willis Winslow’s helpless gaze, and had her every night after that while Winslow wasted away in a downstairs room, listening.

Now Father lies in bed as Willis Winslow once did, attended by the same woman. She’s too old, I would imagine, to be cuckolding him.

But I hope she is.

Already Dead / 117

And the same woman he carried up the stairs is coming down now alone.

“He’s kind of dozing, Nelson.”

“Should I disappear?”

“No, he said to come on up. Then he drifted off.”

“I’ll come back later.”

“You could go up and just give him the paper, maybe.”

“Okay,” I said forlornly.

“You want a refill?”

“I’ll take the bottle.”

She’d done a tremendous job on the house, over which formerly his office had run amok, inroaded generously by his shop. She’d pushed everything back, all the tools and ropes and greasy broken automotive parts and fatly unrolling blueprints and escaped and antique correspondence. His rusty file cabinets had disappeared, all but one, the drawers of which she managed to keep closed and the top of which was free of anything but two white daisies in a vase. In his living room she’d put up flowery curtains that matched the Pacific, also hangings of woven rope from Mexico, and, on the walls of the staircase, which I climbed now, but slower and slower, my ankles in a sense shattered, dragging the devices he’d laid years ago to trap his children—let me never reach the top!—she’d nailed up pictures bright as windows.

Don’t ask me why I’m here. Because of a sickly fascination, I guess, but that’s only one of the many feelings that stab at me now as I find him asleep in his small room at the top of the stairs. There he lies, out of it. And I’m as shocked as ever.

He once threatened to kill a man, a perfectly unsuspecting tourist, when he found this stranger sitting in his accustomed chair in the barroom of the Gualala Hotel. He’s famous for having decked a county commissioner at a meeting of the Point Arena town council; also he assaulted the high school basketball coach right on the street when that fine citizen started dating our mother, and although that contest went against my father—he ended up flat on his ass—the coach quit calling, and Mom never had another date in these parts. All night once, with a shotgun across his knees and a two-gallon jug of gasoline beside him on the floor of his bulldozer, he waited quietly in his equipment lot—this a great many years ago now—to surprise whoever had been thieving from his construction supplies. Father did

118 / Denis Johnson

nothing when the man pulled up under the nearby trees in his pickup truck, he sat like stone while the man peeled away the tool-shed’s padlock with a crowbar, waited until he’d gone inside before climbing down from his perch up in the monstrous vehicle. When the bandit tiptoed out of the shed with his arms full of tools, my father paralyzed him with the touch of the shotgun’s barrel to his throat, and soaked him with the gas, all two gallons of it, pouring it down over his head.