Already Dead: A California Gothic (34 page)

The carpenter hadn’t introduced himself by name. “Where’s Billy?”

“I wouldn’t count on Billy getting here.”

Yvonne smiled. “I’m a little surprised you turned up even, Nelson.”

“Actually, honey, the entire world has been peeled away. Anything can happen now if you ask me.”

“That’s a tremendous juncture. You know the Chinese character for our word
crisis
is a combination of the characters for
danger
and
opportunity
, danger plus opportunity, did you know that?”

“I know I’d like a cigarette.”

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

“Just to fuck you up.”

She laughed in a charming way and then looked around the group, a long look that inaugurated a certain seriousness. She closed her eyes, breathed deeply several breaths in through her wide nostrils and out between her lips, and most of the others did the same, but Navarro didn’t, and neither, he saw, did Fairchild. Yvonne opened her eyes and smiled at them both, as if recognizing without condemnation their resistance, and then addressed them all: “One of the things we’ve come together for is to celebrate the life and afterlife of Nelson Fairchild, Sr.

He’s between lives now, and we’re here to thank him for his recent one and wish him well on his next.

“Something of great importance that we can do is just come together and let our perceptions of him smooth out. Let his deeds and personality, as we perceived them, sink back into the unruffled 220 / Denis Johnson

pool of time. Where he’s without any earthly individuality. Beyond experience, beyond perception. He’s not a villain. Not a bad guy. We’ll do everything he’s done and experience everything, maybe even work the kind of horror Hitler worked ourselves before this journey through a billion lives is over. Don’t put anything past yourself. We let him go now. What we thought we saw is gone. None of that was real. What remains is pure. What remains is real. We say good-bye…we say hello.” They waited there in some sort of reverie for a while until Yvonne let out a long, pleased, somewhat phony sigh, and the group settled its attention on her again. She turned to Hillary Lally. “How was South America?”

“We were there three days and then we left.”

“Oh.”

“There was an accident.”

“I heard.”

“A young girl died.”

“Was it when the car hit you? Hit your car?”

“Not then. Later. It was—she was a pedestrian.”

“But was it the car that did it?”

“We didn’t know. And then we left and—we’ll never know.”

“I think this is a good time to call Randall in.” This proclamation doused the house in silence. Yvonne put her chin on her chest and you could have counted no more than five before she lifted her face to them again.

“Hello. Good afternoon. I’m Randall MacNammara.” Her eyes weren’t rolling in her head, her voice stayed exactly her voice, nothing about her had changed in any way. Nobody was playing spooky tapes or blowing fog. It showed taste and style, Navarro decided, to let the marks run their own grift.

Mo put her hand over his and something happened in his head, but nobody seemed to have noticed, so he wasn’t sure. He was probably in love.

The witch had a true skill. This had to be one of the region’s more elegant scams. But he’d showed, and something was working on him.

Yvonne was all touch. No push or pull. She’d slipped off her sandals and bared her feet, draped her shift’s hem across her thighs. She had great legs; Navarro could see himself throwing cheap vodka on her and then licking it off.

Already Dead / 221

“Let’s look back,” she said, or Randall did, “to our past lives…Relax completely. Start at the top of your head. Let the tension flow out into the void. Relax the muscles of your neck. Relax, let it all flow out…the shoulders…now the back…torso…hips…thighs…calves…Let every bit of tension drain now through the soles of your feet and into the grounding center of the earth beneath us…And as that energy drains away, the energy that we’ve taken in from all the daily influences outside us, what’s left is a kind of very softly glowing pulse within, our true energy, the real, eternal, unchanging, unquenchable, quiet and irresistible truth that we are…Let’s pause now and just be that truth.” Nothing happened for a while beyond the rearrangements of the wood burning in the stove. Navarro did his best, he believed, to envision this bit of swamp gas ignited inside him somewhere, either in his chest or his head, he couldn’t quite determine which, and kept switching between the two.

“Now let this true self travel. It wants to take your vision somewhere, to share with you the sights and sounds of an incarnation you’ve forgotten. Keeping your eyes closed, become aware of the eyes within your eyes. Keeping your eyes closed, open the eyes within your eyes.

Keeping your eyes closed, look around you with the eyes within.” Navarro engaged the game and envisioned a place, a kind of dormit-ory, the lowest floor in a honeycomb of indestructible lightweight cubicles, and he lived there. Lived as a cog, nothing more, with a sturdy suit and a weapon and no thinking past these limits, no desires. In another minute he became aware of Yvonne’s voice again and realized he’d fallen briefly asleep.

“…not to reveal any secrets about ourselves, but just to share where we’ve been, if that seems shareable. Any volunteers? Okay, Ocean.

What did you see? Where’d you go?”

The young lady spoke. “I was by the sea, and I’m almost sure it was this coastline, I mean, Mendocino or right around here.” Something just too beautiful seemed to be messing with her ability to breathe.

“And what were you doing?”

“I was washing clothes.”

“What kind? Did you see what sort they were?”

“I think—Indian clothes? I don’t know. I think I was an Indian.” Mo said, “A Miwok. Or some branch of the Pomos. That could be.”

“What sort of clothes did the Miwoks wear?” Yvonne asked.

222 / Denis Johnson

“I don’t know,” Mo said. “Skins, maybe, until they started trading with whites.”

“You wouldn’t wash skins, would you?”

Sadly the girl admitted it. “You wouldn’t wash skins.” The probability deflated her completely.

Navarro reflected she wouldn’t have been signifying like this if she’d been one of the team. No partners, no promises, no gizmos. We’re all marks.

The carpenter cleared his throat. “I—”

“Excuse me,” Navarro said.

“Pardon?”

“What is your name?”

“Well, Philip—Phil.”

“Hi, Phil.”

He sensed a stiffening beside him. He turned to Mo and was just about to say, Fuck
you
, honey, when Yvonne cleared her throat. “Were you going to share a seeing, Phil?”

“Yeah. I don’t think I was human this time.”

“Oh?”

“Well, I was running across ice, and I had claws, big claws, I know that much. And I think it was dark. No trees or anything, or plants. I can’t think if there was any wind. Just real barren. Wait…eight claws on each—they were like fingers. Real thick hairy arms. Well, legs, because I’m running on all fours.”

Yvonne-Randall waited.

“What was that? Was I some kind of mythical beast?”

“You were on another planet. I’m not familiar with that one. Maybe I should tap in…” She closed her eyes. “Hm. You were out there. I’m not getting anything. Some of these planets have been destroyed, and there’s word that some burned up when stars went nova very early along in the evolution of the inhabitants. They all scattered into various rebirths, widespread incarnations. They haven’t made it up the chain yet to the afterworld.”

“Nobody to tap into.”

“Right, that’s what I mean. Information is not forthcoming.” He’d looked for spooky stuff, but she was serving around a little sci-fi.

“Question?”

She meant Winona Fairchild. “What?”

“You look like you have a question.”

Already Dead / 223

“I do,” Winona said. “I was just—how’d you know I had a question?”

“Nothing mysterious. Just the look on your face. No telepathy here!”

“Oh. Well, I was wondering if anybody here of us, did we know each other in the past? In past lives?”

“Let me tap in…” She shut down again; a long pause; opened her eyes. “These two”—with two fingers scissoring and unscissoring, she indicated Mo and himself—“have been married four times.” Mo laughed with embarrassment. Navarro took it as a boost. Next time I pinch you, he thought, no ticket. But doubted anyway she’d ever failed to charm a cop.

“Three times you’ve been the wife,” Randall-Yvonne said to him.

“Wish I could remember how to cook,” he said, something affable being required now, in light of his tendency to look cross-eyed at and ridicule such geeks as these. Everybody chuckled, and a familiar fantasy came to him, one along the lines of seeing everybody stripped, suddenly, to their undies; but in his case, as he generally went armed and at the moment sheltered a Compact Officer’s .45 ACP under his bulky sweater, in a holster clipped to his belt, the fantasy skewed toward multiple murder, as if he’d just whipped it down and opened up on everybody.

“I just wonder if you wouldn’t mind,” Yvonne-Randall said. “Can I ask you to put your weapon somewhere outside the room?” He cleared his throat. Found no comeback.

“Something’s creating a very low vibration. A distracting hum. Would it be your sidearm?”

“Uh—yeah, sure.”

And why not? But what am I doing? he thought as he stepped from the room.

“Now you,” she nodded in Hillary’s direction as Navarro went out the front door, “have a tale to tell. I’d like to hear it.” He passed silently over the packed dead needles underfoot, looking back over his shoulder toward the driftwood-colored house and wondering what all that had been about. Okay, okay. Northward the bluff rounded to make an inlet and a strip of rocky beach no wider than a footpath, and then the shore tumbled upward to this property with its blunted evergreens crouching lower and lower as they approached the edge. The car was Mo’s, her dinky Cadet. He dis-224 / Denis Johnson

armed himself and jammed the Colt under the driver’s bucket, locked and checked the doors. Okay. You zinged me.

Nobody looked at him as he took his place again between Melissa and Mo. It was dark in here. Somebody had lit some candles on the bookshelves, creating shapes and shadows in a dimness. Hillary Lally sat with her head down and wept onto her knees.

“I guess he wanted to—he’s not faithful. I mean he plays around. I’m used to it. I mean, not used to it but—you know. He plays around. I think he wanted something involving me. I might have done it. He knows me. I’m open to new things. So he, so we, she ended up overnight with us. In the hotel. It was a suite. But nothing happened. I mean she died. That certainly happened! She was in another room, just lying down. There was nobody there. She just wasn’t alive the next thing anybody knew.”

“Go on. It’s fine. Go on.”

“I went in and found her. Well, on cable you can get everything in English. No, I guess it’s satellite. Well, who the hell cares? I don’t know why I brought it up. We were just watching TV and Harry—we were doing, you know—cocaine is quite a casual thing in Rio. Harry said, let’s go out, so I went to wake the girl up, Esperanza, they called her Perry, anyway she gave that as a nickname. Dead, like a lump of something. Like a great big fat fish, you could tell from across the room in the dark. I think it was a lack of vibration. Don’t you? It was quite mystical right there, in fact at that point I left my body…and somebody else came in. Do you believe me?”

“Yes.”

“Another soul.”

“I believe you.”

“Another soul entered my body.” Hillary breathed rapidly several times. “A soul wandering for years and looking for—”

“Revenge against your husband.”

“Oh! God!” Sobs burst out of her. She wiped at her face. “Who, who, who—
was
it?”

“Somebody born into a life of weakness. The weak lives are long ones, because they often continue in the void spaces between the afterworlds. They can involve a lot of wandering and confusion before the next birth. In his earth-time, out of weakness, he turned to pleasures and drugs. He blamed others for his weakness, your husband among them.”

Already Dead / 225

“I could feel his hate. I wanted to
kill
Harry.”

“Shhh. It wasn’t you,” Yvonne-Randall said. “Maybe you felt the feelings, but they were his. Not yours. In your body he went in to stand over your husband for a long time. He almost killed him. Then he found forgiveness. He saw that this life is a punishment for your husband, at least in the terms of warfare and tribunal in which he sees things.”

“I still hate him,” Hillary said. “And there’s nobody inside me now but me.”

Was the woman claiming some evil spirit had entered her heart and made her want to kill her husband? An uncomfortable notion…Something Navarro didn’t like known about himself was that stories of possession by dark forces, of people fallen under the control of enemy souls, felt to him quite believable. In East L.A. he’d arrested any number of sunk, baffled fathers or sons who only moments before had torn their houses down around their families, as if demons had come and gone in their hearts. And many times he’d seen a blurry happiness in the eyes of people just arrested for something inexplicable and ugly, as if demons had come and stayed.

“Goddamn Harry,” Hillary said, still crying like a child. “Oh, Harry, I hate you…”

“Shhh. Shhh. Hush. You and I, we’ll end up doing everything, tasting every fruit, whether good or evil. There can be no penalty, no purgatory, no hell. Only a relearning after error. There’s no banishment, only wandering. No torture, no retribution for our deeds, no need for forgiveness except our own forgiveness of others. And of ourselves.” Hillary wept, drawing long jagged breaths and giving up her misery in short, interrogatory-sounding outbursts, and Yvonne said, not only to her, but to them all: “Shhhhh…It’s Eurus…”
S
hh. It’s Eurus: Shhhh…” and her susurration blended with that of another flurrying past from offshore. “It’s Eurus, god of the east winds.” Out the window the runty bull pines and knotted cypresses hardly moved, they had built themselves against exactly such gods. Arboreal contortions, sculpted into agony. Topiary likenesses but likenesses of what? Some grotesque and lovely inner churning.