Already Dead: A California Gothic (43 page)

Dear Win and Van,

“Win and Van”—how cute. First, congratulations for having killed all three of us and wiped out the Fairchild line. Billy and Dad are down, one to go. My blood’s still ticking but I’m as good as finished too. I don’t mind. I really don’t. And now I’ll open a liter of crummy sulphur-tasting Sonoma blanc and sit down (still standing at the moment) and put all my thoughts before you.—Wine, wine, wine—I’m not dead
yet
!

Incidentally, this is the only letter I’ll send—don’t think I’ll turn you in, don’t think for a second I’d alert the authorities, I mean,
fuck
them, and certainly, of course, fuck you, but above everything fuck
them
. I’ve always stood for that. Admittedly not much else.

Already Dead / 281

Ah Win here’s to California, the stuff pressed from its breasts—from one suckled on its grapes—in vino veritas—

The truth! It’s actually quite relaxing. Once you’ve wrestled with it.

When it’s finally whipped you. Beyond that it’s not so much like wine as water—clear and empty. Water, air, fire. You might compare it to anything elemental, always something concrete—never to some other abstraction because it’s not like any other—never mind what Keats says, he had a meter to contend with, meters can make you say anything.

“Truth is beauty, beauty truth”—it scans but it makes no sense. I feel all right, feel pretty good. I wish I could float indefinitely along on this intoxicated gratitude, but I get mad too. My little dirigible bumps up against big cliffs of hate.

I’m monstrous, okay. But so are your deeds. I mean it takes something like you to keep me from believing the world has some good in it.

My father! All right, that was practically a gift of mercy, you could rationalize that one while playing tennis. And maybe you didn’t kill him. He’d sent you a note warning you you’d be cut out of the will—I saw the note in your kitchen—so you had what the detectives call a motive. But we all have motives, don’t we, what we lack are the will and the blindness. Maybe his death just
occurred
, and presented you with an issue: the old man’s dead, you inherit half his holdings, which, under California law, belong equally to your husband, whom you’re divorcing; if your husband dies before the divorce, you get your half complete. If his brother dies, everything’s yours.

Did the demon tell you he planned to kill my brother? I doubt it, not then. But he persuaded you eventually—or did you persuade him?

Anyhow you knew. Whom else could he have asked for directions to the cabin? Van Ness I entered there just minutes after you—an hour, two hours after, not more. I went in there because I’d been told he was dead and I wanted to ascertain it, but—My brother…In films you shake your brother, you can’t believe it, you shout, Billy! Billy! but not in life.

Not with his blood jelled right over his open eyes. Not with his brains spilling out his mouth like he choked on them. There’s no shaking and shouting in that case. There was nothing to ascertain. Do you understand? There was nothing to ascertain, nowhere to ascertain it, nobody to ascertain it about. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. That’s what I found in there. That’s what you created.

282 / Denis Johnson

May I tell you something? I fired that .357 Magnum only once and I found it difficult to hit anything.

Ah, Van: cutthroat, backstabber, unbelievable wondrous psychic betrayer—

Often I think, repeatedly I think, relentlessly I dream of you in my arms, my mouth on your mouth, the floodlit raindrops bursting the skin of the pond, the mud trickling out of your mustaches, your glasses sideways on your cheek, your eyelashes wet as if with weeping. And thinking it over I’m tempted by every sort of intellectual wildness—I’d like to bring to their safe harbors thoughts that are really feelings, and place a frame around images that are, in fact, fears: how I’d like to drag up by the hair something drowned, something classical and remote, like the Old Man of the Sea, who can be forced to read the future by anyone who holds him while he shape-shifts where he’s risen above the waves at noon, and compare him helplessly to this man. But you, you’re slicker than the sea’s Old Man. You’ve activated everything. You haven’t just predicted my future, but set it playing. And now you believe in fate. Now we all believe in fate.

I know what drives a man like me, I’ve felt it even if I’ve never had its name, but what produces a Van Ness, a man psychotically committed to his every fantasy, the inflicter of reality on dreams? She wouldn’t have let you realize hers if I hadn’t already let you realize mine. I wouldn’t call you the Devil. Frankheimer called you that but I say no.

We’re the devils, she and I, tempting you with fantastic schemes while you,
you
are the attempter, the Adam, you’re the
man
.

Like all men you have a religion—at least a way of looking at yourself and the universe both at once, which is all I’d hope a religion to be, for me, if I could only have one, if I were only a man…I’d call you a Zarathustrian.

But I mean, you know,
I’m
like Nietzsche. Aren’t I? I feel deep suspicion of the mensch, of the reasonable, dutiful man. He knows what he’s doing and it’s identical to the doing of the other guy, the one who doesn’t know. The mensch walks lockstep with the robots, in a long line of hooks hangs his soul on a hook next to theirs. But my father!

But my father was no mensch. He hated the reasonable, dutiful man.

My father was the enemy of your enemy—can’t you see my father was your friend?

Already Dead / 283

Now, look here, you people. A man decides to kill his wife. What’s so unusual? E = MC2, now
that’s
an unusual thought, and Newton’s cogitations, et cetera, and Shakespeare never bothered a page with
them
therefore. But wishing to kill your wife, it’s as basic as thought itself—“I want her dead; therefore I am”—it’s why they invented divorce. But this man, our man—me—he can’t get divorced. So he plots in detail.

He’ll find a Dying Person, enlist his services, let him take the blame—after the deed, the killer’s a corpse anyway—it’s a fantasy, and fantasies are harmless in a man without will or blindness. But then comes a man of will, a man blind to the border between the thought and the act. The bargain is sealed, but the Dying Person decides not to die. Determines to kill the plotter’s father, kill the plotter’s brother, make the wife the winner.

You left my wife alive, asleep. You turned from the place and went into the night. You went to my father’s house. You walked right in through the kitchen, ascended the stairs in the darkness, put your ear to the doors in the hall, and behind one you heard my father hard at work breathing. You turned the knob and went in, and I wish I’d been there to witness the two of you: the one I conjured, and the one who conjured me.

Dad in purgatory exploding I imagine the balloons of little girls with your cigar-end: If you were here you’d know how to handle the sheriff, the cops, the judges, Harry Lally. By their tenderest parts you’d hoist up the pig-men and deliver a bitter lecture. You’d line up the lawyers on a spit like shish kebab, you’d drive Winona into the sea. They nourished you, those types. You could handle them all.

All but Van Ness, creeping up beside your bed.

Did my father fight? That I doubt, or he’d have bit your face off.

They’d have found him with his fingers in your windpipe.

No. He stood up to meet you coming, but his legs gave way. He fell unconscious, pissed his pants, and dreamed. In his dream the forest stood still. The sky turned black. A funnel cloud tore down out of heaven and wrapped him down to the roots. Twisted the great tree slowly. And slowly the roots loosed their grip in the duff and my father for whom I am named, one of the giants of this earth, is dead.

And then you raised the window. And then you climbed into the dark. And then you hung by your fingers from the sill. And you won-284 / Denis Johnson

dered where your fall would take you. And then Van Ness, you dropped, and then in its every detail I envision it…

…You held the match till your fingers spasmed.

You two lovebirds! I’m sure you believe you’ve killed me, but I’ve survived. Probably to deepen my exile. Possibly to die at other hands—you’re ignorant of the pig-men. The pig-men are my own fault.

Speaking of pigs, the huntsman in the fairy tale brought back the heart of a boar as proof that he’d murdered Snow White. Heart of a pig.

I keep waking in the middle of the night, around three o’clock. It looks as if a curtain of plastic has been laid over the moment to protect it. Neighborhood of kindness in the hour of moonlight…If ever I get back to you I’ll touch your skin…listen in the holiness to your pink words…I’ll wipe my feet, I’ll never scream
I’m a genius
at you again. I don’t believe I really killed you, that you lay dead and then rose up alive, the possession of a vagrant soul. In the scientific method there’s much to trouble me, its smugness and myopia, its lofty forgetting of the fact that it’s a method, not a model of the world, its upturned nose at roundnesses till they come back squares, but—what was I saying?

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—