Already Dead: A California Gothic (2 page)

Nobody came to the door when Van Ness drove between the redwood slabs that marked the drive and alongside heaps of junk and stacks of unidentifiable salvage, the accumulations of a clearly eccentric personality—nobody answered when Van Ness went to the door and knocked, though Frank himself was visible through the picture window, sitting next to the dark mouth of his fireplace with his legs stretched far out in front of him, a long man, six feet, nine inches tall.

“It’ll be dark out here pretty soon,” Van Ness called through the windowpane, “but I won’t leave.”

In a minute the giant stood in the doorway looking down at him. “I don’t answer anymore. There’s never anybody there.”

“I’m here.”

“I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.”

Already Van Ness wished he hadn’t come. His friend had been Already Dead / 7

released only recently from a drug or psychiatric ward. Over the last few years he’d suffered setbacks and disarrangements.

Inside, Van felt even more uneasy. Frank had evidently torn apart his living room with a heavy tool, a crowbar, possibly, working in his surroundings a lot of zany perforations from which insulation puffed like yellow smoke. Much of the flooring had been ripped away down to the plywood.

Before he sat back down, the host yanked a plug from the wall socket, saying, “I was just listening to the radio. Did you hear? We’re sending one zillion deranged Marines to the Gulf.”

“I heard they were considering it.”

“Considering no longer. It’s an accomplished thing. This is a war, man.”

“Isn’t it a little early to say?”

“The
Pequod
is there right now.”

“Right now?” The
Pequod
was their nickname for the
Peabody
, the merchant vessel they’d served on together some years before, a small freighter making ports in the Arabian Gulf and the Indian Ocean.

“Oh yeah, right now. Benhurtz cabled his wife, and she called me last week. Just after Iraq crossed the border.”

“Just before you hit the unit.”

“I was very fucked up, but I understood the conversation. Benhurtz is on the
Pequod. Pequod
’s on the Gulf. They’re worried Iraq’s going to pop mines out around there, dive-bomb the shipping, et cetera.”

“It’s hard to believe we were ever there.”

“We could be there now. Smack up against a war.”

“Do I sit down?” Van Ness wondered.

“Hey, take my chair,” Frankenstein said, jumping up.

Van Ness dragged a chair away from what must have been the dining table and set it beside the cold hearth. Candy wrappers filled the fireplace, and the splintered lengths of oaken floorboards.

“The fog is here,” Frank said, moving closer to the window.

“It was sunny all the way down the coast.”

“We had twenty-one straight days of fog last month. Usually it licks up this high and then the morning backs it down a few yards. But last month it stayed.”

“How many days have you been back?”

“I wasn’t counting.”

“Six.”

8 / Denis Johnson

“Okay,” the giant said, “six.” He turned and took a can of lighter fluid from the mantel and started squirting down the wood in his fireplace. He lit a cigarette and, discarding the match, set the kindling ablaze. The front of him turned orange and the room filled with purple shadows. “I was only
there
for three days,” he said.

They’d been shipmates for nearly a decade. Van Ness had left the merchant marine after ten years. A “career move,” a phrase covering a plenitude of small failures. Frankenstein had been drummed out a bit earlier for striking an officer. Van Ness had been a harbormaster in Florida, sold boats on Lake Champlain and most recently on Puget Sound. Frankenstein had taken up a trade and still owned, but did not operate, a plumbing business.

“During that whole time, I was in here with Yvonne,” Frank said,

“that entire twenty-one days of fog. Every morning we looked out that window and saw nothing but the truth—formless uniformity, the full-ness of emptiness. Wow, it made my dick hard! We couldn’t stop fucking! Then the thermodynamics altered off the coast, and the whole monkey dance began again, the universe: relations, progressions, transactions. The designation they give that is fair weather. They say it’s clear. They call it good.” As he spoke he was opening the front door, grabbing chunks of wood from a stack just outside and throwing them on the blaze. He sat down breathing hard, knocking over his ashtray, puffing on his cigarette, coughing. “Makes weird noises, don’t it?” he said of the fire. “Whines and squeaks, clanks and moans. You should’ve been here two weeks ago. Unprecedented acoustics.” He cleared his throat raggedly and spat at the flames. “Our happy little thing went sour.”

“Whose thing?”

“Her real name isn’t Yvonne. She invented a new name to devalue the memory of her parents, castrate her father.”

“Weren’t you doing therapy with her?”

“That’s what was so beautiful, that combination—lover, therapist, goddess. Primal foe.”

He’d struck the fellow, a recently commissioned ensign, a single blow with a closed fist; and squatted for thirty-six hours in the gangway outside the infirmary waiting to learn whether the ensign would live or die. They hadn’t confined him because he’d been well liked by the captain and considered too large for the brig.

“She was victorious,” he said, “in trying to destroy me with lingerie.” Already Dead / 9

“She split,” Van said. “Is that illegal? What’s her crime?”

“What’s her crime, right. The theft of sacred objects.” They’d had no problem dumping him from the service, because he’d lied about his height in the first place; had wilted somehow for the measuring. No formal hearing had been required. It had simply been a matter of correcting the figures and having him cashiered as unacceptably tall.

Frankenstein had been the
Peabody
’s resident intellectual, at least belowdecks—maybe an officer or two had been more widely read; maybe the officer he’d struck—studying, reciting, often getting passionate about things that didn’t matter to most people. The others had always given space to the tall man, a natural leader because of his size, intelligence, and sweetness.

“I came here,” Van Ness said, trying to speak carefully, “because I thought you might have something further to teach me.”

“Teach you? Did I ever teach you? We read a couple books. Then what?”

“I don’t know—what?”

“Do you think we’re educated men? I haven’t spoken to a college professor in my life. I could have done UCLA on a basketball thing, but I just skated on by. What did we really understand of Wittgenstein?”

“I know what we liked about him—”

“That he rejected his whole order of thought, yeah, and started fresh halfway through his life.”

“His independence even from his own truths—”

“But we didn’t understand those truths. On the
Pequod
we were just two assholes who collected big words. Everybody knew we were full of shit but us.”

Van Ness was astonished. “That’s very sad.”

“No. It has no value one way or the other.”

“I’m sick,” Van told him.

“Sick?”

Van Ness said, “I’m not well.”

“Not well…That sounds even worse.”

“It is.”

“That sounds like ‘a lengthy illness.’”

“That’s right.”

“‘Has died after a lengthy illness.’”

10 / Denis Johnson

Van Ness put his face in his hands.

“Dying, huh? That’s a very animal thing to do.”

“Is that all you can think of to say to me?”

“All? No. I can bullshit till Christmas. I can spew reams, man.” Frankenstein looked nervous, bopping his foot, rubbing his fingertips rapidly with his thumb, chewing his lip. Van Ness recognized these as Frank’s signs of anger. Intimidated by his own size, he denied himself any wilder expressions.

There was nothing here for Van, but he couldn’t stop himself, not after five hundred miles spent rehearsing these thoughts. “Maybe we were posing, sure. But you opened the door for me. Wittgenstein, Spinoza—”

“Nietzsche.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah? And why not Hobbes, and Locke? Why not Marx?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because they were pointed toward the depersonalized robot zombie Earth we now inhabit. I’m pointed toward the personal, the subjective, the much more deeply real. And I’ve gone on travelling in that direction.

You—you cry, you weep, you want a theory to eat like a pill and make it all go away.”

“You misunderstand me. Fuck you.”

“If you’re dying, then what you really have to do, man, what you’re really gonna have to do most deeply now, is go ahead and die. Just animal right on out. Nice knowing you.”

Van Ness said nothing for a few minutes while the giant chain-lit another Camel and smoked it away with a series of little convulsions, going into and out of the firelight repeatedly to flick the ash.

“I’ve had those golf clubs for years. I took a nine iron to the walls because I heard the mothers inside there scurrying around and whispering. Part of this, yeah,” Frankenstein said, “was psychotic bullshit.

But there are actual people involved, too, taking advantage, you know, of the chemical dementia. I wanted to split their heads open. I know who they are, some of them. They’re shooting some kind of mist, some kind of spray, into the windows at night. I can hear it leaking into the car, man, when I’m driving. Oh yeah! Oh yeah! I can feel it on my skin.

I yanked the guts out from under the hot tub, let the water out, turned the bastard upside down—okay. Nothing there. I took that nine iron and smashed through the floorboard in the panel Already Dead / 11

truck, the Chevy, and I got one, man! I stabbed its face to shit with a screwdriver, blood all over my hands, my shirt, it was like a waterfall.

Got up the next morning, the blood was gone. Not a trace. They washed it all off me while I was asleep. And they’re shooting microscopic darts at me.”

He paused to light up.

“I’m not a golfer,” Van Ness said.

“Ninety percent of this is psycho bullshit, I realize. But ten percent of it is real.” Frank pointed a finger at Van Ness’s throat. “And that’s the ten percent we have to watch out for.”

The burning redwood hummed steadily. The fire was in its middle age. Rocking back and forth to dip his cigarette ash with his large hand, Frank seemed to enter and exit the changing torchlight of a primitive incarnation, in one of the smoky grotto shelters he liked to claim had been forgotten by his mind but imprinted on his spirit.

Frank had always preached a personal creed fixed, in a scholarly way, to the migrations of the human soul. Maybe, Van thought now, he was right, maybe Frank’s own soul had checked out, simply left a TV babbling somewhere in this big, ruined hotel.

And yet two decades before, Frank had been the one to lead Van, the twenty-two-year-old, into the light of philosophy, the one to guard him while he grew.

Among the sailors belowdecks Van Ness had been seen as the large man’s personal creation, a kind of pet—thus the nickname: Van Ness had had to struggle to remember, when asking for his friend’s number from Directory Assistance, that Frankenstein’s true name was Wilhelm Frankheimer.

Frank asked, “What have you got?”

“You don’t understand, do you?”

“What’s your disease?”

“Shit, man. Call it radiation poisoning.”

“You haven’t got anything. You’re not dying.” Van told him, “I’ll be dead within forty-eight hours.”

“A short ride.”

“Still: I could easily outlive you.”

Driving south back into Gualala’s town proper, Van Ness encountered a straight stretch on the coast route and pressed the acceler-ator pedal down all the way. And found himself, what with the fog 12 / Denis Johnson

and his headlights, driving into a wall of brilliance. He had no idea how far out in front of his windshield the pavement stretched before it hooked left or right and his own trajectory hung out over twenty-five fathoms of air. Within a quarter mile the machine was topping out at around 105, he believed, although the speedometer’s needle came un-moored and whipped back and forth deliriously between 120 and nothing, and the Volvo itself shivered rhythmically awhile, then shuddered so hard he had to clench his teeth, and soon it shook like a crow’s nest in a bad gale, threatening to break loose and fling itself to pieces in midair. Van eased his grip on the wheel until he was not quite touching it, warming his hands on the fires of out-of-control; then something in him—not his will—slapped his hands back onto the steering and pointed him at a legal velocity down the middle of the fog.

Van made it a habit to be friendly wherever he went; while he contemplated a late supper in the bar of a cliffside restaurant later that night, he bought a drink for a man who was also a visitor to the area, a wild-pig hunter. They’d started out by kidding the barmaid together and then got to talking. “Make it a double,” Van urged the man. “I can’t drink myself. I’ve got pancreatitis.”

“Oh, any old thing,” the hunter told him when Van asked about his line of work. “I’ve done a lot of logging lately.”

“Where’s that? Here in California?”

“Del Norte County mostly, yeah. Everywhere, practically.” The man’s hunting companion, another bearded, bulky woodsman, came in and joined them. He’d just driven down from their campsite, and he complained about the fog and the curves, and the cliffs.

The first one bought his friend a drink and for Van a club soda. “You got—what? Your pancreas, something?”

“Pancreatic cancer, actually.”

“Oh.”

The men paused, sipping their drinks.

“Shit,” the other burst out. “I’d be double-time paranoid behind something like that. Fatal, right?”

“Nothing’s certain. I could still easily outlive you.”

“Man”—the logger searched for words. “It’s like—a big blue
light
.”

“Really,” Van said.

“Yeah.”

Already Dead / 13

“Listen. As far as cliffs: my sister’s husband,” the first man now told them, “went to welder’s school in Santa Rosa down here. One day he was driving on the coast, on those cliffs north of Jenner. Have you seen that place? Five or six hundred feet straight down, no shoulder—you’d have time to shit your pants and change into clean ones before you hit.