Fairchild had only a little way to go — this probably green but cur-Already Dead / 415
rently indiscernibly colored State Forest Service picnic table. He sat down, facing out, sitting straight, his heart kicking in his throat.
Fairchild leaned his back carefully against the table, thinking that if he’d been going to stop anywhere at all before his feet shuffled into the waves, it could just as easily have been sooner. He’d thought he was being harried out past the shore to drown, but it was only the hill, only gravity, that had driven him.
He felt other presences, fleeting and distant, mostly, except for his father with his ferocious, unabating eyes. He’d been aware of his father’s presence for some time now, as clearly and sensorily aware as if he’d heard his father bushwhacking down the draw behind him.
Out on a hunt, boy?
More or less perhaps.
Out catching bullets. You’ll end up trephined like a slice of Swiss cheese.
They’re working on it.
If only you could’ve sassed the world like you sass me.
His maculation altered when he spoke. The old man looked patched together out of areas of light and dark, sitting on the other bench across the table and watching things, while Fairchild watched his father.
You’re not the only ghost around here.
I never claimed to be.
There’s a woman out there.
Her? That’s the schoolmarm.
What about her head?
Gone.
Man, me too. I gotta go, I gotta groove.
Whatever for?
The dogs.
The dead dogs. The ghost dogs. We’re all ghosts in these parts.
What about me?
Oh yeah. You, me, them. The old schoolmarm and her two buddies.
Look who else is here.
Winona? Winona?
Oh yeah. Ever since her boyfriend choked her dead…That’s the old Winona. The new one’s somebody else.
I knew it, Fairchild said.
We don’t speak.
416 / Denis Johnson
They turned to watch Winona suffer past in a mist of confusion, touching the fingers of both hands to her neck.
Father, did you know I was coming?
Hell yes. You were here when I got here. Always have been.
Fairchild thought about this remark but steered around any understanding of it.
Hell, Fairchild said, that sure was a storm.
His father just stared at him.
Hell, Fairchild repeated, that was a storm on loco-weed.
Father went on staring.
Was there a storm perhaps you saw?
Never was any storm but you.
Other demons loitered here in their nakedness and neediness and strangerness, other wraiths, including Indians crucified on the trees and cowboys with their scalped, decorticated craniums. All seemed the sources of little illuminations. Including himself: a man of dreams and failure.
Don’t talk to him. When the time comes you’ll know everything he has to say anyhow.
Fairchild watched his own ghost wander far down the beach, carrying an air that didn’t seem particularly unhappy.
All appeared very much alive. When his father yawned he produced a mistral breath.
What say we all get a little sleep?
I can’t.
Why not?
The dogs. The dogs.
The dogs are sleeping, his father said.
His preparation for sleep was like that of the animals. He found a place away from light and noises, where his body wouldn’t be threatened by predators or thieves and he could relax without moving or falling. He lay still under the table and yielded, for once, to no ambush of embarrassing moments — old moments that beset you just before sleep, moments that rise up on their hind legs and walk like dinosaurs.
His eyelids fluttered. The little pond between waking and sleeping is bewitched…no one floats across with open eyes. He renounced control over his train of thought, he said farewell to concerns, to any capacity at all for concern, he let his will fall into a bottomless pit of passivity and nihilism…Then there began to appear
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to him those first messages of a new world — hypnagogic phenomena.
He was shaken by truths, electrified, soothed.
On the day of his death Nelson Fairchild received numerous grants of peace and grief, proofs of the beauty of the world, clarifications, deep consolations, and happiness. Descending from clear dark spaces, he came first into a kind of translucence. He woke with a warm easy feeling and didn’t hurry into the state of waking. Faint, unfriendly messages arrived from that territory, regions of discomfort, aches. Now he was on the shores of awareness, rolled up onto the sands in his own body, sleep a particular to be grasped at, an outer garment he tried to stay wrapped in. But something about the darkness under its baggy folds…It seemed bigger than any darkness he’d ever visited, and scared him further awake.
Dreamed I was real.
Lying on his right side with a bump of sand-grown switchgrass under his cheek, his rucksack cuddled against his belly, he watched what appeared to be the shores of an ocean from his near-sleep. He caught himself caressing his groin with his good hand; realized he didn’t want to stop; understood that he took comfort from it. The other hand had evidently been taken away, erased, and the arm and shoulder too, expunged from his experience and all mirrors and all old photographs of himself. A generalized suffering stole over but didn’t entirely smother his sense of the rightness of things — the shadow of his situation, a little distant, troubling but accepted. He smelled something like the faint rancid signature of a tomcat — eucalyptus. Heard the fustigating breakers — he would write that down.
Oh well. Why not?
He got up and sat at the table he’d slept under. He considered, for a while, how that might have been accomplished, went over the opera-tions he must have performed on the physical plane, the crawling, standing, balancing, lowering, and gathered that he’d just now been heroic. This crazy immense nausea. From now on he promised to be a coward.
It was morning, but with an evening light. The shadow of the mountains worked far out onto the sea and stopped there: here was the gray-green water, there were the clouds, and between them a cupreous molten interlude ate its way toward California. Way back in the high-lands the buzzards walked precariously on nothing. The seals 418 / Denis Johnson
calling, the gulls calling, but he couldn’t see them. He worked one-handed at the buckles on his rucksack — his papers, his pen.
Although entirely alone he was embarrassed at the literalness with which he’d taken it all lately, allowed almost a whole afternoon and evening to swim through him uninterpreted. His was not a mind to permit such things. No unsupervised swimming. His soul never took its clothes off — Melissa said it ruined him in bed. Winona might have said it too if she’d been granted the sensitivity ever to have figured it out.
Then he heard the schoolmarm, the humming of almost intelligible words. A song and a voice reminiscent, decidedly so, of an Indian flute.
And now the low strangled death moan of a man, these sounds more frightening, for their being daylit, than they’d seemed last night.
He moved again, jolted along by his alarm but swiftly powerless, and sat down right beside the sea. The Ocean, the source of life, the place of death, he intended to write, the Ocean behaving like a deity, but he forgot. Sitting in the wet sand he apprenticed himself to the sea’s infinite pitiable preoccupation with the shoreline.