My brother’s cabin lay over a mile from my house, a good half of which I’d have to spend lurching from tree to tree in my stocking feet until I found his drive. It was all downhill or I wouldn’t have tried it.
I just prayed they wouldn’t let loose the dogs.
The truth was I’d never hiked through these woods before. This wonderful scenery and its atmosphere was something to witness, something to inhale. I didn’t like being immersed in it however, stirring up its dust and scraping against its bark and getting its gravel in my socks. All this was fine for my brother, Bill, because he’d given up on civilization. As for me, I was ailing, hungover, had no business rambling under the boughs. I’d been meaning to check myself into one of those places where they feed you grains and herbs and help you moderate the drinking. But the captains of moderation, what happened to them all? These days they want you to stop drinking entirely. Okay then! — let them drink this fear. Taste it coming up from the stomach through the sinuses. Let them try it, it’s like being hung upside-down and everything rushing the wrong way until the blood drips out your ears. I need tranquilization. Those men up there touching stuff, walking into all the rooms, they counted among the many, many things impossible to face.
And I’d hidden the Porsche, but left my jogging shoes in plain sight beside the kitchen table. They’d find dishes in the sink, and upstairs the slept-in — tossed-in, sweated-in — bed. If the men had brains they’d let the dogs nose around and strike my trail. But I doubted the men had brains.
Now I came on a deer path and followed it with less trouble downward. On this walk things that happened played like sparks over the bits of dreams I’d had last night. Stepping on a thorn Already Dead / 47
brought back a dream of catching a large insect. I tore off its wings and stepped on it, and it lashed out, but helplessly, at my foot with a large stinger. Hadn’t I been dreaming, in fact, of this place, and these trees?
Before long I entered the fog. The woods were cool and stopped with a cottony silence. Soothing, protective. The ever-changing here and now presented itself in small discreet chambers materializing out of bright mists. I’m speaking of the actual walk, not the walk I dreamed.
I found Bill’s drive, the winding two-rut road lined with seventeen junked cars, which he believed to be antiques. Most of his delusions were pitiful. The only interesting madness he’d exhibited had been years back, when he visited the nearby reservation and disrobed and begged the Indians to crucify him. He was on LSD.
Here, on the gentler slopes, the big trees can keep their hold — even a few old-growth redwoods, already standing here the day Julius Caesar was born and now nearly two hundred feet tall and thirty feet around.
I might have been wandering through a region of vaulting aboriginal monuments lifted up by a dead race. Nobody worships them now.
Unattended they accomplish their vast meditations. Their indiscernible deaths. Their tremendous, crashing funerals. Then the interminable wasting down until, underfoot, not earth, but a quiet rusty bread. Bill keeps his cabin at the western edge of an untouched several acres of old growth. When the fog burns away he looks down from his back porch onto the ocean, a sunny postcard full of distant black rocks splashed with foam. Yet from his front door he steps right into the prehistoric. Big silence. Big redwoods. Ferny dusk beneath. Forests once sheltered half our race, but now very few humans live in such places, towered over by slow and ancient lives. I believe the effect on my brother has been nearly miraculous. These kind-hearted monsters have wooed him away from madness into a beautiful, if easily perturbable, mildness. Now he’s just a quiet man who gets too excited when he drinks anything with caffeine in it. Once or twice a year I come to see him, and each time I wonder why I don’t just join him forever in this healing place. My father owns it, but it is my brother’s forest.
Among the practitioners of oneiromancy, the forest stands for the unconscious, symbolizes the very place containing all we see when we’re asleep. And the same for the ocean. My brother keeps the forest on one hand and the ocean on the other, dwells between two 48 / Denis Johnson
entrances to the deep dark source of dreams. The forest is a place of danger, magic, and happy endings. All night the dreamer travels in this region and doesn’t realize he’s asleep. The differences between the logic of that world and the logic of this waking one are vast. But they feel the same. And isn’t that how we recognize logic, by the way it feels?
Whatever Descartes may say, his first fact rests only on a feather, this feeling, the same one we have as we wander through forests that don’t exist, forests that are just as primary in that world, entirely as real, as thinking-thus-being is in this one. I passed the junked carcasses with which my brother lines his road, old cars with their histories misting up through their broken windshields, powerful in their deaths, sinister and candid and, to me, frightening. Dust thickening over the stains of messy kids and backseat lovers, engines oxidized to brittle red lumps.
Candid I mean in the absence of any dissemblance in their smashed faces, like dying dogs. If this sweaty hike were dreamed the waker wouldn’t have to ask: these wrecks mean exactly themselves, they mean that everything wastes away, that even steel will be putrefied, they mean that youths coupling in the depths will dissolve. But who cares?
Translating dreams in advance, well, then why have them? Why sleep?
I rounded a bend and there was my brother, bearded and blond, standing beside an International Harvester Scout, dripping water from a coffee can onto its hood.
Bill saw me watching him.
I could very nearly witness the lurching of his brain. He needed words. He’d forgotten they existed. He had to energize his atmospheres and let words form, like clouds, inside him.
“I’m washing the birdshit off this vehicle,” he said.
He wouldn’t get it done, not without a cloth or a brush. No. He was just fooling around because nothing was necessary here.
“It looks like you don’t have shoes on,” he said.
“This is an emergency visit.”
“Hey,” he said, “hey.”
“Nobody’s dead, no.”
Nobody meant our father. Our father wasn’t dead.
“Hey, okay,” Bill said.
“I just had to get here fast.”
We stood not twenty feet from his door, but he failed to ask me in.
Didn’t want me in his one-room house because he thought I’d peek Already Dead / 49
at the letters he was writing. During his manic runs he corresponds voluminously, in a trembling scrawl — with whom I don’t exactly know, but he does in fact mail his letters out, usually in big batches, sometimes, though rarely, to one of our fellow Gualalanians, who then shows them all around town just for laughs. His cabin’s well made, with a back deck, a gable over the front door, a small tidy porch. I followed him as far as the creek that ran beside it, where he got down on his muddy knees to fill his coffee can again. Young acacia trees nosed in under the taller creekside alders. Acacias bloom golden and abundant in the spring, but the variety propagates ruthlessly and has to be contained.
A couple of severed deer heads hung down on bailing twine from the branches, with asterisks for eyes, exactly as the cartoonists show them.
“I believe that’s a doe,” I said of one.
“I’m a poacher,” he admitted, “but in or out of season I don’t take doe.”
This was his life. He killed and butchered deer, packed the bloody meat back and forth between here and our father’s freezer. An elemental calling. “If a couple of people came down here after me,” I asked him,