ming of the planets and the trees was to throw in the towel. No, my life is a soup of corruption, emanating a sickly voltage. The trees know it, he knows, I know. We can pretend to be not yet convinced — to be waiting for the verdict of science — but we know.
Brother Bill. He gave me the sideways attention of the slightly crazy, his posture tentative and tilted, his left side bathed in radiation from another universe. Pouring a quart of water onto a car. It was thrilling, the confusion of sorrows that moved like a cyclone through my lungs, it took my breath away: my brother — I was more perfectly alienated from this person than from, say, Harry Lally, who wanted me dead, or from my unrecognizable wife.
My brother drove me back home. In his completely funky International without a fourth gear or reverse. Astonishing that he could have got it running, or that he’d ever finished building his cabin — my brother, who’d stopped taking his medication long ago, if he’d ever started — or that he could actually drive the thing, that he even knew which half of the road was his. My brother, the one who’d raced, in a driving rainstorm, all the way to the reservation to be crucified. Once also he tried to climb into the Buddhist monastery and got his sleeves tangled up in the barbed wire on top of the fence. The monks — who look like regular people, I’ve seen them, in down-filled vests and loose athletic apparel — clipped him down from where he was hanging and sent him away. Pretty much as he’d sent me away now from his own sanctuary, and in the same spirit.
Bill knew all the ruts and managed to haul us up out of his world without breaking an axle. He knew the trees and the taste of the water, he killed the animals and ate them. He belonged in these woods. I guessed I didn’t. But in this place he was getting much better, and meanwhile outside of it I was getting a lot worse.
Two miles before Winona’s place we came around a curve and right up against the entrance to the Tibetan Buddhist monastery. Usually I’m anticipating it and it doesn’t surprise me, but today we both had our minds on other things. When you’re not expecting it, it’s like a fatal accident and then heaven.
California!
Suddenly and often in this strange land, there opens before the dreamer the Golden Gate. In this case the Tibetan Buddhist temple with its raging copper dome, five stories high, and the hundred-foot-54 / Denis Johnson
tall pagoda, gilded with actual gold, standing up through the mist above the green pasture — better than one square mile of pasture, and all of it surrounded by chain-link and sparkling concertina wire. This is not a dream, illusion, or metaphor. This is California. There really is such a place. It is not a mistake of the imagination, it doesn’t disappear like a mirage or back away like a rainbow.
Anything, anything, anything! — that’s what California offers.
This day, the one I’ve been thinking about, when I woke at Winona’s, when the men came after me and I visited my brother, was also the day the drought broke and we got two inches of rain.
It had been dry all spring and all summer. The Spanish moss turned brittle, broke away from the boughs and lay on the roads like ash.
Meanwhile dust hung over the world like smoke from a gigantic fire.
“Brown heat,” Bill said as if noticing it for the first time. And this may, after all, have been his first trip above the mist in months.
“Look,” I begged him when he dropped me off at Winona’s ranch,
“don’t tell Clarence about this.”
He and Clarence were buddies and pals, of a sort. They worked on cars together.
“Clarence?” he said. “Clarence isn’t like you think.”
“We have differing interpretations of Clarence. Only one of us can be right.”
We dropped the subject and didn’t bother fumbling around for another. When I got out of the car and rapped on its hood, he put it in gear and headed down the tiny road rapidly until he went around a curve. I heard him making a turnaround in a wide spot, and here he came again past the gate peering ahead intrepidly, speeding off toward wherever. And there I stood in front of my troubles without anybody to help me, not even my brother.
I noticed right away that the bogus sportsmen had strung a filament of fishing line waist-high between the gateposts, a trick to find out if a car had entered — more use to me, once I’d ducked under it, than to them: flanking me as ably as any moat.
Just the same that night I was crazy with fear, cowering inside the house with all the lights out, maybe drinking. Not a fear of men. They’d only check their trip wire, they wouldn’t come all the way in. They couldn’t reasonably expect me ever to return anyway. In fact I was only here because I couldn’t have stood another minute in the Already Dead / 55
car with my brother, who smelled bad, who smelled like shit, who smelled crazy. To think of him as healed was exaggeration; he’d merely gentled down to a precarious strangeness. Anyway, no, that night the fear was of the earth and the moon. Of the abeyance in the air that signaled a storm. Of the silence, of the silver light, of the wolf spiders’
webs I could suddenly see in the meadow, the reflecting dew strung on every strand. Now the spider is a stranger in its nest, the wren confused by these miracles. In this perfection of lifeless things, this steely inanimate loveliness, everything alive is sordid, unwholesome. To live is evil, the word itself is evil spelled backwards. What a relief when the breeze picked up, stirring pockets of warm air, bringing noises in through the screen doors and windows — I heard things, and then one set of sounds was real — an engine, and a car’s headlights passed along the ridge road. They didn’t slow down.
I’m remembering now that it was after midnight when the shower began. But first we had the moon and the mist. The big ones blow past from the north, well offshore, and then twist back around to lash at us from the south, driving the coastal fog up into the inland heights. And yet the warm front, giving way before the coastal cool, keeps the heavens clear until just seconds before the rain falls. So we get the mist over the ground and the piquant irrelevancies of a moonlit sky and slashing meteors above.
And then it rained. I went out to the deck to take the hammock down just as the first drops started, tremendous things, exotic, glittering, cold.
I had a sense of them crashing into the dust on my skin. The breeze had an animal smell. The empty hammock rocked. There was jazz in the little race to get it untied, a happy feeling in getting there just in time.
The feeling of a poetic moment, a mingling of California and nostal-gia — on the air a forbidden, a religious scent, an intuition of the summers of other people’s lives, — airy summers, pleasant people, unfettered lives — of the land from which I was exiled. A moment of tenderness, the smell of rain overpowering, as thick and unbreathable as smoke, and almost sentimental, not just the atmosphere’s pregnancy and ripe-ness, but the strains of grief rising up from somewhere — from within.
The simplicity of certain pleasures bursts in my heart. I’m weeping, and asking a ludicrous question: will my life ever be like this?
For a few seconds everything was brushed with just a single quick stroke of moonshine. The deck chairs and spool tables and potted suc-culents stood out like negatives. Then I lost the moon. Vagueness 56 / Denis Johnson
came up over the ridge in billows. I’d had PG&E put a streetlamp at the head of the driveway, it cost less than seven dollars a month, and they took care of the thing. Its glow a quarter-mile off seemed unattain-able, seemed imaginary. A large creature, an owl probably, in this atmosphere it looked white, swept up from under the edge of the hill behind me and passed directly over my head. I could hear its wing-strokes like desperate breaths. I followed around to the front of the house and watched it moving off toward the front gate and the street-light, where its shadow opened out from behind it like a tunnel through the lamp-lit fog. The tunnel closed to nothing as the bird passed over the source, and now there was only the iridescent mist. Everything looked so much like the cover of a science-fiction comic book it hardly seemed possible to be inside it and not to be able to turn a page, impossible to be breathing the weather and the mix of rain and dust and sea-damp and tasting a little of my own sweat, washed to the corners of my mouth with the rain.