Through the window he saw the man he assumed to be his host, still in his bathrobe, his white feet, in zoris, showing beneath its hem, walking flat-footed in the pasture as if it were wet out there, and carrying a black bucket. He poured its contents at the feet of a fat ugly horse.
He took his cap off, fanning at flies while the horse bowed its head over the food. All around the pasture grandly proportioned assemblages of gray timber and junk farming equipment scattered their shadows. He took their intent to be artistic.
Van found the kitchen a pleasant place. The house’s design was solar-efficient; the late sun reached him now, and it was warm. This was a small home with a big loft upstairs and also perhaps a single room — he saw a door at the top of the landing. Down here just the living room and kitchen and a door to, he presumed, a study or a little den. He’d been sleeping in the living room, in a Hide-A-Bed contraption.
He’d done it. He’d killed himself. And here he was. He was probably dead in that universe, but in this one right next door he persisted; his consciousness had simply moved over into this other, potential world in which he did not die. Right. You go down through one hole and come up out of another. Death just moves you to another square. Now he could be sure all beings were immortal. He couldn’t kill, he couldn’t die. They’d been telling us that life was an illusion, but they lied. The illusion was death.
Van’s host stood inside the front door kicking his thongs off and then strode barefoot to the kitchen, nodding in the direction of the pasture and the horse. “Our equine amigo.”
Van sipped at his broth, which tasted like chicken. It seemed to make him hungrier. Maybe some cereal would go down.
“I’m Nelson Fairchild,” the man said. “And I’m going to pour myself some wine. Will you tell me your name?”
“Van Ness. First name Carl.”
“And you won’t be saying much more,” Fairchild predicted, referring to the terrible sound Van was making words with. “Now,” he said, “I’m going to offer you a glass so you can toast with me. Drink it or not, whatever you feel like.” Fairchild held the liter bottle tightly 68 / Denis Johnson
with both hands as he poured. He raised his glass high: “The first person ever to be born in space!”
He sat down at the table, and Van watched him drink. Fairchild was younger than he’d thought, more like twenty-five than thirty-five. A young dude with an old man’s fear in his eyes — fear was the driving wheel. There was a form of security in knowing a person’s prime mover.
The young man’s hands were steady now. He lifted and spread the deck of cards from his solitaire game, stripped one gently from the fan, slapped it down: “The Suicide King.”
Funny how the pictures were always right side up. Yes, he got it — the King of Hearts, stabbing himself, for some reason, in the side of the head. The Suicide King.
Fairchild said, “You’re silent. Stunned by the coincidence.”
“I’m tired.”
“You don’t believe in destiny?”
Van swallowed with some pain, happy to answer. “The concept is almost always misused.” Anxious to answer, even with his throat all torn up.
“The one real road, the signs at the turnings?”
“I make the road. I draw the map. Nothing just happens to me.” He swallowed, trying not to grimace. “I’m the one happening.”
“How can you say that? I just pulled you back from death. You’ve been lying there virtually not happening for ten, twelve hours. For over fourteen hours,” Fairchild said, checking the clock on his electric coffee-maker.
Van stood up and turned over the table.
“React,” he said amid the noise of breakage and the sound of fragments singing over the Spanish tile.
Fairchild said nothing, righting the table and kneeling to scoop up two or three pieces of china pointlessly. Van could see he experienced his anger from the outside in, first in his skin. In twenty minutes the guy’s guts would start burning and he’d freeze it out with a shot of his wine.
“My point still holds,” Fairchild said finally, setting down on the bare table one dripping shard.
“Theoretically it holds. But life isn’t a theory, not mine anyway. I have to live it.”
Fairchild seemed to make up his mind not to clean up the rest of this mess just at the moment. He sat back down.
Already Dead / 69
“You’re exactly the person I thought you were,” Fairchild said.
“Meaning who?”
“You’re a true man of action.”
“Not a man of action,” Van said, swallowing hard after every three or four words, but feeling compelled to speak, dizzy with the necessity of speaking. “I’m a man of will. But I can’t believe in my will, can’t feel it, unless I act from it.”
“Act from it, no matter what.”
“No matter what.”
“Overriding everything.”
“That’s right, everything.”
“Then you act in boldness.”
“Can I be given a little cereal?”
“A man of true courage.”
“Just feed me. I won’t hurt your table.”
It wasn’t night yet but as Fairchild walked among the rooms on the lower floor, speechifying — Van assumed for his, Van’s, benefit — he turned on all the lights, every last one. “When I saw you heading into the pond! Unforgettable. I’m telling you, you banished the storm. We would all hope to accomplish a moment like that in our lives. You accomplished it in mine…” At one point he put a record on the stereo, a Sonny Rollins thing. Van tried to let it soothe him while the madman talked: “Last month I went down to the main San Francisco library.
They know me personally, I’m famous, my obsessive queries. I drove down there I don’t know when — three weeks ago. I won’t go south of here again, not on that Coast Highway. The cliffs beckon. If you were really trying to kill yourself in our pond, I know the desire. But when I’d turned inland after Jenner, I was safe. You head through the Russian River valley, then you’re in the other California — sunshine, vineyards, windmills, small motels…” He went on without the benefit of Van’s attention until the music ended and then he made a segue, lurching, into talk about some movie…No, he wasn’t telling about the movie as much as the experience of having gone to the thing, of being in a theater, darkness—“big people. Gargantuan busts, I mean their heads and shoulders, not their titties. Although also titties. Now: something quite out of my experience happened in there, Mr. Van Ness. A panic got hold of the people in the theater.”
70 / Denis Johnson
Fairchild had gone pale; the work of speaking and remembering had pinched the blood out of his flesh, perhaps concentrated it all in his brain; his energies didn’t make him lively, Van thought — just incredibly tense, his fibers humming to the point where levitation seemed immin-ent. A deep vibration jiggled the cups and saucers on the table.
“The floor,” he said, “rumbled. There were rapid footsteps down the aisles, a lot of people moving all in a bunch, and all with the same thing in mind, whatever it was, and I had the sense that some group was playing a prank. Something made you feel that it was all rehearsed, like a fraternity stunt, and I expected these people to kidnap a freshman and carry him out on their shoulders or something like that. Then I thought, but there are dozens of them. The rows were emptying in waves, starting at the back, and we, those of us down front, we turned around to see that everybody was leaving fast, through every available exit.” Fairchild himself was in motion now, looking around for something in the kitchen. “Now let me tell you,” he said, rummaging abstractedly in the refrigerator, delighted with this memory, “nobody screamed, nobody yelled. Nobody loosed even a tiny exclamation, Mr. Van Ness.