There was only a little muttering as people wondered what was going on and then decided not to stay to find out. The only sounds were the tremendous rumbling of everybody’s feet, and the actors on the screen continuing their dialogue. Mute, terrorized people pouring out of the place! By this time we in the very front were able to guess what was happening, but we were also able to feel sort of removed and safe from whatever was scaring them so much up there in the back — a crazed killer, whatever. So the people in the first three rows didn’t run. We just waited. An usher, a young woman, entered from the lobby and we heard her talking to somebody, but she didn’t make an announcement until one of us up front yelled, ‘Tell us what’s happening!’ Then she starts screaming, ‘It was just a shoebox! A man with a shoebox! There isn’t any bomb!’ All this while, the giant… heads of actors are conversing up on the wall — moving pictures, talking pictures, without any power of illusion left to them. But do you know what? We sat down, those of us who’d stayed around, and in a couple of minutes we were completely consumed again by the drama, which wasn’t a very compelling one to begin with anyway. Cereal, cereal, cereal,” he said, “it’s all we seem to have.” Van watched him dump flakes into a bowl.
Already Dead / 71
“Afterwards I recognized a famous man, a television star, standing there in the lobby with a red and orange sack of popcorn in his hand.” Van had no idea how to respond to this stuff. The sun was lowering into the clouds, a deep rosy light filling the kitchen window, Nelson Fairchild staring out. Tears shone in his eyes. He rode a roller coaster, all right. The emotional Tilt-A-Whirl. Van watched him fashion a face out of all this sadness before he turned full on and started laying fresh places at the table. “And you’re feeling all right?” Fairchild asked him.
“I’ve never saved anyone’s life before. You’re okay?” Van said, “Thanks,” only because he pitied the man.
“Did you walk here?”
“My car’s by the road up there. It’s out of sight I think.”
“Is there somebody who should be called?”
“No.”
“Nobody?”
Van felt a panic of his own beginning to stir. “Listen. You didn’t call the paramedics? Or the cops?”
“No.”
“Nobody knows I’m here.”
“No,” Fairchild said, “and that’s how it should be. You’re here, you’re a secret, I’m giving you cereal. Your appetite’s back. You look better.”
“Just assure me you’re harmless, and we’re fine.”
“We’re all pretty harmless aren’t we? Until we’re cornered?”
“That’s not reassuring.”
“But I thought you wanted to die.”
“Maybe so. But by my own hand.”
Fairchild closed his eyes, maybe, Van thought, with exasperation.
“The point I was making earlier is this — that each person who went to the movies that day believed each of the others capable of killing all of us. And aren’t they exactly right?”
Fairchild was back at the refrigerator, from which he turned now with an odd, pompous air, upholding a carton of milk. “Who knows what a murderer looks like?”
He stood next to Van’s chair. He leaned too close. “Lately I think I’m ready to become one.” Van smelled the rot of wine on his breath. The hat’s emblem read IGNORE PREVIOUS HAT.
Van relaxed. “I see. You’re just fucking with me.” 72 / Denis Johnson
“Hermann Göring,” Fairchild said, pouring milk over his cereal with unsteady hands, “was found at the end dressed in a Japanese kimono and stoned on opium, wearing lipstick and eye shadow and playing with a model concrete railroad in his living room — that’s how crazy you have to be to kill as many people as Hermann Göring did. This is how crazy you have to be to kill one. As crazy as me. Allow me:” He tipped the carton and loosed a quavering ribbon of milk over Van’s bowl.
As soon as he put a spoonful to his lips Van realized what a hunger he had. But the flakes were hard on his throat. He waited for them to wilt in the bowl.
Fairchild said, “Of course I’m simplifying. It may be that in a case like Hermann Göring’s that’s how crazy you get from killing that many people, and this is how crazy you have to be to start.”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“One murder probably leads to another.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Why don’t we find out?”
“I don’t get the meaning.”
“Would you like to find out?”
“Find what out?”
“I’d like you to kill somebody for me. I’d make it worth your while.”
“You’d make it worth my while?” Van said. “What the fuck is ‘worth my while’?”
“Money, whatever.”
So he’d done it. He’d killed himself. And he’d surfaced into this. All right. It was the next thing happening, and that was that. “Money doesn’t work for me,” he said.
“What would?”
Van Ness hadn’t touched a drop of wine, but the room was accelerating anyway. “I’ll do it. Sure.”
“What would work for you?”
The chickenshit. He was going to ride right past it. “I said I’ll do it.” Fairchild stood up and said, “Louise.” He put his thumb and finger to his eyes and pressed. Visibly composed a speech in his mind and then launched into it, crunching the phrases in the collision of emotions.
“In the place where Louise works there is a lady called the Singapore Lady. The Singapore Lady was once a wild young woman Already Dead / 73
married by common law to a carpenter there in San Francisco. She was the terror of the neighborhood. But the carpenter wasn’t afraid of her; he came home late, he catted around. He didn’t care if the Singapore Lady knew. Mistake! She stabbed him in the eye, and he died. Then, with his own saw she sawed him into thirteen pieces. She put the pieces of her husband in a big trunk and had it shipped to a fictitious address in Singapore. Well, during its journey the stink of the corpse became profound and somebody opened the trunk to find green arms and legs and green other parts, including the one-eyed staring head. The woman was quickly arrested — why? Because she’d put her return address on the trunk. Louise says they call her the Singapore Lady because for the last twenty years she’s been wrapping empty packages, addressing them to Singapore, and handing them over to the counselors and guards at the prison to be mailed.
“Louise is my mother. On the day I went to San Francisco she had three months to go before retirement. I wanted to go see her while she was still working in order to avoid the possibility of a longer visit.” Van had eaten most of his cereal. He pushed the bowl away and sat back. “Ignore Previous Hat, huh?”
Fairchild said, “I’m thinking of inviting you to be my accomplice in a murder.”
“I said okay,” Van said.
“Actually, my henchman.”
Van said nothing.
“Does one murder lead to another? I think it does, because I’m suddenly, now, already thinking in terms of killing two more. Maybe three.
Or at least one more. Harry Lally.”
Night had come and turned the windows to mirrors. Fairchild had a habit of studying his image, moving closer, peering right at the reflected mouth as it spoke. “You do this murder. Maybe you should kill everybody who troubles me! Anyway you do this murder. Then you come back here — well, no, definitely not back here — but somewhere; you go somewhere. And finish committing suicide.” But the guy had a psychotic charm. He entertained. “Have you been diagnosed?”