At one point he joined a handful of tourists looking at least partly amused by a monkey dancing on a long chain. The animal wore the stock getup, the bellboy’s uniform minus the pants, performed somersaults absentmindedly, flipping himself as easily as the onlookers’ coins, which he gathered up with a brisk professional aloofness. When they weren’t tossed he approached people one at a time with his startlingly pale simian palm outstretched.
But the instant his gaze fell on Van Ness, the little acrobat charged at him viciously. Van had seen the surprising menace and then the Already Dead / 85
baffling rage pass over the monkey’s face, and was already backped-alling swiftly so that the beast, now nothing more than that, a wild, killing animal, savaged its own belly by running up against the end of its chain. Van walked away fast, shaking his head for the benefit of anybody looking at him — and they all were. A hundred feet from the scene he turned to see the monkey clinging to the side of a litter barrel, still staring at him, its mouth wide open, hissing from down in its throat.
With surprising strength it hoisted the large receptacle and banged it down on the ground over and over, never taking its eyes from Van’s face even across this distance. The crowd stayed back. The monkey’s master crept up on him cautiously, gathering up the chain hand over hand. He looked as confused as anybody there.
This run-in seemed just a silly part of his fate, a maverick detail in the general design. He’d ended one life a suicide and planned to spend the next a murderer, but things like this, stinging outbreaks, ambushes — he thought of the woman he’d picked up hitchhiking who’d nearly accused him of rape — things like this still had the power to hurt his feelings. And now he couldn’t believe it. He was weeping. He bent over and tried to make it look like a bout of coughing. An angry monkey, an angry monkey was making him cry. No, no — it was Elaine Van Ness, his mother. She’d lived alone, had raised herbs in her weedy garden, stolen books from the local library, collected miniature ceramic cats.
And now something had happened and all of that had stopped. Her loneliness, how had she borne it when he himself couldn’t stand even the thought of it? Her son…he hadn’t felt like her son since some time in childhood. Waiting for her to come home from work on schooldays, watching TV shows meant for younger children and eating the peanut butter and crackers she’d left out for him on a plate under a pastel paper napkin. They’d lived in an apartment near Baltimore, just the two of them. Later he’d taken to starting her car in the basement parking garage and driving it around down there. On the smooth concrete the tires squealed, even at a snail’s pace. Eventually he’d smashed one of the headlights against a concrete pillar. His mother had forgiven him. Today he’d have described himself as once again unsupervised and piloting a stolen machine. Quickly, with the heel of his hand, he erased the tears from his face, and then stood up straighter, clearing his throat several times.
86 / Denis Johnson
As he recovered from this inexplicable fit of mourning, he looked up and noticed a woman watching him. A small blonde by the entrance to the Haunted House. She’d just tossed a big head of cotton candy into the trash and now she wiped her hands on a napkin, holding them far out in front of her as if temporarily disowning them. She stared, and then turned away — it annoyed him to be a small panel in the tapestry, it annoyed him to be brief.
Van Ness was sure he recognized her. She passed under the boardwalk’s arch onto the sandy lane of shops and stalls, Pacific Street, and Van followed her for a while with a sense of how she brushed through the thickets of aromas and things like that coming out of other lives, sunlight banging down off a wall, cool dark hovering behind windows, the entangling essence of one person after another at the center of every little scene she passed. He could feel how she let them stroke her — he’d been doing it himself for days now around here. Irrelevant bastards.
Nobody to be introduced to. It annoyed him to be one of them.
He’d seen this person before in similar surroundings. Shelter Cove, the seaside deli — Mrs. Fairchild. This was Winona Fairchild. The woman he was supposed to kill.
She stopped at a shop selling neon signs and the plastic busts of clowns, openmouthed surplus Bozos from squirt-gun shooting arcades.
She spoke to no one, studying their painted faces. She made things like that herself. Van had seen her sculptures. Her husband had seemed proud of her work.
Fairchild planned to knock her out with pills. After some hours, Van would smother her with a pillow. He himself had slept in the bed where she’d die.
Fairchild would spend these moments of terrible genesis in a public place, some miserable tavern it was likely, where he’d be visible. The coroner would blame pills and booze, always an unpredictable mix.
Van reflected that you never knew with these delirium-tremens types.
The extremity of Fairchild’s delusions, the abandon of his folly. He intended to move in with his mistress — whom he’d described for Van, and Van had been amused — and position himself to lead a life in most respects more conventional. He wouldn’t know conventional if it walked up and spat in his face.
Van observed the wife. No question who it was. He hadn’t quite Already Dead / 87
placed her at first because on this breezy day she’d tied her hair back in a long blond ponytail, that was all. In her tattered jeans and sweatshirt, black high-top sneakers, she looked like anybody else around here, but for Van she stood forth magnificently. The day burned in glory, the sun slashing into dark doorways, the woman surely more beautiful than she’d ever been, more virginal and serene in her role as sacrifice, unconscious target, dead clown. It pissed him off. She’d never been so beautiful. He’d never been so angry. And he realized he’d been feeling it for days — the tapestry laid out, a tale told in panels, by design — for days feeling the tragedy and loveliness of fate. First his own. And now hers.
August 11-September 5, 1990
A
s caretaker at Winona’s place my final act was to give Red, the horse, his wormer. I’d been putting it off, but Winona had called. She’d started home. Odyssey over. Although, come to think of it, it’s in setting out for home that the odyssey, the Greek one anyway, the one full of monsters and gods — in turning homeward that the odyssey really begins. And it ends in poignant strangeness, among staring alien eyes, the foolishly gazing faces of the wanderer’s beloved people melted, thickened, elongated by time. Maybe you, too, Winona! — maybe you’ll find nobody you know at the journey’s end.
You’ll stand in just this spot, inhaling the dregs of night mist evaporating from the world, perhaps, and shudder to realize you’ve never smelled anything like it, and you never touched any of this, you never made these sculptures, it’s all garbage now, thanks to your mistakes, most of them innocent, and thanks to my father’s stubbornness and to certain bad conjunctions, like that of myself and Van Ness, the killer I conjured out of a storm. Thanks to these things you may soon be dead — the ultimate stranger! In the meantime, I’ll cure your horse. I couldn’t face you if I sluffed it off.
The horse was something of an epic traveller himself, having started in Vermont and crossed to Oberlin, Ohio, with Winona dur-89
ing her undergrad days. Where he languished without her while she travelled on to Berkeley for graduate school — she and I met there, in fact, during my freshman, and only, year as a big-time university scholar. That June we left school together, Winona with a master’s in fine arts and I with a lot of bitterness. She sent out to Ohio for Red, and here he stands, fatter and fatter on the fields of lotusland.