“Why don’t you take one? One won’t hurt you.”
“I’d rather not.”
“What if I offered you a thousand dollars to take one?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Two thousand.”
“So these aren’t Nembutal.”
“You knew right away. You’re a natural-born plotter.”
“What’s in them?”
“Nembutal on the outside, horse dope on the inside. Zielene. Two of these will knock out a thousand-pound horse.”
“Will it kill her?”
“No. It’ll just put her out. Nothing will wake her. Tie a plastic bag around her head and go off for half an hour. Come back later and remove the evidence.”
He put his hands on his knees in that old-man way of his and scowled through his thick lenses and down over his dangling mustaches at the two little bottles there on the coffee table.
“I’d rather just smother her with a pillow.” The electrifying thing about all this was that each of us had come to the other out of nowhere. Nothing contradictory surrounded us, no evidence that we weren’t capable of anything — no familiar context full of obstacles, no deflating local histories. As a prophet gets laughed at in his hometown, so also the big-time conspirator. But a stranger could be God. If we kept on talking like this it would all actually come about.
“Then, afterward, you have to finish killing yourself,” I said.
“You won’t have to remind me.”
“If you have trouble going through with it, I’ll do it.”
“You’re too nice to me, Mr. Fairchild.”
Already Dead / 93
“I would have to, you see that. I couldn’t let you live. One way or another you’re sealing your fate. In a sense you’re dead as soon as you kill her.”
Van Ness pursed his lips, seemed to be kissing that thought as it hung in front of him. “That’s poetic.”
At the Wharton School in Monterey County, a prep school, one of the best (which I bored right through, though I hardly dented college), I read Hermann Hesse’s Demian and dreamed of a friendship like the one between Max Demian and Emil Sinclair, a bond that frees a person from other bonds and leads him into a new dimension.
From the little he told me I gathered that Van Ness had started out looking for that friend, too, and for that life worth staying on for, that religion, that woman, that vocation. The tall plumber, Frankheimer, may have served for a while in that regard. Once upon a time he’d accomplished a painful transit through a sort of incarnation where he’d been capable of friendship, arriving eventually at his present unapproachable state, this coked-up condition, everybody knew about it, that made him pitiful and dangerous both. And once upon a time Van had depended heavily on Frankheimer’s kinship, and on Demian as a guiding light, an affirmation and a model. But now he’d outgrown it in what he thought of as a cold and Nietzschean way. Outgrown all models, all reasons, outgrown life itself.
Now Van Ness claimed already to have died, more than once, in various other universes. Who can refute that? Is there any proof otherwise? Imagine a slight revision in Nietzsche’s myth of eternal return: not that at history’s end all matter collapses back to the center, Big-Bangs, and starts again identically; but that it starts again with one in-finitesimal difference in the action of a single molecule — every time, and an endless number of times. When you die, your consciousness blanks out, but it resumes eons later, when the history of molecules has been revised enough to preclude your death due to those particular circumstances: the bullet hits your brain in this world, but in a later one merely tickles your earlobe. You die in one universe and yet in another go on without a hitch. You don’t mark the intervening ages — subjectively you experience nothing other than almost having died. But in fact you’ve edged into another kingdom, ruled by another king, engaging other potentialities.
94 / Denis Johnson
If this were true, the person who understood it would have conquered death. Would be invulnerable. Would be the Superman.
There’s a dizzying thrill in a philosophy that can only be tested by suicide — and then never proven, only tested again by another attempt.
And the person embarked on that series of tests, treading that trail of lives as if from boulder to boulder across the river of time — no, out into the burning ocean of eternity — what a mutant! Some new genesis, like a pale, poisonous daisy.
The terrible drought had broken only briefly, that single night of rain soaking us with less than two inches, but the winds seemed bene-volent afterward, often trundling high, white clouds along the very shores of outer space, and mixing the airs so that the coastal weather stayed in general crisp and sunny. People called it an early autumn.
Van Ness disappeared the minute he left Winona’s ranch. He’d been registered at the Tides Motel, but now no more, and I suddenly really didn’t expect to see him again. He’d succeeded in scaring me more than I’d scared him, and maybe that’s all he wanted. But he sent me a postcard from the town of Carmel, explaining that his mother had died and promising to return on Tuesday, September 4. Then we’ll see, he wrote.
We’ll see if our eyes are open.
Still, the reality of our plot was fading. Maybe he just wanted to keep the fear alive by saying hello.
Meanwhile I learned, also, that the phony loggers in the black Silverado pickup had been camping across the Gualala River but lately hadn’t been seen there. Things were easy. Winona settled in after her coastal wandering and the ugly horse Red was no longer my responsibility. As soon as Clarence came back from L.A. I’d have the pot cultivation off my hands. And Winona mentioned that Harry Lally’s wife had boarded her horse at the Say-When Ranch, where the equestrian set held their gymkhanas, and gone off for three weeks in Brazil with her gangster husband. It seemed these autumn breezes had carried away all the heat and fog around me, leaving my days sweet and vacant.
I had more time to spend with Melissa, but she had less for me. I’d never suspected her of anything like fidelity, certainly, but since the day we’d started up I’d believed I was the only steady one. Now I didn’t know, I sensed another presence in her thoughts, and I didn’t ask for the truth because I feared that’s what I’d get.
Already Dead / 95
A week after I left Winona’s I woke up in my own apartment, a rickety box in a fourplex, but mine, an apartment holding more garbage than furniture, but all of it gloriously mine, for the first time in many days. Nobody after me, and coffee in my very own cup. Maybe the weather had anticipated this happiness, this treading through trash in what was supposed to be my living room thinking that I should wash the plastic floor, that I should pull the bedsheets from the windows, popping tacks, which I’d sweep out of here immediately along with all this other crap, mostly wine bottles and paper plates, and put up hopeful, restful curtains.
But such spacious freedoms can’t be infinite. What we gather together has a way of unravelling. That morning I visited Melissa, but she acted nervous and, if possible, more foreign. As if she were hiding something from me. And when I refused to stop talking with a phony British accent, she kicked me out of her little trailer. She’d actually swept the place, and I’d have been willing to hang out longer.
But I felt alien vibrations as we made love in her narrow bed, our knees and elbows banging the trailer’s walls, and when I came, I ejaculated a paranoid essence.
“Did I mention, dahling, that my teddibly beloved wife is back in town?”
“I told you, please don’t talk that way.”