As I write this, a Mediterranean breeze comes in through the open window. I’m writing half naked, in white socks and white boxer shorts purchased in Athens. A stack of books holds down my typesheets; on top of the books rests a chunk of the Berlin Wall, or so I’m happy to believe. I won it last October from a journalist during an afternoon of gin rummy, also of gin and vermouth. These days, and for some time now, I myself am a journalist.
I stopped here off the Greek coast to write a lengthy piece, a historical sketch of the Slavic troubles. The books, the maps, my notes just sit there. From the first day I’ve done nothing but remember the past. The small breeze here tastes as if it comes across miles of early summer corn. The sky has that relentless emptiness the sky can have on a hot day over the endless farms. This island is a big arid solitary rock that pleads for a sculptor to come. To the south and west it has no neighbors. And my window faces that direction. On any calm day when the seas are low the horizon looks like that of the tamed and subjugated Midwestern prairies with which for a time I allowed myself to be surrounded.
I left the Midwest without goodbyes. For about three months, the rest of that summer and into the fall, I stayed in a converted boat-house in Hyder, Alaska, the state’s southernmost region, a strip of coast that runs alongside British Columbia. I spent the long days reading books and listening to recorded music. I really did almost nothing else. One night about ten, when the colossal red presence of the sunset was crashing into the big studio and I was just bending over the tub and putting the plug in the drain to draw myself a bath, a drop of liquid struck my wrist, and then another. I glanced up to see if some pipe overhead were leaking, and then I felt it: tears running down my cheeks. I slipped to my knees, my head hanging, face lolling into the tub, and rested in that position while I sobbed out loud, bawled and shook like a child all through the hour of sundown until it was dark…When I pulled the light-chain I saw that I’d wept so profusely and for so long that a tiny flood of my own tears, enough to fill a shot glass, had pooled in the drain. I was about to pull the plug when I thought better of it. I turned on the faucet and filled the tub and stripped naked and soaked, exhausted by grief and joy, until my bath was cold.
The next winter I took an assignment to cover the Gulf War. I arrived in Dahran, Saudi Arabia, six days before the U.N. bombing campaign began. Soon Scud missiles began blowing up over the city.
I’ve taken assignments steadily since then. I remain a student of history, more of one than ever, now that our century has torn its way out of its chrysalis and become too beautiful to be examined, too alive to be debated and exploited by played-out intellectuals. The important thing is no longer to predict in what way its grand convulsions might next shake us. Now the important thing is to ride it into the sky.
After three weeks in Dahran I moved to the north, the town of Nuaryriyah. Off and on, for a while, I traveled around the uniform emptiness of the Hijarah Desert interviewing American soldiers at the gates of their encampments. I spent many nights near the Iraqi border sleeping inside my rented Toyota in the middle of a vast waste. The desert trembled with incessant bombing, rumbled so deeply it couldn’t actually be heard. I was there, I felt it, it thudded in the soul. I wore khakis and desert boots and an Australian commando’s hat. My face burned brown in the sun. I was adopted by a group of junior executives (what else to call them? — they were young engineers, computer jocks, even an accountant, from Parker-Boyd, a civilian helicopter-maintenance firm under contract to the military in the Gulf) who erroneously understood me to have permission to travel anywhere in the region. With them and their crews and guards of bulky, invulnerable-looking young Marines I flew in helicopters above blazing tank battles in the desert in the night, through black smoke overclouding a world pocked by burning oil wells like flickering signals of distress, of helplessness, floated like prey in the talons of a hawk above a bare brown planet with nothing in it but two or three roads and a war; and continued day after day in a life I believe to be utterly remarkable.
About the Author
Denis Johnson is the author of Already Dead, Jesus’ Son, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, Fiskadoro, The Stars at Noon, and Angels. His poetry has been collected in the volume The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly. He is the recipient of a Lannan Fellowship and a Whiting Writer’s Award, among many other awards for his work. He lives in northern Idaho.
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