Already Dead

  “I know what we liked about him—”

  “That he rejected his whole order of thought, yeah, and started fresh halfway through his life.”

  “His independence even from his own truths—”

  “But we didn’t understand those truths. On the Pequod we were just two assholes who collected big words. Everybody knew we were full of shit but us.”

  Van Ness was astonished. “That’s very sad.”

  “No. It has no value one way or the other.”

  “I’m sick,” Van told him.

  “Sick?”

  Van Ness said, “I’m not well.”

  “Not well…That sounds even worse.”

  “It is.”

  “That sounds like ‘a lengthy illness.’”

  “That’s right.”

  “‘Has died after a lengthy illness.’”

  Van Ness put his face in his hands.

  “Dying, huh? That’s a very animal thing to do.”

  “Is that all you can think of to say to me?”

  “All? No. I can bullshit till Christmas. I can spew reams, man.”

  Frankenstein looked nervous, bopping his foot, rubbing his fingertips rapidly with his thumb, chewing his lip. Van Ness recognized these as Frank’s signs of anger. Intimidated by his own size, he denied himself any wilder expressions.

  There was nothing here for Van, but he couldn’t stop himself, not after five hundred miles spent rehearsing these thoughts. “Maybe we were posing, sure. But you opened the door for me. Wittgenstein, Spinoza—”

  “Nietzsche.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah? And why not Hobbes, and Locke? Why not Marx?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because they were pointed toward the depersonalized robot zombie Earth we now inhabit. I’m pointed toward the personal, the subjective, the much more deeply real. And I’ve gone on travelling in that direction. You—you cry, you weep, you want a theory to eat like a pill and make it all go away.”

  “You misunderstand me. Fuck you.”

  “If you’re dying, then what you really have to do, man, what you’re really gonna have to do most deeply now, is go ahead and die. Just animal right on out. Nice knowing you.”

  Van Ness said nothing for a few minutes while the giant chain-lit another Camel and smoked it away with a series of little convulsions, going into and out of the firelight repeatedly to flick the ash.

  “I’ve had those golf clubs for years. I took a nine iron to the walls because I heard the mothers inside there scurrying around and whispering. Part of this, yeah,” Frankenstein said, “was psychotic bullshit. But there are actual people involved, too, taking advantage, you know, of the chemical dementia. I wanted to split their heads open. I know who they are, some of them. They’re shooting some kind of mist, some kind of spray, into the windows at night. I can hear it leaking into the car, man, when I’m driving. Oh yeah! Oh yeah! I can feel it on my skin. I yanked the guts out from under the hot tub, let the water out, turned the bastard upside down—okay. Nothing there. I took that nine iron and smashed through the floorboard in the panel truck, the Chevy, and I got one, man! I stabbed its face to shit with a screwdriver, blood all over my hands, my shirt, it was like a waterfall. Got up the next morning, the blood was gone. Not a trace. They washed it all off me while I was asleep. And they’re shooting microscopic darts at me.”

  He paused to light up.

  “I’m not a golfer,” Van Ness said.

  “Ninety percent of this is psycho bullshit, I realize. But ten percent of it is real.” Frank pointed a finger at Van Ness’s throat. “And that’s the ten percent we have to watch out for.”

  The burning redwood hummed steadily. The fire was in its middle age. Rocking back and forth to dip his cigarette ash with his large hand, Frank seemed to enter and exit the changing torchlight of a primitive incarnation, in one of the smoky grotto shelters he liked to claim had been forgotten by his mind but imprinted on his spirit.

  Frank had always preached a personal creed fixed, in a scholarly way, to the migrations of the human soul. Maybe, Van thought now, he was right, maybe Frank’s own soul had checked out, simply left a TV babbling somewhere in this big, ruined hotel.

  And yet two decades before, Frank had been the one to lead Van, the twenty-two-year-old, into the light of philosophy, the one to guard him while he grew.

  Among the sailors belowdecks Van Ness had been seen as the large man’s personal creation, a kind of pet—thus the nickname: Van Ness had had to struggle to remember, when asking for his friend’s number from Directory Assistance, that Frankenstein’s true name was Wilhelm Frankheimer.

  Frank asked, “What have you got?”

  “You don’t understand, do you?”

  “What’s your disease?”

  “Shit, man. Call it radiation poisoning.”

  “You haven’t got anything. You’re not dying.”

  Van told him, “I’ll be dead within forty-eight hours.”

  “A short ride.”

  “Still: I could easily outlive you.”

  Driving south back into Gualala’s town proper, Van Ness encountered a straight stretch on the coast route and pressed the accelerator pedal down all the way. And found himself, what with the fog and his headlights, driving into a wall of brilliance. He had no idea how far out in front of his windshield the pavement stretched before it hooked left or right and his own trajectory hung out over twenty-five fathoms of air. Within a quarter mile the machine was topping out at around 105, he believed, although the speedometer’s needle came unmoored and whipped back and forth deliriously between 120 and nothing, and the Volvo itself shivered rhythmically awhile, then shuddered so hard he had to clench his teeth, and soon it shook like a crow’s nest in a bad gale, threatening to break loose and fling itself to pieces in midair. Van eased his grip on the wheel until he was not quite touching it, warming his hands on the fires of out-of-control; then something in him—not his will—slapped his hands back onto the steering and pointed him at a legal velocity down the middle of the fog.

  Van made it a habit to be friendly wherever he went; while he contemplated a late supper in the bar of a cliffside restaurant later that night, he bought a drink for a man who was also a visitor to the area, a wild-pig hunter. They’d started out by kidding the barmaid together and then got to talking. “Make it a double,” Van urged the man. “I can’t drink myself. I’ve got pancreatitis.”

  “Oh, any old thing,” the hunter told him when Van asked about his line of work. “I’ve done a lot of logging lately.”

  “Where’s that? Here in California?”

  “Del Norte County mostly, yeah. Everywhere, practically.”

  The man’s hunting companion, another bearded, bulky woodsman, came in and joined them. He’d just driven down from their campsite, and he complained about the fog and the curves, and the cliffs.

  The first one bought his friend a drink and for Van a club soda. “You got—what? Your pancreas, something?”

  “Pancreatic cancer, actually.”

  “Oh.”

  The men paused, sipping their drinks.

  “Shit,” the other burst out. “I’d be double-time paranoid behind something like that. Fatal, right?”

  “Nothing’s certain. I could still easily outlive you.”

  “Man”—the logger searched for words. “It’s like—a big blue light.”

  “Really,” Van said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Listen. As far as cliffs: my sister’s husband,” the first man now told them, “went to welder’s school in Santa Rosa down here. One day he was driving on the coast, on those cliffs north of Jenner. Have you seen that place? Five or six hundred feet straight down, no shoulder—you’d have time to shit your pants and change into clean ones before you hit. He was driving along behind this black Corvette. Corvette downshifts, Corvette accelerates, Corvette sails half a thousand feet down to the Pacific Ocean. Right over the edge. Turned out the gu
y had just bought the car that morning, brand-new Corvette. Some jilted kid. The brake lights,” he said, “never winked.”

  His partner asked, “What year Corvette?”

  “A year that don’t concern us,” the first man said impatiently. “A year you probably never heard of.”

  The chemistry between them was suddenly familiar to Van Ness. Their connection gave off a sour smoke, like bad wiring. He sensed they’d served time in prison together, or belowdecks.

  Wilhelm Frankheimer felt easier when his old shipmate cut the visit short and left him. He had some coal soaking out by the forge, and he wanted to get to it.

  He’d come by the forge as he had the rock saw and the panel truck and a few other large items, just inheriting them from people he’d once plumbed for, who’d gotten too old or too dead to use them.

  As a child he’d wanted to be a blacksmith and had pictured himself slaving in the mighty light from a smithy’s mouth. But this one wasn’t much bigger than a backyard barbecue grill. You could almost mistake it for one, except for its stovepipe and the hand-cranked blower attached to the side like an oversized schoolroom pencil sharpener. He’d had the forge for years, but hadn’t set it up until he’d come home, this last time, from the priests of reason. Working with steel had quickly become a pointless and happy obsession. He’d fashioned a simple knife and a couple of lopsided horseshoes, but for the most part he didn’t make anything, simply heated steel, pounded steel—affected, worked, and changed steel just for the small glory in it, sometimes burning up the pieces by blowing the fire too hot and watching the metal spray stars until it was gone. Products, forms—he couldn’t have cared less. This was the time of molten things. He’d entered a private and personal Iron Age, submerging himself in the elemental depths.

  The day was nearly gone by the time he headed out back to the shop, a dirt-floored gardener’s hut built by the people he’d bought his house from.

  The fog was bad tonight. If he hadn’t known precisely where the shed stood he couldn’t have found it.

  In the backyard Frankenstein held still a minute and listened to the faint yawping of the seals on Shipwreck Rock, a sound like that of numerous unlubricated things—pistons, pulleys, hinges—drifting up to him nearly two miles on the wind. Some of those sounds were in fact words. Some of the entities out there on that rock were not seals. And not the legendary wraiths of the drowned fishers howling without rescue these last eighty-seven years. Nor the lumberjacks, helpless on the stormy shore, who wept to hear them one midnight in 1903 while the fleet of seventeen barks went down, driven on a gale from Bodega Bay and ground up on these promontories with hardly a stick of kindling to show next day for all their lives and works. Actually, no, these entities belonged to him…

  Carefully he listened. Not a word tonight. They were asleep in his veins.

  As soon as he’d stepped inside his shop and turned on the light, Frankenstein felt his burdens lifting. At the forge he picked through yesterday’s ashes, throwing aside the gnarled clinkers, keeping the pieces that had burned down to coal-coke. He scraped a space over the ash-grate in the tiny hearth and poured onto it three handfuls of wood pellets and doused them with kerosene. But something heavy lay inside him…Where did the weary heart come from? He struck the match, set the pellets ablaze. He didn’t like having to start the fire again, that was the source of this small sadness. You get tired of these endless beginnings.

  He and Van Ness should have broken off contact years ago. True enough, they were both alone, but in completely different ways, and they didn’t deserve each other. Van, you’re sort of a demon, he thought, scraping yesterday’s coal-coke back toward the center of the hearth and over the burning wood pellets, using a metal trowel. He heaped onto his fire a few scoops of wet coal from the bucket of soak water, and raked them into a ring around its center in order to cook the sulfur out of them slowly.

  Yes, the object was to remove the clinkers and the sulfur because anything that does not burn terribly, producing great heat, just worthlessly absorbs it. Only the steel must be allowed to take heat. White heat…He stripped down to a pair of cutoff shorts and work boots and put on a pair of skiing goggles tinted amber, then cranked the blower mindlessly until the coal burned with a coppery brightness.

  He was making a fireplace tool of some sort, he didn’t know what exactly, an improvised and probably useless fireplace tool. He jammed the end of a meterlong stretch of rebar into the fire’s sunny heart…The fire had a heart and a mouth and a song…he cranked the blower till the conflagration blazed white.

  Frankenstein took the three-pound hammer from the wall, found the hand-sized area on the anvil that rang the clearest and gave the most bounce to the hammer’s head—the anvil’s “sweet spot.” Everything has two meanings, he thought, our simplest, smallest words branching off into the storms and whirlpools of sex, warfare, worship. Therefore the words do not work. He breathed shallow while the wet coal at the fire’s edges coked up, the sulfur cooking out of it and filling the shop with lung-stinging fumes. “Coked up”—the verbal thing there made him wonder if he wasn’t just doing this to be doing coke, if the part of him that literalized all words, the undeciphering, dreaming part of him, believed he was in here getting high. Several nights of sick dreaming had preceded his relapse. Various dreams but they all happened in the same place, a city he must have visited once and couldn’t remember anymore, depopulated now, vast and silent stadiums, motionless streets. The man in the dream was no longer himself; it was some other fool, some other drugged maniac, and he, Frankenstein, watched the rest of it from a place beyond, like a moviegoer—a dreamgoer. He’d never before had a dream and failed to be in it.

  Van Ness, now—Van had always showed a quality like that: a figure outside the scene, watching even himself. When he entered the frame, he was dangerous. No such thing as speculation for Van; all aimless bullshit had to be actualized.

  As his therapist, a healer, a shaman, Yvonne had been dealing with the dream part of him. Yanking me in a Jungian way…She had the husk of me open—Jesus, it’s not beautiful now, the memory of it is nauseating, it’s obscene—

  So, Van, you’re going to kill yourself. Good. Everybody’s agony twists in me, but yours hurts more than most. The only person whose suffering I don’t touch somewhere on the searing surface of it is Yvonne. I thought it was because we were special, our connection blessed, banishing pain. But there was never any pain in her to start with. Her center’s a pinpoint, a microscopic star, burning without any life at Absolute Zero. She sucked it out of me, the stuff I get back by inhaling the fires of this forge—the heat. She took my heat. Traded it to the devil for some bauble.

  An ache had coiled itself around his arm from wrist to shoulder. His perspiration dripped, hissing, onto the hot steel. What were these things in his hands? The anvil rang as he pounded the orange tip of the reinforcing bar, the kind used in concrete construction, flattening it. What kind of fireplace tool was this? Maybe another knife. A sword. The anvil’s cries were feminine, operatic.

  Was there somewhere another noise? he stilled himself, head hanging, the hammer dangling from his fist—the beating of mighty wings? The future tattering his walls with its beak. Something flared beyond this room, headlights, possibly, stroking the fog. Although many of these sparks and vibes signaled nothing, and most meant less and less as he evened out after those many days and nights spent flying in the talons of a wondrous beast, some sounds were real, some were seeds, blossoming into events.

  This one, for instance, quickly placed: somebody from the barefoot welfare life was in his driveway. That toylike Volkswagen rattle. VW vans from the sixties survived in this county inexplicably, like frail kites in an attic. The noise of the little engine stopped.

  He stood at the door of his shop holding the hammer tightly in his right fist, reaching with his left hand to cut the overhead light.

  A small voice cried Help! when the light went out.

  “What do you want?”
he asked loudly, and in the dark moved away from where he’d just let himself be heard.

  “I can’t see—and so I want to see!” A woman—one with a foreign accent. “Please light your door for me or I can’t take one step or I’m going to fall.”

  By the uncharted logic of his wars, anybody openly approaching had to be neutral, and he flipped the switch again.

  “Thank you, yes!” Who was this turning up out of the foggy dark? She came at him at a kind of diagonal, like a little dog. “I was just driving by,” she said, “and I saw you. I saw you glowing.”

  He recognized her now. The Iron Curtain chick—immigrant from the tortured lands. Skinny, devoutly New Tribe—ethereal, yes. She had a beautiful face. She wore a white turban on her head.

  Once or twice, but not lately, he’d dealt with her. The van she’d driven up in would be the Sheep Queen’s.

  She looked a little wrecked, her mascara descending in streaks. Maybe she’d come from a party, left suddenly after a disastrous scene. Mussed and tearful. She was appealing like that. He wanted to participate in her fugitive chemistry.

  “Oh my God,” she said, “you’re beautiful! Sweating, half naked, torn clothing!”

  “Yeah? Maybe I should tear your clothes, too.” He hadn’t wanted anybody since Yvonne.

  It was not unprecedented for women to walk up to him like this, right out of the void—his size and power, his rippling beauty. Van Ness had explained it years ago: they were drawn to him exactly as they were drawn to horses standing in the sun.

  “It stinks inside here. This is a bad pollution,” she said, although she was smiling.

  “It’s sulfur smoke.” He sensed no need for delay. “I think I’ll rinse off in the hot tub,” he said, and took off his shorts. He was wearing only his big work boots now, his Wolverines.

  “There’s no fat,” she said. “Your physique is perfect.”

  Her clinical tone was a disappointment. “Why are you here?”