Already Dead

  and then, read the blood-marbled pages John Navarro held in his hands one year later—

  and then in its every detail I envision it, how with the rain’s letup Van Ness you came yourself into a spell of calm and leaned against the Volvo on the passenger side, draped your arms over the roof, laid down your head across your dripping khaki sleeves. Curious how the weather gusted out there in the seaward black, while right around you along the coast road everything wilted and scarcely sighed. You were drenched. You thought of yourself as glistening. Every few minutes as a vehicle passed from behind and rolled you through a bath of light it came to you afresh that these people didn’t know in the least what they were looking at.

  And me, the sucker, Nelson Fairchild, Jr.—he hadn’t known. But now his eyes would be opened.

  You got back inside the car, crossed the Gualala River onto the Sonoma County side and laid by again in sight of a bleached derelict cattle barn, its shape both looming and tentative at this lightless hour. You had another stop to make tonight, but not yet, a little time to kill before—and now you started laughing out loud, and the ocean laughed back. You wiped your mustache energetically, laid the white kerchief on the dash and turned to and cracked open with your dirty hands the Fairchild family’s copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra, stolen earlier that night from Winona’s living room.

  And didn’t you find this place in earshot of the sea’s cachinnation and tolling completely in accord with your new understanding of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s words, of how Nietzsche’s words rang hollow—kid scaring his elders to fend aside his own true terror, he’d never actually lived it all the way out, never tasted his own wares—and weren’t you thinking about his words as you reversed direction three hours later and drove to the hill on the coast road’s east side looking down at the hooded unintelligent eyes of the house where Nelson Fairchild, Sr., lay dead, as you watched the comings and goings of people with grim business in that place, and as you followed—at a great distance, but easily because it was the only other vehicle out that late—my, Nelson Junior’s, sports car up onto the ridge road and into the iron moonless dark and nearly overtook him there; weren’t you still thinking about Nietzsche as you pulled to the roadside a hundred feet back of the stranded Porsche and waited and listened while far, far away the Pacific rolled a marble down a tin groove of infinite turnings; thinking in particular of certain of Nietzsche’s lines concerning evil, a subsistence with which it pained—or did it exult?—you to admit the philosopher had never really stained his fingers—

  An image made this pale man pale. He was equal to his deed when he did it: but he could not endure its image after it was done.

  —and thinking in special particular of one line you’d perhaps read over and over and felt you were probably enacting at this moment as you moved toward Nelson completely sightless but smelling him out by his fear—

  In wickedness, the arrogant and the weak man meet. But they misunderstand one another.

  —reviewing this line in great confidence having proven it wrong by experiment, by deeds, in fact knowing it wrong because we, you and I, the arrogant man and the weak, understood one another exactly to the degree necessary?

  You heard the tenor of your footsteps alter, warped by the car’s acoustic mass, you bumped your hand against the car’s left rear quarter panel and dragged your fingers along the canvas top until they plumbed midair at the driver’s open window, heard the driver’s terrified breathing but couldn’t find him in the drisky black except by reaching through the window until you touched his face. You could have put your fingers to your lips and tasted his tears. And you heard with a curious grieving apprehension the action of your own innards and thought to yourself that Nietzsche never experienced his own guts in his belly, not truly, not like this, and the other said:—I wasn’t even sure you owned a car.

  —You recognize me.

  —Of course I do.

  —You think you do.

  —My father is dead.

  Only the purity of this darkness kept you from laughing out loud.

  —And my wife is still alive. As you know perfectly.

  You kept quiet because the noise of words seemed to create this place by inhabiting it—nearness, farness, a space…The other coughed in the dark and you believed you heard him spit through the opposite window. He spoke again:

  —This is the most absurd night in my experience. It’s completely liberating.

  —Don’t bore me with lies. You don’t get liberated by someone else’s life or death.

  —I mean the absurdity. The absurdity’s liberating. Okay?

  —Okay by me Jack.

  —What happened?

  —What happened when my friend?

  —Don’t piss me off, Van Ness! How do you know I’m not pointing a gun at you right now?

  —Maybe a three-five-seven? Maybe for instance a Smith & Wesson? Maybe because I’m pointing it at you.

  —What is that thing?

  —I borrowed a book to read.

  —The goddamn Nietzsche. The fucking Zarathustra.

  —I borrowed it off Winona.

  —What happened?

  —Nothing happened.

  —But you were there, right there.

  —Nobody home it seemed.

  —She was asleep, you son of a bitch, asleep as planned.

  —I’m getting in.

  You came around the car. The inside smelled of leather and gasoline and mildew. The other shrank and reared like a viper as you sat beside him.

  —Do I gather my father being dead doesn’t interest you very much?

  —I knew about it.

  —Who told you?

  —Perhaps some asshole in the hotel bar.

  —You are a mutated strain.

  —I’m just one station farther down the way. I’ve shed just one more shape than you.

  —Bullshit. You’re crazy is all.

  —Don’t let a little earthquake shake you off. You’re moving to a new stage of yourself. The caterpillar and the butterfly—they can’t imagine each other. An intellectual like you, naturally your own metamorphosis is gonna scare you to the jams—it’s a process beyond the grasp of your mind.

  —And what am I metamorphosing into, professor?

  —The lion.

  —Really? Which one?

  —You know. The camel. The lion. The child.

  —Oh…Zarathustra.

  —First the spirit is a camel, taking on great tasks and reveling in its strength.

  —Also sprach Van Ness. What a bore.

  —Then it turns into a lion, fighting against the dragon of convention, rule, law, even morality—killing all that shit.

  —And how does he turn into a child?

  —How? According to Nietzsche it just happens, it’s inevitable. The spirit breaks the rules and then experiences another birth. The child—(and you quoted now as if reading aloud)—is a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes…

  —Enough. Okay. I get it and it bores me. You bear the burdens as a camel, you break the bonds as a lion, you’re born again as a child.

  —Yeah. But Nietzsche’s wrong.

  —Of course he’s wrong. How could anybody with five successive consonants in his name be right?

  —There’s no child stage. Why would there be? Child of whom? Nurtured and cared for by what?

  —I don’t know, boss.

  —There’s no child stage. Once you become a lion, a spirit acting from will and making its freedoms, that’s the end of it.

  —Your beliefs make you deranged. If you’re a lion, your beliefs make you a rabid one.

  —Relax. Isn’t this better now that your father’s gone? As soon as Winona’s crossed off, you get all the money.

  —Nothing I say can have any meaning to somebody as completely crazy as you.

  —Let’s give it another try.

  —Nothing I’ve ever touched has ever been touched by you.

  ?
??Let’s hit that little honey. Make her dead.

  —I wish I could tell you, get through to you, one thing, the following thing: that you couldn’t say anything like that right now unless you were the complete personification of evil.

  —Evil? I thought we were way past that. Let’s have another go.

  —Just waltz on in.

  —She’ll fall asleep again.

  —Fucking A. Probably does it nightly.

  —One more time.

  —Listen. Those Nembutals. It’s not easy to make a switch. The capsules fall apart, the tweezers dent the little things, you have to be very gentle or they look plainly battered. Plus the powder gets all over them on the outside—enough to make a reasonable person wonder.

  That’s when you knew…

  You struck a match and lit up the damnation in his eyes: the self-defeat, the foregone failure. A queazy self-righteousness translated through his face like oil. And you said:

  —Here. Your book. Keep it.

  (Carl Van Ness: I sixth-sense, telepathize and soothsay what you saw in my jutting ears and big gaze—the shocked naivete of a fawn picked up by the headlights. Oh yes my eyes had been opened. That everything would play as you wanted, that’s what you saw. That this creature had worked out his own destiny at a table in a void with unthwartable agencies. You saw your own efforts like a spoon in a maelstrom and helping no more than that to stir it. You saw me. And I saw only Carl Van Ness with his nowhere face behind those thick specs, moving along our ridges like an empty wolf, preexisting and reexisting endlessly. As I see right now vividly and too late looking up out of the well of my own death with what fine velvet you played me. How you greased me along to stop me breaking to the cops. And what an idiot I was. I believed I was playing you until I’d have them trap you in some final way—catch you square by rights with your teeth in her neck and drag you down to dungeons, boy. I never should have tried to swap our roles. My mistake was thinking you the tempter. But it was I. All along you were Adam moon-naked and I was the baffled snake.)

  —We’ll give her another spin—you said.

  —It would have to be after the funeral. My father’s funeral.

  You held the match till your fingers spasmed.

  September 4–12, 1990

  She leaned against the car a second and jumped back, swiping at her arm and squinting at where it burned.

  Clare was weary and giving her the business. She put him down with a comic and went in to sit at a table near the videos the truckers played.

  Eleven empty chairs before as many games—one farmer boy about sixteen dipping a quarter down into the cleft and the colored light changing over his face while a hand of poker snicked out across the screen—a waitress retying her apron while she watched the images from behind the boy’s shoulder—the cook pressing meat down on the griddle so it spit—one old man and his old woman sunk to the bottom of marital silence in a vinyl booth.

  “Any work?”

  The waitress stared at the game and said, “A position you mean? Or just for a meal?”

  “Position I guess.”

  “No, sorry.”

  “Swindling old monster,” the farmhand said and fetched the machine an openhanded blow.

  “Or maybe just for a meal, did you say?”

  The waitress looked her over.

  “I got a little boy travelling too.”

  She changed out of her dress to wash out empty lettuce crates by the Dumpster, spraying the asphalt to keep it cool beneath her bare feet. She drove the sad torn leaves against the wall and scooped them together into one big mess between her hands. She dumped them in…The tang of Dumpster rot…She rinsed and throttled her bandanna and scrubbed herself up to the fringes of her cutoffs.

  Clarence came and joined her, though he should have been taking his nap. He seemed in a trance and broke down grieving when she sprayed him. “You got it wet.”

  “Well, you had to walk right at the hose, didn’t you?”

  “Shit anyway,” he said.

  “Don’t foul your mouth over a goddamn comic book.”

  “I don’t care what I do,” he said.

  She took him back to the car. He lay down and stared up at the comic until the drawings fell over his face, and later he seemed vague and content while they ate hamburgers by the cafe’s big eastern window and watched the colors of the empty sky and ripe fields swiftly deepen and the building’s shadow stretch out over the concrete-curbed row of walnut trees and the four parked cars. She listened to the farm boy and the waitress recite slowly, like bingo callers, lists of pregnancies and car wrecks. The Lord had banned her from smoking some months ago, and right now, with the day used and the coffee in front of her, she felt that old demon running just a feather along her throat. Clare caught up on his fingertips the last crumbs from his plate and fed them to his tongue. She said, “This is the most loveliest time of day.”

  She bedded him down up front and lay in the cargo space listening while the breeze felt around the cracks.

  “Hey,” she said. “Clarence…?” and fell asleep.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  The cook banged her up the next morning and handed her two boxed breakfasts through the car’s window.

  “For the road.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “Can’t let that little stomach get growly.”

  “Say thank you, Clare.”

  “Thank you.”

  The cook was a little woman with short arms and a flat face and a long-ago smile. “It’s just the number three minus the gravy. You don’t want gravy in a cardboard go-box.”

  “No ma’am.”

  “Where you heading?”

  “Well, we’re trying after a crop, if there is one.”

  “Sea urchins.”

  “Lemme get that open for you, Clare. Sit up straight. Put it straight, you’re gonna spill it and have a mess all over you. Sea urchins?”

  “Yeah, they’re like a cross between a cucumber and a garden slug. The Japanese pay a shitload of money for things like that.”

  “Where do you pick ’em?”

  “Near the sea, I guess. Or right down in it, for all I know.”

  “I’m no swimmer.” She opened her box and fell to with the white plastic fork.

  “Anyway the coast is just right this time of year. Summer’s a bitch with a gun down along this stretch, I’m sure you noticed. Man. If I could cook gourmet I’d go to one of those little hamlets by the sea.”

  “This is good. Gourmet enough for me, eh.”

  “You ever been to Pacific Grove or any of those places?”

  “Not as I believe.”

  “Anyway I think you’ll find what you’re looking for in the sea.”

  “Are you religious?”

  “Fuck no. Not even close.”

  “I am.”

  “Your boy’s got big beautiful eyes. What do you see with them eyes, sweetie?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The girls are gonna eat you up. Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “Well, they are.”

  She drifted the Dodge past the Phillips 66 with the broken door on its john and the row of motel rooms with their red doors burning in the morning light, and gassed up as cheaply as she could at the other one, the Star Store and Fuel, figuring the distance to still cheaper prices at about four gallons’ worth, or fifty-two miles. Back again on Interstate 5 with the driveline’s regular shudder tunneling under her and the tires’ intoxicated tremolo drilling her ears and the tightness starting in her nape, she begged for safe passage and unmitigated guidance and wiped the sweat from the wheel with a sour washcloth. They passed lengths of farmland separated increasingly by blonde hills. Buzzards explored the world far overhead, and beneath the buzzards a crop duster biplane switched back and forth over the highway, laying out a billowy white spoor. Mother and child drove right through it. “Hold your breath, Clare.” The plane’s image passed across the mirror. “Shit.
That’s him. That’s the closest thing to Satan you’ll see today. Remember how people got sick at the orchard?” She was coughing, dizzy, saw a giant foot planted in the sky with its bestial claws dripping venom. She needed a breather here but felt wary of turning off the car. Yesterday she believed she’d come to the desert to break down and lift her heart, felt the great promise in coming up against a storm—miraculous, unique type of storm—then her car gets fixed and she herself also, popped by the character from Los Angeles, and now the man gone and his smell all over her and the storm lifted, just the clear vista faintly messed with by agricultural chemicals.

  So the dust storm wasn’t the thing. And the desert wasn’t the place. And the man was definitely not the man.

  Carrie on Route 5 negotiated palpitating zones of heat alongside burn piles that cracked and rattled like the last two cars on the bone train, and then a whole acreage being burned away, the wind unrolling a black rug fringed with flames and thick mustard-tinted smoke across the open fields toward the anvil of the heavens…She made for the coast—up Route 5 as far as the town of Williams and then west over to Ukiah on California 20, past Ukiah along the Boonville road into rolling hills and oaks, and then among redwoods in Anderson Valley, on through Boonville to Mountain View Road, a skinny lonely zigzag alongside precipices made less nauseating by enclosing forestation, then down a long grade from whose halfway point she spied the open Pacific, where she had to get clean, even drown herself if necessary—made for the coast with something gigantic happening to her there to the west, and eastward, back of her, all death and Devil.