Already Dead

  Yvonne-Randall waited.

  “What was that? Was I some kind of mythical beast?”

  “You were on another planet. I’m not familiar with that one. Maybe I should tap in…” She closed her eyes. “Hm. You were out there. I’m not getting anything. Some of these planets have been destroyed, and there’s word that some burned up when stars went nova very early along in the evolution of the inhabitants. They all scattered into various rebirths, widespread incarnations. They haven’t made it up the chain yet to the afterworld.”

  “Nobody to tap into.”

  “Right, that’s what I mean. Information is not forthcoming.”

  He’d looked for spooky stuff, but she was serving around a little sci-fi.

  “Question?”

  She meant Winona Fairchild. “What?”

  “You look like you have a question.”

  “I do,” Winona said. “I was just—how’d you know I had a question?”

  “Nothing mysterious. Just the look on your face. No telepathy here!”

  “Oh. Well, I was wondering if anybody here of us, did we know each other in the past? In past lives?”

  “Let me tap in…” She shut down again; a long pause; opened her eyes. “These two”—with two fingers scissoring and unscissoring, she indicated Mo and himself—“have been married four times.”

  Mo laughed with embarrassment. Navarro took it as a boost. Next time I pinch you, he thought, no ticket. But doubted anyway she’d ever failed to charm a cop.

  “Three times you’ve been the wife,” Randall-Yvonne said to him.

  “Wish I could remember how to cook,” he said, something affable being required now, in light of his tendency to look cross-eyed at and ridicule such geeks as these. Everybody chuckled, and a familiar fantasy came to him, one along the lines of seeing everybody stripped, suddenly, to their undies; but in his case, as he generally went armed and at the moment sheltered a Compact Officer’s .45 ACP under his bulky sweater, in a holster clipped to his belt, the fantasy skewed toward multiple murder, as if he’d just whipped it down and opened up on everybody.

  “I just wonder if you wouldn’t mind,” Yvonne-Randall said. “Can I ask you to put your weapon somewhere outside the room?”

  He cleared his throat. Found no comeback.

  “Something’s creating a very low vibration. A distracting hum. Would it be your sidearm?”

  “Uh—yeah, sure.”

  And why not? But what am I doing? he thought as he stepped from the room.

  “Now you,” she nodded in Hillary’s direction as Navarro went out the front door, “have a tale to tell. I’d like to hear it.”

  He passed silently over the packed dead needles underfoot, looking back over his shoulder toward the driftwood-colored house and wondering what all that had been about. Okay, okay. Northward the bluff rounded to make an inlet and a strip of rocky beach no wider than a footpath, and then the shore tumbled upward to this property with its blunted evergreens crouching lower and lower as they approached the edge. The car was Mo’s, her dinky Cadet. He disarmed himself and jammed the Colt under the driver’s bucket, locked and checked the doors. Okay. You zinged me.

  Nobody looked at him as he took his place again between Melissa and Mo. It was dark in here. Somebody had lit some candles on the bookshelves, creating shapes and shadows in a dimness. Hillary Lally sat with her head down and wept onto her knees.

  “I guess he wanted to—he’s not faithful. I mean he plays around. I’m used to it. I mean, not used to it but—you know. He plays around. I think he wanted something involving me. I might have done it. He knows me. I’m open to new things. So he, so we, she ended up overnight with us. In the hotel. It was a suite. But nothing happened. I mean she died. That certainly happened! She was in another room, just lying down. There was nobody there. She just wasn’t alive the next thing anybody knew.”

  “Go on. It’s fine. Go on.”

  “I went in and found her. Well, on cable you can get everything in English. No, I guess it’s satellite. Well, who the hell cares? I don’t know why I brought it up. We were just watching TV and Harry—we were doing, you know—cocaine is quite a casual thing in Rio. Harry said, let’s go out, so I went to wake the girl up, Esperanza, they called her Perry, anyway she gave that as a nickname. Dead, like a lump of something. Like a great big fat fish, you could tell from across the room in the dark. I think it was a lack of vibration. Don’t you? It was quite mystical right there, in fact at that point I left my body…and somebody else came in. Do you believe me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Another soul.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Another soul entered my body.” Hillary breathed rapidly several times. “A soul wandering for years and looking for—”

  “Revenge against your husband.”

  “Oh! God!” Sobs burst out of her. She wiped at her face. “Who, who, who—was it?”

  “Somebody born into a life of weakness. The weak lives are long ones, because they often continue in the void spaces between the afterworlds. They can involve a lot of wandering and confusion before the next birth. In his earth-time, out of weakness, he turned to pleasures and drugs. He blamed others for his weakness, your husband among them.”

  “I could feel his hate. I wanted to kill Harry.”

  “Shhh. It wasn’t you,” Yvonne-Randall said. “Maybe you felt the feelings, but they were his. Not yours. In your body he went in to stand over your husband for a long time. He almost killed him. Then he found forgiveness. He saw that this life is a punishment for your husband, at least in the terms of warfare and tribunal in which he sees things.”

  “I still hate him,” Hillary said. “And there’s nobody inside me now but me.”

  Was the woman claiming some evil spirit had entered her heart and made her want to kill her husband? An uncomfortable notion…Something Navarro didn’t like known about himself was that stories of possession by dark forces, of people fallen under the control of enemy souls, felt to him quite believable. In East L.A. he’d arrested any number of sunk, baffled fathers or sons who only moments before had torn their houses down around their families, as if demons had come and gone in their hearts. And many times he’d seen a blurry happiness in the eyes of people just arrested for something inexplicable and ugly, as if demons had come and stayed.

  “Goddamn Harry,” Hillary said, still crying like a child. “Oh, Harry, I hate you…”

  “Shhh. Shhh. Hush. You and I, we’ll end up doing everything, tasting every fruit, whether good or evil. There can be no penalty, no purgatory, no hell. Only a relearning after error. There’s no banishment, only wandering. No torture, no retribution for our deeds, no need for forgiveness except our own forgiveness of others. And of ourselves.”

  Hillary wept, drawing long jagged breaths and giving up her misery in short, interrogatory-sounding outbursts, and Yvonne said, not only to her, but to them all: “Shhhhh…It’s Eurus…”

  Shh. It’s Eurus: Shhhh…” and her susurration blended with that of another flurrying past from offshore. “It’s Eurus, god of the east winds.” Out the window the runty bull pines and knotted cypresses hardly moved, they had built themselves against exactly such gods. Arboreal contortions, sculpted into agony. Topiary likenesses but likenesses of what? Some grotesque and lovely inner churning.

  In the lull as the wind blew by and old Hillary whuffed as if foaling, Fairchild heard again Yvonne’s Electronic Obvious in the air. Covering up her true music with this other.

  Three days? Another reprieve rescinded, a sort of Easter parody, after three days down under, Lally jumps up whole. Lally back machinating after his glorious subequatorial whirlwind thing. The cop, Navarro, looked at Hillary. Crossed his arms over his chest. And then actually crossed his eyes in his face. Good for you. In his sharply creased Sta-Prest sports garb, his acrylic turtleneck from which dangled the black shooting-range wraparounds, you’d pick him out instantly at any political picnic as one of the Secr
et Service. A nonvoter. He’d brought his moll. The waitress was all angles, cartoony, especially as she wore something on the silky side—or just as likely synthetic, what did he know?—a fakey Hindu pants suit, anyway it draped, looked tossed over wires. Fairchild glanced at her more and more often. And she was altogether pretty, the front of her head really just a location for her two immense eyes, quite blue and completely empty of harm. Only did later glances turn up anything else in the way of features, and the lips were full and small and the nose straight and deftly angled and poignantly disfigured by a tiny ring. She had a broad, quiet forehead. Her short haircut curled around forward beneath her ears, which were also lovely, shell-like and almost lobeless, not pierced, and their whorls, the routes to her brain, as he thought of them, not at all complicated. She had great hands, a bit knuckly and marked-up and on closer inspection actually tattooed, but all the better for that, shaped by days in a human life and promising to taste of the whole story. He wished he could lick them. And kiss her eyes. Miracles had blessed her with lids big enough to hide those eyes. When she closed them they came down covering a great dark peace.

  He couldn’t see Winona’s face. She kept herself at an occluding angle, as if one look would audit and judge her. But he’d come for love, not judgment…The session, meanwhile, had become an embarrassment. Hillary went on her knees and rooted, at least in the bulging and shrinking candlelight it appeared she did, between Yvonne’s delicious thighs. Amid the smoky amber shapes and green shadows. “Shhh. It doesn’t involve you,” Yvonne consoled her.

  “But—”

  “It doesn’t involve you except by chance. You were there, and he used your body, came into you at a traumatic moment that left you vulnerable. He would have used you to kill your husband—would have made use of your resentments, your anger against him. We all have those feelings of rage and hate toward the ones we love most. But you found your own forgiveness. Thus did you thwart the demon.”

  A break for tea: the lights back up, another six pounds of hardwood fed frontways into the stove’s blank face. “We have to pay the bills around here,” Yvonne announced, tapping a wicker bowl on the bookshelf beside her. Despite her frankness, meant to disarm, the bowl skipped among them like a turd. Fairchild passed it on without touching his pockets. The others pitched in. Hillary deposited a check.

  “What kind of tea have we got here, Yvonne?”

  “Don’t you recognize it, Nelson? That’s Good Earth. Winona brought it.”

  “I thought I recognized the spices. I’d forgotten about its existence. Where is she?”

  “Winona? She had to go.”

  He set it down and headed out through the kitchen.

  “Winona! Winona!” he shouted in the dark.

  The old Dodge. It wouldn’t start but after six or seven tries. She’d parked off the drive, shoved right in amongst the scrub, where nobody blocked her exit. He clutched the door handle and looked up at her in the dark cab.

  “I love you. Winona. I love you.”

  She tried again and the engine caught. The forward axle thunked as she engaged the automatic transmission.

  “I meant to tell you, sounds like a U-joint going out up front,” he said, “but that’s not important now.”

  “Move!”

  “I’m moving,” he said. “There, I’ve moved, but let me talk. I love you.”

  She pulled onto the drive with her shock absorbers squawking. Gone on the highway, down the salt atmospheres. Hillary had parked her jeep behind the Porsche, or he might have chased after her.

  By the windows’ glow he found his way back to the house and went in again to sit next to Melissa, amid the other idiots and their Idiot Chief. “What are you going to change your name to?” he asked Melissa.

  “I think maybe Music. I like folk music a lot.”

  “Am I interrupting?” he asked the others.

  “We were just getting settled again,” Yvonne told him.

  “What about something more specific? How about Polka?”

  Melissa laughed.

  “I have thrilling news,” he told the others, who’d assembled now as before. “Melissa has changed her name to Polka.”

  “I did not! He’s drunk. But I’m not drunk,” Melissa said.

  “Have you seen me take one drink today?”

  “Well,” Yvonne said, “let’s settle in and take—”

  “Please assure these people of my sobriety.”

  “—take a few deep breaths, to settle in—”

  “Sobriety! To you that’s like Mars.”

  The cop smiled broadly at this until Mo ran a fingernail along his sleeve. He crossed his arms over his chest and shut his eyes as they all got quiet.

  Yvonne held a pair of eyeglasses in her left hand. “I want to read you something from this book, just a short paragraph. The Philosopher’s Stone by F. David Peat.” She put the glasses on and bowed her head above the volume in the lap of her skirt, from which she’d probably had to wring, Fairchild wouldn’t have doubted, a pint of Hillary Lally’s teardrops.

  “‘Even the smallest region of space is filled with radiation from the extremely low frequencies of the Big Bang remnants, through the range of radio waves, from visible light and into ultraviolet, and so up to gamma rays of the highest energy. This radiation comes from stars, from supernovas, from quasars, from the event horizon of black holes, and from the twisting magnetic fields that stretch across vast regions of empty space. Moreover, all this light is carrying information—it conveys information about its origin in a nuclear process deep within the heart of a star or as matter hurtles into a black hole. Every volume of space is alive with electromagnetic radiation…’”

  She closed the book, removed her glasses and handed both to Ocean, who rose from her chair and placed them on the bookshelf.

  “That’s beautiful,” Phil said.

  “Does it bring anything to mind? About our particular environment.”

  Ocean said, “The radar domes.”

  “Exactly.”

  “The Tibetan dome also,” Melissa said.

  “Well, that, too. But they’re completely different. If everything is, at its heart and soul, electromagnetic radiation, then the radar in this area represents a serious environmental violation. And on a mystical level it violates us, too.”

  “And what about the Tibetan dome?” Melissa said. “It’s big and fat and shiny. Like hell!”

  “That dome calls to the soul,” Yvonne insisted. “It’s full of prayer and meditation. Clarity, not radiation. Emptiness. It’s not a threat. But the white domes send out messages, in a sense. Calling to people, messing them up. This should be a place of healing, but instead a great deal of energy is concentrated on looking for, anticipating, destructive intercontinental missiles.”

  Phil said, “Russia’s on our side now anyway. Haven’t they heard?”

  “Well, I suppose they help direct airline flights, too.”

  “What if whales could fly?” Phil said. “Wouldn’t that play some games with their radar!”

  “We should all hang a lot of crystals in every house,” Melissa said.

  “Crystals won’t work.”

  “They work! I cured my appendix yesterday! With a crystal!”

  “Crystals won’t work for this.”

  “What will?” Mo asked.

  “Well, some real countereffect might be achieved by burning their commanding officer’s body and drinking his ashes in a potion. But it’s hard to anticipate where you end up when you engage that kind of negative energy.”

  Hillary said, “Not his body.”

  “Pardon?”

  “It’s a woman. A she—the commanding officer.”

  Yvonne became quite still. “That would be most healing.”

  “That would work,” Hillary said, “without getting too negative?”

  “Yes. That kind of feminine sacrifice.”

  “I’d like to put a query to this policeman,” Fairchild said. “Aren’t sacrifi
ces of either gender sort of kind of like illegal? Nowadays I mean Officer?”

  “So is drunk driving.”

  Traitors on either hand…“Okay, Johnny Cop. I challenge you to a Breathalyzer test. Immediately, please.”

  “Nelson,” Yvonne said. She was lighting a candle and turned from it. “What is this?”

  “A matchbook.”

  “No. It’s this.” She tossed the matchbook at him and he batted it away beneath Melissa’s chair. Yvonne pointed at the candle’s flame. “And what are we seeing? This? No.”

  She sat back and regarded them all and smiled. “You know of course that what we’re looking at is light. It strikes the eye, produces another impulse, which is also electromagnetic radiation, along a nerve. Cells receiving it discharge other impulses of light. And now we’re told the self, the life field on which this makes an impression, is also light…The radar domes mess this up. That’s why they cause cancer. The cancer is a result of effects on the life field. It stirs up negatives in our perception which we read as sickness. Sickness is anger expressing itself in our perceptions about our bodies.”

  Fairchild felt his face descending, and put up his hands to catch it. They smelled of Melissa and the Porsche’s leather. Of course he was sober! But he was dizzy. The prickly sensation in his blood and the vertigo derived, he was sure, not from the ridiculousness of these cosmological assumptions, but from the fact that all his neighbors seemed to share them. At the same time an intense and accelerating episode of déjà vu, of having lived through this very moment, of being able to remember each frame of time in the process of its passing, seemed to narrow all perception, to focus it ruthlessly on the millisecond at hand. Yvonne’s unintelligible voice sounded clearly against his soul, clearly: she was shamming for these people, all this talk of light and fields and dreams, but her voice was the voice of a witch, a vehicle of evil.

  Seconds later he felt he may have fainted. The room had collapsed into the desolation of the candles’ auras, and it looked like they hadn’t got rid of this Randall person after all. She was at it again. The tip-off wasn’t in her manner so much as her speech.