Already Dead

  “When you’ve been caught in the world of perception you’re caught in a dream. That’s simple enough.”

  “Yesterday, you were talking to me about a doppelgänger.”

  “A soul twin. Your twin is in error. This error has led your twin into danger of a peculiar kind.”

  “Who is it? It’s Carl Van Ness.”

  “Your twin makes a basic error in mistaking the self for the universe. We all use the self as the basic referent. He fails to use any other.”

  “You mean he’s self-centered.”

  “As long as you don’t mean merely selfish. We’re talking about a failure of perception that amounts to total spiritual blindness and soul-sickness. This person compounds his basic error by believing that the universe started with his birth and ends with his death. If he believes in reincarnations, he believes in reincarnations of the whole universe. That eliminates karma, relearning, and the law of compensation—since each universe is a closed system, bounded by his lifetime. Through all these universes one after another, the only thread, the only continuity, is his identity. And the thread is endless. He has no destiny.”

  “And is that actually true?”

  “It’s as he makes it. He’s condemned himself to an unimaginable interval on the current plane.”

  “To hell with him, then. But there are two others, two men, out to kill me.”

  “And so they will. But they’re not important.”

  “I beg your fucking pardon?”

  “They’re merely completing a design you began—you yourself began—in an earlier existence. You killed in a previous era, in this one you experience the other side of that. The lesson begun in one life is finished in another.”

  “That’s just—ugly! Justice should be rounded off in a single life, if you’re going to have it at all. Otherwise it’s so unfair, so unpoetic.”

  “It’s a game, Nelson Fairchild. First you learn offense, now you learn defense.”

  “I’m not a gamesman. I look on things as serious.”

  “Well, things aren’t serious. But this one thing is. This Devourer.”

  “Van Ness.”

  “The Devourer has possessed a body at the moment of death, and you took it home with you. You invited it in. Now it eats.”

  “And I’m lunch.”

  “At least you keep your sense of humor.”

  “Sure thing. Yes I do.”

  “He’s the one to take seriously. The others are just figures in your waking dream.”

  “I take my waking experiences as facts. They have a certain logic, anyway. Meanwhile, dreams are jumbles. I know the difference.”

  “What you seem to wake up to is just another form of the same world you see in dreams. All your time is spent in dreaming. Your sleeping and your waking dreams have different forms, that’s all…Nelson Fairchild: Do you believe in God?”

  “When you get right down to it? Yes. Because I’m nuts.”

  “Then let me ask you this: Would God have left the meaning of the world to your interpretation?”

  “I assume so. Of course he did. It’s a stupid question, actually.”

  “If he did, then it has no meaning. Meaning can’t change from person to person, and still be true. No. If God means something by all this, then only one set of interpretations will suffice. God looks upon the world as with one purpose, changelessly established. And no situation can affect its aim. Everything is in accord with it. Everything.”

  “Is there really a God, then?”

  “Well, actually, I don’t know. But I believe it more strongly than you possibly can in a chaos of perceptions like a funhouse.”

  “I call it reality. I’m stuck with it.”

  “Is it real? And are you stuck with it?”

  “Randall MacNammara, Ghost Man, I’m ready to make a deal with you—offer you something. Just tell me what.”

  “I’ll employ the same analogy again. What could somebody from last night’s dream offer you? Riches and gold? Riches and gold in a dream aren’t riches. They’re just dreams. And the people, places, and things you fear are dreams too. Don’t fear them.”

  “Easy for you to say. Couldn’t you stop them?”

  “Couldn’t you face them?”

  “No! Could you stop them.”

  “It’s possible to work some effect.”

  “So do it. Hey—just for fun!”

  “I’m sure you could locate a wandering bitter entity somewhere between the realms. They like mischief. Mischief and hurt.”

  “Then I will. I’ll get me a spiritual vandal.”

  “I’m not interested in helping you.”

  “Why not? What’s the difference—come on! You can’t, can you? You’re just a gig, a trick. Yvonne!” he shouted.

  She closed her eyes. A minute of silence wore away in the room, which he realized had become unbearably warm. Fairchild shrugged away the blanket and wrapped a corner of it around the stove’s porcelain door handle, and shut it tight. Yvonne said, “I’m tired.”

  “Don’t fade on me just yet. What were you just talking about—about mischievous entities.”

  “There are such.”

  “Get me one on the line, then, how about. Whether I’m sure about all this working or not, I’m out to get these bastards done, okay? I’m out of options.”

  “But we don’t know what bargains the two men have made. All their promises will be kept. All their mistakes will be corrected. Whatever they were sent here to fulfill will be fulfilled.”

  “Just cast a fucking spell, will you?”

  “I don’t cast spells. I can open a channel that leads to their guides. I can make a bargain with their guides—arrange to have them take a shortcut.”

  “Which means?”

  “Help them reach their destination sooner.”

  “Destination?”

  “Whatever their fate may be. Probably not a happy one this time around.”

  “You mean hire a cosmic hit man?”

  “You have to understand. Whatever they’re on this earth to do will be accomplished. If it’s something you fear, then maybe we should leave it alone.”

  “Just make a deal. Any deal.”

  She put a hand to her forehead, let her touch fall to a gilded lampstand and fingered its intricacies—its cups, its capitals and its flowers. Her fingers found the switch and she turned it on with a spasm of her hand and let down an unflattering light over half her face. Her mouth worked in bewilderment. Then she gave him a tiny, angry smile.

  He said, “Randall.”

  “The tap-in is not Randall.”

  “We gonna talk to Randall again?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  The one he’d sensed from the first, the guest whose presence he’d felt all along, had come into the room with them.

  “I am Miran.”

  “And who is Miran?” The question hovered unanswerable in the aether.

  October 30, 1991

  The blind people in prison. Suddenly I think about them, suddenly after all this life, the prisoners who are blind. How many are there? What’s it like? Does my mother know some blind prisoners? At the facility she works in, they like to call it a facility, it amuses them to call it a detention center, at the ladies’ pen a few dozen miles out of San Francisco, at the north edge of Marin County—at their prison, the gun towers are not the tallest things. They see pines climbing up mountains another nearly two thousand feet, ascending to the peaks and turning around and looking back at them. I’m not sure what I am getting at here but I think it must be important because I got out of bed just as I was at the verge of sleep to write to you about it, Winona.

  There is something else. I know you made love to Glen Bolger, John Marks and at least one other person, I don’t know which person, after we were married. You call me weak but if you in your lack of wisdom define strength as the ability to suffer worthless pain, well, all I have to say is oh, fuck you. I can see there’s no real need here to fi
nish sentences or pretend to be articulate. It’s another one of those letters. You start out to do something sane and the next thing you know you’re threatening the mayor’s life or taking hostages in a supermarket.

  Sometimes on these gray days the past just comes rolling armylike through the fields toward my naked heart. There was a certain person, one man in particular. I was that man. Now I’m not. I’m writing you only in order more terribly to feel

  Officer Navarro set the pages aside and took a look at his wristwatch, an Omega designed to work underwater to a depth of several fathoms, though he wasn’t a diver, and he wasn’t pressed for time—had about sixteen hours, if anybody was counting, to burn until work tomorrow morning—but was just interested in how long the dryer might run. Another three minutes. Or four.

  Impatient with the whole process, with repetitions in general, he opened the dryer’s hatch in midcycle and watched the collapse of this galloping carousel. He took out his handkerchiefs and white jockeys. They’d dried, but his uniform and jeans had not. He let fall another dime and watched them go, his outer garments, these things of cloth all in a whirl and completely absurd.

  He thought: I’m going up there. One of them sits two hundred yards from this spot.

  He replaced the pages in their envelope and went out to his car, a muscular ’76 Pontiac from whose hood he’d burnished away the gangster Firebird tattoo. Such signifiers he considered a little bit too glorious, a little bit too Mexican. But he liked the power, and he liked the handling. Tossing the white envelope into the child-sized backseat, he got behind the wheel and discovered on the floorboard on the passenger’s side a small green plastic garbage bag containing, as he knew, his three bath towels and two washcloths. He yanked the bag up across his shoulder, and with a sense of struggle, with a sense these repetitions were overcoming him absolutely, with weakened steps, he went back into the Laundromat to start another washer before driving the short distance through the neutral dusk up the hill to the giant’s home.

  Wilhelm Frankheimer had recently moved, had rented a small house, a cedar-shake cottage quite familiar to Navarro, just up Anchor Bay’s only east-west street. It looked pretty much the same, but had tipped detectably toward decline. The lawn was shaggy, the drive unswept. Somebody had broken the flagstones splitting wood out front.

  Navarro picked up a headless axe handle and knocked it against the old ship’s bell posted out by the path. He went on to the front door and knocked several times but had trouble getting Frankheimer to acknowledge. Yet he had to be there, the chimney was smoking and he almost never got out, and when he did he got no farther than the store or the cafe.

  Somebody inside shouted, “Roll on in.”

  Navarro found Frankheimer stretched out near the fire on a plastic deck recliner, wearing an old brown bathrobe and drawing a blanket around his shoulders.

  “Take a seat. Mind bringing me a glass of water first? In the fridge.”

  Navarro obliged him. On the refrigerator, held up by magnets, the school photos of two children fronted his gaze, a little blond girl and a smiling blond boy with a lot of tension in his face.

  “Ignore the magic mushrooms in there.”

  “I wouldn’t know what they look like.”

  “They look like mushrooms.”

  He brought Frankheimer the water jug, but Frankheimer only held it in the grip of his big hands. His legs went longer than the chair so that his shins draped down, scarred and lumpy and shiny, like worn wood, and his jaundiced feet rested at delicate angles on the floor. His metal crutches lay on either side of him.

  Navarro sat himself in the bay window and, for no reason he could name, savored the ridiculousness of his presence here in this room where he’d lived some of his finest moments. This scene of some of his worst behavior. Mo had kept it beautiful; now the place felt cheap and close and smelled of stubbed-out cigarettes and dirty laundry—smelled as a matter of fact like his own place. He really didn’t care about the psychedelic goddamn mushrooms or, when you got right down to it, any of this man’s crimes.

  “You here about the junk I left up there?”

  “Not exactly,” Navarro said. “But it was mentioned to me.”

  “I’ll get around to it. It was a sudden move. I lost the house.”

  “Too bad.”

  “No. It’s all for the best. I’m taken care of.”

  He flung a white gym sock into the fireplace and it started to smoke thickly and then burned.

  “You’ll see me dancing tomorrow,” he said.

  “At the big fun wedding? What makes you think I’m going?”

  “Not you specifically. I was speaking to the whole world.”

  “Yeah. I’ll be there. On duty though.”

  “Dancing on aluminum legs. Stay tuned for that.”

  “What caused this?”

  “Wheels ran over me.”

  “I know. I meant what was the cause of the accident?”

  “You didn’t do the report?”

  “CHP took care of it.”

  “The cause was I was fucked up. More or less sleeping when I was supposed to be awake. Can’t do that, man. You end up in the road. Cars run you down. You spend nine months in plaster. You get six operations.”

  “Were drugs involved? Is that what—”

  “What did the fucking? Well, ultimately, primarily, it was Yvonne. Principally it was her although a car is what apparently ran over me. You know Yvonne? Chiefly it was her.”

  Shame and sudden sweat shut Navarro up, and he changed around in his seat.

  “So you got stoned. Didn’t look both ways.”

  “You currently on duty?”

  “No.”

  “Is this an official visit?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Frankheimer grimaced like an ape and put his finger back between his jaws. “I have a sore under my tongue.”

  “Well, no, I don’t think it’s really official.”

  “Okay. What is it? Social?”

  “Maybe we could talk off the record.”

  “You’re a cop. I’m a critter.”

  Navarro sighed, placed his hands over his knees. “I’m thinking I might resign the first of the month. I’m pretty sure.”

  “Gonna stick around? Maybe in some other capacity?”

  Navarro realized he’d given it no thought—none.

  “So what is the subject of our inquiry?” Frankheimer said.

  “Carl Van Ness.”

  “There’s a name.”

  “You guys pretty good friends?”

  “Friends? Not by any means.”

  “Then what’s the connection?”

  “It’s mystical.”

  “Yeah?”

  “An energy thing.”

  “Yeah? How about aside from all that?”

  “There’s no connection on this level.”

  “What level?”

  “The level of this which you call reality.”

  “Yeah?” Navarro said. “I don’t call anything reality anymore.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  Navarro raised his eyebrows at this nonsense.

  “I’m telling you the truth, but in a language you don’t understand.”

  “Try this. When did you meet him?”

  “Oh, man. Lemme see, that’s gotta be twenty-one, twenty-two years ago. We shipped together a couple years, three or four years. He kept in touch, maybe one letter per year, or just a card. Just a card addressed to Frankenstein. Then, when he showed up—that was it. It wasn’t the same guy.”

  “You had a falling-out.”

  “It was not the same person. It was a walk-in.”

  “A walk-in what?”

  “Sometimes a person dies, and before the soul’s hardly out, another one walks in. A wandering soul. A sick soul, too weak to make it across the realms. A psychotic soul, referred to in most mythologies as a demon. It takes over completely. Sucks at the vital energy. It’s Van Ness’s body, and Van Ness’
s brain, even Van Ness’s ideas. But it’s not Van Ness. When people do evil things repeatedly without compunction, man, that ain’t people. That’s demons.”

  Navarro, who had crossed his arms over his chest during this dissertation, let them drop. He hung his head.

  “Do you believe in such things?”

  Navarro couldn’t look him in the eye, but he found he could tell the truth.

  “Yes,” Navarro said.

  This October had seen plenty of rain—a dozen inches since the first. And now a bit more along the cliffside pastures and over the highway, wisps of it stretched on intermittent gusts. He turned the Firebird’s wipers on and set the timer for the longest interval. Passed along the wide fields where a yearling pinto stallion bucked and hopped by himself a quarter-mile distant from the rest of the string, who stood bunched under trees on dirt they’d trampled lifeless over the months. They’d rubbed up against and killed half the little bull pines back there too. He knew it was a yearling because he’d seen it last September as a rickety foal. The animal stopped still, looking out to sea, then lowered its head as the sky tore open, and Navarro saw the rain dripping from its curved neck as he passed, turning up the wipers full-speed—

  Navarro disliked horses, and any species of animal of whom it was said, “They smell your fear.”

  Just five days ago, when he’d found the pages written in Fairchild’s hand, the sun had blazed hot enough to burn away the puddles in a steam. Perhaps it had been the last clear day of Indian summer, the last beautiful day, as Navarro drove the coast alone, his heart reaching out toward the goodness of the world. A hot day, in fact. He had the windows closed. He had the climate control on and it blanketed him—cool air and thin warm sunlight and the ocean shredding itself silently on the rocks. He was supposedly on patrol but had kept on going, out of town, south, through Anchor Bay and then Gualala and past the green sign—SAN FRANCISCO 114—on the river’s far side, and clear out of the county. If you just stay loose and cool and steady in your breath. Stay away from the spiral’s edge. He’d kept them behind glass in L.A., but here he’d failed. He’d whirled right down into it with them, never even known he’d been in the soup till he was nine-tenths drowned. Slide along the coast. Keep these windows closed.