Already Dead

He thought he was in, he thought he was here, but she brings him slowly in, turning the lights down from someplace, narrowing the focus, blacking things down till there’s just the two of them. She tuned them in, the two of them, until they were very sharp and nothing else was.

  “You are the holy Son of God himself. Say it.”

  Nonsense and incense. “Take a seat, John.” She started to turn toward the kitchen and turned back and looked at him out of her iron-colored eyes. Said in a smoky way, “Is this a John call? Or an Officer call?” He guessed she was kidding him.

  He shrugged. “I hadn’t decided.”

  “Well, you’re not all dressed up like a cop. I’ll take that as a friendly indication.”

  She went into the kitchen, and he sat down in the living room’s biggest chair and watched through the doorway as she prepared a tray of tea. “Why did you want me to say that?” he asked.

  “Just a minute,” she said, and he waited in silence, feeling exactly as he would have felt if there’d been a group gathered here and nobody knew how to begin, until she came back in and offered him tea and crackers and a grayish spread. He took his cup, and she set the tray on the hassock at his knees and sat on the floor on the other side of it. “You were asking me something,” she said.

  “That’s kind of a strange thing to say when someone knocks on your door.”

  With a tiny silver butter knife she spread goo on a cracker and handed it over to him. “A visitor comes to the door,” she said. “I know who he is. He’s everyone. And everyone is the Holy Son. So I was just wanting us both to acknowledge who you are as you stand at my door.”

  Navarro ran another cracker through the dip. Not a vegetarian thing, but more on the order of fish. Spicy. Maybe chicken. He was hungry. With his mouth full: “It’s said you’re a witch.”

  “Said?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who says so?”

  “The question is, do you say so too?”

  “That I’m a witch?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I practice wycca. It’s a form of work. Working with things not visible to us because of a mind-set. The inner world is generally invisible.”

  “Well, everybody’s got their own. It’s just not visible to the other guy, right?”

  “You’re talking about thoughts. I’m talking about the parts of us we never look at because we don’t want to see them. But eventually we’d better look. Eventually we want to look, because nothing outside is working for us. It’s simple, really. If you refuse to find out what goes on under the hood, pretty soon the car won’t start and you find you’re not getting anywhere.”

  “So you’re kind of a mechanic of the dark side.”

  “You want to trivialize what I do by putting it that way. But that’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s a form of work. I’m the one who stands there pointing with the wrench and saying, ‘That’s your carburetor, ma’am. It’s locking up on you in this hot weather. Just get somebody to hold a towel over the intake while you crank her, and she’ll start.’” She smiled at him.

  “So you round them up, grease them down, do a little shuffle.” A ribbed wavering of smoke off a stick of incense on a bookshelf reminded him of her body, and the smoke’s undulations even made him think of clutching her around the waist until something gave. “Maybe I’m being too cynical,” he said.

  “You’re just being typical. People indifferent to the Spirit want to believe it’s all a hoax. I’m not in it for the dough. If I wanted to make a profit by defrauding people of their hope, I’d offer something a lot more expensive. Phony real estate, maybe. Or I’d open a casino. Was I right? About the carburetor?”

  “Vapor lock,” he said.

  “A mechanic showed me that trick just the other day.”

  He thought she knew exactly what he was feeling, that she felt it too, and that what they were saying didn’t matter at all. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are we talking, or are you just running your shit?”

  She touched the back of his left hand with one long, unpainted fingernail. “I think you know what we’re doing.”

  That backed him up. He cleared his throat. “What’s on these crackers?”

  “A witch’s potion.”

  “Tastes like salmon.”

  “It’s trout paté.”

  “It’s pretty good.”

  “Your tea’s gone cold.” Still seated on the floor, she opened the door of her woodstove, leaning out past him and shaping her posture like a dancer’s with one leg outstretched and the other foot drawn in against her thigh. The ridges of her spine bumped up along the fabric of her shift. She tossed the liquid from his cup onto the coals so that it hissed, and poured him a cup from her teapot. She moved the tray onto the floor, rose and took its place on the hassock, leaning toward him with the cup cradled in her hands. “Wouldn’t you like some witch’s brew?”

  Navarro relaxed and let her put the cup to his lips. It was warm but not hot. He’d had this stuff. “Miso soup.”

  “Witch’s brew.”

  “Yech, lady. I like miso, but you can leave the tofu out of it.”

  “How about the bufo?”

  “I guess tofu’s healthy.”

  “I’m quite serious. Do you know what bufo is?”

  This sass made him hate her. The inside of her ankle, the inside of her knee, her bunched thigh. The toes nestled under her other thigh as she sat there on the hassock destroying all casualness with her closeness, the innocent arch of her neck, chin raised, her other foot dangling, moving like a running-down pendulum.

  She said, “The bufo’s in the paté, not in the soup.”

  “This trout stuff? It’s great. Is it smoked?”

  “No, it’s fresh. The smoky taste comes from the rest of it.”

  “There better not be any pot in this,” he said.

  “Henbane, datura—well, really, jimsonweed.”

  “What else? I’m getting a buzz, I think.”

  “Mandrake, ginseng, amanita mushroom—just a tiny bit—and lots of healthy vitamins. Morning glory seeds from Mexico. There’s even a toad involved. Would you like to see?”

  “If you just fed me a frog I don’t think I wanna know about it.”

  She shifted and raised her thigh slightly higher and he thought she was opening her legs in a shocking gesture, but then she slipped her feet to the floor and stood up.

  He got up too, enjoying all this, as a matter of fact remembering, here in midflight, how comfortable it made him feel to be seduced by a woman of the elevated, arty type, because eventually they let him walk on their masks, they owned up to their games. Not the really rich ones. But this one wasn’t really rich. He let her lead him by his hand to the kitchen of oiled wood and lusty fragrances. From a basket atop the fridge she plucked a white knuckle. “Garlic.”

  “I didn’t taste any,” he said.

  “It’s not in the potion.”

  He followed her onto the enclosed back porch, or mudroom, a chilly space stacked along one wall with firewood. He shivered, and she said, “We have to keep him cold. Then he sweats better.”

  He ran the words back in his head, but that is what he thought she said.

  “Look here, John.”

  On a white enamel table which he now got closer to, looking over her shoulder from behind, coming up softly against her, trying to restart the charge between them, he saw her mortar and pestle made of marble, several red mushrooms bearing white warts, a cardboard box with three frogs hunkered down in it stoically. Not big old reptiles. A bit smaller than fists. Two filthy white shoestrings, a metal bottle cap, an X-Acto knife, a matchbook. It all appeared more than curious. He was empowered by the sight of these little objects to toss the place, dismantle the whole building nail by board, and confiscate her cash and property. Articulable suspicion was the legal term.

  She handed him the garlic over her shoulder and,
without any sign of distaste, lifted up one of the frogs and stared at it eye to eye; meanwhile yanked from beside the box a length of stained flagging, torn maybe from a bedsheet. The frog jerked and swam nowhere, spreading its webbed toes wide. “You want garlic,” she said to it. She held the ribbon of sheet between her lips while she pried the captive’s jaws apart. “Put it in, John. Back in his throat—yes—”

  He forced the clove between its jaws. The inside of its mouth felt cool, dry, smooth to his touch. She wrapped its muzzle tightly shut with several winds of her ragged ribbon. Over the lenses of its knobby eyes, small shutters dropped down.

  “What’s the difference between a toad and a frog?” he asked as she set it among its brothers or sisters. They’d taken up diagonal corners with their backs to one another. The other sat still with its eyes walled off and its mouth tied shut around the garlic.

  “You know? I’ve never asked? And I don’t think he’d tell me. Now he’ll start to sweat. And in the sweat is the magic ingredient.”

  “Which is what, more or less?”

  “Bufotenine. Five-hydroxydimethyltryptamine.”

  “Shit. I guess everybody’s getting a mouthful.” He looked out the door’s glass window at the tips of evergreen branches. A psychedelic potion. “Boy, am I ever off the track,” he said, miserable because he didn’t feel allowed to show her how angry he was. He cleared his throat, trying to think. “Do they have names?”

  “Yeah, they’re all named Jeremiah. Do you know that song?”

  “I don’t know any songs.”

  Greenish beads hung by a shoestring from a tack pushed into the door frame. A lumpy charm or something. A cross. A crucifix.

  “That belonged to a girl named Carla Frizelli,” she said. “It’s got quite a history.”

  He didn’t touch it.

  The frog hadn’t moved, but now a vein beat on either side of its protruding closed eyes. “So, Yvonne. How much of your trout paté is Schedule Two?”

  “None of it. It’s all legal, Officer.”

  “Don’t you think you should have told me?”

  “John, John, am I with the FDA?”

  He looked her in the eyes, but she didn’t look away. “You want me to put my gun in the car?”

  She did seem serious: “Not when it’s just us two.”

  “I didn’t bring it.” He looked away first, only to have to observe thick beads of mucus weeping from the toad’s warty hide. Yvonne scraped this product from it with a matchbook cover, set the animal aside, transferred the half-teaspoon or so to one of the bottle caps.

  “And I just ate some of this,” he said.

  “That’s what you came here for.”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  “Yes. And for information. And to be with me.” She marked him with a bland stare and held him with it until the charge had started again, the silence between them humming, and he felt a thickness in his throat, then a dizzy thrill as he thought of snatching up a chunk of kindling and beating her senseless. “Between the male and the female everything is sadomasochistic,” she said, perhaps very inappropriately, perhaps not. He would have taken her by the shoulders and put his mouth on hers, but his hands dangled like weights. He felt the warmth of her breath on his neck and then she turned away, caught at his hand, and released it as he started moving after her. In the living room he sat down quickly on the hassock by the stove and rested his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, staring at the incomprehensible designs in the weaving of a throw rug. His blood flushed against his skin, as if it might burst out. The sensation ebbed away, and he realized he was breathing in rapid gasps and brought it under control. He was aware that she stood by the window, that she lowered the blinds, that she turned and sat across from him in the chair. He began to feel almost normal except for his eyes, which were teary and molten. “What are you going to say?” he whispered because he couldn’t stand waiting any longer for her voice.

  “Did you get a hot rush. Did your skin flush.”

  He tried to nod.

  “That’s only vitamin B-twelve. It passes. Is it past?”

  “You gonna scrape off my sweat now?”

  “You’re okay,” she said.

  He nodded. “This was a mistake,” he said.

  She took his hands. “It’s not a mistake. You and this woman have business.”

  “What woman?”

  “The woman Yvonne.”

  “But you.”

  “I’m Randall MacNammara. You remember.”

  “I remember.” His eyes were feeling better. Except for a slight distancing of events, he’d come around. The little lethargy didn’t seem anything worth fighting. He might have drunk a strong martini.

  “John, every moment of life has a lesson to teach. But most of us would rather just daydream our way past them.”

  “Ah, yeah. Potions.” He sighed. “Witches and demons. I’ve put the cuffs on a few. I’m not interested in those lessons.”

  “This isn’t school. It’s life. What life teaches us is responsibility.”

  I’m all for that, he thought, but didn’t bother saying it. He only said, “Snafu and tofu,” and heard himself or remembered himself laughing.

  “Sooner or later we take responsibility,” she says, “for having created our world.” Certainly, the demons were in his head. Gumdrops in a dream were not gumdrops, but a dream. But as long as you don’t wake, they’re candy. You can eat them. If they’re poison they kill you. Then you wake, still alive. But in the dream you’re dead.

  “I had a purpose here,” he reminded them both, or all three of them.

  “What was your purpose?”

  “I’m looking for Nelson Fairchild.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “I…Why do you say that?”

  “He died this morning.”

  “Uh,” Navarro said. He looked around, but at nothing. “Was this on the news?”

  “You’re one of the few on earth who know.”

  “Well, but…where’s the body?”

  “That’s irrelevant. The question is, where is his soul?”

  “Okay…Hey, would there be any chance of—talking to him?”

  “Not at the moment. Down the line there certainly would.”

  “Wow. Reserving the right to call Bullshit—how did he die?”

  “I’m not in possession of that information, but it seems he was probably murdered. For some lifetimes now he’s been caught in a drama that keeps turning out that way, I’m afraid. But it’s over now. He’s free.”

  She reaches her hand to his jaw and traces the line with her fingertip. Her own lips tremble as she breathes through her open mouth. He was hard. But the flesh of it felt tired, or cold. As did his lips and fingers.

  “Do you like her?”

  “Who?”

  “Yvonne. The woman.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Especially because you like danger, and trouble, and getting off the track. And that’s why she likes you too. Because you enjoy defending yourself.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s the kind of responsibility you believe in.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “But there’s someone who wants to talk to you if only you’ll put aside your defenses. Your moves, your programs, your John Navarro act. It’s all out there waiting to resume, but none of it’s here, in this house. Your certainties, your stock responses. It’s like parking your car by the road someplace and just getting out of it. It’s there, it’s yours, but you shut the door and walk away. You come down the path to this house. The woman opens the door. You come inside, you come in alone, carrying nothing, you shut the door behind you. You’ve come here alone, you’re alone in here with the woman.

  “Come in.” It was Yvonne again. “Come here.”

  He thought he was in, he thought he was here, but she brings him slowly in.

  “You are the holy Son of God himself. Say it.”

  Turning the light d
own from someplace, narrowing the light, blacking things down till there’s just the two of them.

  “You are the holy Son of God himself.”

  She tuned them in, the two of them, until they were very sharp and nothing else was.

  “I am the holy Son of God himself.”

  She let out a long breath and took in a long breath. A great warmth came off her, an easy welcoming sensual joy. Then she looked pained, her face swimming at him and a series of bad thoughts working on her loveliness. She covered her eyes with her hand and said, “Oh?” and it broke him like the song of an old love. She slumped back in her chair and her hand dropped away.

  He remembered now. “‘Jeremiah was a bullfrog.’” He spoke the words. He couldn’t sing.

  “I am Miran.”

  “And who is Miran?”

  “There are deeper levels, or higher levels if you prefer. Or lower, if you like it like that.”

  “You’re getting us into a different darker Babylon-type thing. I can feel it. I don’t feel good,” he said. In fact a prickly nausea overwhelmed him right along the blood in his veins.

  “You’ve never felt good. Your suffering protects you. Pain is the ransom you have gladly paid not to be free.”

  She didn’t appear to be looking at him, or anywhere else. But she rolled her shoulders slightly and seemed aware of him, electrically aware.

  “Use her body.”

  With both hands delicately she raised her hem above her thighs. Beneath her shift she went naked.

  “Feel between her legs.”

  It was like putting his hand into molten iron and finding it only pleasant.

  “Isn’t she wet? Take her.”

  Darkness all around them and particularly behind her almost like a light that put her in a gray silhouette.

  “What are you?”

  “I am Miran.”

  “Are you male or female?”

  “Both. Neither. Both…Take her.”

  He couldn’t see if her mouth was moving.

  “Take her. Anything. She’s ours.”

  He freed his fingers from the slick locks of auburn hair between her thighs. He took her by her forearm’s flesh and then he was on his knees and pulling her forward.

  “Throw her on the floor.”

  He’s on top. He can almost see her eyes.