Already Dead

  “Van Ness. First name Carl.”

  “And you won’t be saying much more,” Fairchild predicted, referring to the terrible sound Van was making words with. “Now,” he said, “I’m going to offer you a glass so you can toast with me. Drink it or not, whatever you feel like.” Fairchild held the liter bottle tightly with both hands as he poured. He raised his glass high: “The first person ever to be born in space!”

  He sat down at the table, and Van watched him drink. Fairchild was younger than he’d thought, more like twenty-five than thirty-five. A young dude with an old man’s fear in his eyes—fear was the driving wheel. There was a form of security in knowing a person’s prime mover. The young man’s hands were steady now. He lifted and spread the deck of cards from his solitaire game, stripped one gently from the fan, slapped it down: “The Suicide King.”

  Funny how the pictures were always right side up. Yes, he got it—the King of Hearts, stabbing himself, for some reason, in the side of the head. The Suicide King.

  Fairchild said, “You’re silent. Stunned by the coincidence.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “You don’t believe in destiny?”

  Van swallowed with some pain, happy to answer. “The concept is almost always misused.” Anxious to answer, even with his throat all torn up.

  “The one real road, the signs at the turnings?”

  “I make the road. I draw the map. Nothing just happens to me.” He swallowed, trying not to grimace. “I’m the one happening.”

  “How can you say that? I just pulled you back from death. You’ve been lying there virtually not happening for ten, twelve hours. For over fourteen hours,” Fairchild said, checking the clock on his electric coffeemaker.

  Van stood up and turned over the table.

  “React,” he said amid the noise of breakage and the sound of fragments singing over the Spanish tile.

  Fairchild said nothing, righting the table and kneeling to scoop up two or three pieces of china pointlessly. Van could see he experienced his anger from the outside in, first in his skin. In twenty minutes the guy’s guts would start burning and he’d freeze it out with a shot of his wine.

  “My point still holds,” Fairchild said finally, setting down on the bare table one dripping shard.

  “Theoretically it holds. But life isn’t a theory, not mine anyway. I have to live it.”

  Fairchild seemed to make up his mind not to clean up the rest of this mess just at the moment. He sat back down.

  “You’re exactly the person I thought you were,” Fairchild said.

  “Meaning who?”

  “You’re a true man of action.”

  “Not a man of action,” Van said, swallowing hard after every three or four words, but feeling compelled to speak, dizzy with the necessity of speaking. “I’m a man of will. But I can’t believe in my will, can’t feel it, unless I act from it.”

  “Act from it, no matter what.”

  “No matter what.”

  “Overriding everything.”

  “That’s right, everything.”

  “Then you act in boldness.”

  “Can I be given a little cereal?”

  “A man of true courage.”

  “Just feed me. I won’t hurt your table.”

  It wasn’t night yet but as Fairchild walked among the rooms on the lower floor, speechifying—Van assumed for his, Van’s, benefit—he turned on all the lights, every last one. “When I saw you heading into the pond! Unforgettable. I’m telling you, you banished the storm. We would all hope to accomplish a moment like that in our lives. You accomplished it in mine…” At one point he put a record on the stereo, a Sonny Rollins thing. Van tried to let it soothe him while the madman talked: “Last month I went down to the main San Francisco library. They know me personally, I’m famous, my obsessive queries. I drove down there I don’t know when—three weeks ago. I won’t go south of here again, not on that Coast Highway. The cliffs beckon. If you were really trying to kill yourself in our pond, I know the desire. But when I’d turned inland after Jenner, I was safe. You head through the Russian River valley, then you’re in the other California—sunshine, vineyards, windmills, small motels…” He went on without the benefit of Van’s attention until the music ended and then he made a segue, lurching, into talk about some movie…No, he wasn’t telling about the movie as much as the experience of having gone to the thing, of being in a theater, darkness—“big people. Gargantuan busts, I mean their heads and shoulders, not their titties. Although also titties. Now: something quite out of my experience happened in there, Mr. Van Ness. A panic got hold of the people in the theater.”

  Fairchild had gone pale; the work of speaking and remembering had pinched the blood out of his flesh, perhaps concentrated it all in his brain; his energies didn’t make him lively, Van thought—just incredibly tense, his fibers humming to the point where levitation seemed imminent. A deep vibration jiggled the cups and saucers on the table.

  “The floor,” he said, “rumbled. There were rapid footsteps down the aisles, a lot of people moving all in a bunch, and all with the same thing in mind, whatever it was, and I had the sense that some group was playing a prank. Something made you feel that it was all rehearsed, like a fraternity stunt, and I expected these people to kidnap a freshman and carry him out on their shoulders or something like that. Then I thought, but there are dozens of them. The rows were emptying in waves, starting at the back, and we, those of us down front, we turned around to see that everybody was leaving fast, through every available exit.” Fairchild himself was in motion now, looking around for something in the kitchen. “Now let me tell you,” he said, rummaging abstractedly in the refrigerator, delighted with this memory, “nobody screamed, nobody yelled. Nobody loosed even a tiny exclamation, Mr. Van Ness. There was only a little muttering as people wondered what was going on and then decided not to stay to find out. The only sounds were the tremendous rumbling of everybody’s feet, and the actors on the screen continuing their dialogue. Mute, terrorized people pouring out of the place! By this time we in the very front were able to guess what was happening, but we were also able to feel sort of removed and safe from whatever was scaring them so much up there in the back—a crazed killer, whatever. So the people in the first three rows didn’t run. We just waited. An usher, a young woman, entered from the lobby and we heard her talking to somebody, but she didn’t make an announcement until one of us up front yelled, ‘Tell us what’s happening!’ Then she starts screaming, ‘It was just a shoebox! A man with a shoebox! There isn’t any bomb!’ All this while, the giant…heads of actors are conversing up on the wall—moving pictures, talking pictures, without any power of illusion left to them. But do you know what? We sat down, those of us who’d stayed around, and in a couple of minutes we were completely consumed again by the drama, which wasn’t a very compelling one to begin with anyway. Cereal, cereal, cereal,” he said, “it’s all we seem to have.” Van watched him dump flakes into a bowl. “Afterwards I recognized a famous man, a television star, standing there in the lobby with a red and orange sack of popcorn in his hand.”

  Van had no idea how to respond to this stuff. The sun was lowering into the clouds, a deep rosy light filling the kitchen window, Nelson Fairchild staring out. Tears shone in his eyes. He rode a roller coaster, all right. The emotional Tilt-A-Whirl. Van watched him fashion a face out of all this sadness before he turned full on and started laying fresh places at the table. “And you’re feeling all right?” Fairchild asked him. “I’ve never saved anyone’s life before. You’re okay?”

  Van said, “Thanks,” only because he pitied the man.

  “Did you walk here?”

  “My car’s by the road up there. It’s out of sight I think.”

  “Is there somebody who should be called?”

  “No.”

  “Nobody?”

  Van felt a panic of his own beginning to stir. “Listen. You didn’t call the paramedics? Or the cops?”


  “No.”

  “Nobody knows I’m here.”

  “No,” Fairchild said, “and that’s how it should be. You’re here, you’re a secret, I’m giving you cereal. Your appetite’s back. You look better.”

  “Just assure me you’re harmless, and we’re fine.”

  “We’re all pretty harmless aren’t we? Until we’re cornered?”

  “That’s not reassuring.”

  “But I thought you wanted to die.”

  “Maybe so. But by my own hand.”

  Fairchild closed his eyes, maybe, Van thought, with exasperation. “The point I was making earlier is this—that each person who went to the movies that day believed each of the others capable of killing all of us. And aren’t they exactly right?”

  Fairchild was back at the refrigerator, from which he turned now with an odd, pompous air, upholding a carton of milk. “Who knows what a murderer looks like?”

  He stood next to Van’s chair. He leaned too close. “Lately I think I’m ready to become one.” Van smelled the rot of wine on his breath. The hat’s emblem read IGNORE PREVIOUS HAT.

  Van relaxed. “I see. You’re just fucking with me.”

  “Hermann Göring,” Fairchild said, pouring milk over his cereal with unsteady hands, “was found at the end dressed in a Japanese kimono and stoned on opium, wearing lipstick and eye shadow and playing with a model concrete railroad in his living room—that’s how crazy you have to be to kill as many people as Hermann Göring did. This is how crazy you have to be to kill one. As crazy as me. Allow me:” He tipped the carton and loosed a quavering ribbon of milk over Van’s bowl.

  As soon as he put a spoonful to his lips Van realized what a hunger he had. But the flakes were hard on his throat. He waited for them to wilt in the bowl.

  Fairchild said, “Of course I’m simplifying. It may be that in a case like Hermann Göring’s that’s how crazy you get from killing that many people, and this is how crazy you have to be to start.”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “One murder probably leads to another.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Why don’t we find out?”

  “I don’t get the meaning.”

  “Would you like to find out?”

  “Find what out?”

  “I’d like you to kill somebody for me. I’d make it worth your while.”

  “You’d make it worth my while?” Van said. “What the fuck is ‘worth my while’?”

  “Money, whatever.”

  So he’d done it. He’d killed himself. And he’d surfaced into this. All right. It was the next thing happening, and that was that. “Money doesn’t work for me,” he said.

  “What would?”

  Van Ness hadn’t touched a drop of wine, but the room was accelerating anyway. “I’ll do it. Sure.”

  “What would work for you?”

  The chickenshit. He was going to ride right past it. “I said I’ll do it.”

  Fairchild stood up and said, “Louise.” He put his thumb and finger to his eyes and pressed. Visibly composed a speech in his mind and then launched into it, crunching the phrases in the collision of emotions. “In the place where Louise works there is a lady called the Singapore Lady. The Singapore Lady was once a wild young woman married by common law to a carpenter there in San Francisco. She was the terror of the neighborhood. But the carpenter wasn’t afraid of her; he came home late, he catted around. He didn’t care if the Singapore Lady knew. Mistake! She stabbed him in the eye, and he died. Then, with his own saw she sawed him into thirteen pieces. She put the pieces of her husband in a big trunk and had it shipped to a fictitious address in Singapore. Well, during its journey the stink of the corpse became profound and somebody opened the trunk to find green arms and legs and green other parts, including the one-eyed staring head. The woman was quickly arrested—why? Because she’d put her return address on the trunk. Louise says they call her the Singapore Lady because for the last twenty years she’s been wrapping empty packages, addressing them to Singapore, and handing them over to the counselors and guards at the prison to be mailed.

  “Louise is my mother. On the day I went to San Francisco she had three months to go before retirement. I wanted to go see her while she was still working in order to avoid the possibility of a longer visit.”

  Van had eaten most of his cereal. He pushed the bowl away and sat back. “Ignore Previous Hat, huh?”

  Fairchild said, “I’m thinking of inviting you to be my accomplice in a murder.”

  “I said okay,” Van said.

  “Actually, my henchman.”

  Van said nothing.

  “Does one murder lead to another? I think it does, because I’m suddenly, now, already thinking in terms of killing two more. Maybe three. Or at least one more. Harry Lally.”

  Night had come and turned the windows to mirrors. Fairchild had a habit of studying his image, moving closer, peering right at the reflected mouth as it spoke. “You do this murder. Maybe you should kill everybody who troubles me! Anyway you do this murder. Then you come back here—well, no, definitely not back here—but somewhere; you go somewhere. And finish committing suicide.”

  But the guy had a psychotic charm. He entertained. “Have you been diagnosed?”

  Among his windows Fairchild kept silent a minute, untwisting cords from their stays and loosing scrolls of rattan down over the glass. “You don’t know the situation. Anybody would go crazy.”

  “No—I think you’re fine. But I was wondering what the professionals had to say.”

  “You wonder why I’d want to get someone killed. I won’t just answer ‘why not.’ But the question implies that a person would have good reasons, and that’s a lie. There are pressures, yes. But nothing to justify it.” He sat down.

  Van thought Fairchild was about to take his hand—something about his hesitation, his gravity—but he didn’t.

  “I am in trouble with my criminal associates. I owe a vast sum of money. My wife’s insurance would take care of that if she died. I can’t get money otherwise—nobody will give me any, particularly not Father, and anyway the words to ask him have been closed inside the fist of hate for decades now. It would be easier for me to let them kill me, or go to Clarence and say, ‘Listen to me please; I want you to grease Winona; snuff the bitch.’ Or something a little more subtle but with the same meaning.

  “You had no right to spill my table,” he added suddenly. “You broke my things. These things are mine.”

  “Clarence is who?”

  “The only guy I know who’s actually really killed people.”

  “This is about money? Divorce her and sell the house.”

  “If you go out the door and look west,” Fairchild said, “you’ll see all I stand to lose by divorcing her. All that land and all that timber. From here to the ocean.”

  “It’s hers?”

  “It’s my father’s, and he’s willed my share of it to her. My Catholic dad. To keep us married.”

  “Why not disappear? Pick up and boogie?”

  “Or why not kill myself?”

  “Why not?”

  “The ultimate disappearance. The ultimate boogie.”

  Van laughed. It hurt, and he stopped himself. “How old are you?”

  “I turned twenty-nine three weeks ago.”

  “And who do you want killed?”

  “My wife, Winona Fairchild.”

  “Yeah…that name.”

  “Winona.”

  “I think I met her.”

  “You met her?”

  “Yes, I met her. In Shelter Cove.”

  “That’s no place to meet anyone.”

  “I met her there anyway.”

  Fairchild jerked at the pocket of his bathrobe. Produced his deck of cards. Laid himself out a hand of…Klondike, if Van knew his solitaire. It was dramatic, really kind of striking, Van thought, the way he fought through pain by clinging to something, anything, of interest. “Bushido,”
Fairchild said now—Van had known him a single afternoon but already could tell when a lecture, like a whale, was surfacing—“do you know the word? Bushido means ‘the way of the warrior,’ a Japanese samurai concept. The idea is, the samurai achieves total detachment by seeing himself as already dead. I invite the would-be suicide to adopt this concept.”

  Again Van laughed, again it tore at his throat. “Coincidences are gonna drive us crazy.”

  “You should have seen yourself going down!”

  “All right,” Van said. “All this is getting to me. I mean I’m thinking about something, and two minutes later—two seconds, even—you’re saying it.”

  “A dangerous chemistry develops between us.”

  “You’re not a simple guy, are you? A simple guy would leave what troubles him.”

  Fairchild sprayed the cards into the kitchen sink. They arced from his fingertips as if enchanted. He did possess a flair. “I have called for a new deck often. But I have never changed my game.”

  Van enjoyed topping him. “For the third time: I will kill this person for you.”

  Thompson drove the truck, and Falls talked: “I was working on some stuff, just jotting down notes, et cetera—things to work out when I had a chance to sit down. Some of the things he came out with about eighteen months later, man”—Falls was talking about Jerry Jeff Walker, the country-western composer—“not the words, but a little of the ideas and the rhythms, they were exactly and precisely what I was doing, man. Or would have done, was about to do. And he must’ve been working on those things right when I was, if they came out eighteen months later. I have a special quality for him, man. I feel we’re in synch.”

  This interested Thompson not at all, the synch or lack of it between Bart Falls, whom he considered to be nothing but a pitiful recidivist, and Jerry Jeff Walker the swaggering barroom minstrel. Thompson liked California jazz. Chet Baker. Art Pepper. People who really lived it. Tom Waits, if you had to have words and concepts. “Look, I think we passed it,” he said.

  “No, I’m watching close. No redwood gate.”

  “It’s gray.”