Read Online Already Dead: A California Gothic by Denis Johnson - Free Book Online Page A

timber, and all the land it stands on, going down into the clouds. To the right, to the north, glimmers a tiny orange dome: the temple of a Tibetan Buddhist monastery far up in the hills.
    On the highest ridge east of here you can see two brilliant white structures, quite similar in shape to the Tibetan one and even, when you think of it, related to it in the tilt, so to speak, of their thrust: a U.S. Air Force radar station, stroking the aether with receptors.
    I used to sit out here while my wife talked to me, with my mind five miles out to sea.
    Winona became hateful shortly after beginning a friendship with Yvonne. Her “cute” quality took on a piggish cast. By a subtle slanting her cuteness became oinky. She didn’t gain weight. But her Already Dead / 43

    vision became near and small and the space between her eyes narrowed in self-absorption. She added to her vocabulary a contemptuous snorting sound and used it on me ceaselessly, claiming she wasn’t aware of it.
    Her pal Yvonne is very New Age. Into channeling, crystals, wycca, et cetera. She holds “sessions”: seances, basically, in which she claims to be inhabited by various nonmaterial entities ready to solve petty ro-mantic problems and answer worries about the future. Channeling is just the new Ouija board, but the people involved are grown-ups, and usually money changes hands. Basically Yvonne’s a professional sor-ceress. Flat green, jail-green eyes. Flaring nostrils. To me she looks like a witch, but not because of a warty beak—in fact she has a lovely face altogether. Yet when I think of her face, what comes to mind is something quite different, unappealing, maybe even disturbing. The Slavic cheekbones, broad nose, flared nostrils look, in my memory, like those I saw on gargoyles on Italian churches. In Palermo, for instance, where my life’s dark night fell. Her face and theirs blur together, gazing down on my most stupid moves. Sure, Yvonne’s probably harmless. But I hate her. I’ve got her mixed up in my mind with bad things.
    I sit out here and think convulsively until I’m numbed by dope and confused by my own brain—think about my business woes, my wife, my mistress, my region and my region’s demands and allowances. My idiot brother. My ugly father. Free will? Personal decisions? It’s not that simple, not at all. What am I but the knot, the gnarled dark intersection, of all these strands? They keep me from acting, and they tug at me to act. Stand fast, and I’ll be torn. But if I want to move, then all of these things must break, they all have to be ripped apart, and that’s the end of me just as much as the end of them.
    What if there were such people as Yvonne pretends to be, sons and daughters of men trafficking with mysterious powers, ready to fix things backstage, in the darkness behind the scenes? The witches who ended up with Carla Frizelli’s crucifix—I’d like to talk to them. Milt Sharkey claimed witches stole it, this token from the Coast Silky’s claws. You know the silky, a creature of fancy with a divided life, like a were-man or werewolf, but of an aquatic order: a seal in the ocean who takes the form of a man and crawls ashore by night, dripping and ashamed and bent to the corruption of the unaccursed.
    The Coast Silky is said to have been an actual man, one of the 44 / Denis Johnson

    sailors from the seventeen boats that went to pieces in the storm of 1903, only this man didn’t drown like the others. The strife of waves carried him far out past Shipwreck Rock, where he clung to some logging flotsam, slowly freezing until he bumped against a big bull seal and with his skinning knife opened it from jaw to crotch and clothed himself in its bloody warmth, and in the next night’s darkness washed to shore still alive; and thereafter hunted and wore the seals and believed himself one of them. Sometimes he’d shake off the psychosis, traipse the dark fog in his fisher’s rags seeking some way back into the