Already Dead: A California Gothic Read Free Page A

They washed it all off me while I was asleep. And they’re shooting microscopic darts at me.”
    He paused to light up.
    “I’m not a golfer,” Van Ness said.
    “Ninety percent of this is psycho bullshit, I realize. But ten percent of it is real.” Frank pointed a finger at Van Ness’s throat. “And that’s the ten percent we have to watch out for.”
    The burning redwood hummed steadily. The fire was in its middle age. Rocking back and forth to dip his cigarette ash with his large hand, Frank seemed to enter and exit the changing torchlight of a primitive incarnation, in one of the smoky grotto shelters he liked to claim had been forgotten by his mind but imprinted on his spirit.
    Frank had always preached a personal creed fixed, in a scholarly way, to the migrations of the human soul. Maybe, Van thought now, he was right, maybe Frank’s own soul had checked out, simply left a TV babbling somewhere in this big, ruined hotel.
    And yet two decades before, Frank had been the one to lead Van, the twenty-two-year-old, into the light of philosophy, the one to guard him while he grew.
    Among the sailors belowdecks Van Ness had been seen as the large man’s personal creation, a kind of pet—thus the nickname: Van Ness had had to struggle to remember, when asking for his friend’s number from Directory Assistance, that Frankenstein’s true name was Wilhelm Frankheimer.
    Frank asked, “What have you got?”
    “You don’t understand, do you?”
    “What’s your disease?”
    “Shit, man. Call it radiation poisoning.”
    “You haven’t got anything. You’re not dying.” Van told him, “I’ll be dead within forty-eight hours.”
    “A short ride.”
    “Still: I could easily outlive you.”
    Driving south back into Gualala’s town proper, Van Ness encountered a straight stretch on the coast route and pressed the acceler-ator pedal down all the way. And found himself, what with the fog 12 / Denis Johnson

    and his headlights, driving into a wall of brilliance. He had no idea how far out in front of his windshield the pavement stretched before it hooked left or right and his own trajectory hung out over twenty-five fathoms of air. Within a quarter mile the machine was topping out at around 105, he believed, although the speedometer’s needle came un-moored and whipped back and forth deliriously between 120 and nothing, and the Volvo itself shivered rhythmically awhile, then shuddered so hard he had to clench his teeth, and soon it shook like a crow’s nest in a bad gale, threatening to break loose and fling itself to pieces in midair. Van eased his grip on the wheel until he was not quite touching it, warming his hands on the fires of out-of-control; then something in him—not his will—slapped his hands back onto the steering and pointed him at a legal velocity down the middle of the fog.
    Van made it a habit to be friendly wherever he went; while he contemplated a late supper in the bar of a cliffside restaurant later that night, he bought a drink for a man who was also a visitor to the area, a wild-pig hunter. They’d started out by kidding the barmaid together and then got to talking. “Make it a double,” Van urged the man. “I can’t drink myself. I’ve got pancreatitis.”
    “Oh, any old thing,” the hunter told him when Van asked about his line of work. “I’ve done a lot of logging lately.”
    “Where’s that? Here in California?”
    “Del Norte County mostly, yeah. Everywhere, practically.” The man’s hunting companion, another bearded, bulky woodsman, came in and joined them. He’d just driven down from their campsite, and he complained about the fog and the curves, and the cliffs.
    The first one bought his friend a drink and for Van a club soda. “You got—what? Your pancreas, something?”
    “Pancreatic cancer, actually.”
    “Oh.”
    The men paused, sipping their drinks.
    “Shit,” the other burst out. “I’d be double-time paranoid behind something like that. Fatal,