Already Dead: A California Gothic Read Online Free

clinkers, keeping the pieces that had burned down to coal-coke. He scraped a space over the ash-grate in the tiny hearth and poured onto it three handfuls of wood pellets and doused them with kerosene. But something heavy lay inside him…Where did the weary heart come from? He struck the match, set the pellets ablaze. He didn’t like having to start the fire again, that was the source of this small sadness. You get tired of these endless beginnings.
    He and Van Ness should have broken off contact years ago. True enough, they were both alone, but in completely different ways, and they didn’t deserve each other. Van, you’re sort of a demon, he thought, scraping yesterday’s coal-coke back toward the center of the hearth and over the burning wood pellets, using a metal trowel. He heaped onto his fire a few scoops of wet coal from the bucket of soak water, and raked them into a ring around its center in order to cook the sulfur out of them slowly.
    Yes, the object was to remove the clinkers and the sulfur because anything that does not burn terribly, producing great heat, just Already Dead / 15

    worthlessly absorbs it. Only the steel must be allowed to take heat.
    White heat…He stripped down to a pair of cutoff shorts and work boots and put on a pair of skiing goggles tinted amber, then cranked the blower mindlessly until the coal burned with a coppery brightness.
    He was making a fireplace tool of some sort, he didn’t know what exactly, an improvised and probably useless fireplace tool. He jammed the end of a meterlong stretch of rebar into the fire’s sunny heart…The fire had a heart and a mouth and a song…he cranked the blower till the conflagration blazed white.
    Frankenstein took the three-pound hammer from the wall, found the hand-sized area on the anvil that rang the clearest and gave the most bounce to the hammer’s head—the anvil’s “sweet spot.” Everything has two meanings, he thought, our simplest, smallest words branching off into the storms and whirlpools of sex, warfare, worship. Therefore the words do not work. He breathed shallow while the wet coal at the fire’s edges coked up, the sulfur cooking out of it and filling the shop with lung-stinging fumes. “Coked up”—the verbal thing there made him wonder if he wasn’t just doing this to be doing coke , if the part of him that literalized all words, the undeciphering, dreaming part of him, believed he was in here getting high. Several nights of sick dreaming had preceded his relapse. Various dreams but they all happened in the same place, a city he must have visited once and couldn’t remember anymore, depopulated now, vast and silent stadiums, motionless streets.
    The man in the dream was no longer himself; it was some other fool, some other drugged maniac, and he, Frankenstein, watched the rest of it from a place beyond, like a moviegoer—a dreamgoer. He’d never before had a dream and failed to be in it.
    Van Ness, now—Van had always showed a quality like that: a figure outside the scene, watching even himself. When he entered the frame, he was dangerous. No such thing as speculation for Van; all aimless bullshit had to be actualized.
    As his therapist, a healer, a shaman, Yvonne had been dealing with the dream part of him. Yanking me in a Jungian way…She had the husk of me open—Jesus, it’s not beautiful now, the memory of it is nauseating, it’s obscene—
    So, Van, you’re going to kill yourself. Good. Everybody’s agony twists in me, but yours hurts more than most. The only person whose 16 / Denis Johnson

    suffering I don’t touch somewhere on the searing surface of it is Yvonne.
    I thought it was because we were special, our connection blessed, banishing pain. But there was never any pain in her to start with. Her center’s a pinpoint, a microscopic star, burning without any life at Absolute Zero. She sucked it out of me, the stuff I get back by inhaling the fires of this forge—the heat. She took my heat.