Read Already Dead: A California Gothic for Free Online

case where on this earth should I be, Father? Where do you want me, what should I do? Anything, but only tell me. I don’t know what you want! Speak! A child, I’m miserable admitting it, a child stands like a priest under his father’s sky. Why do you fate me to fail you?
    “Burst apart, explode, fly, galactic, starburst, asunder!” Melissa liked to shout American words while we drove too fast in the 26 / Denis Johnson

    Porsche, a creamy yellow 356 roadster, a third of a century old. But on the rare Coast straightaway it easily broke a hundred. I could get a word in only on the tightest curves, when the engine quieted.
    “I’m sorry,” I told her. Then a brief straightaway. A Porsche is not a cream puff car. It’s angry, full of wrenching torque. A curve: “I know you wouldn’t screw that guy.” I meant the busboy I’d accused her of.
    “Okay, you would, we both know it. But my job is to love you anyway.
    That’s my task.”
    “It doesn’t matter.”
    “It matters to me. I’m going to show you how much it matters. Show you something I’ve never shown anyone.”
    “I’m getting carsick again.” We’d entered a series of zigzag hairpins taking us down toward a creek that passed under the highway and out to sea.
    I didn’t keep to the road, but turned off abruptly just before the culvert.
    “Why are we turning here? It says no trespassing.”
    “I’m checking things out.”
    “Checking for trespassers? Is this your land?”
    “Shut up, please. Watch for the plates.”
    A pickup with a camper shell lowered itself down around the hairpin switchbacks, passed our position, and started climbing up the other side of the gulch. It kept to the highway. They hadn’t seen us turn.
    Melissa said, “Plates?”
    “The plates! The plates! The license plates! Were they Oregon? They were blue. Could have been California. How many in the car? I saw two. Did you see two?”
    “I see someone bringing me a license on a plate. To eat!”
    “Were there dogs in the back?”
    “English is impossible!”
    “Those men are following me. They’ve got dogs.”
    “I didn’t see. Listen to me. English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.” She was crazy about words and figures of speech, the result of having had to learn a second tongue.
    The skinny gulch the creek cut through made a little evening over us. The surf, out of sight, muted by two big hills, merely grunted and thumped. I was woozy with drink. Still I was frightened in a rubbery Already Dead / 27

    way. I calmed myself by contemplating the water and thinking this Buddhist thought: that the river is everywhere at once, at each part of itself, although it gives the illusion of moving and we think of its journey as having a beginning and an end. Many of our most powerful dreams begin on an empty road, beside a river, which indicates the great depth of the dreaming.
    Melissa snuggled close, awkwardly bridging the gearshift between our seats.
    “Everything about you is extremely tiny,” I said, kissing her tiny nose, mouth, fingers. I tasted margarita salt.
    “Who wants to follow you?”
    “I could name a few.”
    “Why?”
    “Because my life is a mess.”
    Melissa wore an old high-fashion ladies’ hat, a kind of white turban thing that kept her hair from whipping at her eyes and protected her beautiful ears from the chilly wind. When we drove with the top down she always bundled herself up in a fluffy white terrycloth robe I kept for her behind the seats. In this coast-cruising outfit she looked not quite recuperated from brain surgery. I kissed her some more, dreaming that my miracles would heal her.
    Her eyes were sideways and wide open, looking at my watch. “What is the time, please?”
    “It’s four-forty in the afternoon.”
    “We’re drunk before supper again. It’s marvelous! I’ll be asleep at eight. I’ll wake up at three this morning and walk out naked into the stars.”
    “When was the last