“The world may seem to cause you pain. And yet the world, as causeless, has no power to cause. As an effect, it cannot make effects. As an illusion, it is what you wish. Your idle wishes represent its pains. Your strange desires bring it evil dreams.
“Salvation does not lie in being asked to make unnatural responses which are inappropriate to what is real. Instead, it merely asks that you respond appropriately to what is not real—by not perceiving what hasn’t occurred.”
“Yvonne.”
“Randall.”
“Randall.”
“Yes, Nelson?”
“Could you boil that down for us, please?”
“Sure: life is a dream, and to take it as anything else is a form of madness. What you call sanity is just insanity to a less noticeable degree.”
“I’ve noticed much insanity in my life.”
“In your waking dream.”
“I didn’t dream it.”
“I’ll say it again. All is illusion, therefore all is just as you wish.”
“So I’m making the world up? That’s an old hypothesis.”
“An eternal fact. And when you see this fact, there are two possible responses: the first is to see that you’re making it up, and make up something you like. The second is to let God make it up, let him give it a single meaning, his meaning, and cling to that meaning—”
“Which is?”
“Peace and love.”
“That’s two meanings, if I’m counting right.”
“Peace and love, as opposed to war and fear.”
“Look. If I’m dreaming, then why should I have any control over my perceptions? I can’t control my sleeping dreams, can I? Otherwise they’d reflect my true corruption. Why should a bad man have happy dreams?”
“One day they’ll be dialing up these vibes on various monitors. The doctors will adjust our auras and send us home. It’ll all be quite nice, even the Christian fundamentalists will approve.”
“Look—Yvonne.”
“I’m not Yvonne.”
“You sound like Yvonne.”
“Why not? I’m speaking with her vocal chords.”
“Still, some indication—you know—”
“You’d like me to roll up the whites of my eyes and blow smoke out my nostrils?”
“Up my ass is where I think you’re blowing smoke, my dear.”
“And grant you three wishes”—this in a basso voice that raised applaudatory laughter. “Spirit Guides, help from a higher realm—you don’t believe these things,” Yvonne-Randall said.
“Maybe I do. But I don’t have to like them.”
“What’s the difference, if they’re true?”
“Well, it’s another world, dear. Don’t I have trouble enough with this one?”
“You’re saying you do believe in a spirit existence we can tap into?”
“Actually I find that I do—sometimes—in a very general way—but by ignoring it I find I live with a certain complexity and on several levels. If I participate in your cosmology, what am I left with? Rules. Explanations.”
“Well, suggestions anyway. Even some answers, maybe.”
“Recipes for magic antidotes. And cheat sheets for deciphering the cosmic codes.”
“It doesn’t matter what you do. We have time in which to experience everything, belief, nonbelief, and in between.”
“Groovy.”
“Nelson Fairchild. I want you to get serious. I have a message for you, Nelson.”
He feared it concerned Winona. “Okay.”
“It’s important now that you take seriously what I’m going to say.”
“Yes. I’m trying.”
“Your father has recently died.”
“Is that supposed to be big news?”
“No, it’s not. But this is: your father’s death is part of something that concerns you deeply, that concerns your soul. There’s a term in use now in your world, in limited use—holocoenosis. It refers to the fact that each thing, everything, is affected by action on any single thing—kind of a cause-and-effect conduction throughout reality.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Would you by any chance be familiar with certain notions concerning bifurcations in dissipative structures?”
“I most certainly would not. In fact if I had to be I hope I’d kill myself.”
“You have a parallel. A soul whose path parallels yours very closely. Kind of a doppelgänger.”
“Holy smokes. Kind of a doppelgänger, did you say?”
Beside him, Navarro laughed and then tried to excuse himself with his eyes.
“He’s out to devour you. He is a devourer…”
Nobody said anything now. Certainly not he himself.
“A soul twin. Many of us have them. In our more comfortable lives we don’t meet them. In the lives where we do, the meeting creates cosmic fireworks. Legendary love affairs or strange hatreds…”
“For God’s sake, spit it out, ghost!”
“Nelson Fairchild. Listen.”
Her music had changed. Everybody’s music had changed.
“You bitch.”
“Are you listening?”
“What have you done with my wife?”
She spoke calmly, setting up no vibrations: “I think we should talk more privately, Nelson.”
It made him weak with dread, though it was what he wanted, and he said immediately, “Maybe even in this lifetime. I’ll pencil it in.”
Later he stood with his keys in his hand, waiting for Hillary to get her rig backed out, and the cop stood next to him with his arm around the waitress’s tiny shoulders. Melissa waited in the Porsche. “I’m not drunk,” he told the cop.
“I realize that, man. I was just kidding.”
“She got me shook. I hate her.”
“She’s got a rare gift, Nelson,” the waitress said.
“Of one kind or another,” the cop added.
“I guess so. I don’t know. But I know she talks to the dead.”
“What if she does?” the cop said. “So what? Why should I believe some asshole just because he doesn’t have a body?”
“…There. There is a man with a complete cranium,” Fairchild told Melissa as they all drove off in two directions, “while the rest of us have these gauzy frayed places where bullshit keeps getting in.”
“Could you drop me at the hotel?”
“If we weren’t natural enemies, I’d want to befriend him and stay near him.”
“He reminds me of a picture,” Melissa said.
“What picture?”
“A picture. He’s holding still.”
“He’s steady inside. But he’s wrong about Yvonne. She’s not a fake. She talks to demons. She works with evil. She can deal.”
On his way to the apartment, having dropped Melissa at the hotel, Fairchild swung into the gas station. Nothing else in Gualala was open, nothing but the hotel bar, and that not visibly, stuck away on the building’s north side. But here was the Phillips 66, effulgent, clarified, and lonely, like a stage before a darkened audience. It wasn’t so much a need for fuel that drew him as the sight of it there, and of the attendant dumping out windshield water like a bucket of stars across the greasy pavement. The attendant stood still and watched with an air of uncertainty until the Porsche’s arrival was complete.
“Are you open?”
“Yeah. Sure. Hi.”
Fairchild got out of the car. “Should I fill it myself?”
“No, I’m happy to.”
“Too late for the windshield, huh?”
“I’ll get it. I’ve got some Windex.”
“Let me unlock the cap for you. It locks.”
He stood next to the attendant, looking right down on the top of his hatless head. A small young guy pumping gas on the weekdays, on the Sabbath he preached at the little church in West Point. He’d used to be a pitiful case, a drunken wreck and, it was generally assumed, an irremediable moron. Now here he stood, shepherd of a li
ttle pickup flock and purveyor of combustible oils. Holding the work of the Quality Nozzle Company in his grip.
“Tell me about demons.”
“I’d rather talk about the Savior.”
“What do you know about demons?”
“I don’t know anything I haven’t read in the Bible. You can read the same things, I guess you’re aware of that.”
“And what about spirit guides? You’ve heard of them. Do you believe in such guides?”
“Well, going by the Scripture, there’d only be two—the Holy Spirit, and the Devil Satan.”
“Channeling—”
“You’re only channeling Satan. Better cut it out.”
“So you definitely believe in the Devil.”
“Definitely. You want the Windex? You’re all bugged up.”
“Permit me to quote you something from Nietzsche: ‘Whoever has theological blood in his veins is shifty and dishonorable in all things.’”
“I’ll go along with that.”
“I’ve heard you pitch quite a sermon at the chapel of a Sunday.”
“You’ve heard it? Or heard about it?”
“Billy told me you’ve got the Spirit.”
“You remember what I was like.”
“I remember doing rum and coke with you one Fourth of July. Cocaine coke. Not the drink.”
“I don’t remember. So how could I deny it?”
“I remember you asking me if you could suck my dick, in fact.”
“That could be. There’s not an alky worthy of the name who hasn’t had somebody’s joint in his mouth some time or other.” The preacher smiled. “So the question is: How did I get all the way here from all the way there?”
“I don’t know. How?”
“Somebody prayed for me.”
“Yeah…So would you do me a favor, please?”
“I won’t blow you, no.”
“I was going to ask you to pray for me.”
“I do already. Every day.”
“Thank you.”
“You’d be welcome at the chapel tomorrow night. We have prayer meetings Thursdays, usually at somebody’s house. But we’re getting such a crowd we decided to use the chapel.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Nelson. Maybe we’ll see you tomorrow night.”
“I don’t think you will.”
“No, I won’t count on it.”
He turned north but drove past his fourplex building and pushed out of town, keeping the Porsche at a steady run, not slinging it around the curves, through the mute irrelevance of Anchor Bay, down the drop into the gully where the campground slept by the water, past Shipwreck Road and Shipwreck Rock and still northward, the double yellow lines wavering slowly ahead in a world denominated by his headlights. The landscape opened wide past Point Arena, and he continued through it in the general direction of Manchester, until the silvery pastures on his left ended in a grove of some dozen acres. Even in this hour of souls it looked like a friend. In the dark he couldn’t make out the fence, only the massive cypress, eucalyptus, and oak—the wrought, asymmetrical varieties…His high beams lit up the white arch and the rickety birthday-party lettering suspended across its apex identifying this Catholic graveyard. The trees and graveheads jumped sideways and slid backward as the illumination crossed them. He drove in far enough that his headlights wouldn’t draw the gaze of any late traveller, and got out leaving them on to see by and walked.
He left the pavement, started across the graves. Am I ashes? Have I come to scatter myself? The headstones like ruins, leavings. Past the older section and the names eaten up. Among the whiter crosses…Californian. So here we are. It’s Wednesday, do they tell you things like that, down there in California? But I didn’t pick up the Barron’s. Anyway it’s night and I can’t read because it’s almost as dark out here as it is in there. And is somebody praying for me?
Not likely.
But he said he was.
He pumps gas. He pumped you some.
I guess you know everything now.
I know more than I did.
You know—
I know you’ve walked your nose flat into a corner and you refuse to do the only thing.
Which is?
Turn around.
Excuse me, he said, walking across his father.
He knelt to the bucket of flowers by the gravestone and plucked from it a spongy toy, a ball. Standing upright he held it so as to catch what light he could. But its color was as indiscernible as its purport. He compressed it in his fist and shoved it into his back pocket. He touched his fingers to his father’s stone.
He said aloud, “I love you.”
September 13, 1990
Fairchild woke in an upstairs room of the Gualala Hotel in the afternoon. Melissa slept beside him: With your wings quivering…Around him the windows revolved, the white-hot windows. His grogginess gave everything the quality of extremely old films in which the static hums steadily and the voices move softly and almost inaudibly inside it.
“What did you dream?”
“I dreamed I was sad.” Then she laughed. “But that’s funny—because I’m not! I’m happy!”
“Are you?”
“But you—you’re not. Nelson, why are you crying?”
“My brother. My brother is dead.”
“Oh, my God, but you can’t be serious! It was only dreaming.”
“My brother is dead, and my father is dead.”
“Oh, and it hurts—I know!”
“Tell me, baby, what were you sad about in your dream?”
“I was sad because I couldn’t be ice. And I woke up now, and now I find out I’m melting.”
“Oh! Melissa. Oh! I wish we were.”
“Don’t cry. Don’t cry. It’s one of those days.”
He was seeing things not in a decipherable, but in a perceivable, appreciable design—like snowflakes…
Van Ness left his car by the Pacific, on a bluff looking down toward the cove that had once, he assumed, harbored Carter’s Landing, and he walked from there across the Coast Highway and up to the forested end of Carter’s Landing Road. He passed through a neglected truck garden behind a neglected driftwood lean-to at the road’s end, some bikey’s hooch, some Deadhead’s last burrow, and then entered the woods below William Fairchild’s cabin, he didn’t know how far below, carrying in a pillowcase thrown over his shoulder Nelson Fairchild, Jr.’s .357 Magnum. He turned back, left the path, and from the covering foliage satisfied himself that the lean-to he’d just passed was indeed unattended before going on. The grade steepened, the path narrowed. Probably only William Fairchild and wildlife ever made use of it.
In the deeper woods Van Ness came on a bear trap, corroded to the core and frosted with dry lichen along its jaws’ northern edges. The teeth lay wide, and though he judged its springs to have set down long ago, still his groin tingled when he put his hand to the trap’s tongue and pressed it.
The woods gave out on a gully to his right; the gully disappeared in vaporous eastward currents; in the currents he saw an entity fashioned of the vapor: an angel with great white wings uplifted from its shoulders, standing upright, an angel profoundly corrupted and profoundly feminine, drinking the blood of its young and turning to suckle strangers. Mother I have your diamonds. The prayers of the Inquisitors. She trailed them in her tresses as dew.
He moved around a broken cedar and lost sight of her, and she was gone, and the roiling mist was gone.
Farther on he entered the big grove. He felt its silence long before he came into the cool hush and sourceless dim light among the trees. They had a peculiar sweet musty smell. Most of the ground had the combed and fertile uniformity of a riding arena’s floor. Nothing much grew between the widely separated house-sized trunks other than fern and fungus; no second generation competed with these ancients. Some of them lay fallen, suddenly occupying their astonishing dimensions, like downed airliners. The path divided to circumvent the base of one, t
he cake of its roots thirty feet in diameter. He walked around the butt and alongside the deteriorating length of it for two hundred paces. He’d come farther into the grove now than he needed, he was certain of that. Ahead he made out shafts of light where the younger forest resumed.
He turned directly to his right, found the edge of the grove, and threaded along this border between two eras until he spotted the creek. He followed the creek upstream to the cabin. Behind the house the grove maintained its immense twilight, though he himself stood amid a sunny thicket of sapling acacias, and in back of him the skyline opened all the way to the sea.
Through the cabin’s north window he saw William Fairchild sitting with his feet up on his dining table and his hands locked behind his head.
Van Ness set the pillowcase at his feet, opened it and removed the gun, and then looped the pillowcase through his belt so as not to forget it here. For these simple movements he could hardly find the strength. The coursing of sugars unpent in his blood by adrenaline was turning him dizzy. His extremities fizzed and his ears rang. To decrease his intake of oxygen he opened his mouth and panted rapidly. Instantly as he thought he had the balance for it, he moved to the door and pushed it open. Though Fairchild’s shape was at rest, he’d screwed his mouth to one side, one eye squinting, in an expression of puzzled thought; from between his lips a pencil jutted. He removed it and lowered his hands and put his feet on the floor, but he seemed to require some effort to get his attention back to the time and place.
“Can I help you? Excuse me. Can I help you?” When he saw the gun he turned away in flat rejection as he might have turned from a dirty photo or a wicked gesture.
Van Ness walked close, leveled the Smith & Wesson at the back of the head, and depressed the trigger—Fairchild hunched and winced and bits of blood and bone slung like slobber from his jaw as Van ushered him, with fanfare and fireworks, into a neighboring actuality.
For a few seconds the killer held the gun aloft exactly as the recoil had positioned it. He put it to his own head. One.
Two.
Three.
The pin smacked the cap. The cartridge whispered irresolutely. He could hardly hear it for the deafness created by the first shot. He tossed the weapon down beside the corpse’s empty hands. It went on hissing.