Free Already Dead: A California Gothic by Denis Johnson Page A

trees can keep their hold—even a few old-growth redwoods, already standing here the day Julius Caesar was born and now nearly two hundred feet tall and thirty feet around.
    I might have been wandering through a region of vaulting aboriginal monuments lifted up by a dead race. Nobody worships them now.
    Unattended they accomplish their vast meditations. Their indiscernible deaths. Their tremendous, crashing funerals. Then the interminable wasting down until, underfoot, not earth, but a quiet rusty bread. Bill keeps his cabin at the western edge of an untouched several acres of old growth. When the fog burns away he looks down from his back porch onto the ocean, a sunny postcard full of distant black rocks splashed with foam. Yet from his front door he steps right into the prehistoric. Big silence. Big redwoods. Ferny dusk beneath. Forests once sheltered half our race, but now very few humans live in such places, towered over by slow and ancient lives. I believe the effect on my brother has been nearly miraculous. These kind-hearted monsters have wooed him away from madness into a beautiful, if easily perturbable, mildness. Now he’s just a quiet man who gets too excited when he drinks anything with caffeine in it. Once or twice a year I come to see him, and each time I wonder why I don’t just join him forever in this healing place. My father owns it, but it is my brother’s forest.
    Among the practitioners of oneiromancy, the forest stands for the unconscious, symbolizes the very place containing all we see when we’re asleep. And the same for the ocean. My brother keeps the forest on one hand and the ocean on the other, dwells between two 48 / Denis Johnson

    entrances to the deep dark source of dreams. The forest is a place of danger, magic, and happy endings. All night the dreamer travels in this region and doesn’t realize he’s asleep. The differences between the logic of that world and the logic of this waking one are vast. But they feel the same. And isn’t that how we recognize logic, by the way it feels?
    Whatever Descartes may say, his first fact rests only on a feather, this feeling , the same one we have as we wander through forests that don’t exist, forests that are just as primary in that world, entirely as real, as thinking-thus-being is in this one. I passed the junked carcasses with which my brother lines his road, old cars with their histories misting up through their broken windshields, powerful in their deaths, sinister and candid and, to me, frightening. Dust thickening over the stains of messy kids and backseat lovers, engines oxidized to brittle red lumps.
    Candid I mean in the absence of any dissemblance in their smashed faces, like dying dogs. If this sweaty hike were dreamed the waker wouldn’t have to ask: these wrecks mean exactly themselves, they mean that everything wastes away, that even steel will be putrefied, they mean that youths coupling in the depths will dissolve. But who cares?
    Translating dreams in advance, well, then why have them? Why sleep?
    I rounded a bend and there was my brother, bearded and blond, standing beside an International Harvester Scout, dripping water from a coffee can onto its hood.
    Bill saw me watching him.
    I could very nearly witness the lurching of his brain. He needed words. He’d forgotten they existed. He had to energize his atmospheres and let words form, like clouds, inside him.
    “I’m washing the birdshit off this vehicle,” he said.
    He wouldn’t get it done, not without a cloth or a brush. No. He was just fooling around because nothing was necessary here.
    “It looks like you don’t have shoes on,” he said.
    “This is an emergency visit.”
    “Hey,” he said, “hey.”
    “Nobody’s dead, no.”
    Nobody meant our father. Our father wasn’t dead.
    “Hey, okay,” Bill said.
    “I just had to get here fast.”
    We stood not twenty feet from his door, but he failed to ask me in.
    Didn’t want me in his one-room house because he