The Name of the World

by Denis Johnson

  To my way of thinking, this secret project of the nameless slave, whether man or woman we’ll never know, implicated all of us. There it was, all mapped out: the way of our greatness. Though simple and obvious as an act of art, the drawing portrayed the silly, helpless tendency of fundamental things to get way off course and turn into nonsense, illustrated the church’s grotesque pearling around its traditional heart, explained the pernicious extrapolating rules and observances of governments—implicated all of us in a gradual apostasy from every perfect thing we find or make.

  Implicated. This wasn’t my reaction only. I talked with lots of people who’d seen this work, and they all felt the same, but in various ways, if that makes sense. They felt uneasy around it, challenged, disturbed. I suppose that’s what made it art, rather than drawing.

  The piece wasn’t beautiful, particularly, unless you like looking at tree rings on a fresh stump, and not as engrossing or as mystifying, in fact, as a piece of wood. Natural entities, the clouds, the sea, these are four-dimensional, and so is the slab of wood, because it invites you to consider that each ring took a year to make. The anonymous drawing was just a lot of sorrowful concentricity, but it spoke a truth. It made me in all matters a fundamentalist. I didn’t go to “take it in.” I went to be convicted.

  I can’t say I remember much about this particular visit to the museum. But I must have been troubled more than usual on this day, a bad anniversary, because I made the rest of it memorable by deciding to look up Heidi Franklin, the art historian with whom I’d hovered briefly in a capsule above the first few moments of this long winter, at Ted MacKey’s house, in the widow’s walk.

  Whatever else I did in the museum that day, I must have had a wordless exchange with Bill in which we acknowledged one another perfunctorily and I wondered if he recognized me. Over these last four years he’d grown a mustache and acquired a chair in which he sat, these days, looking bored but not inattentive. Certainly not counting his money. Maybe he had a pension from the military, or some other stipend that made it possible to live on the wages of a rent-a-cop.

  I nodded, I smiled. And so did Bill. I believed that at some juncture in his life Bill had made decisions he didn’t know at the time he was making—that had won him medals or by which he’d let his comrades down…I’m sure I imagined too much, but I saw an old war not quite faded in his eyes.

  This was what our imaginary conversations—that is, forgive me, my imaginary conversations—often touched on. The indiscernible points, the little dimes, where fate takes its sharpest turns. I explained no more to him than I did to anybody else, but he spoke freely of his life after this thing that had happened, or hadn’t quite. Of how afterward he’d found it impossible to decide anything, or not to decide. How at a point in his journey out of mourning he’d wandered into a tunnel in which he traveled alone, and had no one to talk to, and couldn’t call out. Because of the consequences, the split-second consequences, everything he did or didn’t do became impossible.

  And naturally, because I was talking to him in my head, the whole conversation was a monologue, and it was all about me. Exile, detachment, paralysis, fear—all the qualities people projected onto my flat white surface—they really played no part in anything that happened after the accident that took my wife and daughter. Everything occurred despite its complete impossibility. Including my decision, that day, to look for Heidi Franklin at the Art Department.

  The doors to the Fine Arts Building lay directly across a paved court, almost a patio, that served the museum’s entrance, too. By walking over this pavement in the freezing weather, by stepping outside the routines I’d set for myself and going to see a woman, I wasn’t doing anything special, certainly not stirring my lifeless portions. I might have thought so three years earlier, when I’d still mistaken my paralysis for simple grief. But it wasn’t simple.

  The day of the accident, our neighbor picked up Anne and Elsie, my wife and daughter, out front of our house, and made a U-turn heading for the highway. I stopped them with a wave and leaned down to the driver’s window. There’d been an ice storm the night before. The streets were dangerous. I thought he should take the gravel shortcut to town, I thought he should stay off the fast roads. He’d been pointed toward the shortcut anyway, and now he’d turned around. “Aren’t you just heading on through to town?” “No, because of construction.” “It’s Sunday,” I told the old man, “they won’t be working.”

  Everybody knew our neighbor, General Neally, retired many years from the Air Force (and, incidentally, a widower), as a vigorous, tennis-playing, memoir-writing Southern gentleman. But lately he’d been getting frail, I thought. Once when I watched him heading in his Cadillac out of his driveway and pausing to look right and left, right and left, and again right and left, more confused, it seemed, than cautious, I wondered if he should have been operating a car. Only a couple of weeks before the accident, the General and I had met one morning at our mailboxes and he’d invited me to his kitchen for coffee. As he puttered around after the makings he grew silent and scratched his head, turned around to face me, and said in absolute surprise, “What do you want!”

  All this was on my mind as I stood beside his car, failing even to glance at my family on the other side of him—I remember that often: I might have looked one last time into their faces, but didn’t—and told the General, “Take the gravel road, it’s shorter.” “I like the big highway anyway,” he said. And drove off. I stood there with one last statement—“Take the gravel road. It’s safer”—on the tip of my tongue. On the tip of my tongue. I can still taste it in my mouth. If only I’d said it. Even if he’d again rejected my advice, he’d have been delayed a few more seconds during the exchange, and maybe they’d all be alive today. During the next few terrible weeks, imagination served up other things I could have done. I might have kept them home, or called them a cab, or kept our own car out of the shop another few days—it was only in for a tune-up, because of the warranty. I might have kept a second car…but we didn’t need one, I commuted to the District each day in the Senator’s limousine. So I said nothing, and they drove away.

  Five miles down the road the General came to a stop sign, applied his brakes, and floated over the ice into the path of a panel truck going forty miles an hour. (A truck from a florist’s shop. I don’t know—I didn’t view the scene—but I assume there were flowers everywhere.) At once Anne and Elsie were dead. The General survived for twenty-four hours, but never woke up. May they all rest in peace.

  This winter day exactly four years later I went across the separating court, past the tarnished sculptures, through the doors of the Fine Arts Building. Went along through my tunnel, as I had for four years now. I took each step entirely out of a dull curiosity, not as to what waited ahead, because I didn’t care, but as to whether or not I could take one more step. I hadn’t found much else to interest me along the way. At the risk of stretching the illustration, I can say I sometimes came to turnings in the darkness and wondered if this were a labyrinth.

  The Fine Arts Building was an old one, with high ceilings that made the halls seem narrow and proportioned for some earlier, elongated race of academics. The place reeked of oils and glues and old wood. I didn’t expect Heidi to be in. I thought I’d end up leaving a message at the office. A young man with a stubbly goatee, the rest of his head hairless, seemed to be in charge there. When I asked for Heidi Franklin he ducked behind his desk and was gone, entirely gone. “Excuse me?” I called. I stepped closer and peered over the desk to find him bent low over the floor, fiddling with the plug to his electric typewriter. “She might be at the performance,” he said.

  “Can I leave her a note?”

  He stood up and I noticed a clever touch of style in his otherwise baggy contemporary apparel: a powder-blue Lacoste alligator shirt. Where the alligator patch belonged, the material was torn away and a small patch of his bare chest showed instead. A tiny alligator was tattooed there. “Try the Cannon Performance. Room Eight,”
he said.

  “Cannon Performance? Sounds dangerous.”

  “I’m sure it’s meant to.”

  I found Room Eight just a few steps down the hallway and peeked through the half-open door to see a number of students, say two dozen, most of them lounging on the floor, others perched on stools, all of them outfitted and decorated in the disheveled and expressive Art Department mode. Easels had been pushed aside and stools and chairs herded together. The large room was silent. But I couldn’t see any performance, no one performing, though most of the front of the room lay visible to me. I stepped in quietly and sat at a wooden school desk by the entrance, more a part of the miscellany, the drop cloths and easels and boxes, than of the audience. Now I could see the room’s near corner, and on a small platform a woman perched on a table with her legs widely parted, her left foot up beside her and the right one dangling, a young woman, nude below the waist except for her shoes—black tennies, high-top, unlaced, one lace purple or darkish and the other white or gray—engaged in shaving her lathered mons veneris. She used a pink disposable safety razor. I sat close enough to see these facts and colors. She was having some trouble with this operation, making very short strokes of her razor, swishing it vigorously in a chipped enamel bowl of water after every couple of strokes, and changing razors frequently from a plastic package full of them.

  It took me a bit to recognize the young woman I’d met at Ted MacKey’s the same night I’d met Heidi Franklin, that is, the tipsy cellist in the blue velvet dress. I tried to stay with the conventionally visible facts: She had red hair, pretty blue eyes, the faint violet circles around them more pronounced because of her complexion’s paleness. At the moment she wore a yellow baseball cap and a blue T-shirt that said Edgars in white cursive letters across the breast.

  I’d meant to sit out of the way, but as the dais was tucked into this corner, my corner, where I hadn’t expected to find it, I was very nearly in the lap of the performer. Did freckles wander over her knees? As I leaned forward to see, I caught myself, terribly embarrassed. But nobody was looking at me. The students attended carefully, like the audience in an operating theater, with a collective attitude that seemed clinical if not outright jaded: She was an artist, that’s all. I couldn’t imagine why they called this a Cannon Performance.

  Very close to me stood the teacher, a short, barrel-chested man in jeans and a red sweatshirt. He looked tough and loud, but right now he was wordless. Also I’m guessing he didn’t feel very tough. I never met him, then or later, and was never able to ask.

  As the session broke up—or at any rate as this performance was concluded with a wiping away of moist wisps of lather with a white hand towel, and she closed her legs and pulled down the hem of her blue T-shirt and sought about for her jeans with her free hand, laying the towel aside simultaneously, and others began to move around the room—I left. I went out to the court full of metal figures and walked from piece to piece, frowning so hard at them I eventually became aware of a pinpoint agony between my eyebrows. The sculptures seemed altogether leaden, unwieldy, pointless. And you’d better believe I’d forgotten all about Heidi Franklin.

  Entirely out of habit, I walked off toward the School of Law. What had I witnessed? The point of the performance was lost on me but its effect was a wallop, and I stood by the skating pond clutching its cold railing with my bare hands, disoriented by the youth around me, not for the first time on this campus. The pond was covered by a cloud rising off the ice, the island in the middle of it almost invisible. And ominous. A looming arrival, a ghostly advent, the ghost ship of mariners’ legends.

  For half an hour I stood and watched these young skaters and tried to put them together with what I’d just seen. But the attempt itself was an act of minor hysteria. A Cannon Performance? I certainly felt shot by a cannonball.

  Here before me was another vivid picture—youth, freshness, vigor, the very life-breath visible out of their mouths—the cinematic picture, coming toward me out of the fog, growing substantial and then astonishing. Bright colors, breaths and words and laughter and the skirl of their blades, and then they faded, they were nothing. Yet on the other hand these same youngsters seemed to illustrate not life and youth and games, but training. All in a line and a direction, drilling for the march. The faces changed, but the round went on, and the round brought to mind the slave’s drawing that so affected me, the line pursuing its model until it was no longer a failed emulation, no longer an unintended parody, but finally an abomination of ignorance.

  I myself was hunched like a skater, still gripping the railing, and I was filled, suddenly, with a sense of rightness and truth—flooded and becalmed in the wake of an insight: I recognized that every one of these skaters wore my face.

  For precisely four years I’d hovered like this around my own past. A ghost moving in the mist. Circling, attending, ministering to the great beshrouded monolith. And coming back to the slave’s drawing almost daily, as a disfigured actor might be drawn repeatedly to the mystery of his face in the mirror. Now its lesson came clear: As I followed my own round over and over I wandered farther and farther from its core, my course less and less beholden to the central shape. For a long time now I’d really had little to do with the source of my grief. I was in fact quite free of it. Yet my devotion remained.

  Nothing was required of me. I just had to put one foot in front of the other, and one day I’d wander wide enough of my dark cold sun to break gently from my orbit.

  I belted my overcoat, but with difficulty, my hands senseless by now with cold. I twisted my scarf under my chin and pulled on my gloves. I turned away from this revelation and toward the world, hungry to get the news about myself. What would happen to me now?

  I can’t say this next thought simply occurred to me, because in fact it stayed with me constantly. It surfaced now as it often did, that’s all: In a few more years my daughter would have gone to college. I would have loved for her to whirl to a stop by this railing and laugh the sweet laughter of old movies on television. Above all I would have loved for Elsie to have turned out something like…but I couldn’t remember the cellist’s name.

  My eagerness stayed fresh for a while, a few days, better than a week. Then, oppressed by low gray clouds, low temperatures, it faded. But I waited.

  A breath of change in late February gave over to a succession of blizzards in early March. The meteorologists couldn’t help themselves and repeated the phrase “blanketing the Midwest” over and over. The town took on the breadlike curvatures of Alpine villages in photographs. The skaters went away. The skating pond, and even its railing, disappeared beneath several feet of snow. The red sculptures at the top of the monolith went under, too. Roofs imploded, vehicles and livestock were buried, travel stopped, everybody suffered, and we were well into April before the skies cleared and the white fields began to thaw.

  The weather defeated all of us. With the difficulties, the delays, everyone fell behind. By the time I got around to visiting J. J. Stein at the Forum for Interpretative Scholarship, I thought it possible he’d forgotten we’d ever met.

  I’d never before seen the Forum grounds, an odd piece of our University settled a dozen miles outside of town, in a compound that had been an insane asylum in the days when they were called exactly that. This day of my visit to the Swan’s Grove Campus the weather felt new. Winter’s edges had been pushed back, the sidewalks were clear and the roads were dry. The deep snow in the fields had collapsed into dimples that had become, at last, here and there, craters with soaked gray pasture at their bottoms.

  “The Grove,” as J. J. Stein called it, was one of those academic backwaters into which state money miraculously and secretly finds its way, the kind of place some enterprising state legislator, I thought, would someday expose and ruin. As if to protect the place from attacks on its irrelevance, the University Hospital ran its small Head Trauma Rehabilitation Unit out here. Also, in one of the old buildings once full of madness, a charitable foundation housed a printin
g press. Dr. J.J.’s Forum for Interpretive Scholarship had a small L-shaped structure to itself.

  He showed me all around the grounds, steering me by the arm as if I were decrepit. Others were out taking the air as well. Some of them looked drunk, probably patients from the Rehabilitation Unit. We toured the grove of elms that gave the place its name, the various buildings, the creek, the handball court. None of this was necessary. We just wanted to stroll in the wet sunshine.

  Coming up from under the terrible winter, it all looked dismal. Ripe for haunting. Colossal, unwieldy crows congregated in the bare branches of the elms. “Seventeen acres,” J.J. said. “It was bought in the thirties for nothing. The College of Medicine did experiments out here on animals for several decades. That big smokestack is the crematorium.” He pointed to a hundred feet of brick rising out of a small concrete structure. We were crossing the central field diagonally, using a wide paved walk. “They’ve still got a facility over by the creek. Most of us stay away from it.”

  Plainly the place’s creepy history was much enjoyed by some of the people who used it now. J.J. brightened as he talked about it, although none of the folks we crossed paths with seemed to be enjoying anything much, and many put me in mind of the former denizens. In the strangeness of spring, finally without hats, our jackets open, inhaling the warm air suspiciously, I’m sure we all looked like lunatics. It didn’t help that some of us staggered or shuffled, wearing open galoshes and pajamas under overcoats, practicing simple movements with rehabilitated heads.