The Name of the World

by Denis Johnson

  Just such a person as I’ve described blocked our path—a smiling man with one hand raised high above his head—and said to me, “I’d like to give you my address.”

  J.J. spoke up and said, “That’s fine. But do we need your address?”

  The man leaned unsteadily to one side as if fighting a strong wind, his left hand raised and the fingers curled around an imaginary baton, or a small invisible torch. “I’d like to give you my address.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Go ahead, if you want.”

  “I’d like to give you my address,” the man said. “I’d like to give you my address.”

  He stood before us for a while with an expectant and inquiring slant to his eyebrows, as if the next move were ours. As we walked around him, he continued on his way with his left hand held aloft.

  After J.J. had shown me the grounds and everything else, the offices available to such as me, the copying facilities and coffee lounge and rest rooms, introduced me to Mrs. Towne, the gray-headed secretary in the flowered dress who served all the Forum members (but I saw no Forum members; the place was a morgue), after this short tour, he invited me into his office, sat us both in chairs, put his feet up on his desk, and said, “We don’t have anything for you, I’m afraid.”

  “Well,” I said, feeling stupid, irritated, and relieved. I really didn’t want to work here anyhow, not unless I was shooting a horror film. “It’s certainly been a pleasure looking the place over.”

  He brushed this off and started a long explanation about funding and so on that almost started to interest me, or rather his discomfort and his unexpected and charming inability to handle it did.

  “Look, Michael,” he said finally, getting up. “I’m bullshitting you. It’s the politics. The Foundation people are all affluent lefties. You had to work for Senator Thom!”

  I laughed and said, “I didn’t have to.”

  And he said, “Michael, I could use a friend. Let me take you to dinner.”

  I hesitated too long. He must have known I was hunting for an alibi.

  “My divorce is final today,” he said.

  I’d heard about it. His wife, a campus beauty, had been pursued and seduced by a visiting author, the famous novelist T. K. Nickerson. She’d managed the final details of the divorce from the flat she and the author shared these days in Rome.

  “Okay. Let’s get a bite,” I said.

  I left J.J. to close up his shop and walked alone out under a supernatural cloudscape, the sunset soaking the underbellies of huge formations. The entire world was pink. While I waited out front, a man came toward me, the same one who’d stopped us a while earlier, still gripping some tall invisible thing in the pastel dusk. With his free hand he offered me a piece of paper. “Here. This is my address. It’s written down here.”

  “Is this you? Robert Hicks?”

  “Check. Robert Hicks,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  “Mike.”

  “Mike what?”

  “Reed.”

  “Reed what?”

  “Michael Reed. That’s my name.”

  “Check. Michael Reed,” he said.

  “Who are these other people?” On the scrap of typesheet he’d handed me, a list of almost a dozen names followed his own.

  “Those are my friends in the Unit. The Head Trauma Rehabilitation Unit,” he said, “check, the H-T-R-U.”

  “Oh.”

  “We all have the same address. Check.”

  “I get it.”

  “The H-T-R-U. The H-T-R-U. The H-T-R-U,” Robert Hicks said.

  “Robert—does anybody ever ask you what you’re holding?”

  “Not too much. Once in a while.”

  “And what is it?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t see it. It’s very light,” he said.

  He started talking to himself loudly in words I couldn’t understand, and walked away.

  I sat on a bus-stop bench, the same stop the campus shuttle had let me out at when I’d arrived, because I didn’t own an automobile, and I watched the aimless strollers—so many of whom had been rendered permanently aimless by bad accidents—as many as two dozen people out on the grounds, concentrating hard on going nowhere. I was convinced I could pick out the patients, the ones getting better, from the University con artists like myself trudging among the buildings. But the new air, the pink sunset, the wide pocked field of slush crossed by the gray bars of the sidewalks like a big faded Confederate flag, people marching crookedly over it as if the battle had just ended…it wouldn’t be claiming too much to say that as I sat there holding in my fingers Mr. Hicks’s list of head-injury victims I felt the stirring even of parts of me that had been dead since childhood, that sense of the child as a sort of antenna stuck in the middle of an infinite expanse of possibilities. And childhood’s low-grade astonishments, its intimations of a perpetual circus…meeting, at random, kids with small remarkable talents or traits, with double-jointed thumbs, a third or even a fourth set of teeth. I don’t claim I enjoyed those long-ago days very much, they were so full of ridiculous horrors, but there was also this capacity of the universe to delight by turning up, like a beautiful shell on a long empty beach, a kid whose older teenaged sister liked to show off her bare breasts, or a boy who could take a drag off a cigarette, pinch his mouth and nostrils shut, and force smoke out through his ears. What happened to them? The boy whose hands were an optical illusion. His hands looked reasonably proportioned and complete, they were unremarkable until you looked closely and discovered that each hand had only three fingers, plus a thumb. But if you asked me, “Which finger was missing?” I couldn’t have chosen. All his fingers seemed to be there.

  “Are you looking at my hands?” J.J. asked me on the drive into town. I’d been staring at his two-fisted grip on the wheel of his Karmann Ghia.

  I told him about the boy I’d known. “That’s interesting,” he said, but I think he meant it was a stupid thing to admit having on your mind. Meanwhile I suspected his own mind was on his divorce. He seemed preoccupied, and we didn’t talk much as he drove the rattling sports car into town. As we got out of his car in a deserted parking ramp, he told me, “My hands are normal…” I heard an implied “But,” and thought he’d now proceed to introduce me to some grotesque secret about his body. Instead he locked his classic car from the outside, using the key in both doors, and led me to dinner.

  There were the troughs where students ate pizza or ribs or burgers or stir-fry, and then there were the establishments that had erected price barriers against all youth, where you could sit and talk. J.J. took us to one of the quiet ones, a small Italian place dedicated to romance. We sat by a frosty window—right after sunset the air had turned chilly—at a table for two spread with checkered linen. We were early. A waiter went around lighting candles shoved into Chianti bottles. I waited for J.J. to talk about his sadness, but instead, while we drank the house wine and waited for the food, he asked me about Senator Thom. “I’m curious—I’m trying to pin you down,” he admitted. “Did you like the guy or hate him? Did you quit or get fired?”

  “Finally. Someone crass enough to ask.”

  “You’re not slapping my hand, are you?”

  “No. Really. Nobody’s ever asked.”

  “It’s just that he’s in the news right now. I saw him last night on the tube, dueling with journalists.”

  Questions about the Senator’s ethics had come before the public recently. Not for the first time. “‘Fight every battle on TV,’” I quoted. “One of his mottoes. He’s got a million.”

  J.J. said, “Many predict the end of his career.”

  “Not me.”

  “Did you accomplish anything? Working for him?”

  “In D.C. I experienced what I once heard called ‘the temptation to be good.’ It’s a curse. As soon as it hit me I got confused. I still don’t know if, by quitting, I gave in to a bad temptation, or managed to resist a good one.”

  “Wow. Sounds like Zen,” he said. “
Am I supposed to make sense of it?”

  “There’s a perfect stillness at the center of Washington,” I said, and he folded his hands before him with the pleasant air of someone stuck beside a psycho on a public bus. “It’s natural to talk about it in paradoxes,” I insisted. “Everything in the world is going on there, but nothing’s happening. It’s all essential, but it’s all completely pointless. The motives are virtuous, but whatever you do just stinks. And then you retire with great praise.”

  “Well, we sort of guess all that, don’t we? So why did you enlist?”

  “I’ve got a half-dozen explanations,” I said, “but I’ll give you the shortest one: It was financial. I was restless, and I was curious, but mainly I was just poor. I wanted to leave behind the pinchpenny life of a high-school teacher. The prospect of money somewhere down the line meant a lot to me.”

  “But you didn’t get it.”

  “I got a raise.”

  “But you didn’t get rich.”

  “No.”

  “And you don’t care.”

  “No. Not right now. Should I?”

  “No,” he said. Then: “How much of a raise?”

  “I went from the low thirties to—after two or three years—just about eighty thousand. Just under.”

  “Hey. That’s not bad!”

  “I was designated executive legal staff. That put me at the high end.”

  “And how are your politics now? Or am I prying?”

  “You mean, will I vote for Senator Thom?” The Controversial Senator Tom-Tom, he was called by his constituents. The Big Chief, he was also called. I had stayed with the Senator at first in the hope of having influence, later in the hope of being there on the day of his defeat, finally in the hope of gathering evidence to bring him down. But he was clean, and it wouldn’t be fair to omit saying that he was even a good man. It’s just that his principles were small and his horizon was November. He should have been a Republican, but he was a Democrat—why? Why not? I think very little of either party now, and I can’t understand how I ever managed to see any difference between them. Worst of all, somewhere in the middle of my visit to that planet, I’d misplaced my sense of humor about all this. Would I vote for Senator Thom?

  “I no longer vote,” I told J.J.

  The spaghetti and the lasagna came. J.J. changed the subject, wanted to know how I felt about teaching, about students, about the academy. And now I got it—he was conducting an interview after all.

  How many interviews, how many J.J.s winding what quantity of pasta around how many forks, did the future hide? The question dropped me in a pit. Is there any limit, I thought, to how boring this place can be? By the time we’d both turned down dessert and were halfway through our cups of coffee, I’d decided no. No limit. “Do you know what?” I said. “I think I’ll let this next year be my last. I believe I’m through with the life of the mind.” Getting it said felt like a minor thing, but necessary. Like finally taking a second to tie a flapping shoelace.

  “Through with the life of the mind! Now I’m convinced you’re just the guy we need at the Forum.”

  “No. Thanks, but no.”

  A bit of silence between us now. We heard a man and a woman talking at the table just next to ours. The woman mentioned somebody’s funeral. J.J. took an interest.

  He stopped eating. He was clearly eavesdropping. Now the woman said, “I think it’s muggy in Alabama. Isn’t it?”

  “Muggy?” the man said. “It’s Alabama.”

  “I’m sorry,” J.J. said, “excuse me—”

  They both looked over at us. J.J. said to them, “Trevor Watt is dead?”

  They looked at each other for a second, and then back at J.J. “Yes—he’s dead.” It came out of both their mouths at once.

  The man said, “He had a heart attack last Saturday.” J.J. cleared his throat. He looked stunned. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “He was a pretty good acquaintance of mine. Where was he?”

  “He was at Brown,” the woman said.

  The man said, “Well, but he’d retired. He was living in—”

  “Down in Alabama someplace,” the woman said.

  While we paid our bill, J.J. went on chatting with them, and I urged him to take his time. I stepped outside and stood smoking a cigar on the sidewalk. Casually I drop that fact, but actually I’ve never smoked. This one had been given to me. People gave me gifts, people liked me, maybe because they sensed I was virtually dead and couldn’t hurt them.

  I’d been waiting for J.J to take up the subject of his wife, to open a window on his bitterness this day of his divorce. But nothing of the kind had happened. He and his wife had been separated a couple of years. Crossing the legal finish line seemed to have made him pensive today, but I supposed in general he’d mended.

  As a matter of fact, just a few weeks previous I’d met J.J.’s wife. This was at a large dinner party at a Dean’s house, one of those old-fashioned affairs where many had come for dinner but most—the students—would be booted out after cocktails. She’d been traveling through with T. K. Nickerson, the writer who’d won her away from us. Everybody called him “Kit.” Her name was Kelly. Kit and Kelly had been on their way to, or from, Europe in the dead of winter. Kelly was a beautiful woman, striking without having to be glamorous. She just dropped a purple silk dress over her head and she was ready to spend an evening in a room full of men trying not to go crazy in her presence. Tiberius Soames, my Haitian colleague in the Department of History, attached himself to her early that evening and never left her side. Her eyes looked sleepy, but her gaze was vibrant. She had very pale eyelashes. Straight strawberry hair to her shoulders.

  Another redhead was also there at the dinner party that night, the redheaded cellist, the creator of the Cannon Performance, that is. She was working for the caterer of this affair, helping in the kitchen and bringing around the food. She wore a gray-and-white uniform and had her hair bunched under a black net, and she looked very plain. But that only accentuated the aura of her mischief. She moved among us with a tray like the secret queen of some criminal enclave, casing the joint. As I reached for one of her hors d’oeuvres, she smiled and said, “Hello, Michael Reed.”

  It had been a month or so since we’d met at Ted MacKey’s, and then only briefly. Tonight I’d noticed her right away, but I hadn’t expected to be remembered. I was astonished. I probably looked it. She smiled and passed by.

  Before we all sat down to eat, I made sure to find out her name. This was a nerve-racking endeavor, not entirely to my surprise. Less than two weeks earlier, I’d been staring at her naked privates. I tried to intersect her path as if by accident. I sidled around and we approached each other at a drift, like objects in outer space. “You’re overly fond of these little numbers,” she said of the items on her tray.

  “No. I was trying to remember your name. I’m sorry. I can’t remember.”

  “Flower.” After a small challenging beat of silence during which I managed not to ask if she was kidding, she said, “Yes. Flower Cannon.”

  “Oh!—Cannon.”

  “Oh?”

  “I must not have heard it, back when we met.”

  “You’d have remembered.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you saw one of my performances last month, I think.”

  “Well,” I said.

  “Did you like it?”

  “Well…” But I was stalled. I’d become completely stupid. “That is the full text of my remarks,” I said.

  Flower Cannon laughed at me and moved along.

  As for Kelly Stein, J.J.’s wife, I didn’t pass one word with her beyond a glancing introduction, because during dinner she sat way down the long board, in another conversational district.

  I sat almost directly facing Kit Nickerson, however: a much less formidable figure than the black-and-white portraits on his book flaps, a tall and thin man with a boxer’s mashed nose, a prominent Adam’s apple, and kind, watery eyes. He had a bit of a stutter. But
it went away as he began arguing with a young author who sat across the table and a couple of places down, so that their exchange roped in a small audience of several others of us. It was hard not to feel slightly embarrassed for the other fellow, a guest teacher in the English Department here, as Kit himself had been two years before, when he’d hooked up with Kelly Stein—a prodigy of sorts, this much younger man, still in his twenties, half lost in his baggy clothing, with shoulder-length hair and a sweet face that cleared him of any suspicion, at least it seemed to me, that he liked to pick fights. “Do you want me to lie?” Kit asked him. “Because I could certainly manage it. Lying is sort of my vocation.” That was the first audible remark.

  Apparently the younger man had accused the famous novelist of betraying his early promise. How he’d reached such a point in the middle of a lot of small talk would have been hard to trace, but having found himself out here past the glow of the party’s lights, so to speak, out in the dark with the great man, he wasn’t backing down, give him that much. I saw his fingers trembling as he touched his water glass. He succeeded in keeping his gaze direct. “The people in your early books were all different from each other. You really sampled the world. I mean, those characters, like in Quest for Tears, or any of the early ones, really…they have some commonalities, they’re people who all have at least some education, and real passion, but outside of that, they can belong to any class, any walk of life. I mean, you got around, put it that way. Now it’s just people covered in jewels, people on yachts, people at state dinners…I’m sorry, I mean I say this as an admirer, a follower, an emulator even—but don’t you think you’re turning into sort of a lapdog for the privileged?”

  “But Seth,” Kit said, “you’re just being a snob in reverse. Don’t privileged people have feelings, too? Don’t they have inner lives? Can’t their passion be real?”

  “There’s more to it than their material circumstances. Nowadays—in your books nowadays—somehow they’re kind of morally—uh.” He was wilting. “Morally aloof.”