The Name of the World (3 page)

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 printing 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.

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?”