The Name of the World (7 page)

Under my hands the floor felt gritty with what I thought might be sawdust. It took me a little more time to remember what I was doing down there—I was trying to get up. I looked up to see Flower Cannon beside the stage. She’d taken off her black wig. She had her drink tipped up high and she was looking at me sideways. But out of a sort of libertarian barroom tact, I think, neither she nor anybody else seemed to be making very much of this incident. A couple of guys from a neighboring table helped me back onto my chair while I said, “I’m all right, I’m all right.”

Vince himself had disappeared, and a good thing—a person with his criminal history couldn’t afford any more trouble.

As soon as I could stand up straight, I left. On my way out I suddenly felt dizzy and sat down at the bar and asked for some orange juice. I sipped at it no more than a couple of minutes and then made my way out to the bright parking lot, where I realized I hadn’t even stopped off at the men’s room to see to my condition. My hands were filthy where I’d pushed myself up from the floor. Along with the grit of sawdust I found the stains of spilt drinks on my knees where I’d crawled around looking for my senses. I began to realize I had no idea where in the world I was going.

A man approached me, a young man frowning intelligently. Apparently he’d followed me out of the casino. “I saw that in there,” he said.

I leaned against a car.

“You okay?”

I nodded and tried to smile. “Excellent.”

In retrospect, there’s the humiliation: I forgot to be outraged, tried to play the cowboy.

“If you want to press charges, I’ll show up in court.”

“It was just one of those ridiculous—aah,” I assured him incoherently, “you know how it goes.”

“That was a completely unprovoked attack.”

I recognized him. He was a grad student with an office in our building, the Humanities Building. I didn’t know what subject he taught, but whenever I went down the stairs I passed his office, and it seemed he was always there, always talking in a self-assured nonstop voice to one of his students while others waited outside his door or sat on the stairs nearby. In a way, he was a junior colleague of mine. My embarrassment was now complete.

“If there’s anything I can do—”

“I’d really feel worse if you troubled yourself about it at all.”

“Yeah, I get you,” he said. “Okay.”

“Thanks.”

“Just tell me you’re navigating on your own power, and I’m outa here.”

“I just needed air. I’m all right.”

After he’d left me I moved myself a few paces and sat on the bumper of a truck while I tried to make a plan for the rest of the day, which looked completely unappealing now. I determined I’d check on bus schedules. If I didn’t learn of a bus leaving very soon, I’d get a motel room and watch TV or nap while I waited.

But now I found myself signaling across the parking lot to Flower Cannon as she came out of the casino. She headed right over, whether to greet me or because her car was parked close by I didn’t know.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” she said. She was wearing jeans and a man’s wrinkled linen sports coat. Her makeup was gone.

“We’re actually acquainted,” I said.

“Yes. Hi,” she said.

“Do you remember me?”

“Sure. You just got knocked out in there. You’re quite memorable.”

“I was just going to ask you for a ride back to the University, if you remember me.”

“Michael Reed, right?”

“Yes. Michael Reed. I need a ride.”

“Did he steal your car, too?”

“I’m glad one of us sees the humor in it.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just laughing because I’m drunk.”

“Drunk? And you’re driving?”

“All over the road like a goddamn maniac. We’ve got plenty of room,” she said. “Hop right in.”

Actually her grad-student Japanese hatchback was crowded with boxes, books, clothing, trash. I cleared a space on the passenger side by shoveling junk over the back of the seat.

“I’m sorry it smells funny,” she said. “It needs to go through the car wash sometime with the windows open.”

She started the car after a couple of tries. “Wasn’t there somebody else?” I asked.

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Who’s we?”

“We?”

“You said we. Who’s we?”

“I don’t know. You and me.”

“Okay. I just didn’t want to forget someone.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“Fuck ’em,” she said, “whoever they are,” and we swooped out of the lot.

I’d stayed in Riverside no more than two hours, probably less, been conveyed there swiftly and stayed briefly to be assaulted and now was conveyed back again over the flat landscape where the fields lay in perfect sterile rows of dust. I felt wonderful in a way. But my head ached.

“I missed your act,” I told her. “What was the alias you performed under?”

“‘O. O. O’Malley,’” she said.

“And you won.”

“I sure did.”

“Very good.”

“You take it all off, you get the prize. Gynecology triumphs.”

“I missed that.”

“‘Skin to win.’”

“Excellent.” I couldn’t really converse. I worried about
Flower’s driving. She didn’t give it her full attention. She took her eyes off the road whenever she addressed me and had a trick of jamming the gas suddenly and accelerating up into the seventies for no good reason. In a sports car she’d be a demon. I could feel the cogs and guys of the steering about to snap. I worried about the tires, certainly they were the cheapest. Yes, sometimes part of me wanted my life to end like this, in a bad wreck, as a way of sharing the horror of Anne and Elsie’s last moments. But the rest of me was just inordinately afraid in a car.

Flower dropped me at the gate to the Humanities Building parking lot.

“Are you going in?” She shut the engine off and turned herself toward me.

“Going in. Yes. Why wouldn’t I be going in?”

“I don’t know. I thought maybe your car was parked here or something.”

“I don’t have a car. I’m going in.”

What do I see when I remember her face? Those eyes. In fact they were mind-wrecking. Blue and pitiable and sweet, in their deep dark sockets, though I wish for some other word than sockets. When I looked into them my thoughts just stopped.

“Well, fix your face first. You’re smudgy,” she said. She had a funny way at the ends of her sentences. Rather than a pause, she created a plunge.

“How much was the prize for your dance?”

“One-fifty.”

“That’s not bad.”

“It’s two fifty on the Fourth of July.”

“Maybe I should try to be there,” I told her.

“Sure. I’ll give you a lift,” she said. “Since you don’t have a car.”

I went in through the basement entrance and checked my reflection in a mirror in the men’s room. The wild punch had dented my forehead near the scalp. I didn’t look like a brawler so much as a man who forgot to watch where he was going. I wet my hair and pasted a forelock over the red area and went upstairs to the monthly Department of History coffee klatsch. I was pretty much the last to arrive, and as I entered the small lounge, always to me somehow reminiscent of a prison’s visiting area, they all looked up from their conversations. Then the dozen or so of them welcomed me almost as a reception line, one by one. As if I’d done something special I didn’t know about.

This was curious, even slightly disorienting. I sipped coffee and ate a cookie until their attention drifted away from me and I was left dusting powdered sugar from my fingers.

Tiberius Soames greeted me with a sort of wise and happy weariness. He put his hand on my shoulder. “You’ve been worried about me. And I appreciate that. But no. I’m fine. Yes.”

“You sound all right,” I said. And we went together toward the pair of urns and drew ourselves more completely unnecessary coffee.

Soames seemed to discover the Styrofoam cup in his hand, gulped at it gratefully. “I’ve just got no more stomach for the bitter charade. When my mother died her body was eaten by dogs.”

I tried to think of some words to say. I tried, but I couldn’t. “Dogs?” was the best I could do.

“That’s my message to the world. Why should it be otherwise? Should I disguise the facts concerning our universe?”

“Tiberius—” Many people called him Tibby, but I didn’t know him that well, and anyway he might be going crazy right before our eyes. The situation seemed to call for full names.

This thought brought back the moment I’d had with the patient at the Swan’s Grove campus, with his head trauma and his upraised invisible flame. It seemed just the kind of remark the patient might have made. When my mother died her body was eaten by dogs. Instead the man had given me his name and address and I still had them somewhere among my notes. Robert Hicks.

Tiberius said, “All right then. I’ll stop alarming you and say something trivial and muy apropos. For instance, do you have any German? No. Okay then. You’ll be interested to know that in German
klatsch
means ‘gossip.’ Here is our wonderful hostess;
sprechen zie Deutsch
?” he asked as Clara Frenow approached, whisking crumbs from her bosom and getting frosting on her neckline in the process. “At du klatsch we are torn by dogs.”

“I think you said,” she said, “did you say—?”

“Yes, in an attempt to be appropriately trivial and at the same time Germanic just somewhat. Clara. My goddess. Are you the originator of the idea that we should occasionally
klatsch
together?”

“Uh. Yes,” she said. “Rather I mean—no, Tibby. It’s been a
tradition since the seventies.” Clara had completed her round of chemotherapy. She didn’t wear a wig, but covered her patchy baldness with an assortment of caps, baseball caps, knit caps, hats of felt, of straw, a sailor’s hat, today a jaunty blue beret that made her look like an English schoolgirl. For a few weeks her battle had shot her full of fire. She’d been running over with new ideas and seemed to be viewing the materials of her life from a mountaintop. The fight had apparently been successful, the cancer was driven back, and now Clara seemed her sad self again.

And weren’t we all just as sad? These little gatherings where you can smell the sugar, the small cakes. Ours were come-as-you-are, but you couldn’t make these occasions any more bearable by wearing shorts and tennis shoes. Stainless steel urns on brown institutional tables hidden under white paper lace. Professor Frenow in her pitifully jaunty headgear, Tiberius Soames with his fingertips at a floating braille, looking as if the air hurt his skin. He stayed near me but was silent. He smiled a wide terrified distracted smile. I couldn’t tell if he was pained for me or for himself.

The History Department was thriving, thanks entirely to Soames. As a young diplomat in the Haitian government, I believe an assistant to the President’s Chargé d’Affaires, he’d been implicated in a coup conspiracy, quite accurately, he said, and I didn’t doubt him. He escaped to France and received political refugee status, which protected him from extradition. He claimed to have been spirited to Paris by the British MI-6. When he talked of his past he had a habit of stating some
where invariably in the tale, “All the boys in MI-6 went to the same school and shared a horrible adolescence.” This information meant something to him. He was always turning it over in his mind, apparently, but as far as I know he never got its significance across to any of the rest of us. The kids adored his personal reminiscences, stories that sometimes hijacked whole lecture periods but which he tied to the study of history in a way that illuminated it as the very medium of our lives. Here, after all, stood a man who lived under sentence of death in the land of his fathers. History had done that. He would never return. He’d written half a dozen books, contributed frequently to
Foreign Affairs,
and had a good exile. Still, it was exile.

Clara rang her spoon against her cup and delivered a toast. A toast to me. The purpose of today’s gathering was to celebrate me. Because I was leaving. Everyone applauded politely.

Apparently they weren’t going to renew my contract. This was news. I’d expected one more appointment, and then the gate. Clara and I had chatted at the end of the previous year and left the subject open; somehow it had closed all by itself. Here I’d been wondering what would happen to me year after next, and it was happening now.

I wondered if, in the shuffle of medicines and sorrows through her recent life, Clara had simply forgotten to discuss this with me. As I tumbled it all over in my mind, smiling and faking my thanks, bitter and relieved, I considered she’d probably at first simply hoped, and finally just presumed, that no discussion was necessary. Out of sheer personal cowardice
she may have decided to let that one conversation serve as the final and necessary acknowledgement that, as far as History was concerned, I was history. But that was the style in our Department, and, as far as I knew, in all the other Departments. We conducted our business with a nonconfrontational vagueness which, in the world I’d been formerly a part of, the political realm, had been saved for communication with the voters (the Senator had called them “the votes”). To constituents we equivocated, but behind closed doors nobody minced words.

I heard a female campaign manager say to an aide once, “Do you want to know how a loser stinks? Put your nose in your armpit. Then empty your desk.” Maybe in the academy a distaste for causing pain kept us from shafting one another quite so mercilessly, but I don’t think Clara’s way of firing someone was very much more adroit, and I doubt the young aide clearing out his desk drawers had felt any more astonished and red-faced that day than I did at the moment.

Suddenly Soames was lucid: “Are you secretly ready to get out of this place?”

“I can feel the whole experience withering around me.”

“Perfect! You understand me perfectly. Do you remember the dead skins of the Pulitzer Prize winner? Right. His books—dead skins! How could he say that? Do you think he was being stupidly provocative or simply imitating a colossal human anus?”

“He treated me okay, Tiberius. But I wasn’t chasing his girlfriend around the living room.”