The Name of the World Read online

  Denis Johnson

  The Name of the World

  For Cha and Ellie

  Contents

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  About the Author

  Fiction

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Since my early teens I’ve associated everything to do with college, the “academic life,” with certain images borne toward me, I suppose, from the TV screen, in particular from the films of the 1930s they used to broadcast relentlessly when I was a boy, and especially from a single scene: Fresh-faced young people come in from an autumn night to stand around the fireplace in the home of a beloved professor. I smell the bonfire smoke in their clothes and the professor’s aromatic pipe tobacco, and I feel the general, unquestioned sweetness of youth, of autumn, of college—the sweetness of this life. Not that I was ever in love with this dream, or even particularly drawn to it. It’s just that I concluded it existed somewhere. My own undergraduate career stretched over six or seven years, interrupted by bouts of work and transfers to a second and then a third institution, and I remember it all as a succession of requirements and endorsements. I didn’t attend the football games. I don’t remember coming across any bonfires. By several of my teachers I was impressed, even awed, and their influence shaped me as much as anything else along the way, but I never had a look inside any of their homes. All this by way of saying it came as a surprise, the gratitude with which I accepted an invitation to teach at a university.

  When the chance came along, I was nearly fifty. After college I’d taught high school for better than a decade, earning postgraduate credits in the summers. One day I wrote a letter to a presidential candidate, advising him on policy and strategy (this was Senator Thomas Thom of Oklahoma; he faded early in the primaries), and although I’d had no idea people who wrote such letters were ever heeded, much less hired, in a blink I went from Mr. Reed the Social Studies person to Mike Reed the speechwriter, staff floater, and cloakroom confidant, and spent nearly twelve years in Washington. I quit just after Senator Thom began his fifth term. I took the job at the University when my book idea was turned down—I’d offered to witness to power’s corrupting influence, but apparently no such witness was required.

  Then I found myself in the Comparative Studies wing of the Humanities Building, although I was actually an Adjunct Associate Professor of History. (The Humanities Department was long ago dissolved to form more departments, bigger departments; the old building houses budgetary mavericks, grant-sponsored programs and the like, experiments that live out their funding periods and fade away. Somehow this became the home of History.) I ran small seminars, asking bright, undirected students to read books I’d already read and then listening while they presented papers to the rest of the group for criticism. In other words, I didn’t do anything. This would have interfered not at all with a glorious future in that place, but I didn’t bother with the other side of business there, either, the meetings and the memos and so on.

  Four renewals was about the limit for my type of appointment, and I was near the end of my third. After next year, they’d move me along. Meanwhile, I was on vacation.

  But people in positions like mine have to keep alert for new ones, and so I found myself one evening dining in a group of eleven at the home of Ted MacKey, Chairman of the School of Music. The surroundings came close to the 1930s moving picture of this life: the snowflakes coming down outside in a college-town night that threatened to add to itself the jingling of sleigh bells and the songs of young carolers, while inside the house, lodge-like in its dimensions, we all drank hot buttered rum around a warm blaze that sent a changing light under the lustrous mantel and onto windows of leaded glass, and onto a black antique telescope and a monstrous beige globe I would have bet presented the world as it had been long ago, but would never be again. We drank hot buttered rum in the atmosphere, in other words, of a very expensive gift shop. It oppressed me. It oppressed me although I’d been given my supper in plenty of homes exactly like it at other universities and in Washington, and I’d even eaten here at Ted MacKey’s, two winters previous. It oppressed me for that thought as much as any other, maybe, the mental image of a thousand such dwellings pressed window to window across the wide undifferentiated air of a plunging chasm, and me with a spoon and a bowl and a smile in every one of them.

  The dinner that night honored a distinguished visitor to our campus, the Israeli composer Izaak Andropov. As it happened, he’d taken a fever, and didn’t attend.

  I was here to make a new acquaintance, the head of a University fiefdom called the Forum for Interpretive Scholarship. The Forum had money. They had Associate-level jobs. They had offices, salaries, everything. Best of all they had no duties, no classes. Or so Ted MacKey had promised me, letting out this information in a casual way, as if I might not be looking around for another slot someplace the year after next. This happened all the time, that is, people I hardly knew often suggested, one way or another, that they’d like to help me. I was the object of much goodwill, in fact, sometimes because the man I’d worked for in Washington was disliked, and I’d quit him; or, conversely, because he was liked, and I’d worked for him. In any case, here was a chance to stretch out my vacation another academic year or two. Nothing ever happened at the Forum beyond an occasional presentation by one of the scholars, most of them emeriti from Big Ten universities and such, who just dragged out the lectures they’d been dragging out this way since the days when Ted MacKey’s big beige globe had known what it was talking about.

  I don’t think any of the guests knew each other more than casually, but we didn’t have to struggle much for things to say, as Ted MacKey had arranged a short concert for us. A young woman played the guitar and another the cello, after which Ted’s grade-school son played the lute with astonishing self-possession, wearing pajamas and a robe and fuzzy slippers, and concentrating, plainly, not on his fingers but on the truth of his music.

  I was seated next to Dr. J. J. Stein, the one who pulled the strings at the Forum for Interpretive Scholarship. Some kind of Scotch broth was dealt out. Even if I was aware I’d enjoyed too many of them, I didn’t mind these dinners, particularly at the University. I like being around people who like being where they are. In the scholarly world, the world of the mind, much more than in the world of politics, it’s common to meet people who’ve truly earned their comfort, at least in a sense, having labored through and left behind the parts of childhood so unpleasant for scholars, brains, intellectuals. And here they are, respected and safe at last, while the others slug it out in the marketplace. Dr. J. J. Stein was the person I might have imagined if I’d been trying to visualize this meeting in advance, a happy, bearded, balding scholar. And he went on to make an explanation for me of a kind I might have expected, too—incredibly earnest thinkers always have to explain the names they choose for their projects, because the names mean absolutely nothing when you hear them—as to why “Forum” was just the right word, why only “Interpretive” conveyed the right sense, why, when you’d finished considering all the words in the English language, “Scholarship” had to be the one.

  I wasn’t sure how deliberate a job of selling had been set for me in Dr. J.J.’s mind, but it happened I had an idea I wanted to elaborate, one requiring research assistants and more than one office, the kind of enterprise that might rope in all sorts of scholars and result in an anthology of essays all on a theme, and this vision I produced for him while he interrupted with enthusiastic questions, and the cellist, just on the other side of him, got attractively tipsy. In the midst of this it occurred to me aloud that Dr. J.J. might write my anthology’s introduction and make it an occasion for talking about his Forum. The cellist, one of Ted’s grad students, dev
eloped a kind of ironic interest in the plan, and asked questions herself, and pretty soon started interrupting the Doctor’s interruptions, chiefly by saying, almost exclusively by saying, “Oh—really?” A striking redhead in a dress of blue velvet, she sat at the head of the table: Halfway through the meal she’d moved around to Izaak Andropov’s unclaimed place of honor. Her ivory cheeks and her ivory shoulders grew flushed, and her voice took on a musical and dangerous timbre. I’m not sure why it is that the experience of witnessing a talented young person make a slight fool of herself, at a stiff little gathering like this, is so pleasant. But as she began to draw the focus to our corner of the table, even to become memorable, I sensed my own spiel would be forgotten, and I wasn’t entirely sorry for the fact.

  After dessert, Ted took three or four of us up to a parapet above the house. From the third floor a corkscrew staircase entered a dome on the roof, a curious structure like a glassed-in birdcage, about eight feet in diameter, say, and without illumination, so that the little group of us stood suddenly in the night, and in the sky. The weather had cleared, the snow had blown off the glass, and there were stars and moonlit, decorative clouds in the black heavens. “This used to be a sort of widow’s walk,” Ted explained, “but you can see it’s been turned into—well, I don’t know what it was turned into, to tell you the truth. I bring people up here because I’m curious whether it’s something with a recognizable purpose.” None of us recognized its purpose. In the end, I was left up there to ponder it all with a woman named Heidi Franklin, a historian from the Art Department. A friendly but awkward woman, precise and despairing—a homely woman, and I think I have the license to make such a remark, because I’m homely, too, and older than she, so I was homely first. I’m cherubic, baby faced, past fifty but taken for years younger, with cheery blue eyes, and for all of that, homely. In the glittering dark we stood talking very softly, probably about the stars. Heidi may have been interested in a nightcap somewhere downtown; I might have been, too. That neither of us put our finger to the balance, so to speak, and urged it in that direction owed to a sense we probably shared, and I certainly felt, that we’d been left up here alone together by design. If I’d asked, I might have learned that she was single, as I was, or worse, maybe recently divorced, as I was recently widowed.

  When I say recently, I don’t mean it in the sense that I might have bought a car recently, or seen a movie recently. I’m speaking as I’d speak about the recent change in the earth’s climate, or the recent war, the recent—I think that’s clear enough. It had been nearly four years, long enough to make me eligible again. Other people seemed to think so, anyway, and I wasn’t going to argue about it.

  When it was somehow decided the evening was done, all the guests left together, and the drivers started up their cars and sat inside them with the doors open while everybody said goodbye a second time. Here and there among the evergreens, lumps of snow dropped from branch to branch and down to the ground, yanking at the boughs. We’d all covered ourselves in caps and scarves, all but the lady cellist, who went hatless and carried her coat over her shoulder. In the fluorescent light of the curbside arc lamps she looked ghastly, her blue velvet dress a sudden mournful black. I heard her say three words: “Sane? Or tame?” Her abundant red hair looked purple, her big blue eyes looked fake, inhuman, her lips stood out starkly in her face. She was talking to her date, she didn’t know the rest of us existed, the aging rest of us, the sane, or tame, rest of us. I felt very kindly toward her, glad of her presence, maybe because she was drunk and didn’t care about herself.

  “I’m sorry we got sidetracked earlier,” J. J. Stein told me as we parted. “Come around sometime. Just drop in. I’ll show you around the Forum.”

  “Terrific. I look forward to it.”

  Ted MacKey, a tall, elegantly graying man, stood in the amber warmth behind his windowglass, both hands uplifted in farewell. Ted wasn’t quite as he first appeared. Over the rest of the winter he included me in a couple of other gatherings at his home, much less formal ones, and it turned out that he was a hipster, a gifted trumpeter who enjoyed a connection with all sorts of suave, tight-lipped, soft-spoken jazz musicians from up and down the Mississippi who ate his food, drank his booze, and improvised with him in trios and quartets. Not condescending to him in the least, I might add, but plainly honored to be playing with him, these men, sometimes women, who sent out their souls through their instruments, and otherwise expressed themselves, I noticed, only by tipping their heads, shrugging their shoulders, or slightly lowering their eyelids.

  This was also Ted MacKey’s style. Out of context it had seemed professorial. And just as people tended to get him wrong, he and our colleagues tended to get me wrong. I’d come among them as a man in shock, sickened by politics and at that time freshly, as opposed to recently, widowed. In the four years of our very slight acquaintance Ted had reinterpreted my ongoing paralysis as detachment, maybe irony. I was hip, I was beat. I could have sat in with Chet Baker, if I’d known how to play an instrument. As for my fellow teachers of history, they mistook my numbness for terror. They looked at me and saw somebody like J. Alfred Prufrock—looked at me and saw somebody like themselves.

  The gatherings at Ted’s were something of a relief. And not just from the meetings and occasional grim dinners with the stick figures we in the Department of History had made ourselves into, but also from the bleakness of my fourth winter here. The monthlong Christmas break was hard on the Department. I stayed in the empty college town, as I’d done every Christmas, and when classes resumed it seemed the other teachers had each, over the holidays, taken on some fearful form of suffering. Clara Frenow, the Chairperson, had been diagnosed with cancer and begun chemotherapy. Meanwhile our only colleague of color and the only one of us with something like a personality, a man named Tiberius Soames, an almost pathologically brilliant West Indian who conducted his large undergraduate lectures with such flourish he’d doubled the number of History majors since his advent here, tumbled suddenly into a psychic abyss and was hospitalized with severe depression. Two weeks after the winter break he was back, fragile and foreign, perpetrating a painful imitation of himself. Others fell under their own bad luck: a son arrested for drugs, a summer home burned to the ground with heirlooms inside, a case of writer’s block and a textbook contract dissolved, and trouble between the young married couple who shared a full-time position.

  Myself, I continued as I had for years. I showed up where I was invited. I read a great deal in the library. I went to the movies by myself. I watched the skaters on the campus pond. Quite a bit more than I’d have liked it known, I held imaginary conversations with a man named Bill, in which I went over the same ground I’d been going over since the deaths of my wife and daughter. While I went around looking paralyzed or detached, my thoughts ripped perpetually around a track like dogs after a mechanized rabbit.

  Maybe this is why the young skaters looked so comfortable, even on the coldest days. In the daylight hours on what was called the Middle Campus, between the School of Law and the School of Social Sciences, from a dozen to as many as a hundred boys and girls glided around a pond with a tiny unscalable island in its center, a monolithic, rock island with a sculpture on its peak—red sheet-metal shapes—the pond marked off by a railing. Everybody skated around it in one direction. “Pond” may not be the right word. People told me it wasn’t eight inches deep. A reflecting pool, I’d guess; about twice the area of a football field. There were always a few wobbly beginners clinging to the rail, but for the most part these young students sat on the pond’s stone lip while they got on their skates, then stood up to take one long, expert stride onto an invisible carousel. It didn’t look like exercise. No rabbit eluded them. They went in an endless loop, but they weren’t after anything.

  I often ate lunch in a cafeteria in the basement of the School of Law and then walked beside a bike path around the Middle Campus, stopping to watch the skaters until the chill forced me to start walking again, dow
n past the pond and the Science Quad and over to the Museum of Art. And that’s what I happened to do on February 20, the fourth anniversary of the accident that took my family. I watched the skaters, and then went to see Bill, the man with whom I was so sociable, as I’ve mentioned, in fantasy.

  The friendship was all in my mind, but Bill was not. I saw him once or twice a week. He worked in the Museum of Art. I often visited a particular drawing there, and Bill was the guard who generally stood near it, wearing blue pants and a white shirt with a breast tag bearing his name: W. Connors. I introduced myself once, and he told me his first name. A black man, somewhere in his late forties.

  That I should be so affected by this drawing as to come around all the time, hungering at it, I thought might be understandable to a person who’d spent enough time in its presence to have been penetrated, similarly penetrated, maybe without the complicity of the artgoer, but penetrated anyway by its message. I felt a kinship with Bill—an illusory kinship, like the strange shocking wedding you experience with a figure who turns his face toward you as you flicker past in a train—to inhabit a frame for them, as they inhabit a frame for you—looking from either side of the same frame, I think you get it, in a moment that blinks on and blinks off, but never changes, a picture, in other words. Anyhow I liked thinking we shared something, each of us involved so much with what was going on in the same frame, Bill Connors and I.

  This picture was an anonymous work that almost anybody on earth could have made, but as it happened, a Georgia slave had produced it. The work’s owners, the Stone family of Camden County, had found the work in the attic of the family’s old mansion. It was drawn with ink on a large white linen bedsheet and consisted of a tiny single perfect square at the center of the canvas, surrounded by concentric freehand outlines. A draftsman using the right tools would have made thousands of concentric squares with the outlines just four or five millimeters apart. But, as I’ve said, the drawing, except for the central square, had been accomplished freehand: Each unintended imperfection in an outline had been scrupulously reproduced in the next, and since each square was larger, each imperfection grew larger too, until at the outermost edges the shapes were no longer squares, but vast chaotic wanderings.