Denis Johnson - The Name of the World

Apparently Flower knew a bit of my history, the lousy part. “Do you cry a lot? Your family was wiped out, weren’t they? So do you cry?”

“I used to but I stopped.” We leaned against the counter as against a bar in a tavern, facing one another. “I think you remind me of my wife,” I told her. “And I think you remind me of my daughter.” As long as we were being blunt. “She was only twenty-three when we went to Washington.”

“Not your daughter.”

“My wife. Anne.”

“Was she a whole lot younger than you?”

“About fourteen years. I was forty-four when she had our daughter, and I turned forty-nine three weeks after I lost them, the two of them. After they died.”

“How old when they died?”

“Huntley was almost five. Anne was thirty-four.”

“And now you are—”

“I’m fifty-three.”

“And I’m twenty-six.”

“You’re young enough,” I admitted, “that it’s sort of the main thing about you.”

“I’m less than half your age.”

“Yeah. Finally. And next year you’ll be more than half.”

“You’re getting younger and younger.”

“When I’m two hundred? You’ll be seven-eighths of the way there.”

This silliness was all about nothing. I was enchanted with how easily it came.

She said, “It’s funny the way mathematics works, Michael Reed.”

She still had a strange ending to every statement. On my name her voice went over into the depths, and I went right along with it. Now she said, and I was sure she meant to flirt with me, “Let’s just let that simmer right there.”

She picked up a lab coat bunched on the counter, stepped behind a large blank canvas on an easel, and dropped her pants around her small black boots.

I sat on my chair again and watched. She stood backed by a white wall. The white canvas blocked all of her between her shoulders and knees. She managed to get out of her slacks without taking off her boots. She removed her blouse and hung it on the easel. Then she put on her gray smock.

We sat down at a collapsible table and moved aside her cluttered paints and pencils and ate our soup. Afterward I walked around. Against one wall I found her bed, just a pallet on the floor with a square pillow of dark silk, shot silk, I think it’s called. All of her paintings faced the wall.

“Can I see what you’re working on?”

“I don’t think so. No. They aren’t going anywhere.”

“Why not?”

“I lack talent.”

I wanted to lie with her on that pallet. To be very tired and sleep beside her all night.

Gradually the things she surrounded herself with, the materials she collected, were separating themselves from one another. I would live here among her bits of glass and shards of mirrors, strips and patches of astronomical and topographical maps, nautical charts; I’d live here in sunken Atlantis. It got bad light for a studio, all from the North and West, with the windows, though high in the room, set low to the ground outside. Or I would put her in the finest studio on earth.

She kept glass jars of buttons and boxes of marbles. Here was the lid of a large box like a tray holding multicolored strings and yarns, the silvery papery bark of a birch tree, small chrome and plastic emblems, the ones I could see saying Satellite, Coconut, Rolls-a-Lot, Susie, Ramon, Camaro. I was ready to fall in love. I was willing if she’d let me. On the floor against the wall among her leaning paintings was a black boom-box fingerprinted with the entire spectrum. It played low music, apparently always on. I thought I recognized an old Billy Srayhorn tune called “Blood Count.”

I liked her environment very much. These intricate and unintelligible objects. Again I felt tremendously shy. I couldn’t quite develop any of my reactions into a word.

Something was missing. She saw me looking around. “What?”

“Where’s your big old cello?”

She laughed. “It’s in the music building. I’m in a chamber group.”

“Right. I heard.”

“I’m pretty bad at that, too. But you can play just about any piece if you practice it enough.”

“I think as long as we’re getting a little personal,” I said, “I’d better get right to the question on everybody’s mind. What’s your middle name?”

“No Middle Name,” she said. “That’s ‘N.M.N.’ on all the forms, but my sisters called me M ’n’ M.”

“Sisters! There are more of you? What a world.”

“Two sisters. One’s married to an out-of-work pseudo-actor-type asshole and the other has her own business, one of those catering trucks that sells lunch at construction sites. You know the ones with the shiny dimpled aluminum all over? The beautiful ones?”

“What are their names? — your sisters’—including middle names. If any.”

“Daisy and Kali. After my maternal granny and the Hindu goddess. So we just call her Goddess. As far as middle names, you’d better ask them. I don’t think they’d like me to tell.”

“The goddess of death?”

“You mean Kali?”

“Isn’t Kali the goddess of death?”

“The goddess of death, yes, the blue one, with how many arms and those thick black eyebrows they all have, all those gods and goddesses.”

“Wow.”

“She looked good on a poster in a head shop. She looked quite beautiful and blue and they didn’t know what she was the goddess of, with all her extra arms. They were new and hip, and they’d renounced all concepts. They were too hip to know anything at all.”

“Your parents were flower children, maybe.”

“No maybe! We all went to the Rainbow gatherings every summer. Every July Fourth until ’93, for an orgy of pantheism and anarchy. After Goddess left home they moved to The Land — that huge commune down in Tennessee. My dad met Mom in ’68 when he was a fisherman in Alaska. She worked every summer in Anchorage.”

“Anchorage? Doing what?”

“Well. As a matter of fact she was a whore.”

“Fantastic,” was about all I could say.

“She made enough in ten weeks to live all year. I mean — back then. Before they met.”

“Ten weeks…” She had a way of making anything I could say sound stupid far in advance of my saying it.

“After they met, no, she quit the seasonal whoring, and then all she had was her memories.”

“Of course, you could be kidding me.”

That seemed to hurt her. “Why do you say that?”

Now we had one of those pauses, but it wasn’t hers, it was mine, because I hadn’t thought she could be wounded.

“…I guess because I don’t want to seem gullible.”

“Okay. Nobody does. Should I tell you what I like about you?”

“That depends.”

“I know. But I like you because you’re small. Everything about you is the right size. Your spirit, too. Everything’s portable. You’re very self-contained. What do you like about me?”

Though I’d already said it once, it happened to be true, and so I said, “I admire you because you’re wild.”

She laughed at me for that.

I said, “Oh, you’re wild. You’re light. Even when you’re perfectly still you’re ready to be blown all around by the elements.”

Now she looked shocked. “You did a pretty good job of stammering up till now. But that sounds rehearsed. Either that’s a line of yours, or you’ve been thinking about me. Thinking actual words about me in your head.”

“I dreamed about you last night.”

“Tell me.”

“No.”

“Have you had fantasies about me?”

To get back something of myself, I crossed my arms over my chest. Ten feet away the radio still played jazz. She was still standing. I was still sitting in a chair. I felt like a pupil, a slow one. “You’re a force on the planet, that’s for sure. Where did you get that far-out name?”