The Name of the World

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The Name of the World Page 11

by Denis Johnson


  I let them all inside while he used the phone. In my living room now wallowed a sort of monster of callow health and well-being.

  “Nothing but boxes,” one repeated.

  “Can’t you turn on a light?”

  “Listen, you punk,” I said. “The numbers light up when you pick up the phone. Otherwise you can go downtown and use a pay phone.” I might say anything now. By the minute I felt more and more out of bounds and ridiculous, more and more stupid and mad at myself.

  Two policemen arrived in a squad car to find us all standing out front in an arrangement like that of a field sport: five teammates surrounding a guy who might break into a run. One officer took charge while the second stood quietly beside him and arbitrated by saying “Sh!” now and then to the youngsters.

  The boy explained the situation quickly but repeatedly, using many times the phrases “My father’s car!” and “We were just driving along!”

  “This license the most recent one you have?” the officer asked me. I told him yes.

  “His house is full of boxes! He’s moving, Officer. My father’s car!”

  “How much have you had to drink tonight, son?”

  “Me?”

  “You’re the one I’m talking to.”

  “Me? Okay. A couple—”

  A second spoke up. “I didn’t have any, Officer. And I’m the one driving.”

  “Okay,” another friend said. “We had two six-packs. That’s—two beers each, right?”

  “We just want to be honest, Officer.”

  “We were headed straight home. We were headed straight home.”

  “You boys go to Henry Harris?”

  “Yessir. We were at the game. We were headed safely home.”

  “Honest, Officer, I didn’t have one beer, I swear to God.”

  “Then you be the one to drive your friends home.” The officer shone his flashlight now into every face, mine too, and took a quick emphatic decision. “In terms of what’s happening now: I’m not gonna try and cope with you all and your silliness tonight. We’ll take this up at the station in the morning when everybody’s sober.”

  “His house is full of boxes—he’s leaving town!”

  “I’m getting all the information off his driver’s license and faculty ID.”

  “Faculty! He’s on the faculty? What kind of faculty did they allow him on? You should be fired,” the boy concluded.

  “Otherwise I put you on a blow-machine, son, and we get you for Minor in Possession.”

  “Oh,” the boy said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t understand. Thank you, Officer.”

  The others said thank-you with a murmuring humility all the more pitiful for being genuine.

  The Officer said, “Mr. Reed. You’ll be there tomorrow, right?”

  “Just say when.” But I didn’t intend to deal with this. I felt happy and alive and I would leave town that night, in my BMW full of boxes, driving fast, well over the limit.

  “If my dad doesn’t get the money for that windshield—”

  “Son. He’ll be there. And you, too, you’ll be there. Everybody sober, eight A.M.”

  “Eight!”

  “Hey. I usually go home at seven. I’ll be staying overtime just for you.”

  “Us too? All of us?” another said.

  “One of you better come along. Whoever of you, I don’t care. Just so we have two witnesses.”

  The boy whose father owned the damaged vehicle took hold of my hand and shook it with a kind of post-cathartic goodwill. “I’ll see you in the morning, Sir. Don’t worry,” he told us all, his friends, myself, the cop, the sky of stars, “I think he’s just a schizophrenic. We’ll work this out.”

  I left town before dawn. I never heard anything more about any of this. Apparently, crimes on a petty level can actually be waltzed away from.

  I didn’t drive straight out of town. I made a brief side trip to visit the mystery, I guess I’ll say, of a pair of personal symbols: the monolith and the circular skating rink—now, in summer, a flat pool reflecting the midnight sky. My car sat a hundred yards off in a loading zone behind the student-union building with a front door open and the interior illuminated dimly. I stood at the rail looking down at the black of space and the silver clouds floating past my feet. Summer classes hadn’t started, at two A.M. there wasn’t a soul around, certainly nobody skating. And I missed them, and I missed the curiosity and estrangement and hope with which I’d breathed the winter air in the movie I’d inhabited briefly before it had ended. I missed the hunger.

  As I write this, a Mediterranean breeze comes in through the open window. I’m writing half naked, in white socks and white boxer shorts purchased in Athens. A stack of books holds down my typesheets; on top of the books rests a chunk of the Berlin Wall, or so I’m happy to believe. I won it last October from a journalist during an afternoon of gin rummy, also of gin and vermouth. These days, and for some time now, I myself am a journalist.

  I stopped here off the Greek coast to write a lengthy piece, a historical sketch of the Slavic troubles. The books, the maps, my notes just sit there. From the first day I’ve done nothing but remember the past. The small breeze here tastes as if it comes across miles of early summer corn. The sky has that relentless emptiness the sky can have on a hot day over the endless farms. This island is a big arid solitary rock that pleads for a sculptor to come. To the south and west it has no neighbors. And my window faces that direction. On any calm day when the seas are low the horizon looks like that of the tamed and subjugated Midwestern prairies with which for a time I allowed myself to be surrounded.

  I left the Midwest without goodbyes. For about three months, the rest of that summer and into the fall, I stayed in a converted boat-house in Hyder, Alaska, the state’s southernmost region, a strip of coast that runs alongside British Columbia. I spent the long days reading books and listening to recorded music. I really did almost nothing else. One night about ten, when the colossal red presence of the sunset was crashing into the big studio and I was just bending over the tub and putting the plug in the drain to draw myself a bath, a drop of liquid struck my wrist, and then another. I glanced up to see if some pipe overhead were leaking, and then I felt it: tears running down my cheeks. I slipped to my knees, my head hanging, face lolling into the tub, and rested in that position while I sobbed out loud, bawled and shook like a child all through the hour of sundown until it was dark…When I pulled the light-chain I saw that I’d wept so profusely and for so long that a tiny flood of my own tears, enough to fill a shot glass, had pooled in the drain. I was about to pull the plug when I thought better of it. I turned on the faucet and filled the tub and stripped naked and soaked, exhausted by grief and joy, until my bath was cold.

  The next winter I took an assignment to cover the Gulf War. I arrived in Dahran, Saudi Arabia, six days before the U.N. bombing campaign began. Soon Scud missiles began blowing up over the city.

  I’ve taken assignments steadily since then. I remain a student of history, more of one than ever, now that our century has torn its way out of its chrysalis and become too beautiful to be examined, too alive to be debated and exploited by played-out intellectuals. The important thing is no longer to predict in what way its grand convulsions might next shake us. Now the important thing is to ride it into the sky.

  After three weeks in Dahran I moved to the north, the town of Nuaryriyah. Off and on, for a while, I traveled around the uniform emptiness of the Hijarah Desert interviewing American soldiers at the gates of their encampments. I spent many nights near the Iraqi border sleeping inside my rented Toyota in the middle of a vast waste. The desert trembled with incessant bombing, rumbled so deeply it couldn’t actually be heard. I was there, I felt it, it thudded in the soul. I wore khakis and desert boots and an Australian commando’s hat. My face burned brown in the sun. I was adopted by a group of junior executives (what else to call them?—they were young engineers, computer jocks, even an accountant, from Parker-Boyd, a civilian helicopter-ma
intenance firm under contract to the military in the Gulf) who erroneously understood me to have permission to travel anywhere in the region. With them and their crews and guards of bulky, invulnerable-looking young Marines I flew in helicopters above blazing tank battles in the desert in the night, through black smoke overclouding a world pocked by burning oil wells like flickering signals of distress, of helplessness, floated like prey in the talons of a hawk above a bare brown planet with nothing in it but two or three roads and a war; and continued day after day in a life I believe to be utterly remarkable.

  About the Author

  Denis Johnson is the author of Already Dead, Jesus’ Son, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, Fiskadoro, The Stars at Noon, and Angels. His poetry has been collected in the volume The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly. He is the recipient of a Lannan Fellowship and a Whiting Writer’s Award, among many other awards for his work. He lives in northern Idaho.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  FICTION

  Already Dead

  Jesus’ Son

  Resuscitation of a Hanged Man

  Fiskadoro

  The Stars at Noon

  Angels

  POETRY

  The Man Among the Seals

  Inner Weather

  The Incognito Lounge

  The Veil

  The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly

  Copyright

  THE NAME OF THE WORLD. Copyright © 2009 by Denis Johnson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Mobipocket Reader January 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-186938-9

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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