The Name of the World (13 page)

—Which I reached within an hour. I spent a good long while opening the door, which I’d never operated, of my house’s small garage, and parked the BMW. In the dimness I couldn’t make out the color of this vehicle, and I hadn’t bothered to notice in the light. I can’t think of any more significant betrayal in my life, that is, any clearer contradicton of a former self, than owning this car after four years’ mourning two victims of a car crash. I pressed the button and stepped out quickly as the door rolled shut. I stood on the walk looking up at a hazy sky from which nevertheless a bit of starlight descended. The waterfall noise of a stadium crowd reached me, exploding and fading. A block away we had the high school, the town’s biggest, or so I understood: low penitentiary structures and trampled grounds. In the mornings, clumps of students plied the neighborhood. I wasn’t around to see what they got up to in the afternoons.

I took a liter bottle of Pellegrino from my refrigerator and walked over to the high school, where a night baseball game was in progress. The stadium lay in a vale—a dell?—one of the few significant depressions in the area’s landscape. The whole world had seeped away and down into this bowl. The playing field below me was utterly green with vegetable life and white with electric light, floating in an empty blackness.

I watched the rest of the game. It seemed an important one. The fans behaved like an excited, roaring liquid. Over this distance I couldn’t make out the ball itself, had no evidence of it except the occasional very small tick of it against a bat, so all
this complicated behavior, all the grace of the players and the commotion in response, seemed to be about nothing.

I thought of Flower Cannon, of her studio like a sunken cave, her tiny incidental treasures, her collection of envelopes. I wished I could see the phrases the others had written. I was sure she’d led each of us to a moment when a drop of essence sprang out—something delicately insane, not at all “tame”—and then captured it in her box of handwriting. I was sure her cedar box was a beautiful zoo of wild utterances. And the finest accomplishment of her art.

I couldn’t turn it off, the memory of her voice: “She was watching me. She wasn’t blind.”

I remained looking down on the ballfield until the sound of departing cars died almost completely, until the bleachers lay skeletal and deserted, until suddenly the floodlights went off with a
thunk,
producing a darkness that momentarily felt not only deep but entirely personal to me. My eyes came back and the simple night returned around me and I got up and walked off dusting my seat, shifting my nearly empty bottle of Pellegrino from hand to hand. When a car full of boys sailed past whooping—whooping at me, it seemed—I shouted, “Quiet!” and they yelled, “Fuck you!” in reply. “Fuck
you
!” I yelled back. They turned the car around at the corner and went past me again, all the occupants squawking unintelligibly like the wheels on a passing train.

“FUCK YOU!” I screamed.

The car slammed to a halt. Its tires thumped over the right-hand curb and then the left as it made a quick wide U-turn and
roared back toward me in the lowest, loudest gear. The oncoming glare struck my head like lightning in a bare room.

I flung my bottle with everything I had, right from the earth up. I put so much into the effort that it yanked at the tendons in my legs, behind my knees. Even above the engine’s commotion I heard a sharp clunk, and fracturing glass.

The car jigged sideways just before crushing me, hopped onto the grassy margin, slid across it, and stopped some twenty yards away. A black star, full of an atomic potential, dark and fraught. It rumbled and breathed. For several seconds, nothing else. Then it suddenly burst apart, all four doors, and divided into its constituents like an egg-sack.

They came at me, several boys, I couldn’t guess how many, and in the face of their headlong strength and life I felt myself filling like a balloon; filled to bursting; filled with spitting rage. How I’d longed for this as a teacher!—to charge at a squad of students, to grapple with as many as I could get my hands on and go down in the dirt clawing, kicking, biting. I gouged at their eyes and mouths, took an elbow in the eye, a knee to the kidneys. I wanted to get at least one of them by the throat.

“What’s wrong with this guy!”

“What is wrong with you!”

“He’s crazy! He’s out of his mind!”

“You’re insane! You’re manic-depressive or something!”

“YOU CRAZY BASTARD.”

In no time they had me pinned against the car, a couple of grunting boys on each outflung arm while another, on his belly, embraced my ankles.

“FIVE AGAINST ONE!” I hollered.

“This is gonna cost you! This is definitely gonna cost you! And you better pay! That’s my dad’s car!”

“I’ll fight you one at a time,” I said. And I’m afraid I
was
crazy, and I meant it. I started the struggle again when hands frisked my pockets.

“Look! Hold still! Just—I’m not robbing you! I just want your license!”

One boy had let go of me—the one whose dad owned the car—and taken hold of his own head with both his hands. He marched back and forth. “We could say it was a small accident! Like when you, when you, when you—I don’t know!” He let go of his head. “Do you have insurance? You
better
have insurance. We’ll just take your name, your number on the license—where’s his license?”

“He doesn’t have a wallet. Don’t you have a wallet?”

“It’s at home.”

“You threw a
rock
at my
car
!” the driver said. “How
old
are you?”

A good question. I was starting to feel miserable now. Just the same I thought I might yet punch this kid in the face. “I’m only about a block over, guys,” I said. “Come on and I’ll give you some ID.” It struck me that I’d been driving for two days without a valid license. Mine was years expired, issued half a continent away.

“I’m not letting you in my dad’s car!”

“And I wouldn’t get in anyhow,” I said. “I’m walking.”

“Don’t think you’re getting away! I’m right on your ass!
I don’t care if you—I don’t care if you—” He couldn’t say what.

They followed me in the car, driving very slowly and discussing me audibly. They seemed to be coming to the solid conclusion amongst themselves that I was schizophrenic.

“Do you
live
here?” the driver said when he saw the inside of my house.

“You have this persistent tone of alarm,” I told him. “Will you cut it out?”

“It’s bare! You’re all boxed up! When are you leaving?”

“I’m not going anywhere. I don’t even own a car”—a precise but misleading fact I felt happy to divulge. The truth was I’d started to share his suspicion I might just flee in the night.

I had, I think, nine boxes and a suitcase, and a plan, or a hope, for getting them all in the car. I would have shipped the majority of them but they had no destination.

“God! You’re worse than a kid!” the boy said.

All five of them stood on my small porch, shouldering each other aside to peek through the open door into the dark interior while I found my wallet in my linen sports jacket.

The driver consulted with the others until he grasped that consulting with them couldn’t help, they were all so young and drunk and perplexed and entertained by his trouble, and then he decided he had to call the police.

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.