The Name of the World

  “I saw the man standing in the corner of the yard. He’d walked in the flower bed, I could see his footprints as clearly as the footprints in a cartoon or a comic book, big, funny shoeprints with nothing else around them. I’m supposing he was a small man. I know how he looked to me—I can close my eyes and look right now. He seems just the right size, a friendly size, not an intimidating size like most grown-ups.

  “His head is very narrow, very sort of wedgelike. He’s looking at me, he’s been watching me as I study the bare flower beds, and he says,

  “‘If I were a girl I’d want to be a flower.’

  “That quick I tell him, ‘I’m a flower!’

  “‘Are you a flower?’

  “I didn’t know what to say. I’d wanted him to tell me, ‘Yes! You’re a flower!’ but he didn’t quite do that, did he?

  “I can’t see very much else about him, nothing that I’m sure is real. I think he’s wearing brown corduroy pants and a frayed sweater, but I maybe imagined them later, added them on my own later on.

  “He said, ‘I can put you on the wall. Can I put you on the wall? I won’t let you tumble.’

  “My mom’s in the kitchen maybe twenty feet away. She’s got her stereo cranked up playing music, loud music—”

  (I interrupted: “What music?” I asked. “Hippie-type rock ’n’ roll,” she said. I realized it had to be so—but I imagined the hymn of the Frieslanders playing.)

  “When he had me sitting on the wall he told me, ‘I can climb.’

  “He climbed onto the wall. ‘Watch me climb.’

  “And he came down on the other side, saying, ‘Can I take you down from the wall? Let me.’

  “He showed me a car parked there in the dirt lane between the houses. He said, ‘Here’s my car.’ I don’t remember what it looked like.

  “I don’t remember being in his car, or moving or traveling. I remember a forest all around, like a story I’d always known about, like meeting a celebrity everyone knows about. The famous forest. The forest from fairy tales and bedtime stories.

  “I remember the inside of a very small room with a very low ceiling and I remember knowing that this was his home, where I sat in a small chair and he sat in a big one, and that it was a gingerbread home. Whenever I’ve smelled ginger since then, these memories come back so strong and so fast I get dizzy.

  “I don’t have much of my time there. I know we talked, or he said things to me that I didn’t find very important. I was waiting for something else, for someone to come, for an event or a show to start—that was the feeling I had: I was waiting. This part didn’t count, sitting here, because I was waiting for something else.

  “I think we sat there for a long time. Maybe hours. I was gone many hours, I do know that, and I don’t remember doing anything but sitting in that very small room like the inside of a mushroom, and I remember thinking, This is a gingerbread house, and this room is a mushroom. I thought this was a fictional man who turned out to be real, just as the forest of fiction had turned real.

  “We sat in the mushroom in the gingerbread house. It was dim and small in there. He talked, and I don’t remember. I remember only two things:

  “He said to me, ‘She’s blind.’

  “‘Who is blind?’

  “But he didn’t answer. I thought he didn’t know the answer. That he knew someone was blind, but that he didn’t know who.

  “He sang a song. I don’t know the song.

  “If I ever hear it in my life again I’m sure I’ll recognize it. But I can’t call up any memory of the song, or really any image of him singing. I just remember knowing that the man in the gingerbread house sang a song. And I remember that he said to me, ‘She’s blind,’ and I said, ‘Who is blind?’ and he didn’t answer.”

  (As for me, the listener, you’d think sitting still would have given me some control. Instead I was getting more and more worked up. The feeling that I’d been released from God’s power left me removed, but removed to a realm of emotion, a cauldron. I saw Flower presenting her nakedness on a glaring stage, small and perfect and surrounded by darkness, like a scene in a secret grotto.)

  “All morning the whole neighborhood searched for me. By afternoon the police were involved. Well after dark, two cops found me by the road at the edge of the woods. I hadn’t really been afraid of the little man at all. But the two cops scared me so much I couldn’t stop bawling. They tried to be nice, but they were like giant robots. Their car was like a horrible spaceship.

  “They asked me where I’d been, but I didn’t answer. Later I thought about it, remembered what there was to remember. I’ve remembered ever since.

  “I remember he said, ‘She’s blind. And her name is Flower.’

  “‘Is it me?’ I asked him. ‘Is that my name?’

  “That’s when I remember the other little girl. I don’t see her. I just kind of remember I knew she was there. That he said her name was Flower.

  “And so my name became Flower, too.”

  Flower sat beside her easel and watched me long enough in silence that I understood her story was finished.

  I asked her, “What’s your name—your real name?”

  “My name is really and legally Flower Cannon.”

  “But not originally? Originally what was your name?

  “Micah. Micah James. No Middle Name.”

  “That’s just as beautiful…But James?”

  “My mother’s name was James. They didn’t get married till I was seven, just after Kali was born. I don’t think they planned on getting married right then, or they wouldn’t have named her Kali—not when her last name would be Cannon. ‘Kali Cannon!’ At that time I changed my name legally to Flower. Or rather my parents had it changed, because I asked them to.

  “I didn’t talk about what happened. I didn’t tell my parents for years. When I did tell them, it made them momentarily crazy, my mom anyway. My mom stood up in her living room and lifted the coffee table over her head and broke it over the back of a chair. They’d never asked, and that’s the reason I’d never told them.

  “At first I sort of assumed they knew, as if they could have seen, as if my life were on TV and they were of course watching my show, the show that was the story of my name.

  “Otherwise I’ve told very few people. And never any man except my father, until now, until you. It’s not a secret, but it’s very valuable and I haven’t really felt like taking it out and showing it to anybody for fear they might come back later somehow, and somehow they might steal it. Steal it and put another one in its place that looks and feels right but isn’t the real story, isn’t really as valuable.”

  “Flower. Why tell me?” It was a desperate question.

  “Why? Because you have the right face for this. You understand what this man looks like. The man in the story. Because in certain important ways you look like him. No, you don’t look alike, but I think he had the same feeling when he looked at himself in the mirror. The same feeling you get when you look at your face. If you look. Do you look, Michael?”

  “No.”

  “No. You wash it, you shave it, you don’t look. But you used to look?”

  “A long time ago. In my teens, I guess.”

  “Later I remembered the little girl. I’m sure she was watching me. She wasn’t blind.”

  —This was what flooded the basement with fear, this simple statement: “I’m sure she was watching me. She wasn’t blind.” What connected these words from Flower’s lips to the accident that killed my family? From them I understood that I could no longer bear my daughter’s death. It was going to break me. And I would have to let it.

  I’m not sure I said goodbye. The tide of my own confusion carried me out of the room and up out of the building. Once again I was in my car, and this time I was going. The old building hunched there in a dusk that seemed to get paler rather than darker as the light leached out of it. I could make out the shape of Flower’s face at the basement window, watching, I suppose. Was he
r story the story of a ghost? The ghost of my daughter? I started the car and pulled away.

  I haven’t seen or heard of her since.

  I got it into gear and onto the Old Highway and drove east, running away from the sunlit rim of the plains. I wasn’t traveling fast, not at first, but the rows of cultivation whipped quickly by, and in the dizzying exactness of their changing perspective they turned and opened and closed again as I shot down the middle of the fields. I accelerated but I still felt as if I had stepped wrong and was plunging backward. Like the rider on an amusement, I had that strange satisfaction that it was all designed to be scary, to be fun, and would soon be over. I wondered if that meant I was going to die. I had no reason to think I would, but I wondered. I put my foot to the floor and stared straight forward while the terror of high speed opened up the sinuses in my head and put a taste of pennies in my mouth. And I drove like a spear through the tiny towns, miniatures in a work of meticulous depiction floating on the fields of corn and soy, went speeding along through them toward some deep violent conclusion—to have my heart torn out and eaten while I watched. The sun had set but the fields were soaked with light in the dusk. I wanted to stagger to the shore of this mindless iridescence and throw into it my most beloved thing, my very favorite thing. When I’d worn myself out going too fast, I pulled into the roadside weeds. I stopped the car in the middle of the round shimmering table of the earth. Meanwhile the dusk wouldn’t die. Everything was visible and there was even enough light to read the title of the pamphlet from the Friesland Fellowship: “Come to the Father.”

  I picked it up from the dashboard and read its few paragraphs. I found myself disappointed by what it said. Its author stressed that an inward experience of conversion was important. In my current frame of mind I’d hoped for warnings much stranger and not so obvious: “Brown shoes are important.” “Attention to the length of the fingernails is crucial.” “Everything depends on the sky.”

  On the very brink of making love to her, I hadn’t seen Flower naked. More than once I’d seen her stripped completely bare, but not this time. She’d had her smock unbuttoned, that was all. This time I’d been the one stripped bare. A nakedness both sudden and long in coming. Did she do that to me? Or did it simply coincide?

  I thought of what she’d said, in my mind I heard her saying it, I couldn’t stop hearing it, I wished she’d never said it:

  “I’m sure she was watching me. She wasn’t blind.”

  I drove on toward the world’s darker half. Now the horizon was like that of the sea around certain islands, tar black, blended with the night. Halfway up the sky and to my right floated the new moon. Satisfied that darkness had found me, feeling in a way hidden from myself, I put the car in gear and went to my home.

  —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 insur
ance. 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.