The Name of the World

  After a while a man’s voice said, “Brother Fred, why don’t you pick out a hymn?” I have no idea how this voice’s owner, whom I couldn’t see, was suddenly given the confidence to speak up, or what made him choose Brother Fred to lead us.

  A young man stood, struggled down along the pew past a series of knees, and went quickly up the aisle to open a hymnal on the podium. He looked like all the others, with long sideburns, almost sidelocks, and a mustache and a white shirt. Around me everybody was taking hymnals from slots in the pew-backs. “Number two thirty-eight?” he said. “How about two thirty-eight?” The cover of the one I took up bore only the name Friesland. I found the hymn—

  Sweet hour of prayer, sweet hour of prayer,

  That calls me from a world of care

  And bids me at my Father’s throne

  Make all my wants and wishes known.

  In seasons of distress and grief,

  My soul has often found relief

  And oft escaped the Tempter’s snare,

  By thy return, sweet hour of prayer.

  Their song astonished even more than their praying. They sang in multiple harmony, in a fullness and with a competence that didn’t seem studied, but perfectly natural, innate, all talent. I heard none of the usual bad voices, none of the people you want to go up to and ask, “Could you please not sing?”

  I kept my eye on Flower Cannon. She sat in the middle of the women, as I in the middle of the men. I wished I’d sat close enough to distinguish her voice, and let me go stronger and admit that I painfully regretted not hearing her sing. She looked very different from the others around her. They wore skirts and she wore slacks. No other woman had her head uncovered, none let her hair fall free or bared her arms. Flower’s long red hair flowed down her back. Her blouse was sleeveless and her armpits stained with wide blotches of sweat. I made a note to myself—I had to get to a chemist someday, and ask if sweat is the same substance as tears.

  The blond boy she’d been talking to sat two rows ahead of me. Once again it occurred to me—it more than occurred, the insight knocked the breath out of me—that the boy lived in a silence. Why on earth had he come? He sat quite still, completely self-possessed and perfectly alienated. For all he heard, he might have been in this chapel alone at midnight. Perhaps he was sensitive, in some tactile way, to an atmosphere thickened by hundreds of blended voices—how many? As the hymn swayed around me like wheat in a wind I found myself counting the house. Fourteen rows, about a dozen folks on each side of the aisle: nearly three hundred people, all singing beautifully. I wondered what it must sound like out in the empty green fields under the cloudless blue sky, how heartrendingly small even such a crowd of voices must sound rising up into the infinite indifference of outer space. I felt lonely for us all, and abruptly I knew there was no God.

  I didn’t think often about that which people called God, but for some time now I’d certainly hated it, this killer, this perpetrator, in whose blank silver eyes nobody was too insignificant, too unremarkable, too innocent and small to be overlooked in the parceling out of tragedy. I’d felt this all-powerful thing as a darkness and weight. Now it had vanished. A tight winding of chains had burst. Someone had unstuck my eyes. A huge ringing in my head had stopped. This is what the grand and lovely multitude of singers did to me.

  I’m one of those who believes he can carry a tune, and so I sang, too, and nobody stopped me. Until just past six, for exactly an hour by my watch, we praised the empty universe. I felt our hearts going up and up into an endless interval with nothing to get in the way. All my happy liberated soul came out my throat.

  Outside after the singing I stood talking with my self-appointed host, who explained that the sect was called the Friesland Fellowship, after its birthplace in the north of Holland, if I got it right. While he explained they didn’t believe in insurance companies, military service, or state-supported education, I looked around for Flower.

  She found us first. Apparently she’d noticed me earlier. She said hello and introduced her young companion.

  “This is also Mike. Mike Reed, this is Mike Applegate. Mike has a date tonight.”

  “Which Mike?”

  “Both Mikes. I’m loaning Mike Applegate my car. And Mike Reed could give me a lift to my studio. I could cook you up a little soup.”

  I told her I had a bag of groceries and a BMW, and she said that was perfect. All of this she repeated in mime and sign for the younger Mike. Remarkable how the expressions lit up her features and communicated the light to his. The evening’s prospects were brilliant in his face. He held out his palm and she pointed toward her car and said, “The keys are in it.” He understood.

  We watched as the young blond Michael got into her hatchback with an angular ease, puffed out two short signals of exhaust, and took off fast.

  “Well, this is slick,” she said as we got to my car. “Is it fast?”

  “Not as fast as you want it to be.”

  “Come on! These guys are built for the Autobahn.”

  “I know, but I’m not. I drive under the limit. It handles well,” I said, feeling somehow required to offer a defense.

  I took the Friesland Fellowship’s pamphlet from my breast pocket and laid it on the dash while I started the car. Flower picked it up and looked at it, but all she said was, “Do you know what it sounds like, Michael? Like a mechanical animal.”

  And truly, the engine had a strongly mechanical yet somehow vocal sound when it accelerated. We entered the queue of vehicles heading onto the highway. The Frieslanders’ will to conform seemed to reach deep into their choice of cars: mini-vans, well-equipped pickups, very few sedans, all of them in darker colors, and all fairly new.

  “Where did you say we’re going?”

  “To my studio.”

  “Back in town?”

  “No. Here. About two miles from here.”

  “Way out here in the country?”

  “It’s in the Tyson School. I’m living there.”

  Tyson was a town, or a village, I wasn’t sure what it was.

  All of this while I felt lifted by a strange new medium, a strange element—I now tell you that I was newly buoyant in a brighter life. In the midst of a hymn, God had disappeared. It was like waking from a nightmare in which I’d been paralyzed. Like discovering that gravity itself had been only a bad dream.

  And here beside me was Flower Cannon dressed like an Andromedan cadet in her black-and-white zoot suit. I said, “Flower, explain yourself. Are you a prospect? What were you doing there?”

  “I was there,” and she hesitated…“for the music.”

  “Where did you meet him? Mike.”

  “Mike? The other Mike?”

  “Mike Applegate.”

  “In signing class.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Mike Applegate.”

  “I mean—”

  “I met him in signing class. He was the teacher.”

  “I almost thought you said ‘singing class.’”

  She paused…“I don’t guess he sings.”

  In her voice I heard that timbre, that attractive and dangerous timbre—as if an outburst of laughter were caught in her throat and making a sort of chamber of hilarity there.

  “It was a twelve-hour class, two hours a night for six nights. It went fast, and we learned fast because our teacher couldn’t talk out loud. And so I—and the others too, all of us who took the class—I sign differently from most hearing folks.”

  “How so?”

  “They talk when they sign. I’m mute.”

  “I’m glad you’re talking now.”

  She made great conversation, and entirely apart from its content. Her pauses were like pools. You wanted to draw closer until you were immersed. Some wealth of facial animation lingered from her previous discourse with the deaf Michael. I could hardly take my eyes away to look ahead, but it didn’t matter. The road was ruthless, never bending.

  “Was he just there for the car?”
/>
  Pause.

  “He was there for the music.”

  We traveled slowly, washed along in an ocean of chlorophyll. Nothing existed out this way but tiny communities, widely spaced, each gathered around two or three monumental grain elevators. I didn’t know the name of any of these towns, not that I supposed it mattered, and we didn’t even reach the first, which must have been Tyson.

  I told her, “I admire you.”

  She took a breath to speak but seemed to change her mind. Then said, “Why?”

  “Because you do crazy things without having to be crazy.”

  “If you think I’m not crazy,” she said, “you’re out of your mind.”

  “I remember a comment you made once—and I thought you were looking right at me when you said it, is why I remember it so clearly. You said, ‘Sane? Or tame?’ Okay, but that’s not the issue. The reason most of us seem so sane is we’re clinging by our fingernails. But not you.”

  “And not you, either.”

  “Most everybody, I’d say.”

  “Not you. Not clinging. You’re tied. You’re tied to the mast, like Ulysses.”

  “I sure was.”

  “But not no more.”

  “No.”

  “Show me not no more, Michael Reed.”

  “You. Are you a siren? A witch?”

  With a certain frustration I knew I spoke too soon, too urgently. I wanted to get out of the way the things I knew to say, wanted to say, the things I’d been thinking, all in the hope of moving into the unforeseen. The wind thundered around the car.

  She said, “I’m a girl.”

  And now we arrived. I stopped the engine. The silence released our voices. But we had nothing further to say for the moment.

  She’d directed us to a schoolhouse of orange brick in the midst of endless cultivated fields. The old building looked gigantic. Anything higher than a stalk of corn was visible for miles. A scraggly tree way off in the distance had the decisiveness of one clear fact.

  We went up the steps. Flower used a key to the big front doors. How many times had I let myself into a silent public school after hours, to smell the lunches spoiling in lockers and the janitor’s pungent wax, in the buildings of concrete and metal, exactly like our public prisons? This one was actually smaller than most, only four classrooms and an office on the first floor, and perfumed within by citrus and oil paint. We took a short flight of steps into the basement and Flower put her key away again. For a purse she carried a small leather pouch that puckered with a string. She propped open the door at the far end of the hall, and the last of the day filled that region like a mist. The building felt irresistibly empty.

  “Isn’t it quiet?”

  “It makes me want to run around breaking stuff.”

  “This is a public school building,” she said. “I guess you could bust the windows, but everything else is indestructible.”

  In her basement studio, formerly a classroom, I sat on an institutional wooden chair, first putting down a handkerchief because the seat was daubed with paint. Everything was like that, every surface. I set down my plastic bag of produce on the floor next to her telephone, which was basically black but fingerprinted in a multitude of colors. Enough light came through ground-level windows—windows at the level of our heads. I watched her, not taking much in. Around the place I noticed three or four canvases on easels, all turned to the walls, the paintings hidden.

  “Well! What do you think?”

  “It’s messy and full of ghosts,” I said.

  “The school’s gone.”

  “I got that.”

  “They all go to a consolidated over in Hereford now. You can apply for space here through the state Arts Council.”

  “And are you allowed to live here?”

  “No.” She hadn’t really entered, standing just inside the door. She turned on the overhead fluorescents. “It’s just a regulation,” she said. “Nobody checks.”

  I told her I wasn’t hungry but she said she was. I gave her my bag of groceries and waited alone, not moving a muscle, awkward and inexplicably ashamed, almost tearful with a sense of unbelonging, while she went to the janitor’s closet down the hall to fill a saucepan with water. On a hotplate stashed randomly among a lot of junk on the wall-length counter she started things cooking. She handed me a knife and I stood up to help. I tried to wipe the paint from the blade but it was dry. I diced a carrot. The vertigo, the plunging shyness, passed. I cut up a cucumber. I asked what we were making and she said it was miso soup. I sliced an onion. “I’m crying,” I said. “I’m crying, too,” she said. “It’s a good one.”

  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 Sat
ellite, 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.”