The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [10]
“Who are these other people?” On the scrap of typesheet he’d handed me, a list of almost a dozen names followed his own.
“Those are my friends in the Unit. The Head Trauma Rehabilitation Unit,” he said, “check, the H-T-R-U.”
“Oh.”
“We all have the same address. Check.”
“I get it.”
“The H-T-R-U. The H-T-R-U. The H-T-R-U,” Robert Hicks said.
“Robert—does anybody ever ask you what you’re holding?”
“Not too much. Once in a while.”
“And what is it?”
“I don’t know. I can’t see it. It’s very light,” he said.
He started talking to himself loudly in words I couldn’t understand, and walked away.
I sat on a bus-stop bench, the same stop the campus shuttle had let me out at when I’d arrived, because I didn’t own an automobile, and I watched the aimless strollers—so many of whom had been rendered permanently aimless by bad accidents—as many as two dozen people out on the grounds, concentrating hard on going nowhere. I was convinced I could pick out the patients, the ones getting better, from the University con artists like myself trudging among the buildings. But the new air, the pink sunset, the wide pocked field of slush crossed by the gray bars of the sidewalks like a big faded Confederate flag, people marching crookedly over it as if the battle had just ended…it wouldn’t be claiming too much to say that as I sat there holding in my fingers Mr. Hicks’s list of head-injury victims I felt the stirring even of parts of me that had been dead since childhood, that sense of the child as a sort of antenna stuck in the middle of an infinite expanse of possibilities. And childhood’s low-grade astonishments, its intimations of a perpetual circus…meeting, at random, kids with small remarkable talents or traits, with double-jointed thumbs, a third or even a fourth set of teeth. I don’t claim I enjoyed those long-ago days very much, they were so full of ridiculous horrors, but there was also this capacity of the universe to delight by turning up, like a beautiful shell on a long empty beach, a kid whose older teenaged sister liked to show off her bare breasts, or a boy who could take a drag off a cigarette, pinch his mouth and nostrils shut, and force smoke out through his ears. What happened to them? The boy whose hands were an optical illusion. His hands looked reasonably proportioned and complete, they were unremarkable until you looked closely and discovered that each hand had only three fingers, plus a thumb. But if you asked me, “Which finger was missing?” I couldn’t have chosen. All his fingers seemed to be there.
“Are you looking at my hands?” J.J. asked me on the drive into town. I’d been staring at his two-fisted grip on the wheel of his Karmann Ghia.
I told him about the boy I’d known. “That’s interesting,” he said, but I think he meant it was a stupid thing to admit having on your mind. Meanwhile I suspected his own mind was on his divorce. He seemed preoccupied, and we didn’t talk much as he drove the rattling sports car into town. As we got out of his car in a deserted parking ramp, he told me, “My hands are normal…” I heard an implied “But,” and thought he’d now proceed to introduce me to some grotesque secret about his body. Instead he locked his classic car from the outside, using the key in both doors, and led me to dinner.
There were the troughs where students ate pizza or ribs or burgers or stir-fry, and then there were the establishments that had erected price barriers against all youth, where you could sit and talk. J.J. took us to one of the quiet ones, a small Italian place dedicated to romance. We sat by a frosty window—right after sunset the air had turned chilly—at a table for two spread with checkered linen. We were early. A waiter went around lighting candles shoved into Chianti bottles. I waited for J.J. to talk about his sadness, but instead, while we drank the house wine and waited for the food, he asked me about Senator Thom. “I’m curious—I’m trying to pin you down,” he admitted. “Did you like the guy or hate him? Did you quit or get fired?”
“Finally. Someone crass