The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [23]
Flower dropped me at the gate to the Humanities Building parking lot.
“Are you going in?” She shut the engine off and turned herself toward me.
“Going in. Yes. Why wouldn’t I be going in?”
“I don’t know. I thought maybe your car was parked here or something.”
“I don’t have a car. I’m going in.”
What do I see when I remember her face? Those eyes. In fact they were mind-wrecking. Blue and pitiable and sweet, in their deep dark sockets, though I wish for some other word than sockets. When I looked into them my thoughts just stopped.
“Well, fix your face first. You’re smudgy,” she said. She had a funny way at the ends of her sentences. Rather than a pause, she created a plunge.
“How much was the prize for your dance?”
“One-fifty.”
“That’s not bad.”
“It’s two fifty on the Fourth of July.”
“Maybe I should try to be there,” I told her.
“Sure. I’ll give you a lift,” she said. “Since you don’t have a car.”
I went in through the basement entrance and checked my reflection in a mirror in the men’s room. The wild punch had dented my forehead near the scalp. I didn’t look like a brawler so much as a man who forgot to watch where he was going. I wet my hair and pasted a forelock over the red area and went upstairs to the monthly Department of History coffee klatsch. I was pretty much the last to arrive, and as I entered the small lounge, always to me somehow reminiscent of a prison’s visiting area, they all looked up from their conversations. Then the dozen or so of them welcomed me almost as a reception line, one by one. As if I’d done something special I didn’t know about.
This was curious, even slightly disorienting. I sipped coffee and ate a cookie until their attention drifted away from me and I was left dusting powdered sugar from my fingers.
Tiberius Soames greeted me with a sort of wise and happy weariness. He put his hand on my shoulder. “You’ve been worried about me. And I appreciate that. But no. I’m fine. Yes.”
“You sound all right,” I said. And we went together toward the pair of urns and drew ourselves more completely unnecessary coffee.
Soames seemed to discover the Styrofoam cup in his hand, gulped at it gratefully. “I’ve just got no more stomach for the bitter charade. When my mother died her body was eaten by dogs.”
I tried to think of some words to say. I tried, but I couldn’t. “Dogs?” was the best I could do.
“That’s my message to the world. Why should it be otherwise? Should I disguise the facts concerning our universe?”
“Tiberius—” Many people called him Tibby, but I didn’t know him that well, and anyway he might be going crazy right before our eyes. The situation seemed to call for full names.
This thought brought back the moment I’d had with the patient at the Swan’s Grove campus, with his head trauma and his upraised invisible flame. It seemed just the kind of remark the patient might have made. When my mother died her body was eaten by dogs. Instead the man had given me his name and address and I still had them somewhere among my notes. Robert Hicks.
Tiberius said, “All right then. I’ll stop alarming you and say something trivial and muy apropos. For instance, do you have any German? No. Okay then. You’ll be interested to know that in German klatsch means ‘gossip.’ Here is our wonderful hostess; sprechen zie Deutsch?” he asked as Clara Frenow approached, whisking crumbs from her bosom and getting frosting on her neckline in the process. “At du klatsch we are torn by dogs.”
“I think you said,” she said, “did you say—?”
“Yes, in an attempt to be appropriately trivial and at the same time Germanic just somewhat. Clara. My goddess. Are you the originator of the idea that we should occasionally klatsch together?”
“Uh. Yes,” she said. “Rather I mean—no, Tibby. It’s been a tradition since the seventies.” Clara had completed her round of chemotherapy. She didn’t wear a wig, but covered her patchy baldness with an assortment of caps, baseball caps, knit caps, hats of felt, of straw, a sailor’s hat, today a jaunty blue beret that