The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [38]
“What do you mean? My mind in particular, or anybody who happens to read them?”
“Anybody’s mind. If anybody finds out what they say, their perfection will slowly deteriorate.”
“But you know, don’t you? You’ve read them.”
“Yes. But if anybody else ever does, then what they’re doing inside me will be destroyed.”
She looked at me now with a very vivid, communicative expression on her lovely face. It said she was quite willing to view all this as absurd and humorous, but her eyes emanated a deep curiosity to see if I might somehow understand. I think I did understand. But I don’t think she believed I did.
And I did kiss her. Touched her sleeve with my fingers. She didn’t draw away. I plucked at her sleeve and she came close and I put my lips to hers.
“Okay,” she said. “Come back inside, please.”
She took me by the hand, carrying her box in the crook of her arm. On the way in she toed the rubber-tipped stopper with her pointed boot, and the heavy door swung to behind us. She set the box of phrases beside her pallet in the classroom and we descended onto the folds of nylon—it was a sleeping bag, not much of a cushion against the concrete floor. For a few minutes we kissed wildly, but I felt like a man in the wrong neighborhood, expecting at any moment to turn onto the right street, wondering where the hell it is and growing more and more panicked and disoriented. She was sweet, nothing about her felt held back, no slight deflection, no place reserved for herself, no irony or mischief, no studious objectivity, none of the stratagems that might have kept part of her out of this dalliance with an old man.
“Tell me your dream. The one you wouldn’t tell me.”
“I saw you in a room full of strangers. On a stage. They were studying you. It was just a dream.”
Kissing me, she unbuckled my belt and I helped with the rest. In my white boxer shorts I gave back her kisses and we both worked at the top buttons of her smock.
“This isn’t it,” I said. I felt no desire for her now. With a distinct and physical sensation I was slipping back into that hole where I felt no desire at all. I gripped her hands tight but it didn’t help. “I’m leaving.” I clutched at my clothing, snatched up whatever looked like mine from the floor and covered myself.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
My shirt open, barefoot, I got out to my car and tossed my shoes and socks into the back seat and hung on desperately to the steering wheel. She stood on the steps, just a shape. A shape containing…
This—now—was the point I’d wanted to reach with her. All the expected moments had been stepped through. One step more would take us into moments that could never have been foretold. I opened the door and put my feet out and pulled on my shoes. I buttoned my shirt, I watched her shape. I turned off the motor and went back.
She wasn’t there. The shape of her may not have been there in the first place. I went up the front steps and down the steps inside.
She stood still at the end of the hallway, having hesitated, I guessed, at the sound of my footfalls coming. She’d opened the back door again. From outside a warm green breath filled the hallway and began moving through it softly and audibly.
She came toward me carrying her message from a vanished god. “Would you like to hear the story of my name?”
I had a sense of her studio, just to my right, filled with ghostly items and skeletal things.
Again: “Would you like me to tell you the story of my name?”
I followed her back into her studio and sat on the spangled chair.
“First I think I have to tell you another story before I can tell you the story of my name.”
I didn’t say a word.
“An illustrated tale. Not just a story—a picture, too.”
Looking for something or other, she wandered among her objects, these multifarious seashells, sprays of baby’s breath, sprays of peacock feathers like abstract eyes on white