The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [40]
“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