The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [41]
“They asked me where I’d been, but I didn’t answer. Later I thought about it, remembered what there was to remember. I’ve remembered ever since.
“I remember he said, ‘She’s blind. And her name is Flower.’
“‘Is it me?’ I asked him. ‘Is that my name?’
“That’s when I remember the other little girl. I don’t see her. I just kind of remember I knew she was there. That he said her name was Flower.
“And so my name became Flower, too.”
Flower sat beside her easel and watched me long enough in silence that I understood her story was finished.
I asked her, “What’s your name—your real name?”
“My name is really and legally Flower Cannon.”
“But not originally? Originally what was your name?
“Micah. Micah James. No Middle Name.”
“That’s just as beautiful…But James?”
“My mother’s name was James. They didn’t get married till I was seven, just after Kali was born. I don’t think they planned on getting married right then, or they wouldn’t have named her Kali—not when her last name would be Cannon. ‘Kali Cannon!’ At that time I changed my name legally to Flower. Or rather my parents had it changed, because I asked them to.
“I didn’t talk about what happened. I didn’t tell my parents for years. When I did tell them, it made them momentarily crazy, my mom anyway. My mom stood up in her living room and lifted the coffee table over her head and broke it over the back of a chair. They’d never asked, and that’s the reason I’d never told them.
“At first I sort of assumed they knew, as if they could have seen, as if my life were on TV and they were of course watching my show, the show that was the story of my name.
“Otherwise I’ve told very few people. And never any man except my father, until now, until you. It’s not a secret, but it’s very valuable and I haven’t really felt like taking it out and showing it to anybody for fear they might come back later somehow, and somehow they might steal it. Steal it and put another one in its place that looks and feels right but isn’t the real story, isn’t really as valuable.”
“Flower. Why tell me?” It was a desperate question.
“Why? Because you have the right face for this. You understand what this man looks like. The man in the story. Because in certain important ways you look like him. No, you don’t look alike, but I think he had the same feeling when he looked at himself in the mirror. The same feeling you get when you look at your face. If you look. Do you look, Michael?”
“No.”
“No. You wash it, you shave it, you don’t look. But you used to look?”
“A long time ago. In my teens, I guess.”
“Later I remembered the little girl. I’m sure she was watching me. She wasn’t blind.”
—This was what flooded the basement with fear, this simple statement: “I’m sure she was watching me. She wasn’t blind.” What connected these words from Flower’s lips to the accident that killed my family? From them I understood that I could no longer bear my daughter’s death. It was going to break me. And I would have to let it.
I’m not sure I said goodbye. The tide of my own confusion carried me out of the room and up out of the building. Once again I was in my car, and this time I was going. The old building hunched there in a dusk that seemed to get paler rather than darker as the light leached out of it. I could make out the shape of Flower’s face at the basement window, watching, I suppose. Was her story the story of a ghost? The ghost of my daughter? I started the car and pulled away.
I haven’t seen or heard of her since.
I got it into gear and onto the Old Highway and drove east, running away from the sunlit rim of the plains. I wasn’t traveling fast, not at first, but the rows of cultivation whipped quickly by, and in the dizzying exactness of their changing perspective