The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [45]
“Just say when.” But I didn’t intend to deal with this. I felt happy and alive and I would leave town that night, in my BMW full of boxes, driving fast, well over the limit.
“If my dad doesn’t get the money for that windshield—”
“Son. He’ll be there. And you, too, you’ll be there. Everybody sober, eight A.M.”
“Eight!”
“Hey. I usually go home at seven. I’ll be staying overtime just for you.”
“Us too? All of us?” another said.
“One of you better come along. Whoever of you, I don’t care. Just so we have two witnesses.”
The boy whose father owned the damaged vehicle took hold of my hand and shook it with a kind of post-cathartic goodwill. “I’ll see you in the morning, Sir. Don’t worry,” he told us all, his friends, myself, the cop, the sky of stars, “I think he’s just a schizophrenic. We’ll work this out.”
I left town before dawn. I never heard anything more about any of this. Apparently, crimes on a petty level can actually be waltzed away from.
I didn’t drive straight out of town. I made a brief side trip to visit the mystery, I guess I’ll say, of a pair of personal symbols: the monolith and the circular skating rink—now, in summer, a flat pool reflecting the midnight sky. My car sat a hundred yards off in a loading zone behind the student-union building with a front door open and the interior illuminated dimly. I stood at the rail looking down at the black of space and the silver clouds floating past my feet. Summer classes hadn’t started, at two A.M. there wasn’t a soul around, certainly nobody skating. And I missed them, and I missed the curiosity and estrangement and hope with which I’d breathed the winter air in the movie I’d inhabited briefly before it had ended. I missed the hunger.
As I write this, a Mediterranean breeze comes in through the open window. I’m writing half naked, in white socks and white boxer shorts purchased in Athens. A stack of books holds down my typesheets; on top of the books rests a chunk of the Berlin Wall, or so I’m happy to believe. I won it last October from a journalist during an afternoon of gin rummy, also of gin and vermouth. These days, and for some time now, I myself am a journalist.
I stopped here off the Greek coast to write a lengthy piece, a historical sketch of the Slavic troubles. The books, the maps, my notes just sit there. From the first day I’ve done nothing but remember the past. The small breeze here tastes as if it comes across miles of early summer corn. The sky has that relentless emptiness the sky can have on a hot day over the endless farms. This island is a big arid solitary rock that pleads for a sculptor to come. To the south and west it has no neighbors. And my window faces that direction. On any calm day when the seas are low the horizon looks like that of the tamed and subjugated Midwestern prairies with which for a time I allowed myself to be surrounded.
I left the Midwest without goodbyes. For about three months, the rest of that summer and into the fall, I stayed in a converted boat-house in Hyder, Alaska, the state’s southernmost region, a strip of coast that runs alongside British Columbia. I spent the long days reading books and listening to recorded music. I really did almost nothing else. One night about ten, when the colossal red presence of the sunset was crashing into the big studio and I was just bending over the tub and putting the plug in the drain to draw myself a bath, a drop of liquid struck my wrist, and then another. I glanced up to see if some pipe overhead were leaking, and then I felt it: tears running down my cheeks. I slipped to my knees, my head hanging, face lolling into the tub, and rested in that position while I sobbed out loud, bawled and shook like a child all through the hour of sundown until it was dark…When I pulled the light-chain I saw that I’d wept so profusely and for so long that a tiny flood of my own tears, enough to fill a shot glass, had pooled in the drain. I was about to pull the plug when I thought better of it. I turned on the faucet and filled the tub and stripped naked and soaked,