The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [5]
I can’t say I remember much about this particular visit to the museum. But I must have been troubled more than usual on this day, a bad anniversary, because I made the rest of it memorable by deciding to look up Heidi Franklin, the art historian with whom I’d hovered briefly in a capsule above the first few moments of this long winter, at Ted MacKey’s house, in the widow’s walk.
Whatever else I did in the museum that day, I must have had a wordless exchange with Bill in which we acknowledged one another perfunctorily and I wondered if he recognized me. Over these last four years he’d grown a mustache and acquired a chair in which he sat, these days, looking bored but not inattentive. Certainly not counting his money. Maybe he had a pension from the military, or some other stipend that made it possible to live on the wages of a rent-a-cop.
I nodded, I smiled. And so did Bill. I believed that at some juncture in his life Bill had made decisions he didn’t know at the time he was making—that had won him medals or by which he’d let his comrades down…I’m sure I imagined too much, but I saw an old war not quite faded in his eyes.
This was what our imaginary conversations—that is, forgive me, my imaginary conversations—often touched on. The indiscernible points, the little dimes, where fate takes its sharpest turns. I explained no more to him than I did to anybody else, but he spoke freely of his life after this thing that had happened, or hadn’t quite. Of how afterward he’d found it impossible to decide anything, or not to decide. How at a point in his journey out of mourning he’d wandered into a tunnel in which he traveled alone, and had no one to talk to, and couldn’t call out. Because of the consequences, the split-second consequences, everything he did or didn’t do became impossible.
And naturally, because I was talking to him in my head, the whole conversation was a monologue, and it was all about me. Exile, detachment, paralysis, fear—all the qualities people projected onto my flat white surface—they really played no part in anything that happened after the accident that took my wife and daughter. Everything occurred despite its complete impossibility. Including my decision, that day, to look for Heidi Franklin at the Art Department.
The doors to the Fine Arts Building lay directly across a paved court, almost a patio, that served the museum’s entrance, too. By walking over this pavement in the freezing weather, by stepping outside the routines I’d set for myself and going to see a woman, I wasn’t doing anything special, certainly not stirring my lifeless portions. I might have thought so three years earlier, when I’d still mistaken my paralysis for simple grief. But it wasn’t simple.
The day of the accident, our neighbor picked up Anne and Elsie, my wife and daughter, out front of our house, and made a U-turn heading for the highway. I stopped them with a wave and leaned down to the driver’s window. There’d been an ice storm the night before. The streets were dangerous. I thought he should take the gravel shortcut to town, I thought he should stay off the fast roads. He’d been pointed toward the shortcut anyway, and now he’d turned around. “Aren’t you just heading on through to town?” “No, because of construction.” “It’s Sunday,” I told the old man, “they won’t be working.”
Everybody knew our neighbor, General Neally, retired many years from the Air Force (and, incidentally, a widower), as a vigorous, tennis-playing, memoir-writing Southern gentleman. But lately he’d been getting frail, I thought. Once when I watched him heading in his Cadillac out of his driveway and pausing to look right and left, right and left, and again right and left, more confused, it seemed, than cautious, I wondered if he should have been operating a car. Only