The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [6]
All this was on my mind as I stood beside his car, failing even to glance at my family on the other side of him—I remember that often: I might have looked one last time into their faces, but didn’t—and told the General, “Take the gravel road, it’s shorter.” “I like the big highway anyway,” he said. And drove off. I stood there with one last statement—“Take the gravel road. It’s safer”—on the tip of my tongue. On the tip of my tongue. I can still taste it in my mouth. If only I’d said it. Even if he’d again rejected my advice, he’d have been delayed a few more seconds during the exchange, and maybe they’d all be alive today. During the next few terrible weeks, imagination served up other things I could have done. I might have kept them home, or called them a cab, or kept our own car out of the shop another few days—it was only in for a tune-up, because of the warranty. I might have kept a second car…but we didn’t need one, I commuted to the District each day in the Senator’s limousine. So I said nothing, and they drove away.
Five miles down the road the General came to a stop sign, applied his brakes, and floated over the ice into the path of a panel truck going forty miles an hour. (A truck from a florist’s shop. I don’t know—I didn’t view the scene—but I assume there were flowers everywhere.) At once Anne and Elsie were dead. The General survived for twenty-four hours, but never woke up. May they all rest in peace.
This winter day exactly four years later I went across the separating court, past the tarnished sculptures, through the doors of the Fine Arts Building. Went along through my tunnel, as I had for four years now. I took each step entirely out of a dull curiosity, not as to what waited ahead, because I didn’t care, but as to whether or not I could take one more step. I hadn’t found much else to interest me along the way. At the risk of stretching the illustration, I can say I sometimes came to turnings in the darkness and wondered if this were a labyrinth.
The Fine Arts Building was an old one, with high ceilings that made the halls seem narrow and proportioned for some earlier, elongated race of academics. The place reeked of oils and glues and old wood. I didn’t expect Heidi to be in. I thought I’d end up leaving a message at the office. A young man with a stubbly goatee, the rest of his head hairless, seemed to be in charge there. When I asked for Heidi Franklin he ducked behind his desk and was gone, entirely gone. “Excuse me?” I called. I stepped closer and peered over the desk to find him bent low over the floor, fiddling with the plug to his electric typewriter. “She might be at the performance,” he said.
“Can I leave her a note?”
He stood up and I noticed a clever touch of style in his otherwise baggy contemporary apparel: a powder-blue Lacoste alligator shirt. Where the alligator patch belonged, the material was torn away and a small patch of his bare chest showed instead. A tiny alligator was tattooed there. “Try the Cannon Performance. Room Eight,” he said.
“Cannon Performance? Sounds dangerous.”
“I’m sure it’s meant to.”
I found Room Eight just a few steps down the hallway and peeked through the half-open door to see a number of students, say two dozen, most of them lounging on the floor, others perched on stools, all of them outfitted and decorated in the disheveled and expressive Art Department mode. Easels had been pushed aside and stools and chairs herded together. The large room was silent. But I couldn’t see any performance, no one performing, though most of the front of the room lay visible to me. I stepped in quietly and sat at a wooden school desk by the entrance, more a part of the miscellany, the drop cloths and easels and boxes, than of the audience. Now I could see the room’s near corner,