The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [7]
It took me a bit to recognize the young woman I’d met at Ted MacKey’s the same night I’d met Heidi Franklin, that is, the tipsy cellist in the blue velvet dress. I tried to stay with the conventionally visible facts: She had red hair, pretty blue eyes, the faint violet circles around them more pronounced because of her complexion’s paleness. At the moment she wore a yellow baseball cap and a blue T-shirt that said Edgars in white cursive letters across the breast.
I’d meant to sit out of the way, but as the dais was tucked into this corner, my corner, where I hadn’t expected to find it, I was very nearly in the lap of the performer. Did freckles wander over her knees? As I leaned forward to see, I caught myself, terribly embarrassed. But nobody was looking at me. The students attended carefully, like the audience in an operating theater, with a collective attitude that seemed clinical if not outright jaded: She was an artist, that’s all. I couldn’t imagine why they called this a Cannon Performance.
Very close to me stood the teacher, a short, barrel-chested man in jeans and a red sweatshirt. He looked tough and loud, but right now he was wordless. Also I’m guessing he didn’t feel very tough. I never met him, then or later, and was never able to ask.
As the session broke up—or at any rate as this performance was concluded with a wiping away of moist wisps of lather with a white hand towel, and she closed her legs and pulled down the hem of her blue T-shirt and sought about for her jeans with her free hand, laying the towel aside simultaneously, and others began to move around the room—I left. I went out to the court full of metal figures and walked from piece to piece, frowning so hard at them I eventually became aware of a pinpoint agony between my eyebrows. The sculptures seemed altogether leaden, unwieldy, pointless. And you’d better believe I’d forgotten all about Heidi Franklin.
Entirely out of habit, I walked off toward the School of Law. What had I witnessed? The point of the performance was lost on me but its effect was a wallop, and I stood by the skating pond clutching its cold railing with my bare hands, disoriented by the youth around me, not for the first time on this campus. The pond was covered by a cloud rising off the ice, the island in the middle of it almost invisible. And ominous. A looming arrival, a ghostly advent, the ghost ship of mariners’ legends.
For half an hour I stood and watched these young skaters and tried to put them together with what I’d just seen. But the attempt itself was an act of minor hysteria. A Cannon Performance? I certainly felt shot by a cannonball.
Here before me was another vivid picture—youth, freshness, vigor, the very life-breath visible out of their mouths—the cinematic picture, coming toward me out of the fog, growing substantial and then astonishing. Bright colors, breaths and words and laughter and the skirl of their blades, and then they faded, they were nothing. Yet on the other hand these same youngsters seemed to illustrate not life and youth and games, but training. All in a line and a direction, drilling for the march. The faces changed, but the round went on, and the round brought to mind the slave’s drawing that so affected me, the line pursuing its model until it was no longer a failed emulation, no longer an unintended parody, but finally an abomination of ignorance.
I myself was hunched like a skater,