The Name of the World - Denis Johnson [9]
Coming up from under the terrible winter, it all looked dismal. Ripe for haunting. Colossal, unwieldy crows congregated in the bare branches of the elms. “Seventeen acres,” J.J. said. “It was bought in the thirties for nothing. The College of Medicine did experiments out here on animals for several decades. That big smokestack is the crematorium.” He pointed to a hundred feet of brick rising out of a small concrete structure. We were crossing the central field diagonally, using a wide paved walk. “They’ve still got a facility over by the creek. Most of us stay away from it.”
Plainly the place’s creepy history was much enjoyed by some of the people who used it now. J.J. brightened as he talked about it, although none of the folks we crossed paths with seemed to be enjoying anything much, and many put me in mind of the former denizens. In the strangeness of spring, finally without hats, our jackets open, inhaling the warm air suspiciously, I’m sure we all looked like lunatics. It didn’t help that some of us staggered or shuffled, wearing open galoshes and pajamas under overcoats, practicing simple movements with rehabilitated heads.
Just such a person as I’ve described blocked our path—a smiling man with one hand raised high above his head—and said to me, “I’d like to give you my address.”
J.J. spoke up and said, “That’s fine. But do we need your address?”
The man leaned unsteadily to one side as if fighting a strong wind, his left hand raised and the fingers curled around an imaginary baton, or a small invisible torch. “I’d like to give you my address.”
“Okay,” I said. “Go ahead, if you want.”
“I’d like to give you my address,” the man said. “I’d like to give you my address.”
He stood before us for a while with an expectant and inquiring slant to his eyebrows, as if the next move were ours. As we walked around him, he continued on his way with his left hand held aloft.
After J.J. had shown me the grounds and everything else, the offices available to such as me, the copying facilities and coffee lounge and rest rooms, introduced me to Mrs. Towne, the gray-headed secretary in the flowered dress who served all the Forum members (but I saw no Forum members; the place was a morgue), after this short tour, he invited me into his office, sat us both in chairs, put his feet up on his desk, and said, “We don’t have anything for you, I’m afraid.”
“Well,” I said, feeling stupid, irritated, and relieved. I really didn’t want to work here anyhow, not unless I was shooting a horror film. “It’s certainly been a pleasure looking the place over.”
He brushed this off and started a long explanation about funding and so on that almost started to interest me, or rather his discomfort and his unexpected and charming inability to handle it did.
“Look, Michael,” he said finally, getting up. “I’m bullshitting you. It’s the politics. The Foundation people are all affluent lefties. You had to work for Senator Thom!”
I laughed and said, “I didn’t have to.”
And he said, “Michael, I could use a friend. Let me take you to dinner.”
I hesitated too long. He must have known I was hunting for an alibi.
“My divorce is final today,” he said.
I’d heard about it. His wife, a campus beauty, had been pursued and seduced by a visiting author, the famous novelist T. K. Nickerson. She’d managed the final details of the divorce from the flat she and the author shared these days in Rome.
“Okay. Let’s get a bite,” I said.
I left J.J. to close up his shop and walked alone out under a supernatural cloudscape, the sunset soaking the underbellies of huge formations. The entire world was pink. While I waited out front, a man came toward me, the same one who’d stopped us a while earlier, still gripping some tall invisible thing in the pastel dusk. With his free hand he offered me a piece of paper. “Here. This is my address. It’s written down here.”
“Is this you? Robert Hicks?”
“Check. Robert Hicks,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Mike.”
“Mike what?”
“Reed.”
“Reed what?”
“Michael Reed. That’s my name.”