The Name of the World by Denis Johnson Page A

closer until you were immersed. Some wealth of facial animation lingered from her previous discourse with the deaf Michael. I could hardly take my eyes away to look ahead, but it didn’t matter. The road was ruthless, never bending.
    “Was he just there for the car?”
    Pause.
    “He was there for the music.”
    We traveled slowly, washed along in an ocean of chlorophyll. Nothing existed out this way but tiny communities, widely spaced, each gathered around two or three monumental grain elevators. I didn’t know the name of any of these towns, not that I supposed it mattered, and we didn’t even reach the first, which must have been Tyson.
    I told her, “I admire you.”
    She took a breath to speak but seemed to change her mind. Then said, “Why?”
    “Because you do crazy things without having to be crazy.”
    “If you think I’m not crazy,” she said, “you’re out of your mind.”
    “I remember a comment you made once—and I thought you were looking right at me when you said it, is why I remember it so clearly. You said, ‘Sane? Or tame?’ Okay, but that’s not the issue. The reason most of us seem so sane is we’re clinging by our fingernails. But not you.”
    “And not you, either.”
    “Most everybody, I’d say.”
    “Not you. Not clinging. You’re tied. You’re tied to the mast, like Ulysses.”
    “I sure was.”
    “But not no more.”
    “No.”
    “Show me not no more, Michael Reed.”
    “You. Are you a siren? A witch?”
    With a certain frustration I knew I spoke too soon, too urgently. I wanted to get out of the way the things I knew to say, wanted to say, the things I’d been thinking, all in the hope of moving into the unforeseen. The wind thundered around the car.
    She said, “I’m a girl.”
    And now we arrived. I stopped the engine. The silence released our voices. But we had nothing further to say for the moment.
    She’d directed us to a schoolhouse of orange brick in the midst of endless cultivated fields. The old building looked gigantic. Anything higher than a stalk of corn was visible for miles. A scraggly tree way off in the distance had the decisiveness of one clear fact.
    We went up the steps. Flower used a key to the big front doors. How many times had I let myself into a silent public school after hours, to smell the lunches spoiling in lockers and the janitor’s pungent wax, in the buildings of concrete and metal, exactly like our public prisons? This one was actually smaller than most, only four classrooms and an office on the first floor, and perfumed within by citrus and oil paint.We took a short flight of steps into the basement and Flower put her key away again. For a purse she carried a small leather pouch that puckered with a string. She propped open the door at the far end of the hall, and the last of the day filled that region like a mist. The building felt irresistibly empty.
    “Isn’t it quiet?”
    “It makes me want to run around breaking stuff.”
    “This is a public school building,” she said. “I guess you could bust the windows, but everything else is indestructible.”
    In her basement studio, formerly a classroom, I sat on an institutional wooden chair, first putting down a handkerchief because the seat was daubed with paint. Everything was like that, every surface. I set down my plastic bag of produce on the floor next to her telephone, which was basically black but fingerprinted in a multitude of colors. Enough light came through ground-level windows—windows at the level of our heads. I watched her, not taking much in. Around the place I noticed three or four canvases on easels, all turned to the walls, the paintings hidden.
    “Well! What do you think?”
    “It’s messy and full of ghosts,” I said.
    “The school’s gone.”
    “I got that.”
    “They all go to a consolidated over in Hereford now. You can apply for space here through the state Arts Council.”
    “And are you allowed to live here?”
    “No.” She hadn’t really