The Name of the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

brushed this off and started a long explanation aboutfunding 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.”
    “Check. Michael Reed,” he said.
    “Who are these other people?” On the scrap of typesheet he’d handed me, a list of almost a dozen names followed his own.
    “Those are my friends in the Unit. The Head Trauma Rehabilitation Unit,” he said, “check, the H-T-R-U.”
    “Oh.”
    “We all have the same address. Check.”
    “I get it.”
    “The H-T-R-U. The H-T-R-U. The H-T-R-U,” Robert Hicks said.
    “Robert—does anybody ever ask you what you’re holding?”
    “Not too much. Once in a while.”
    “And what is it?”
    “I don’t know. I can’t see it. It’s very light,” he said.
    He started talking to himself loudly in words I couldn’t understand, and walked away.
    I sat on a bus-stop bench, the same stop the campus shuttle had let me out at when I’d arrived, because I didn’t own an automobile, and I watched the aimless strollers—so many of whom had been rendered permanently aimless by bad accidents—as many as two dozen people out on the grounds, concentrating hard on going nowhere. I was convinced I could pick out the patients, the ones getting better, from the University con artistslike myself trudging among the buildings. But the new air, the pink sunset, the wide pocked field of slush crossed by the gray bars of the sidewalks like a big faded Confederate flag, people marching crookedly over it as if the battle had just ended…it wouldn’t be claiming too much to say that as I sat there holding in my fingers Mr. Hicks’s list of head-injury victims I felt the stirring even of parts of me that had been dead since childhood, that sense of the child as a sort of antenna stuck in the middle of an infinite expanse of possibilities. And childhood’s low-grade astonishments, its intimations of a perpetual circus…meeting, at random, kids with small remarkable talents or traits, with double-jointed thumbs, a third or even a fourth set of teeth. I don’t claim I enjoyed those long-ago days very much, they were so full of ridiculous horrors, but there was also this capacity of the universe to delight by turning up, like a beautiful shell on a long empty beach, a kid whose older teenaged sister liked to show off her bare breasts, or a boy who could take a drag off a cigarette, pinch his mouth and nostrils shut, and force smoke out through his ears. What happened to them? The boy whose hands were an optical illusion. His hands looked reasonably proportioned and complete, they were