The Name of the World Read Online Free PDF

unremarkable until you looked closely and discovered that each hand had only three fingers, plus a thumb. But if you asked me, “Which finger was missing?” I couldn’t have chosen. All his fingers seemed to be there.
    “Are you looking at my hands?” J.J. asked me on the drive into town. I’d been staring at his two-fisted grip on the wheel of his Karmann Ghia.
    I told him about the boy I’d known. “That’s interesting,” he said, but I think he meant it was a stupid thing to admit having on your mind. Meanwhile I suspected his own mind was on his divorce. He seemed preoccupied, and we didn’t talk much as he drove the rattling sports car into town. As we got out of his car in a deserted parking ramp, he told me, “My hands are normal…” I heard an implied “ But, ” and thought he’d now proceed to introduce me to some grotesque secret about his body. Instead he locked his classic car from the outside, using the key in both doors, and led me to dinner.
    There were the troughs where students ate pizza or ribs or burgers or stir-fry, and then there were the establishments that had erected price barriers against all youth, where you could sit and talk. J.J. took us to one of the quiet ones, a small Italian place dedicated to romance. We sat by a frosty window—right after sunset the air had turned chilly—at a table for two spread with checkered linen. We were early. A waiter went around lighting candles shoved into Chianti bottles. I waited for J.J. to talk about his sadness, but instead, while we drank the house wine and waited for the food, he asked me about Senator Thom. “I’m curious—I’m trying to pin you down,” he admitted. “Did you like the guy or hate him? Did you quit or get fired?”
    “Finally. Someone crass enough to ask.”
    “You’re not slapping my hand, are you?”
    “No. Really. Nobody’s ever asked.”
    “It’s just that he’s in the news right now. I saw him last night on the tube, dueling with journalists.”
    Questions about the Senator’s ethics had come before the public recently. Not for the first time. “‘Fight every battle on TV,’” I quoted. “One of his mottoes. He’s got a million.”
    J.J. said, “Many predict the end of his career.”
    “Not me.”
    “Did you accomplish anything? Working for him?”
    “In D.C. I experienced what I once heard called ‘the temptation to be good.’ It’s a curse. As soon as it hit me I got confused. I still don’t know if, by quitting, I gave in to a bad temptation, or managed to resist a good one.”
    “Wow. Sounds like Zen,” he said. “Am I supposed to make sense of it?”
    “There’s a perfect stillness at the center of Washington,” I said, and he folded his hands before him with the pleasant air of someone stuck beside a psycho on a public bus. “It’s natural to talk about it in paradoxes,” I insisted. “Everything in the world is going on there, but nothing’s happening. It’s all essential, but it’s all completely pointless. The motives are virtuous, but whatever you do just stinks. And then you retire with great praise.”
    “Well, we sort of guess all that, don’t we? So why did you enlist?”
    “I’ve got a half-dozen explanations,” I said, “but I’ll give you the shortest one: It was financial. I was restless, and I was curious, but mainly I was just poor. I wanted to leave behind the pinchpenny life of a high-school teacher. The prospect of money somewhere down the line meant a lot to me.”
    “But you didn’t get it.”
    “I got a raise.”
    “But you didn’t get rich.”
    “No.”
    “And you don’t care.”
    “No. Not right now. Should I?”
    “No,” he said. Then: “How much of a raise?”
    “I went from the low thirties to—after two or three years—just about eighty thousand. Just under.”
    “Hey. That’s not bad!”
    “I was designated executive legal staff. That put me at the high end.”
    “And how are your politics now? Or am I