The Name of the World (12 page)

“Before I can tell you the story of my name,” Flower said, “I believe I have to tell you the story of your face.”

I felt better when she said that. “A sad, ugly tale.”

“I don’t want to! But it’s necessary.”

She’d found a sketch pad, a sheaf of newsprint in large sheets. She sat on a stool behind the nearest easel, set up the pad, took a thick pencil from the easel’s tray, and began, I guessed, to draw. She was left-handed.

“Your lips are thin. You have a big space between your nose and upper lip, like a monkey, but you miss having a monkey face because your chin is too small and there’s not enough face beneath your mouth to make a monkey face. Your nose is small and pushed up too far. Too much of your nostrils show. That makes your eyes look sort of dull-minded and also sort of fearful.”

She stopped momentarily and honed her pencil on a piece of emery paper.

“Your eyes are a very beautiful blue. You have nice round cheeks, and bushy well-defined eyebrows. Very definite eyebrows. Your hair is nice, very tightly curled, kinked, really, and
with lots of colors in it, brown and blond and some blue and mostly gray. And you’re small.”

Flower stood up and held the sketch pad out before her at arm’s length a full minute, looking back and forth between her rendering and her model. She turned the pad to me. It was quick, but recognizable.

“Your hands are small. I’ve told you you have an inner and outer smallness that’s very attractive, at least to me.”

“Thank you. I think.”

“The story of your face is over.”

“Thank you even more.”

“Now the other story. Once I was taken away by a guy to a gingerbread house.”

“Excuse me?”

“This is the story of my name.”

“Okay. All right.”

“When I was a little girl, one day a man led me away from my home and took me to a gingerbread house.

“He was small like you, Michael, and his nose was turned up too far, like yours, and his chin was too small like yours. But his face was narrow, and his whole head, too, and his ears were big and funny. Not like yours. You have nice ears.

“I was four years old. One morning he came to our back yard and took me away. They didn’t find me till after dark.

“He sang a song,” she said.

“Were you terrified?”

“I wasn’t. And I’m not terrified when I remember. But everyone I’ve ever told it to has been.”

(She looked at me quizzically, searching, I suppose, for my fear. I’m sure it was there and I’m sure she discovered it.

(Yet now these words came from me—I didn’t intend them and I didn’t even know what they meant—I just remember them now—I hear them—I said, “I still can’t feel anything.” No response from Flower. Maybe she didn’t hear.)

“I don’t remember much. Sometimes when I’m trying to recall what happened, I think I remember another little girl there. An almost sad little girl watching me. I didn’t think of sadness then, so I don’t know, but I almost think she was sad. Here’s what else I remember:

“In the morning I was playing in the garden. I had some mischief in my mind. The back yard was bordered all around by a flower bed about six feet wide, all along the base of this cinderblock wall that enclosed the yard. It was the spring season. I looked in the earth where I sort of understood, without actually remembering doing it, that my mother and sisters and I had planted bulbs in the fall, tulip bulbs, and I sensed there were tulips growing there right now, just under the dirt. I wanted to dig there and see. It was a mischief in my mind. I didn’t care if I disturbed the tulips.

“I saw the man standing in the corner of the yard. He’d walked in the flower bed, I could see his footprints as clearly as the footprints in a cartoon or a comic book, big, funny shoeprints with nothing else around them. I’m supposing he was a small man. I know how he looked to me—I can close my eyes and look right now. He seems just the right size, a friendly size, not an intimidating size like most grown-ups.

“His head is very narrow, very sort of wedgelike. He’s looking at me, he’s been watching me as I study the bare flower beds, and he says,

“‘If I were a girl I’d want to be a flower.’

“That quick I tell him, ‘I’m a flower!’

“‘Are you a flower?’

“I didn’t know what to say. I’d wanted him to tell me, ‘Yes! You’re a flower!’ but he didn’t quite do that, did he?

“I can’t see very much else about him, nothing that I’m sure is real. I think he’s wearing brown corduroy pants and a frayed sweater, but I maybe imagined them later, added them on my own later on.

“He said, ‘I can put you on the wall. Can I put you on the wall? I won’t let you tumble.’

“My mom’s in the kitchen maybe twenty feet away. She’s got her stereo cranked up playing music, loud music—”

(I interrupted: “What music?” I asked. “Hippie-type rock ’n’ roll,” she said. I realized it had to be so—but I imagined the hymn of the Frieslanders playing.)

“When he had me sitting on the wall he told me, ‘I can climb.’

“He climbed onto the wall. ‘Watch me climb.’

“And he came down on the other side, saying, ‘Can I take you down from the wall? Let me.’

“He showed me a car parked there in the dirt lane between the houses. He said, ‘Here’s my car.’ I don’t remember what it looked like.

“I don’t remember being in his car, or moving or travel
ing. I remember a forest all around, like a story I’d always known about, like meeting a celebrity everyone knows about. The famous forest. The forest from fairy tales and bedtime stories.

“I remember the inside of a very small room with a very low ceiling and I remember knowing that this was his home, where I sat in a small chair and he sat in a big one, and that it was a gingerbread home. Whenever I’ve smelled ginger since then, these memories come back so strong and so fast I get dizzy.

“I don’t have much of my time there. I know we talked, or he said things to me that I didn’t find very important. I was waiting for something else, for someone to come, for an event or a show to start—that was the feeling I had: I was waiting. This part didn’t count, sitting here, because I was waiting for something else.

“I think we sat there for a long time. Maybe hours. I was gone many hours, I do know that, and I don’t remember doing anything but sitting in that very small room like the inside of a mushroom, and I remember thinking, This is a gingerbread house, and this room is a mushroom. I thought this was a fictional man who turned out to be real, just as the forest of fiction had turned real.

“We sat in the mushroom in the gingerbread house. It was dim and small in there. He talked, and I don’t remember. I remember only two things:

“He said to me, ‘She’s blind.’

“‘Who is blind?’

“But he didn’t answer. I thought he didn’t know the answer. That he knew someone was blind, but that he didn’t know who.

“He sang a song. I don’t know the song.

“If I ever hear it in my life again I’m sure I’ll recognize it. But I can’t call up any memory of the song, or really any image of him singing. I just remember knowing that the man in the gingerbread house sang a song. And I remember that he said to me, ‘She’s blind,’ and I said, ‘Who is blind?’ and he didn’t answer.”

(As for me, the listener, you’d think sitting still would have given me some control. Instead I was getting more and more worked up. The feeling that I’d been released from God’s power left me removed, but removed to a realm of emotion, a cauldron. I saw Flower presenting her nakedness on a glaring stage, small and perfect and surrounded by darkness, like a scene in a secret grotto.)

“All morning the whole neighborhood searched for me. By afternoon the police were involved. Well after dark, two cops found me by the road at the edge of the woods. I hadn’t really been afraid of the little man at all. But the two cops scared me so much I couldn’t stop bawling. They tried to be nice, but they were like giant robots. Their car was like a horrible spaceship.

“They asked me where I’d been, but I didn’t answer. Later I thought about it, remembered what there was to remember. I’ve remembered ever since.

“I remember he said, ‘She’s blind. And her name is Flower.’

“‘Is it me?’ I asked him. ‘Is that my name?’

“That’s when I remember the other little girl. I don’t see her. I just kind of remember I knew she was there. That he said her name was Flower.

“And so my name became Flower, too.”

Flower sat beside her easel and watched me long enough in silence that I understood her story was finished.

I asked her, “What’s your name—your real name?”

“My name is really and legally Flower Cannon.”

“But not originally? Originally what was your name?

“Micah. Micah James. No Middle Name.”

“That’s just as beautiful…But James?”

“My mother’s name was James. They didn’t get married till I was seven, just after Kali was born. I don’t think they planned on getting married right then, or they wouldn’t have named her Kali—not when her last name would be Cannon. ‘Kali Cannon!’ At that time I changed my name legally to Flower. Or rather my parents had it changed, because I asked them to.

“I didn’t talk about what happened. I didn’t tell my parents for years. When I did tell them, it made them momentarily crazy, my mom anyway. My mom stood up in her living room and lifted the coffee table over her head and broke it over the back of a chair. They’d never asked, and that’s the reason I’d never told them.

“At first I sort of assumed they knew, as if they could have seen, as if my life were on TV and they were of course watching my show, the show that was the story of my name.

“Otherwise I’ve told very few people. And never any man except my father, until now, until you. It’s not a secret, but it’s very valuable and I haven’t really felt like taking it out and showing it to anybody for fear they might come back later somehow, and somehow they might steal it. Steal it and put another one in its place that looks and feels right but isn’t the real story, isn’t really as valuable.”

“Flower. Why tell me?” It was a desperate question.

“Why? Because you have the right face for this. You understand what this man looks like. The man in the story. Because in certain important ways you look like him. No, you don’t look alike, but I think he had the same feeling when he looked at himself in the mirror. The same feeling you get when you look at your face.
If
you look. Do you look, Michael?”

“No.”

“No. You wash it, you shave it, you don’t look. But you used to look?”

“A long time ago. In my teens, I guess.”

“Later I remembered the little girl. I’m sure she was watching me. She wasn’t blind.”

—This was what flooded the basement with fear, this simple statement: “I’m sure she was watching me. She wasn’t blind.” What connected these words from Flower’s lips to the accident that killed my family? From them I understood that I could no longer bear my daughter’s death. It was going to break me. And I would have to let it.

I’m not sure I said goodbye. The tide of my own confusion carried me out of the room and up out of the building. Once
again I was in my car, and this time I was going. The old building hunched there in a dusk that seemed to get paler rather than darker as the light leached out of it. I could make out the shape of Flower’s face at the basement window, watching, I suppose. Was her story the story of a ghost? The ghost of my daughter? I started the car and pulled away.

I haven’t seen or heard of her since.

I got it into gear and onto the Old Highway and drove east, running away from the sunlit rim of the plains. I wasn’t traveling fast, not at first, but the rows of cultivation whipped quickly by, and in the dizzying exactness of their changing perspective they turned and opened and closed again as I shot down the middle of the fields. I accelerated but I still felt as if I had stepped wrong and was plunging backward. Like the rider on an amusement, I had that strange satisfaction that it was all designed to be scary, to be fun, and would soon be over. I wondered if that meant I was going to die. I had no reason to think I would, but I wondered. I put my foot to the floor and stared straight forward while the terror of high speed opened up the sinuses in my head and put a taste of pennies in my mouth. And I drove like a spear through the tiny towns, miniatures in a work of meticulous depiction floating on the fields of corn and soy, went speeding along through them toward some deep violent conclusion—to have my heart torn out and eaten while I watched. The sun had set but the fields were soaked with light in the dusk. I wanted to stagger to the shore of this mindless iridescence and throw into it my most beloved thing, my very favorite thing. When
I’d worn myself out going too fast, I pulled into the roadside weeds. I stopped the car in the middle of the round shimmering table of the earth. Meanwhile the dusk wouldn’t die. Everything was visible and there was even enough light to read the title of the pamphlet from the Friesland Fellowship: “Come to the Father.”

I picked it up from the dashboard and read its few paragraphs. I found myself disappointed by what it said. Its author stressed that an inward experience of conversion was important. In my current frame of mind I’d hoped for warnings much stranger and not so obvious: “Brown shoes are important.” “Attention to the length of the fingernails is crucial.” “Everything depends on the sky.”

On the very brink of making love to her, I hadn’t seen Flower naked. More than once I’d seen her stripped completely bare, but not this time. She’d had her smock unbuttoned, that was all. This time I’d been the one stripped bare. A nakedness both sudden and long in coming. Did she do that to me? Or did it simply coincide?

I thought of what she’d said, in my mind I heard her saying it, I couldn’t stop hearing it, I wished she’d never said it:

“I’m sure she was watching me. She wasn’t blind.”

I drove on toward the world’s darker half. Now the horizon was like that of the sea around certain islands, tar black, blended with the night. Halfway up the sky and to my right floated the new moon. Satisfied that darkness had found me, feeling in a way hidden from myself, I put the car in gear and went to my home.