Free The Name of the World by Denis Johnson Page A

sheer personal cowardiceshe may have decided to let that one conversation serve as the final and necessary acknowledgement that, as far as History was concerned, I was history. But that was the style in our Department, and, as far as I knew, in all the other Departments. We conducted our business with a nonconfrontational vagueness which, in the world I’d been formerly a part of, the political realm, had been saved for communication with the voters (the Senator had called them “the votes”). To constituents we equivocated, but behind closed doors nobody minced words.
    I heard a female campaign manager say to an aide once, “Do you want to know how a loser stinks? Put your nose in your armpit. Then empty your desk.” Maybe in the academy a distaste for causing pain kept us from shafting one another quite so mercilessly, but I don’t think Clara’s way of firing someone was very much more adroit, and I doubt the young aide clearing out his desk drawers had felt any more astonished and red-faced that day than I did at the moment.
    Suddenly Soames was lucid: “Are you secretly ready to get out of this place?”
    “I can feel the whole experience withering around me.”
    “Perfect! You understand me perfectly. Do you remember the dead skins of the Pulitzer Prize winner? Right. His books—dead skins! How could he say that? Do you think he was being stupidly provocative or simply imitating a colossal human anus?”
    “He treated me okay, Tiberius. But I wasn’t chasing his girlfriend around the living room.”
    “Oh, my friends and foes! That night! Later! You have no idea how violently I masturbated!”
    Let that be the last word of any description of the conversations among our Department members.
    But no, I couldn’t let it. A few minutes later I trailed Clara Frenow into the hallway and called her name as she struggled with her office door.
    “I’m surprised I even feel irritated with you,” I told her.
    She looked surprised herself, then unsurprised, then incapable of surprise. “You want to come in?” she said.
    It was visible and plain, the oppressiveness stealing back over her life. And all she had was her blue beret. She looked prehistoric. I could see her in the rags of animals, lifting up a small harpoon against the storm.
    “Nah,” I said, “forget it, no.”
    Tiberius hadn’t had his last word, either. He turned up beside me now and put both hands on my arm: “Michael, we must get out of this flatness. The flatness and the regimented plant life. The vastly regimented plant life. Nothing matters but that we get out of here.”
    He walked away toward the hallway’s end. He hadn’t even glanced at Clara. In the stairwell he became a swaying silhouette and disappeared six inches at a time, descending.
    “Clara, I thought we had an understanding.” But I might as well have been saying, I understood we had a thought.
    “Well, I don’t know about that.”
    “Then I guess we didn’t. It’s probably silly of me to be talking about it. Anyway—come on. What happened?”
    “The position’s gone tenure track. It was kind of sudden, Mike.”
    We both knew I’d done nothing to build a case for getting tenure.
    “We assumed it was coming, but it came without warning,” she explained. “The fact is Marty blessed us suddenly with the tenured slot when Tiberius got all that publicity. Look, we’ve got to move Tiberius over to a tenure track. In fact we’d better give him tenure right away or we’re going to lose him.”
    “If you haven’t already.”
    “He’s not as around-the-bend as he acts. He’s just lighting a fire under us. And having fun at it, too, I might add.”
    Marty Peele was the Dean of Liberal Arts (and the man at whose house Tiberius had been so pleased to meet Kelly Stein). The History Department was barely on Marty’s radar, but apparently he’d been galvanized by a series of interviews Tiberius had done with somebody on PBS. Soames had been brilliant. That which