Free The Name of the World by Denis Johnson Page B

excellent teaching couldn’t do for him, the impression that he’d become famous had managed to do. And good for him.
    “Good for him. And, really: good for the Department. And good for the whole institution. It just comes kind of abruptly—as you say.”
    “I would have shuffled you over to Tibby’s position for a year, but the truth is, we had to restructure the budget, too. In effect his line isn’t there, not for a year or two anyway.”
    “You mean it isn’t there at all?”
    “Well, it’s sort of there. There just isn’t much money forit.” Tiberius had probably gotten a whopping raise, in other words.
    “I could maybe do with that. Just for the one year.”
    “Well, of course, Mike. If you want the position—uh.” She finished off by saying, nearly wailing, “Oh, Mike!”
    “Oh, Clara!” It was impossible. I’d been wrong to ask. “All right. I feel like a fool. I know you’ve done whatever you could. I’m out of line. I owe you thanks, and that’s all.”
    “You’ve been wonderful here,” she said.
    “It’s been good for me.” I was sincere in saying it.
    I took the stairs to the parking-lot entrance. When I reached the street I didn’t know whether to go right or left. Soon I’d have to start acting like a person who cared about what happened to him.
    Not a lot happened. The following day I carried a cardboard box to the office and emptied my desk into it. Over the next two weeks I brought several such boxes into the house I rented. Slowly I packed, as yet without a destination. I watched the weather turn.
    Just before the end of the academic year I took a trip to upstate New York to attend the Conference on Emerging Democracies. I flew by jet to New York City, and from there I rode a train. I had no preparations to make, no real role to play at the Conference, a gathering sponsored by the Giddings Policy Studies Foundation and an annual tradition since the days when “democracy” had meant “socialism,” a roundup of intellectuals currently undertaking a project of cool-headed, not to say bald-faced, retrenchment. I spent avery long three-day weekend among a lot of people who, I was sort of glad to see, had no intention of abandoning their earliest and most hopeful assumptions. Sixteen weeks before, the Berlin Wall had come down. Nobody mentioned this. The term “Marxist” flew all around the place, but none of the speakers ever referred to The Left or The Revolution or The People. On panels, behind podiums—so tiny in nearly empty auditoriums—they displayed the vivid, liberated staunchness of spinsters in old novels. What they’d mistaken for a political philosophy had always amounted, they were seeing now, to an aesthetic, and the divorce it was undergoing from its previous claim to relevance could only serve to purify it. They were no-nonsense about being all nonsense. This didn’t preclude a certain shift in personal style. The men no longer smoked pipes of tobacco, and the women no longer drank sherry or wore bright lipstick inexpertly applied. I don’t know why I went. I think I wanted something to happen to me there but nothing did.
    Except that I spent a couple of days in the city and was struck as always with how dirty and beautiful New York is. The gray light is a song. And the grafitti alongside the Amtrak: The rails head north out of Penn Station under the streets, almost as through a tunnel, alongside the passing logos of gangs and solitary hit-artists who use the patches of sunshine that fall into the brief spaces between overpasses, their fat names ballooning into the foreground of their strange works, switched on and off in alternating zones of light and dark. They make the letters of our own alphabet look like foreignideograms, ignorant, rudely dismissive, also happy: magical bursting stars, spirals, lightning. And I realized that what I first require of a work of art is that its agenda—is that the word I want?—not include me. I don’t want its aims