Mickelsson's Ghosts (105 page)

“In a thousand years,” he said, grandly melancholy and sarcastic at once, old Fritz on his mountain, “all of this—”

She looked at him with exaggerated interest, and Mickelsson realized in dismay what a bore he had become.

He stood up and put his hands in his pockets. He'd left his pipe at home. “Have you got cigarettes?” he asked, a little testy. He kept himself partly turned away from her.

She shook her head. “I'm sorry.”

He waved, perfunctory. What was the world coming to? Nobody smoked anymore, college kids, anyway. It was selfish and hedonistic, a decay of faith in goodness even beyond the grave, a shameful usurpation of space that rightfully belonged to the next generation. What times! Social responsibility was dead, a trampled corpse. Let the tobacco farmers fend for themselves, also the chemists who put in the sugar and formaldehyde. Every poor devil for himself!

For a time neither of them said anything, at least aloud, each of them looking, like tired visitors to a modern-art museum, at the mound of covers over Brenda's feet.

Then she said, “I know it was wrong of me to call you.” When he bent his head, weary of fraudulence, both the fraudulence of phoney expressions and the fraudulence of “true” ones, she looked at him reprovingly. “I was distraught,” she said. He thought about her choosing the word
distraught.
“When I found out he was really
doing
it—I mean with
her,
a married woman, and so
ugly
—”

“She is a bit ugly,” Mickelsson said, and sighed.

She took a deep breath. “I guess I was a
little
drunk. But it was so
bush!”

“Don't be silly.”

“It was.
Is.
It sucks! I mean you just begin to think … that the world … Do you know what that class of yours is like, Professor?”

He suppressed a nasty smile. It had led, he might have mentioned, to this.

“My parents are divorced,” she said. “They never really liked each other anyway. They used to whack each other all over the place. Even at parties, once out in the yard behind these people's house; they had to call in the police. I grew up with this feeling that … We'd go to the houses of these various different people, and we'd play with the kids, the other people's, and then we'd all go to bed and the parents would switch. Once I got sick and I went to find my mother and she was in bed with this other man—he was—” She stopped herself. “Anyway, in your class … your class was like
church
or something.”

As if by way of apology, Mickelsson put his hand back on her shin.

She leaned forward a little, rounding her back. She said, “Every time I went into your class I'd feel better. I felt all at once like possibly there might be things to
do
in the world. I'd go back to the dorm and I'd feel like singing. Really! Only then there was nothing at all to do. I'd read Aristotle, and I mean, it sucked. And then this one time you told Alan I was smart. I'd hardly noticed him. I mean he's so, well—” Her eyes narrowed. “I mean I know he's an asshole. Anyway, he asked me to go to this meeting with him, and he told me what you said. … He hadn't noticed if I was smart or not, himself—nobody does—but because you told him I was, he believed it. …”

Mickelsson asked, blushing, “What made you a swimmer?”

She flicked a look at him. “My parents had a pool.” Her lips stretched diagonally, making a face. “They had me swimming before I could walk. They put me in when I was one year old. They'd read this book. I took off like a fish, swimming underwater—at least that's what they say. All over my room they had pictures of Mark Spitz and Johnny Weismuller, Esther Williams. … There was a class at the Y. For babies. I was ‘fabulous.' My mom's word.”

“How did
you
feel?”

She shrugged. “I thought it was fabulous. What did I know?”

“And now?”

She lowered her eyes. “I like it.”

“I understand you're still fabulous.”

She nodded.

Mickelsson gently patted her foot. As if to himself he said, “You worried me, the way you kept looking out the window. I thought you were seeing through my lies.”

“You were lying?”

“Not on purpose.”

She nodded again. “What I was really doing, I was thinking about how you looked sort of half sitting on the desk, half laying across it, up on one elbow. Some ways you're so fussy, and yet there you'd sprawl. It sort of took back what you said.”

“The reclining Buddha.”

She grinned, glancing at him sideways. “I noticed how it bothered you that you were overweight. You look better now, but you know, people always get stouter when they're middle-aged.”

He noticed that he was stroking her lower leg, not seductively but as if she were a child or a cat. He pressed down just a little harder, as if to erase what he'd done, then removed his hand. “I've got to get back home. You're OK now, aren't you?”

She shook her head.

“You're not OK?”

“I guess,” she said.

He felt a sudden, urgent need to give instruction, though the dizziness was with him again. “Listen, don't put up with anything you don't want to,” he said. “Women do that too much. Men too. On the other hand, don't be too hurt by betrayals, don't be too final. …” He blushed. Rhetoric. “People hardly ever intend real harm,” he said. “They're just weak and stupid, or attached to bad ideas, and then embarrassed and defensive. You see—” He broke off. He blushed more darkly than before and looked away. “Alan's a good, generous boy,” he said. “It's true that, like all of us, he's prone to error. …”

“I'll break his fucking neck,” she said.

She spoke so earnestly he had to smile, looking up at her face. “Might be a good idea,” he said after an instant. “Show him he's important to you. Or maybe find somebody new, somebody who's never betrayed anybody yet, and break
his
neck, let him know right off the bat how you feel. Start clean.”

“I should have done that to Alan the first time he spoke to me.”

Mickelsson feebly shook his head. “You have to realize—a famous singer, pretty in her way …”

“Ugly as a rat.”

“Well, yes … Spark of the divine, though.”

“You think so? Even rats?”

“Beware of tribal narrowness, my child.” He sadly raised his hand, palm out. “Reject speciesism!” He rose from the bedside as he spoke.

Brenda reached up with one finger and touched his raised hand. Her eyebrows, darker than her hair, went out from the bridge of her nose like hawk's wings. “If my father were like you,” she said, “I'd be a saint.”

“You are a saint.”

She nodded. “True.”

“We're still friends?” He moved toward the door.

She looked at him thoughtfully, then shrugged and smiled, meaning,
Why not?

“Good-night, Brenda.”

She nodded again, then stopped smiling. “Shit,” she said. She closed her eyes.

9

He awakened briefly to a sound of clanking machinery and big engines; construction work on the road, he thought, then slept again. He found himself reasoning with a large, dark figure with its back turned, quite literally a mountain of a man, and robed in the darkest black imaginable, but no more frightening, once one got talking to him, than McPherson in Mickelsson's graduate-school days. He'd done the right thing, Mickelsson insisted, not so much pleading his case as explaining—he'd done the right thing in gently separating his life from the life of Jessie Stark. She'd had sorrows enough; and so had he. He would not judge her—he was pleasantly conscious of his virtue in saying this, and he meant it sincerely—but the woman he'd seen on the couch with Tillson was not what the child-angel within him cried out for. Reality did not contain anywhere what his heart cried out for. He would therefore ask for nothing, and take nothing. Live in truce with the universe, here in his comfortable, dark mountains. When he thought of his children, or what his wife had been like once, or of the photograph of Jessie at twenty-five, he was of course a little grieved; but that would pass. He would not die, that was his decision; in a small way, he would let the world die. Resignation. How obvious the solution, now that he'd come to it; and how little philosophy it took, in fact. Not a solution at all, a problem outgrown. When the figure said nothing, he reached up a little timidly to tap its back and draw its attention. His hand touched not a form but an absence—chilly, damp air like the air in a cave.

“How can this be?” he cried, rushing up to a great, silent crowd of people who waited wearily, some sitting, some standing, among their suitcases and trunks. The clothes were old and drab, and the men had not shaved in days—nor had the women, for at least as long, combed their hair. Their bus or train or plane had apparently been delayed indefinitely. In the dream it did not seem odd at all that he should reach out to them, pleading for advice or, at least, agreement. He touched the powdery dry sleeve of a bearded old man's coat, telling him his story. He'd finally shaken old Nietzsche's satanic hold on him, he said, seeing the great philosopher only for what he was: not as the destroyer and absolute doubter he noisily, mockingly proclaimed himself, but as a man tortured by holiness, maddened by hypocrisy, stupidity, and cowardice, furious at Christianity for the destruction of all that was holy and good, sweet-tempered, noble, as he'd said himself in his famous parable of the madman who rushes into the village crying “Whither is God? I shall tell you:
We have killed him
—
you and I!”
(Nietzsche the misanthrope, yet passionate lover of humanity, who had said, “The men with whom we live resemble a field of ruins of the most precious sculptural designs, where everything shouts at us: ‘Come, help, perfect! … We yearn immeasurably to become whole!' ”); Nietzsche the Lutheran minister's son, hounded even on the highest mountains, where he regularly fled, by the ghost of the Reich-loving, good-German father of Protestantism, master musician and monstrous hate-monger (who had written: “What shall we Christians do now with this depraved and damned people of the Jews? … I will give you my faithful advice. First that one should set fire to their synagogues. … Then that one should also break down and destroy their houses. … That one should drive them out of the countryside!”)—Luther whose Christ had in the end turned Nietzsche into a self-styled Antichrist, though he was nothing of the kind: God's dog, or at worst, a classically defective Christian, guilty of Pride, as Luther was tormented by Pride and more, finally even Sloth, rolling over for order, hierarchy, harmony, good German monk that, in the end, he was (but Nietzsche had, in his final great madness, debased himself, throwing himself down, to no avail, before Cosima Wagner, admitting at last, symbolically, however futilely, the necessity of what he'd dismissed from his system, amazing grace; whereas Luther remained to the end self-righteous and stiff-necked, for all his rhetorical self-abasement—remained, in Mickelsson's grandfather's phrase, a sinner besmutted beyond all washing but the Lord's) … not that Mickelsson was blind to his own sins, mainly Wrath and Despair. … “What choice have I,” Mickelsson asked, “but the wisdom of the Orient: self-abnegation?” He said, leaning closer, “I will become one more piece of the world! No more ego! I'll make furniture—good, solid, comfortable pieces. No more thought!” The nose of the man with whom he spoke began to move. It was not a nose, he noticed now, but a bird. When it began to beat its wings, he jerked awake.

Mid-day. He stared at the guest-bedroom ceiling, lying on his left side, remembering everything, then looked over at the door he would in a few more minutes go through, beginning his new, more narrowly circumscribed life. He listened for sounds downstairs. Nothing. He noticed that, new as it was, the paint on the guest-bedroom door was cracking, and he felt a twinge of irritation. That was the kind of thing he must learn to put up with.

Yet he felt a strange uneasiness creeping up on him, as if there were something important he was supposed to do and had not done. Suddenly it came to him that the feeling was not free-floating guilt but fear, increasing by leaps and bounds. He held his breath and confirmed what a part of him had known for minutes now: he was not the only one breathing in the room. He rolled slowly away from the door onto his back, groping across the bed with his right hand until he came to ice-cold fingers—a hand that seized his tightly and hung on.

The next thing he knew he was standing in the hallway, clutching his head in his two hands, bent over from the pain of his heart's pounding, whispering to himself, and the guest bedroom, behind him, was empty. Perhaps the old woman had simply vanished; perhaps she'd gotten up, a little after him, and had moved away out of his line of vision. He straightened up, breathing deeply, and at last, unable to think what else to do, he went back into the bedroom, looking around carefully, seized his clothes from the chair and his shoes from beside the bed and carried them downstairs to the kitchen, where he dressed.

He raised his face toward the kitchen ceiling, listening, once more holding his breath. Not a sound. For a long moment he stood scratching his head with both hands, trying to think; then abruptly he lowered his hands: there was nothing to think about. The old woman had finally noticed him; had turned her rage from the foolish old man to one more deserving of her stronger-than-the-grave indignation.

No danger,
he thought. No ghost in the world has the power to move a wing of the most delicate moth off course.

Once again the clankings and groaning engine sounds penetrated to his consciousness. He looked out the kitchen door. Halfway up the mountain behind his house, just below the woods, two bulldozers were tearing a huge brown gouge across his field. Below the gouge, trucks and cars were parked. Fifteen or twenty men and women in dark, drab clothing stood watching the tractors or working with picks and shovels. When he opened the door and stepped out to see what the devil was going on, the whole thing vanished, the engine sounds abruptly breaking off. A small, dark bird sang on the ice-crusted telephone wire.