Mickelsson's Ghosts (19 page)

Miss Mariani was smiling. It was exactly as she'd always thought.

Inevitably, both Blassenheim and Nugent had their hands up. Mickelsson again glanced at the clock—two minutes left—then nodded, decisively, at Blassenheim.

“But isn't it true,” Blassenheim asked, “that all that really proves is that Plato had a sort of aristocratic bias, like the modern, like, capitalist? He couldn't believe that a Jew like Einstein or a fifteen-year-old kid might be the real philosopher kings? I mean, some things are right and some things aren't right, that's all there is to it. If an evil government survived for a million years, it would still be evil.”

Again Mickelsson nodded. “Of course it would,” he said. “By definition. The problem is—”

Again Nugent had his hand up, furiously waving it.

He realized with a start that Brenda Winburn was staring at him, her large, dark eyes still as gun-barrels. Perhaps it was only that the others were gathering their papers and books, ready for the bell. Her stare was murky with shadows, like that of a child on drugs, though he doubted that it was that. He had an irrational sense that in a moment she would break out of her terrible lethargy of soul and shout at him, or snarl like an animal, expose him as a quibbler, an obscurer, a time-server, a fraud. Along with his fear of her came a sexual stirring. Michael Nugent's face was white, his hand stretched up, desperately reaching. That instant—fortunately—the bell rang. With the back of the hand that held his pipe he touched his forehead; then he smiled, as if grudgingly, and nodded his dismissal of the class. Most of them, as usual, went out shaking their heads. As usual, he'd fooled only the smart ones.

He was halfway to his mailbox when Alan Blassenheim caught up with him. “Terrific class,” the boy said, grinning crookedly, not meeting his eyes.

“Thank you,” Mickelsson said. Faint panic stirred in him, a minute sickness near his heart.

“I really like that way you do that, make us think for ourselves.” He shook his head, falling into step with Mickelsson, then brushed his rich, dark hair back with his fingers.

“I guess that's what it's all about,” Mickelsson said.

“I was wondering,” the boy said. He glanced over his shoulder. “Maybe you could give me a list of books or something.”

Mickelsson smiled, unconsciously checking the hallway for familiar faces. “Fine. Drop by the office sometime.”

“Yeah, sure. OK.” The boy hesitated an instant, knowing he'd been dismissed, then continued beside him. After a moment he said, “I was thinking about that thing you quoted from Collingham that time, how all widespread errors contain some truth. I got to thinking, you know, since there are all these people that believe in God—”

They'd come to the mailroom. Rogers, in history, looked up from his mailbox, saw Mickelsson, and mournfully grinned. “Peter,” he said, “are you invited to Blicksteins'?” He glanced at Blassenheim, politely and sadly registered his existence, then looked back at Mickelsson.

“I'd forgotten all about it.”

Rogers laughed as if wearily, colored light sparking off his silver hair and glasses. “I thought you might have. Or rather, to tell the truth, Jessica thought you might have.”

Without meaning to, Mickelsson frowned.

“See here,” Rogers said, looking up at him more carefully and raising a hand, palm out.

“No, no, that's fine. I'm glad you reminded me,” Mickelsson said. “It slipped my mind, that's all.” He smiled, reassuring, then turned his attention to fitting the key into the mailbox.

“Well, see you, then,” Rogers said.

Mickelsson nodded and, with his left hand, waved. It occurred to him that Tillson, his chairman, might be invited; an unpleasant thought. He dismissed it the next instant. It was a dinner party, small; and Blickstein knew a fool when he saw one.

As he glanced over his mail, Mickelsson was aware of Blassenheim awkwardly hovering at his elbow. Consciously, a little guiltily, he blotted the boy out. Bills, ditto sheets, various letters, one from the American Society of Aesthetics. He thought of leaving the student newspaper, then on second thought lifted it from the floor of his box. On the front page he found a picture of his student Brenda Winburn in her swimsuit, poised for a dive.

“It's funny to think of professors having private lives,” Blassenheim said. Mickelsson half registered something odd in the tone, but his attention was focused on the girl. She was raised up on her toes, her legs chunkily muscular, her breasts much smaller than he'd have imagined. Her expression was intent, unreadable, as if she were deep in meditation. At her back there was a large, inexplicable shadow, as if she had broad, dark wings. When he glanced at Blassenheim, he saw, in the instant before the boy looked away, that Blassenheim had been studying him hungrily. To cover his surprise, Mickelsson tapped at the picture with his pipestem. “Pretty girl,” he said. “Smarter than you'd think.”

Dutifully, Blassenheim looked at the picture.

Mickelsson closed the mailbox and turned to leave. “Stop by any time,” he said, his voice accidentally stern, “we'll work out that list.”

“Yes sir,” the boy said. Though he did not seem satisfied, he smiled.

Mickelsson felt, suddenly, a physical heaviness, a leadenness of limbs and heart, that it took him a moment to understand. This afternoon at three, he must cope with his graduate seminar in medical ethics. He remembered how he'd been himself, in his days as a graduate student: the hungry ambition, the awful heart's wail for wisdom and justice, the moral outrage in the presence of soulless pedantry. Not that his freshmen and sophomores were so different, or his children, even when they'd been small, no more than five or six. Maybe one was born with it. One of those infant and childhood diseases, often fatal. He got a sudden painful memory of the Minnesota football team, sitting on glossy, battleship-gray wooden benches in the locker-room at half-time, listening to old Deer-lock's harangue. Team-spirit, honor, courage, shame. Faint in the distance, the marching band peeped out its snazzy syncopations. After a moment, a faraway crowd roar reached the locker-room, not like something now happening (back then) but like something from a dream, an old, old memory.
Gim-me a M! Gim-me a I! …
The black smudges on his teammates' cheekbones were like Indian war-paint playfully smeared on the faces of children at a party.

As he turned the corner, starting down the hallway toward his office door, he glanced up for some reason from his impatient perusal of return addresses and saw that Nugent had gotten there ahead of him. His heart sank, and, without entirely meaning to, he put on an expression of harassed irritability. There was another young man with Nugent, a tall, handsome black boy in a tank-top, his hair in corn-rows. Mickelsson had a feeling they'd been in earnest conversation and had stopped at sight of him. They stood not far apart, their heads inclined toward one another, watching him approach. He nodded, a quick little jerk of the head, and looked back down at his mail, letting them know he was busy. At his door, with his right hand closed around the keys in his pocket, Mickelsson reconsidered and turned toward Nugent. If he and Nugent could have their conversation, whatever it was, here in the hallway, he might get finished with it quickly.

“Hi, there,” Mickelsson said and, in spite of himself, grinned.

Nugent bowed with exaggerated formality and blanched a little, as he always did when directly addressed. “Hi,” he said. He looked confused for an instant, then said, overcoming fear, “Professor Mickelsson, I'd like you to meet my friend Randy Wilson.” He reached out and touched his black friend's elbow, exactly as one might touch the elbow of a younger sister or, perhaps, a girlfriend.

“How do you do,” he said.

“Hey, man,” Randy said, and shyly reached out his hand.

Mickelsson shifted his Plato's
Republic
and the letters he held from his right hand to his left and extended his right hand for an ordinary handshake, then quickly readjusted to a power-to-the-people shake. Though he couldn't have said why, his heart sank more.

“Randy's in dance,” Nugent said.

“That's wonderful,” Mickelsson said—rather stupidly, blinking. He felt caught in one of those contemporary tragedies of the kind his ex-wife especially favored, the kind in which you laugh and laugh until the grossly predictable horror swings in. Who else would the sorrowing, suicidal white boy choose as best friend—no, lover—but a black boy in, of all things, dance? Murderous cliché! How easy it was to find roads to catastrophe!

But it was the real world, not theater; scuffed, fake-marble floors, taped-up
New Yorker
cartoons on the office doors. All might yet be well. Randy had fine, supple muscles, enormously wide lips, such apparent sweetness and childlike timidity one could not help hoping for the best. He was already fading back, delicately allowing Nugent privacy for his conversation with the professor.

Nugent said, “I just wanted to say, that was terrific, the way you handled that.”

“Oh?” Mickelsson said, and waited.

Randy Wilson stood ten feet away from them now, sidling away still further, reading the notices on Libby Tucker's long bulletin board, his hands on his buttocks, perfectly pressed to them like limp leaves, the elbows perfectly parallel, oddly widening his shoulders.

Nugent glanced at Mickelsson's office door, then away, as if aware that Mickelsson had decided not to let him in. “All that crap about Ideal Forms,” Nugent said, “and Nature struggling toward God's Ideas.”

“Mmm,” Mickelsson said, and waited.

Nugent stood oddly still, his chin thrust forward, the bone-line disturbingly visible, troublesome as the sound of one's own heartbeat in bed. The tracery of his veins showed under the skin. “Everybody wants to go back to the simplicity of childhood,” he said, and smiled as if in panic. “They're scared of the modern world, you know? Want to get back to innocent, sweet Nature, William Wordsworth. They don't understand what we came out of—superstition and craziness.”

Mickelsson's smile became fixed. He began, almost against his will, to pay attention. He couldn't spend much time on this; he had yet to finish his preparation for the medical ethics class. But Nugent was a strange young man, no question about it.

“Look at the world—the Church is a would-be mass murderer. I mean the Pope's medieval craziness on abortions—no place for them, even to save a woman's life! Higher education in full retreat, or if it tries to stand firm—like Greg—he was my chemistry teacher … someone murdered him. Got into his apartment and—you know the one I mean?” He began to blink rapidly.

Mickelsson nodded. He'd heard something about it; not much, though it had been in the papers.

“I mean,” Nugent said, his voice breaking, and suddenly jerked his forearms out to the sides, the rest of his body motionless, “what we need is devices for present-day survival, you know what I mean?” He stretched his lips in a failed grin, one angry, superior intelligence to another. “I used to be in engineering—”

Mickelsson nodded again.

“We need
inventions,
that's what I think. But not space-shuttles, smaller computer chips, artificial blood. All that's been tried.” With a wave he dismissed Technological Man to outer darkness. “Did you happen to read a book by Dr. James J. Lynch, called
The Broken Heart: The Medical Consequences of Loneliness?”

“I've heard of it,” Mickelsson said, lying, hoping to avoid a long discussion.

Nugent's head tucked in abruptly, as if he were suddenly going into a fit, and his arms cringed back from extended position, then closed on the straps of his small, dark green backpack. He pulled it off with clumsy haste, unsnapped the top, dove in with one hand, and after a moment came out with an orange-red paperback book. “I thought you might like to look at it,” he said. “I'm sorry about all the underlinings—” He pressed the book toward Mickelsson's chest. Automatically, unwillingly, Mickelsson took hold of it. The boy said, his eyes on Mickelsson's forehead, “What Dr. Lynch argues—well, it's here on the cover.” He pivoted around to stand beside Mickelsson, almost pushing against his shoulder, pointing with two white fingers at the blurb: “Dr. Lynch brings together striking evidence that companionship is an important life-force.”

“Interesting,” Mickelsson said, and, as the boy released it, accepted the book.

“People like what's-his-name, the kid in our class—the pretty one—”

“Alan Blassenheim,” Mickelsson said, reserved.

“Well, anyway,” Nugent said, “anyway, it's easy to say we'd have been happy if we'd lived fifty years ago, or in ancient Judah, whatever—try to resuscitate a bunch of dead ideas—”

He felt a queer, sentimental urge to touch the boy's arm, say something like “Listen, take it easy!” Instead, he looked thoughtfully at the cover of the book.

“It's all about heart attacks, and the reason why they happen,” Nugent explained. “Most people don't realize how important it is, for our very survival—”

“I'll be interested to read it,” Mickelsson said.

The boy went white, as if slaughtered by some thought, and his red, seemingly lashless eyes blinked rapidly again. “It was good, the way you handled that, that shit-ass crap—”

Mickelsson went on looking at the cover of the book. “Come on now,” he said (he heard in his own voice Rifkin's whine), “I was equally hard
on you.”

“That's true, but I don't think you understood what I was saying. I mean, I didn't make it clear.”

He stood in calculated silence. Then he cocked his eye at the boy. “You can't blame me if I'm a little confused, Mr. Nugent.” He allowed a little gentleness into his voice. “You give me this book about loneliness and, I take it, heart disease, and at the very same time you ask me to squash a fellow student like an insect. What will it lead to, such scorn of one's fellow human beings?”