Mickelsson's Ghosts (64 page)

Beyond the windows—he would tack up cardboard for tonight and glaze them tomorrow—it was twilight now. The day had been warm, springlike; he'd worked with only a sweater, not even needing gloves. But now a cold wind was rising: wind of a kind he had lately come to dislike. It would sing in the eaves and evergreens, inclining him to thoughts of hauntedness. Not that even now he was convinced that the house had ghosts. Nonetheless, the wind made him uneasy.

Martin Luther asked, “Do you repent these numerous and various sins?”

“I feel sorry for all the people I'm hurting,” Mickelsson said. “That's my best offer.”

And so in everything, even his feelings toward Jessica Stark, Mickelsson waited for some miracle, some burst of illuminating, all-transforming light out of Heaven—Luther's nearly castrating thunderbolt, perhaps—and refused, until it came, to lift a finger. The only exception to this was his house. Every free minute he could get (he no longer even looked at the manuscript on his desk), he worked at transforming the place—putting down the diningroom floor, plastering, rewiring. He was spending money (theoretical money) as if it grew on trees, but since Owen Thomas said nothing, trusting him, Mickelsson was able to pretend not to notice. He had no idea how high his bill was by now. Hundreds, no doubt. He blinked the thought away as he blinked away the dusty sweat that ran in rivers down his forehead. If he stopped for a minute to pay attention to his affairs, Mickelsson believed, he would see his doom, solid as the house itself, all around him. With a recklessness Rifkin would have no difficulty explaining, he went on spending, hand over fist, never real money, credit at the hardware store, elsewhere plastic promises, burying himself—as all the country was doing, according to the papers—in a mountain of irredeemable pledges. He worked like a maniac. His wrists grew thick, his hands cut, barked, and swollen.

Rifkin would whine in his nasal way, “Isn't it just a new form of the old disease, Professor?”

“Maybe you're mistaken,” Mickelsson said, pointing sternly, like a lecturer, at the empty air. “Maybe it's some kind of magic that I'm involved in. How do you get martins to come eat your mosquitoes? You build a martin house. I've listened too long to you sensible people with your life-withering sanity. What do you do with the impetuous, dangerous torrents of the soul? You try to dry them up!”

“Ah yes,” Rifkin said, “freedom, holy self-abandonment!” Like a puppet he jiggled his head and waggled his two uplifted hands. Then, abruptly, he folded his arms over his chest.

“I'll tell you something,” Mickelsson said, pointing the bight of his trowel at him, threatening. “All you say has been said before, millions of times. No doubt it was said by the tall, big-brained Neanderthals before they vanished from the face of the earth—for all their love of order! I'll tell you what
we
say, the new breed of terrible invaders from the south: ‘We philosophers and free spirits feel ourselves to be shone upon by a new dawn with the news of God's demise. Our heart flows over with thankfulness, amazement, presentiment, expectation. Finally! Our ships can embark again, and go forth to every danger! Every hazard is again permitted the inquirer! Perhaps there was never before so open a sea!' ”

He broke off, banishing Rifkin from his livingroom. Just a few nights ago, going through a box of clothes his ex-wife had sent down to him in one of her fits of housecleaning frenzy or residual tenderness, Mickelsson had come across the full-length scarlet hunting coat he'd worn when his last so-called episode was upon him, a coat they'd bought long ago on Portobello Road, when they'd passed through London on the way home from that grim year in Heidelberg. He'd felt a brief jolt of fear, holding the coat up to look at it, and he remembered how he'd bawled, clinging to Rifkin in his dimly lit office, shamelessly clutching the cotton of Rifkin's shirt, bellowing like a bull in the slaughterhouse, while Rifkin, as if absent-mindedly, patted the red coat's shoulder, his eyes shifting from Mickelsson's face to the nurse who was preparing his shot. Poor humanity had need of its Rifkins, mock all it might. He'd considered throwing the coat away, but then its wrinkles and the dangling brass button at the collar had distracted him, made him forget his fear and remember instead how Mark and Leslie had run eagerly from shop to shop, streetcart to streetcart, or had pressed up close, timidly holding hands, to look up, mouths open, at street musicians. In the end, he'd taken the scarlet coat to the cleaners, along with other things in need of cleaning and trifling repairs. He must remember to get over to Montrose and pick them up. Anyway, he must get himself a Pennsylvania lawyer, the I.R.S. man had told him. Old Cook would be sufficient. How much big-city cunning did it require to acknowledge that one's client's case was hopeless?

It would not do, he understood, to think too hard about what it meant, this fixing of the house; yet he couldn't help toying with the idea he'd suggested to his phantom physician, that it was magic, not madness—if there was really any difference. Perhaps in a way he was doubling back into his childhood, as if playing with the idea of starting over. The first time he'd run a plane down a yellow pine board, watching the shaving curl up past his fists, he'd remembered with a clarity astonishing to him how his father had looked at thirty, his sleeves rolled up tight to his pink, freckled arms, his jaw thrown forward, lower teeth clenched around upper teeth. Sometimes his father would sing as he worked:
“In a cavern, in a canyon, excay-vay-ting for a mine …
” Mickelsson's uncle Edgar would move around, expressionless and straight-backed as a gorilla, as if sunk into his own grim meditation, but sometimes he would glance over in the direction of the barn or wellhouse where Mickelsson's father worked and sang, and one could see that Mickelsson's uncle was listening. Another time, when Mickelsson was working on his plumbing, fixing a leak under the bathtub, he got a sudden, wonderfully sharp image of his father down in the well with a trouble-light, his legs spraddled wide, shoes wedged into the wet stone walls on either side. He'd had the farts, Mickelsson remembered, and they'd all joked about it, especially his father: “If anybody'd dropped a match I'd've been blowed to Kingdom Come!” he said. It was true that, up at the top of the well, where Mickelsson, a small boy, lay on his belly fearfully looking down, the smell was horrendous. His father's red hair, just under the trouble-light, glittered and gleamed like new copper.

Still another time, prodded by an old rotten clothespin he'd just picked up from the cellar floor, Mickelsson saw his mother at the clothes-line behind the house, reaching up, her mouth full of clothespins, to hang trousers, pair after pair, by the cuffs. Her hair, with the sun in it, was the color of Ellen's before Ellen had begun to dye hers black. Straw-yellow. His mother's stockings were rolled at the knees.

All that Thursday and Friday—his days for “research,” as he'd told Tillson—he worked at plastering the new diningroom. It was indeed research, in a way (which was not to deny that he'd been less than forthright with Tillson). Dreams, memories, insights drifted into his head unbidden. He saw his sister in her coffin, dead of polio at nine. He remembered his uncle pouring gasoline over the pigpen, four dead sows inside—what it was they'd died of Mickelsson had now no idea. The corpses had been pushed together in a pile and old truck tires placed around them. Then his uncle had stood back and had thrown a match. There was a roaring explosion and a cloud of fire rushed outward and upward, almost to where Mickelsson stood holding his uncle's scabrous hand. Cousins squealed and ran back a few steps—Billy, Erik, Jeanette, Mary Ann—and from the center of the fire came a crackling, hissing sound, a rumble like a voice, and a thousand thousand sparks went flying up. His uncle's eyes, watching the fire, were a startling, glassy red.

When the plastering was finished, dark gray where he'd worked most recently, lighter, finally white, where he'd worked earlier, Mickelsson sat down on the rickety chair exactly in the middle of the room—it made him think of some play by Samuel Beckett that Ellen had taken him to—and with childish satisfaction looked over what he'd done. He went to the kitchen to get himself a beer, then came back and sat down to look again. Of all the repairs he'd made so far, it was the plastering that pleased him most. When the thought of his son came to him—still missing, no word—Mickelsson suddenly got up, turned off the lights, and left the room. He stood beside the telephone in the kitchen, his right elbow on the wall, his hand on his forehead, going over in his mind again and again the numbers that would ring his ex-wife's telephone. At last he admitted to himself that he was afraid to call her and went back through the livingroom to his study, where he sat down at his desk and put paper into the typewriter. He stared at the paper, not turning the typewriter on, then at last laid his aching arms on the typewriter and the whiskery side of his face on his arms. He'd been sitting there for some while, waiting out time like his poor angry student Michael Nugent, when it came to him—a shiver of dread moving slowly up his spine—that there was someone standing behind him. When he held his breath, he could hear whoever it was breathing.

He fixed himself supper, a cheese sandwich and a glass of milk, then went into the livingroom to eat and, afterward, sit pondering. Even now he felt watched.

Perhaps, he thought, he should get Jessica to help him with the Christmas party.

He went into the new diningroom to look at the plastering job one last time, stood there for twenty minutes, arms folded across his chest, then at last turned off the lights and went up to bed. He fell asleep listening for the phone.

It was at something like two in the morning that the phone did ring, and Mickelsson, waking suddenly from some unpleasant dream, stumbled naked from his bed to answer it. He realized at once, as soon as he reached the wall where the telephone was, that he should have brought a blanket to wrap around him.

“Hello?” he said.

“Hi, Dad.” His son's voice was sweeter than ever to his ear, strangely cheerful—a cheerfulness possibly forced, he could never tell, but instinctively he accepted the pretense, if it was that. His heart lifted.

“Mark! Where are you?”

“I'm sorry if I worried you. Everything's fine, I'm OK. I just wanted to call, let you know things are all right.”

“That's good! It's wonderful to hear your voice!” He was bent over, clinging to the receiver with both hands. “How are you?”

Mark laughed. “I'm fine. Really. Are you OK?”

“You know me. Like an old horse standing in the rain. How are you?”

“Dad,” Mark said.

“I know. I already asked you that. It's so good to hear your voice!”

“I suppose Mom's been pretty worried. Did she call?”

“I called her, as it happens. She has been worried, of course. You should call her. How are—” He stopped himself. “It's so good to hear your voice!”

“I'm sorry I worried you,” Mark said, “but things got sort of—heavy.” He spoke the word apologetically, as if he'd gladly not use the street-talk if there were anything else. “I'm sorry about the Rollei. I guess Mom told you?”

“I saw the picture in the paper. Don't worry about it. You looked terrific! I didn't know you still had that hat. Do you need money? Is there some way the Rollei can be fixed?”

“I've got another camera now—an Instamatic. It doesn't make art—it's a real moron's camera, actually; I should be ashamed to be seen with it—but it's good enough for what I need it for right now, and it's easy to hide. I've got a line on something better, actually. If anything develops maybe I'll ask you for the money.” He paused. “It's kind of a lot.”

“Whatever you need, just let me know.”

“Thanks, Dad. I will. Dad, you wouldn't believe this stuff.”

“The police, you mean?”

“All of it.” Mickelsson could see him smiling, slightly drawn back, maybe fiddling with the phone cord. “There were these people that came to U.V.M., representatives of Yankee. Kids would ask them questions, and they'd say, ‘As representatives of a profit-making organization, it's obviously not in our interest to answer a question like that.' They were amazing. You expected them to lie, but they never lied about anything. They just refused to answer. It was a scary thing to see, all that arrogance—I mean the fact that they thought they'd get away with it. And the thing is, they
do
get away with it. A few kids may yell at them, but the nukes keep going up, and the alternatives—things like solar and wind and geothermal—they keep being blocked. Obviously they're not in a position to talk straight; all the facts are against them. But they figure if they don't talk at all they'll win, and I guess maybe they're right. Nobody really believes in Doomsday. People just go on, putting up with whatever they're told to put up with. It's suicidal.”

“Well,” Mickelsson said.

“I keep being amazed how hard it is to get people to listen. When we were at Yankee, sitting in, we'd talk with the oglers, tell them true horror stories—how the cancer incidence goes up fifty per cent in the area of a nuke plant for every one per cent elsewhere; how three of the nuke plants in New York State, and dozens elsewhere, are built on earthquake faults; how everything depends on the plant's emergency core-cooling system, and the thing's never really been tested—in this one small-scale test it failed six times out of six. You should have seen how the people we talked to reacted.” He laughed sadly. “Mostly they just looked at the ground and shook their heads. Talk about walking peacefully into the ovens!”

“It's incredible all right,” Mickelsson said.

Mark laughed. “Sorry to rant. Anyway, we're doing what we can.”

“Look, don't do anything dangerous, OK?”