Mickelsson's Ghosts (2 page)

He found his well-being, if one could call it that, increasingly dependent on these late-night walks. Not that even his walks were exactly carefree. Sometimes large dogs would come out at him; or the hulking silhouettes of teen-aged boys, gathered on some porch, would suddenly fall silent as he passed. He'd taken to carrying a heavy walking-stick he'd picked up at one of Binghamton's innumerable antique stores. It was intended only for self-defense—or less than self-defense, mere symbolic protection—though it had also aesthetic and social functions useful to Mickelsson just now. It was an article from the age of well-made objects, the age when possessions were adornments of a life presumed-until-proven-otherwise to be noble and worthwhile. That presumption had, for Mickelsson, lost force, though it was, when one came right down to it, the whole basis of his ethical theory, every word he'd written through all those ruinous years. Lately he'd come to be increasingly cynical, increasingly impressed by accident: chance virtue, chance wickedness, at best the magpie gatherings of emotivism. He'd paid too little attention to deep-down meanness—the right wing shaking its Jesus-loving, eager-to-kill, fat fists over “the horror of abortion”—all those hundreds of thousands of poor dead babies—the left wing sweating with pious indignation over all those poor dead mothers. “Atheists! Antichrists!” one side screamed. “Motherfuckers! Assholes! Baptist shit-heads!” the other screamed back. A noble debate. He did not doubt that human beings had the equipment to make relatively unbestial choices, but he doubted more and more that they would ever get around to it or that, in the final analysis, it mattered. If Life had become for him less the grand thing he'd once supposed it, the so-called Life of the Mind—of which he'd once written so glowingly—now fared even worse with him, seemed to him, in fact, a joke. Mind. God help us! The country was gearing up to make its stupendous intellectual choice between Reagan and Carter, or possibly Ted Kennedy. The newspapers had long since moved their tear-jerker stories of starving Cambodians back to page 22, making room for new horrors. Mainly Iran and the hostages. (Every gas station had its picture of Uncle Sam looking stern, however futilely, and its emptily ferocious legend “Let my people go!”) Carter became thinner of voice every day, Reagan—in his dyed hair and make-up—more jokey. In such a world Mickelsson's walking-stick, with its smooth, dark, glowing wood, silver-tipped, and its heavy silver handle in the shape of the head of a lioness, was comforting, a steadying force; or so he would tell himself, holding the cane to the light, admiring it one more time, up in his kitchen, or swinging it jauntily, firmly grasping the head as he walked dark streets, his broad hat cocked.

One night, passing down a narrow, shabby, poorly lit street where he'd seldom walked before—dull houses, each with its enclosed or open or long-ago-screened-in, full-width porch, its light over the door (turned off by this hour), its one large or two small windows, its rusty porch-glider, fridge, potted plants—Mickelsson suddenly froze in his tracks, the hair on the back of his neck rising. Right in front of him on the sidewalk, barring his path, stood a large, pitchdark chunk of shadow—a dog, he realized after an instant: a black Doberman, or perhaps a Great Dane. It simply stood there, head level with Mickelsson's waist, not growling but firmly blocking passage. Seconds fell away. Mickelsson could see no one to call to, no movement anywhere, though from somewhere not far off came the tinny noise of a TV.

Now the dog did begin to growl: a low, uncertain rumble. Carefully, making no sudden movements, Mickelsson shifted the cane to both hands and raised it like a bat. And then, an instant before he knew he would do it, quick as a snake, he brought down the cane with all his might, aiming for the animal's head. To his surprise—then horror—the dog did not leap back with the predictable lightning quickness of its kind, nor did it, as Mickelsson had expected, lunge forward to bite him. It simply went down the way cows had gone down at slaughtering time, when his father hit them between the horns with the eight-pound maul. Perhaps the dog was old, half blind, half deaf. In any case, down it went, almost without a sound—no snarl, just the crack of the canehead striking home, then the
huff
of escaping breath as the body struck the sidewalk. Mickelsson stared, the TV's rootless harmonics suddenly loud in his ears. It was too dark to see well, but he sensed, if he did not see, the death tremor. He turned left and right, looking around in alarm at the nearby porches and windows. Miraculously, no one seemed to have witnessed the thing. He moved the tip of the cane toward the animal, thinking of poking it to make sure it was dead, but then resisted the impulse. He raised the cane, thinking of hurling it away into the shrubbery, but again changed his mind, imagining the dog leaping up at him as soon as he was weaponless. He looked around one last time—still no one—then tucked the cane under his arm and fled.

Back in his apartment, with the door bolted, Mickelsson cleaned the head of the cane under the kitchen faucet with great care, though he could see no sign of hair or blood, then poured himself a drink and sat down with it at the kitchen table, swallowed half of the drink at once, and after that sat with his glasses off, his forehead on his fists, eyes narrowed, almost shut, trying to think what he should do. He would call the police if he were the ethicist he'd all his life claimed to be and thought himself; but that thought had hardly entered his mind before he pushed it away forever. Back in Providence, where he'd been well-to-do and respected, he'd have gone to the police at once; but in Providence he wouldn't have killed the dog.

It began to seem to him that when he'd first stood there, blocked by the thing on the sidewalk in front of him, a car had passed. Surely he was wrong: surely the lights would have shown him what kind of dog it was. No, then; there had definitely been no car. Yet somehow he couldn't convince himself. He remembered distinctly how, then or at some other time, headlights had shown him the rough bark on the tree just ahead of him, right beside the tilting, crumbling sidewalk, then the bark on the next tree and the next. He looked again at the silver cane-handle, dented now, the left eye of the lioness blanked out, as if blinded.

“Jesus,” he whispered, almost prayerful, covering his eyes, reliving the moment of the dog's silent fall. Something nagged for his attention, then at last broke through: a siren, not far off. He listened as if his heart had stopped, then at last realized that it was moving away, not coming nearer—and not a police siren anyway; the ascending and sinking wail that meant somebody's house was on fire.

He got up, weak and heavy-limbed, his gorge full of acid, carried the walking-stick to the closet of the bedroom, and hid it in the darkest corner, behind an outgrown suit, the long brown bathrobe he never wore, and a box of old windowshades that had stood there, abandoned, when he'd moved in.

It was nonsense, of course, all this anguish of fear and guilt. No one had seen. And it had been, strictly speaking, an accident—at worst, an act of legitimate self-defense. The city had a leash law. Even if someone had seen him do it, no one could say he'd done anything wrong; the law was on his side. He compressed his lips. He was beginning to sound like Heidegger in the days of the Führer.

The kitchen smelled of old coffee grounds, stale tobacco, must and mould. Again vague alarm rose up in him, the peripheral sense of dread that comes when a dream begins to decay toward nightmare. At last the cause of his unease reached his consciousness: a mouse was stirring in the garbage bag or in one of the junk-filled drawers under the sink.

He looked up in alarm, freezing for an instant, then drawing back his head from the innards of the once-again jammed-up Xerox copying machine, hearing his name called—Geoffrey Tillson, his department chairman, bleating in a voice as thin as a bassoon's: “Professor Mickelsson, could I ask you to step in here a minute when you're free?”

His heart raced, but at once he steadied himself. By the chimpanzee grin old Tillson wore on his gray-bearded face (thrust forward and slung low, level with the rock-solid hump on his back), Mickelsson made out that, almost certainly, it was nothing, just some ordinary nuisance. The chairman, it must be, had a student in there with him, or a disgruntled parent, or someone from the State Education Office, in any case someone to be dealt with gently, petted and stroked, the kind of thing Mickelsson, mainly by virtue of his standing in the department, was thought to be good at. (It was summer vacation. The bastard had no right.) He stole a last look at the snarled-up paper trapped among plastic cams and mysterious metal pins. All day long things had been going wrong for him, as if even inanimate objects were hostile, wary of him. Then he straightened up, took his glasses from the top of the machine, and put them on—bifocal lenses for which everything in the world was slightly too near at hand or far away.

“I guess I'm more or less free now,” he said, still blushing, and faked a laugh—two sharp hacks. He saw that the secretary's eye was on him, over behind the desk to the left of Tillson's open door. She seemed to be watching him suspiciously, and he blushed more deeply. He asked, as if to account for the blush, “Charlotte, do you think you could clear this thing for me?”

“Surely,” she said, and at once stood up, automatically smoothing her skirt with one hand, giving him one of those pitying, superior smiles. No doubt she was a man-hater, her nice, secretarial smile masking private scorn. All pretty, well-built young women were despisers of men, these days, or all except the born-again Christians. His female students' papers were full of it. They batted their lashes and swung their rear ends, but their hearts seethed. Not that their anger was necessarily ill-advised. Here he was now, hunched over, looking irate and imploring, as domineering males had been doing for centuries, ever since they'd learned it was frequently quicker than hitting those fat little asses with sticks. He thought of saying, sheathing anger in a joke, “I'll pay you of course. Keep track of your time!” But the girl was still covertly eyeing him, and he decided he'd better not. They already had reason enough to believe he was crazy.

He worked on his expression, rolling down and buttoning his cuffs again, then moved toward Tillson's inner sanctum, smiling, holding his hand at half-ready, prepared for the necessary handshake. He entered with his head tipped forward like a bull's, one eyebrow raised, eyes dead serious, the rest of his features assembled to a hearty grin. They could always count on old Mickelsson, he thought; madman Mickelsson, born for better things, maybe for selling used cars. He was aware of Tillson's watchful eye and the queer, no doubt accidental gesture of the right hand raised toward his grizzled chin, two fingers lifted above the rest and aiming outward, like a claw raised to strike, or a papal blessing, or the sly cobra sign of ancient Tibetan art. The young man who turned to shake Mickelsson's hand had such glassy eyes and pallor of skin, color like a dead man's, that Mickelsson was for an instant almost thrown. Careful, he thought, and tightened the screws on his expression, letting no muscle slip.

“Professor Mickelsson,” Tillson said, beaming with fake pleasure, “this is Michael Nugent. He's transferring into philosophy from engineering.” He continued to beam, head twisted painfully up toward Mickelsson's, as if tickled pink to have the honor of introducing two such marvels. Tillson's black trousers were baggy at the knees. His shapeless black coat hung forlorn on the back of his chair. His tie was wide and wrinkled, not quite clean.

“Glad to meet you, Michael,” Mickelsson said. He gave him a nod and put the smile on
energize.
“Good to have you with us! Glad you saw the light!”

The boy mumbled something, accepting Mickelsson's football-coach handshake without returning it—not just responding limply, but actively refusing to respond (or so it seemed)—and his eyes, meeting Mickelsson's, threw a challenge. Clearly something was eating the boy. The leaden skin, the reddened eyelids, the nervous, weak mouth like a child's all gave ominous warning. He wore a blue, pressed workshirt with starch in the collar, and neat, pressed slacks, such clothes as nobody in philosophy had worn since the fifties. His elbows and knuckles and the tip of his nose were red, as if scrubbed with Fels Naptha. Mickelsson drew his hand back.

“Professor Mickelsson, as you may know, is our department's most distinguished philosopher,” Tillson said, and he put one hand on Nugent's arm, the other on Mickelsson's, preparing to press them subtly toward the door. Mickelsson smiled on, though he knew pretty well what the praise was worth, and he kept his eyes, with their familiar look of (he knew) intense, crazed interest, on the young man's face. What a world, Mickelsson was thinking. Tillson and himself, arch-enemies, shepherding another poor innocent—fugitive from the clean, honest field of Engineering—into the treacherous, ego-bloated, murder-stained hovel of philosophy. But Mickelsson was a team man, at least when he was set up for public view—had been one all his life, even here in the Department of Philosophy he none too secretly despised. The show of happy solidarity rose in him instinctively, which was one of the reasons Tillson called on him in delicate cases like this one, whatever the delicacy of the moment might be (he would learn soon enough, he knew).

“What I thought, Pete,” Tillson said, “was that maybe you could run over Mr. Nugent's program with him—help him figure out what he'll need, what he might take first, and so on. What he might manage to get out of. Ha ha. Little fatherly guidance.” His face took on, briefly, a startled look; then he jerked the smile wider, the edges of his moustache twitching from the strain, and asked Nugent, “Did I remember to give you your papers back?” He looked over at the low table in front of the couch where he liked to take cat-naps—the tabletop was littered with professional magazines and a clumsy stack of student papers—then over at the desk, finally at the young man's left hand, rising now as if of its own accord to show a ragged sheaf of forms and the computerized Fall Schedule of Courses. “Ah, good, good! If my head weren't screwed on—” He raised his smile toward Mickelsson again, gave a little wink, and, as if without knowing he was doing it, began pushing Mickelsson and Nugent gently out of the room.