Mickelsson's Ghosts (3 page)

“Fine! No problem!” Mickelsson said, so heartily that probably not even Tillson understood that nothing could be farther from the truth.

As soon as the three of them were outside his office, Tillson pretended to have a memory flash and, catching Mickelsson's arm again, said, “Oh, there's something I meant to ask you, Pete.” He turned to the boy. “Would you excuse us just a moment? It shouldn't take more than a second or two.” He laughed. He was already leading Mickelsson back in, drawing the door shut behind him, tossing the boy one last apologetic nod. “Sorry about this, Pete,” he said when the door was closed. “I know you don't deal with undergraduate advising—”

“What's up?” Mickelsson asked, hoping to cut past the chit-chat. He shifted his eyes away, forcing himself not to stare at Tillson's hump.

“You do go straight at things, don't you,” Tillson said, but smiling, edging away toward his desk. He cranked his head around, rolling his eye back at Mickelsson like a sheep. “I got a call from the dean about Nugent, out there. It seems he's been going through something of a crisis—attempted suicide, apparently depressed about the death of his father. A sad, sad business.” He shook his head, involuntarily raising two fingers to his beard. “I don't know all the details, I'm afraid. It seems Blickstein and the boy had a talk, and I understand the boy's dead set on”—Tillson's ironic smile twitched briefly—” ‘the consolation of philosophy.' ” Again he rolled his eyes up at Mickelsson. “I'm sure you'll agree that's more your line than mine. Maybe more your line than anybody else's in this department.”

“It's true,” Mickelsson said, unable to resist, “I do still try to deal with life-and-death issues from time to time. But it hardly makes me a psychiatrist.”

“Yes of course. I realize—”

“It sounds to me as if the young man shouldn't be in school at all,” Mickelsson pushed on, slightly reddening. “If we're so hard up for students we've got to rob the state hospitals—”

“Now listen! Take it easy!” Tillson said, surprised, reaching out to touch Mickelsson's forearm. “It's not a question of state hospitals!” He peered into Mickelsson's eyes as if trying to read his peculiar, twisted mind. “I must say,” he said—the smile twitched, then vanished—“I have no
idea
whether or not he belongs in school—”

“Yes, I see,” Mickelsson broke in. “I'm sorry.” Before he could stop himself, he wiped his forehead with his shirtsleeve. “You're right, I'm probably the one who should advise him.” He forced a laugh.

“You've been under a strain,” Tillson said, somewhat questioningly, as if to see if that were it.

“It's that God damned apartment,” Mickelsson said, and laughed again.

“You ought to get out of there,” Tillson said. For an instant he looked much older, distinctly smaller. “You oughtta get a really good lawyer, Pete. It's just not right.”

Mickelsson looked down, abruptly formal. “We'll see,” he said. “Right now I'd better go deal with our angry young friend.”

Nugent sat rigid, as if straining every muscle to appear relaxed, nothing moving but his rapidly blinking red eyelids. His red-knuckled hands lay loosely folded, and his knees hung far apart, the outsides of his upper legs jammed against the fronts of the chair-arms. He sat to Mickelsson's right, in the wooden chair Mickelsson privately called his learner's seat. He had a disconcerting way of staring straight at you, or into you, his childish, vulnerable-looking lips slightly parted. His eyelashes were colorless, almost invisible.

He said nothing as Mickelsson—puffing from time to time at his pipe, making furtive, tight gestures—explained the content of the philosophy courses available during the coming semester, the general requirements for the B.A. degree, and, in joking, careful fashion, something of the character of the teachers Nugent would run into. He recommended Garret's survey of modern philosophers, Lawler's Aquinas—“more for Lawler than for Aquinas,” he said, and laughed—then, grudgingly, mentioned Tillson's logic course. Almost without knowing he was doing it he avoided mention of the lower-level Plato and Aristotle course he himself would be teaching, nor did he mention the pop courses thrown in to attract non-majors and swell the F.T.E.—The Philosophy of Death and Dying, Human Sexuality, The Essential Karl Marx. As he spoke he made notes for the boy to take with him—carefully pencilled, succinct phrases that cut deep into the yellow, legal-sized pad he wrote on. Though the world was muggily baking, out beyond the partly drawn Venetian blinds, the office was cool, all shade, almost tomblike. A flat smoke-cloud hung above their heads. On most of three sides the room was walled by books.

The boy asked, breaking in on him, “What about the Plato and Aristotle course?”

“Hmm,” Mickelsson said, looking down at the schedule, leaning his forehead onto the fingertips of his left hand, elbow on the desk. He laid the pipe on his growing stack of unopened mail. (It could wait. He wasn't supposed to come in to his office anyway during the summer.) “Well, yes, that's open,” he said. “Of course the Plato-Aristotle course is basically for freshmen. I'm afraid you might find it—”

“It's unusual, isn't it?” Nugent asked. “Senior professors teaching freshmen? Most departments I don't think they do that. They throw the freshmen to the grad students.”

“Well, actually,” Mickelsson said, then stalled. The young man's stare was unnerving. At last, heartily, cocking his eyebrow, he said, “Never underestimate the power of conviction, Mr. Nugent! No matter how good he is—no matter how mightily he believed in the beginning—when a man's taught for fifteen, twenty years, he can begin to leak steam at the joints. These graduate students … The biggest problem we have with our grad students is they put too much time into their teaching and not enough into their coursework.” He grinned.

Nugent raised his arm for a quick, impatient wave, then returned it to artificial rest. An extremely odd gesture, Mickelsson thought, dropping the grin and staring hard at the computer-printed words
PLATO
/
ARISTOTLE
, 10
A.M.
,
M.W.
,
RM.
27
F.A. BLDC
. (
MICKELSSON
),
NO PREREQ
. Before he could make out what to think of Nugent's fierce little wave, the boy was saying, “A friend of mine told me that most of this department does ‘analytic,' you're practically the only one that does real philosophy.”

“Well, ‘real,' ” Mickelsson said, picking up the pipe again, allowing himself an ironic half-smile. He glanced at the middle of Nugent's forehead and let the sentence trail off.

“I'm after the real thing, whatever level it is.” Something faintly distressing had entered the boy's voice, a sort of catch, as if he were fighting strong emotion.

Mickelsson sat very still for an instant, then put his pencil down, slowly leaned back in his chair, lowered his chin to his chest, and, holding the pipe, interlaced his fingers over his paunch, avoiding the young man's eyes. After a long moment's thought he said, more weary than ironic this time: “ ‘The real thing.' ” He stole a furtive glance at his watch: 2 p.m. Again he raised one eyebrow, sliding his eyes toward the boy. “Mr. Nugent, let me tell you something. If I were you, I wouldn't pin my life's highest hopes on philosophy. It's all right as entertainment—keeps you off the streets—but it's always been better at framing questions that have a chance of making sense than at figuring out answers. In fact there are some philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein, for instance, who claim that getting the question right
is
the answer.” He'd meant to smile as he said it, but no smile came. He glanced down at his watch again. The hairs curling over the leather strap were silver. “Believe me, I can tell you from bitter experience—” he began soberly.

“Philosophy's the only discipline there is that even cares about figuring things out,” Nugent said. He seemed to grow more pale by the minute. “All the others, except maybe chemistry, are just tinkering. History, mathematics, English lit, poly sci—” The very names seemed to stir his indignation. “Don't worry, I've thought it through! It may be that—” He paused, swallowed, then forced himself on, slightly sneering: “It may be that certain individual philosophers are not what they ought to be“—he gave Mickelsson what might or might not be an accusing look—”but philosophy itself
per se
is the highest activity known to man, and
certain
individual philosophers, at least—” He broke off to get back control of his voice, then continued as if angrily, “I don't mean to fawn or anything, but I know how you live, I know how much—” Again he was forced to break off.

Mickelsson sat perfectly still, dreadful revelation spreading through him. Was it worship, then, that made Nugent stare? He said rather sharply, “It sounds to me like what you're looking for is religion. You know how Kant described philosophy? One man holding the sieve while the other milks the he-goat.'“

Nugent said nothing, simply went on staring at him, blinking.

Mickelsson's scalp tingled unpleasantly. He cleared his throat and sat forward, laying the pipe aside with finality, shot his cuffs, then picked up his pencil and scowled at the notes on the pad. “I'd definitely recommend that you take Lawler's Aquinas,” he said, businesslike, conscious that he was blushing a little, “and Tillson's Introduction to Logic.” He underlined them, then put brackets around them. “As for the Plato-Aristotle course—” The hand holding the pencil gave a tight little wave, dismissive.

“Maybe I could get the book and read into it a little, before the semester starts. If you could give me the title—”

Mickelsson scowled harder, every nerve alert, like a diver in the presence of large, groping tentacles, then abruptly gave way and wrote down the title of the course, the time and place, and the two required texts. “It's two titles, actually,” he said. He erased the crossed
l
in
Plato
and retouched the loop. Then he said, glancing at Nugent, “I see you haven't taken any Greek.” He said it for no honorable reason, simply to throw a small impediment in the way of the young man's devouring earnestness.

“Not yet,” Nugent said, and looked uneasy.

“Let's put you down for Greek, then.” Neatly, pressing firmly, he wrote down
Greek 101, M.W.F., 4-5 p.m., Rm. 226 Lib. N. (Levin).

“I want to thank you for this,” Nugent said, his voice husky, his body pale and motionless, eyelids rapidly blinking.

“It's nothing, believe me,” Mickelsson said, and glanced at his watch.

That afternoon he began his house-hunting.

In the beginning his premise was that buying was impossible, he was looking only for a place to rent. He had nothing, not a penny, with which to make a down payment, and even if he did by some miracle find money, chances were, if he bought a place, the I.R.S. would swoop in on him and snatch it. He'd never made up to them the money his ex-wife had “borrowed” from his tax account three years ago, nor had he paid his taxes for the last two years; in fact, until his lawyer had broken his daze with hell-fire warnings, he'd been too depressed and disorganized to file. But when Mickelsson had looked for houses for a week, finding nothing that would do—tarpaper shacks, falling-down cottages on still, gloomy lakes, low-ceilinged dungeons of cinderblock, one uninsulated, half-converted barn—nothing, nothing, and no prospects ahead (realtors were so uninterested in rental property he could hardly get them to drive out with him and look), he began to have second thoughts.

There was, in fact, one place where he could get a few thousand. He'd started, some years ago, a small account he'd be able to draw on if his mother should need a nursing home. It seemed unlikely that she would, given her spirit and her evident happiness where she was, with relatives in Wisconsin; but one never knew. Now, uncomfortably, disliking himself for it, he began to think about turning to that account. It was not as if his mother were destitute—she was, one might say, better off than he was. And the I.R.S. could as easily snatch his mother's money (as he'd always thought of it) as it could snatch a house. Besides, what would it gain them, snatching a shabby little farmhouse he had practically no money in? Soon he'd settled on flight to a house of his own as if the matter were out of his hands, blind destiny. No use worrying, he told himself; the “examined life” was easily overrated.

Now he began to hunt with considerable intensity, pulling together all his powers of concentration, poring over booklets and brochures, burrowing through newspapers, writing himself notes in his Pocket Calendar and Daily Reminder, then hurrying from one end of the county to the other to poke through damp cellars, bump his head on attic beams, wipe and shake sticky cobwebs from his fingers, blush, apologize, and back away (“Thank you, I'll call you, yes good, good, thank you”—cringing inwardly, with each exaggerated bow, at his moral cowardice), even now finding nothing that would do, nothing but termite-fodder, overpriced trash.

He did not like that increasing tendency to lie to himself and others—“I'll call you, yes good.” An existentialist, of course, could defend it without a blink; another kind of thinker could argue its rightness in a community of liars; another might assert its suitability to a stock behavioral mode voluntarily elected; but Mickelsson—glowering with rage turned inward, fists clamped tight on the steeringwheel—had never been friendly to the notion that human beings are free to turn into tomato plants at will, or even to the best utilitarianism, and least of all to R. M. Hare's opinion, Oxonian and therefore unassailable, that morality is life-style. He wouldn't have denied, if anyone other than his psychiatrist had asked him, that his search had all the earmarks of a mad compulsion, though of course one could always manufacture fine theories, delimiting categories,
obs
and
sols.