Mickelsson's Ghosts (36 page)

“Sure,” she said with a shrug, “why not?” She seemed to be working something out in her mind.

“I'll pick you up, then,” he said, lifting his chin and sweeping one arm out like a Congressman performing.

At once he got an image of Jessica seated in her mink coat in his old, beat-up Jeep, but before he could take back his offer, she said, looking in horror at his desk-clock, checking it against her wristwatch, “Jesusl Gotta run!”

After she was gone, Mickelsson stared for a time at the mail on his desk, his mind a blank. When he came to again, he thought:
She's right; I should apologize to Tillson.
He took out his checkbook and hastily wrote a check to his ex-wife, addressed and stamped the envelope, and sealed the check inside.
Dear God, let it clear,
he thought. The letter from Ellen he dropped in the wastebasket unopened.

Then he saw the letter from Finney. He reached for it at once.

The photograph was startling. Young people of college age, some perhaps only highschool students, lay everywhere in attitudes of passive resistance; a few sat foetus-like, hands over their heads. In the foreground two angry-looking members of a SWAT squad were lifting a young woman by the hands and feet. They were helmeted, white billy clubs hanging from their belts. At the center of it all, the only protester standing upright, was Mickelsson's son. Though the picture was black and white, Mickelsson saw the boy's hair as flame red, flying out wildly in all directions under the top-hat. In one hand stretched out toward the photographer's camera, the boy held the remains of his Rolleiflex. His expression was solemn, the eyes just dark shadows, the mouth a straight line of resignation, as if the violence done to his camera had nothing to do with the police or, indeed, with anything terrestrial. The standing figure seemed ritually still and formal, clothed in the apparel of a by-gone age. It was as if he were not really there, a trick, of light.

When he phoned the university, Mickelsson could learn nothing. Mark hadn't visited the dorm in a week; no one could say whether or not he'd been going to his classes. Somehow Mickelsson had known Mark would have vanished. He phoned Ellen. She wept. “You must be very proud,” she said. “Ellen,” he said, “try to be reasonable!” “For God's sake,” she said, “why don't you die or something?” After that she cried for a long time and couldn't answer when he spoke. Then The Comedian came on.

“Is that you, Professor?”

“Hello, Willard.”

He remembered the first time he'd seen the boy, out in the hallway of some grubby theater during the first intermission, lighting the cigarette in Ellen's cigarette holder, Ellen puffing furiously, sucking her cheeks in, bending her head to him—he was a good nine inches shorter than she was and as skinny as she was fat. Both of them were dressed in black and white and both of them wore dyed black hair. Neither of them had noticed Mickelsson standing by the ticket-table, drinking coffee from a paper cup, getting ready to say hello. He hadn't been expected, had intended to surprise and please her. It was an evening of plays—
Three Radical Plays for Women
—that Ellen had produced, and apparently Ellen and her friend agreed with Mickelsson that the evening was going badly. When Ellen, looking up past her smoke, had seen Mickelsson, she'd frozen, eyes caught in an evil wince. Slowly—ratlike, as it seemed to Mickelsson—the boy had turned to see what was wrong. That instant told everything. There was some fish he'd read about in his childhood: the male impregnated the female then docilely let her eat him. The boy touched Ellen's waist as he looked at Mickelsson. She apparently hadn't yet told him that she hated to be touched. All women, according to Ellen, hated to be touched, and all men were touchers. Women, she said, were lunar.

Willard said now, his voice crackling with emotion-held-in-check, “I should think you'd know by now that El doesn't appreciate these phone-calls.”

“Good dog,” Mickelsson said. He was thinking of German shepherd watchdogs, but the joke was admittedly obscure.

There was a pause; then the boy said, “If you have things to say to El, I'd be grateful if you'd relay them through me.”

“I'll bet you would,” Mickelsson said.

“In future, if you don't mind—”

“I do mind, actually.”

“I'm not too interested, actually, in what you do and do not mind.”

One could imagine him thrusting his beard forward, eyes hooded. He would be standing bent-backed with the intensity of his emotion, maybe rising in slow, precarious rhythm onto the balls of his feet, then down again onto his heels. He wore pointy black, shoes, black suspenders.

“Occasionally it's necessary for a man and his ex-wife to discuss the welfare of their children,” Mickelsson said. “You wouldn't understand that, given your proclivity to fucking barren mares. Don't be needlessly offended! I'm impressed by your Jesuitical devotion to your, so to speak, sex object—”

The phone went dead.

Mickelsson hung up, then looked at the newspaper photo of his son again, then folded it carefully and put it away in his billfold.

His graduate class in medical ethics had eight students. It met in a windowless room on the library's fourth floor, around a dark, polished table. If he was lucky he did not have to sit next to or across from Gail Edelman, a bright young woman with whom, unfortunately, he had once spent the night. Generally, though the class was supposed to be a seminar, Mickelsson lectured, or rather, read from old notes. He would arrange the ashtray, pipe tobacco, pipe knife, matches, and notecards in front of him, hardly looking up as late-comers entered, and would skim through his notes, organizing his thoughts—he was never completely unprepared, in fact, but no one could doubt that for the most part he was winging it, not so easy with graduate students as with freshmen but possible as long as he alone held the floor—and when everyone was settled and the talk had died down, he would look up and say, formally—the formal tone indispensable to his ruse—”Good afternoon.” “Good afternoon,” they would respond, not quite words, more like a collective
Mmmm'n.
In just two weeks now their reports would begin, and he'd be off the hook, temporarily at least. If he had fifteen students, the maximum for the course, he'd be off the hook for good; but God sends only what He sends. In the brief moment when he looked up at them he got their placement, Gail Edelman in the far corner, where she often sat, these days, C. J. Wolters, his forty-year-old ex-highschool teacher across from him, fat Pinky Stearns profusely sweating to his immediate left, Janet Something to his right (it was hard to learn names when one never took attendance, never called on a student, never gave spot quizzes). … Of his eight students, only two, Stearns and Wolters, were male. In the old days, when Mickelsson had first begun teaching, nearly all graduate students in philosophy were men.

He lit his pipe, cool and reserved as an officer of the Gestapo, carefully squared his deck of notecards, and began.

“We observed last week that before we can talk seriously about ethics as they relate to any given field—law, education, medicine, whatever—we need some fundamental principles we feel we can trust. We've reviewed the common available options—Kant's imperative, Utilitarianism, R. M. Hare's philosophy of (as we called it) ‘style,' and so on—and we noted the limitations of each position. The fact, for instance, that Kant, if you were his dearest friend and you went to him asking him to hide you from the police—Kant, if he acted by his principles, would turn you in. What I'd like to do today is set out—or anyway begin to set out—a system that may prove less vulnerable to reasonable attack, anything short of, as we mentioned, an
absolute
attack, such as Nietzsche's, though my approach, as you might expect, is Nietzchean”—he laughed formally—“a looking out from one window, then another.” He laughed again. “The position involves four basic areas of inquiry: One: What? Two: Why? How? Who? When? Where? Three: Foreseeable effects? and Four: Viable alternatives?” He glanced at Pinky Stearns, to his left—yellow-bearded, puffy-faced, leaning on his hand, lost in thought or private sorrow. Wolters, across from Mickelsson, was writing furiously in his notebook, his left hand half raised, palm out, begging Mickelsson not to go too fast. Janet Something sat sideways, leaning on her elbow, facing Mickelsson. She had no notebook. She smiled and waited. The bitch had read his book.

“Let's begin with the ‘what,' ” Mickelsson said. He glanced at the card. “The
is
is father to the
ought;
or, to put it another way, the moral judgment is about what befits or does not befit the personal situation as it really is. Let me give a rather quick and—admittedly—cheap example. A good deal of discussion of capitalism and socialism is lamed from the start by a failure to identify ‘what' it is that is meant by capitalism and socialism. Professor Robert L. Heilbroner points out that in much that is said about capitalism, the explicit assumption is that the United States is the most typical capitalist nation. Thus, Paul Sweezy, the American Marxian critic, says that the United States is a capitalist society, the purest capitalist society that ever existed. …” He took off his glasses, more impediment than help, and held the card up closer. “But as Heilbroner says, it might well be argued that the United States is not a pure realization of capitalism but rather ‘a deformed variant, the product of special influences of continental isolation, vast wealth, an eighteenth-century structure of government, and the terrible presence of its inheritance of slavery—the last certainly not a “capitalist institution.” For ‘pure' capitalism, we should perhaps look to Denmark, Norway, or New Zealand. Obviously, making
those
countries our model will affect all subsequent analysis of the political, economic, or moral dimensions of capitalism. We start with a different ‘what.' ”

He set aside the notecard and glanced up at his students—all dutiful, most of them scribbling away like doomed prisoners writing for pardons they were sure they wouldn't get. Janet Something hadn't moved a muscle in all this time, staring at him with a slight, inscrutable smile. She was short and, more than that, built low. She was said to be a brownbelt in karate. Under her Oxford-cloth shirt she had, he imagined, voluminous steel tits. It crossed his mind (weirdly, for a quarter of a second) that he would like to be hit by her, even killed. They would be screwing. She would kill him the instant he came. The tall young woman with the Polish name and the hair drawn tight to her head, then frizzing out—she sat beside Janet—moved her left hand slowly back and forth, fanning away smoke from Mickelsson's pipe and her classmates' cigarettes. She seemed unhappy, dark circles under her eyes.

Guiltily, he turned to the next card.

“And obviously Russia is an equally dubious model of socialism,” he said. “I assume you've all read Marx—if you haven't, please do! Anyway, you get the point. As the scholiasts liked to say,
Ex falso sequitur quid-libet
—that is, for those of you whose Latin is rusty”—mechanically, he smiled—” ‘From false premises anything can follow.' As E. H. Hare points out—not to be confused with R. M.—a hundred years ago it was the established belief of the medical profession that masturbation was a frequent cause of mental disorder.” He glanced up, smiled again, then again looked down. “Explaining ‘what' masturbation was, medical experts in those days claimed it was an activity that caused an increased flow of blood to the brain and thus was enervating in its effects. It was supposed to produce”—he drew the card closer—“ ‘seminal weakness, impotence, dysuria,
tabes dorsalis,
pulmonary consumption, not to mention senility, stupidity, melancholy, homosexuality, hysteria. …' ” He let his voice trail off, deciding against reading the whole long list. He said, “This is obviously a dim view of ‘what' masturbation is, not that any of us here would practice it.” No one laughed. “With such chaotic notions of the ‘what' of masturbation—and thus as to what effects it could have—rational moral discourse on the subject was impossible.”

He turned to the next card. Wolters again held up his hand, his cigarette between two fingers, to slow him down. Obligingly, Mickelsson paused for a moment. The fat woman, Rachel Something, at the end of the table, next to Gail Edelman, jerked her ballpoint pen from the paper she'd been writing on, looked at it, then angrily shook it. She whispered something to Gail, who, with a glance at Mickelsson, bent down for her purse.
Ah, poor miserable humanity,
he thought,
all this punishment
—
smoky rooms, broken pens, boring professors. … What crime could possibly warrant all this?
He thought again, just for an instant, of the night when, on one of his walks, he'd stopped at Gail's. He'd been somewhat drunk; she, surprised and nervous. Frightened, possibly? Had she thought he might, despite appearances, prove a rapist and murderer? In the apartment she lived in the ceilings were weirdly high, the wallpaper dark. The memory was too painful, too shameful, to allow further play.
What sufferings and humiliations people live through!
he thought.
Poor girl! Poor good, kind kid!

He said, glancing down at the card, “On the subject of death there are similar definitional problems. Medically, death is not a moment but a process. Some organs may die while others live. At what point in this process do we declare that death has come? When, if ever, are we justified in preserving the living dead for the recycling of their functioning organs? Or take the area of sexual intercourse …” He caught himself just in time to prevent, or at least divert, an instinctual glance at Gail. He almost evaded the glance at Gail by a glance at Janet, but caught that too. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that, studiously, mournfully, Gail was writing something, clearly not class notes—he suspected it was a letter—in her notebook. He read: “It will obviously be telling if one immediately defines sexual intercourse as ‘the marital act.' The widely respected moralist Richard McCormick”—he gave the words an ironic twist—“has written: ‘Since sexual intercourse and its proximate antecedents represent
total personal exchange,
they can be separated from total personal relationship (marriage) only by undermining their truly human, their expressive character.' ” He looked up. “Obviously, McCormick is answering, by his lights, the ‘what' question regarding sexual intercourse. Either it is marital or it is objectively wrong.” Now for just an instant he did look balefully at Gail. She was buried in her writing. “Do you think this is a good idea?” she had asked, distressed. He thought of Donnie Matthews.