Mickelsson's Ghosts (96 page)

“Are you getting someone to cover your classes?”

“I should, shouldn't I,” he said.

That too she seemed to find too queer to deal with. After a time she said—one last cry across dark waters—“I
would
like to see you, really.”

“We'll get together.”

“I keep pacing and pacing, sort of yelling and yelling inside my head. I think the strangest thoughts.”

He thought of Finney's idea—nobody out there, nobody, nowhere,
nothin.

“Keep the chin up,” he said.

When the conversation finally ended, or withered to stillness, a perfunctory good-bye, he knew that the next time the phone rang, he wouldn't answer. He went back to stand beside the bed, reasoning with himself. He should at least call the oil company, try whining and cajoling; otherwise the pipes would freeze. And anyway, it was a bad business—theoretically at least—letting himself give up. He should eat, drink a cup of coffee. As his body got going, his spirits would revive. (Well, something like that. Descartes was behind every tree.) He should listen to the radio, start up a fire in the stove, maybe go down in the basement and make something—more picture frames, why not?—or the rolltop desk he'd been meaning to make for his daughter. But already he was leaning down over the bed, already half dreaming, drawing the covers back, preparing to crawl in.

Behind him, the phone rang again. Mickelsson looked down at his gray, loose stomach—how long had it been since he'd touched the weights?—and tried to decide what to do. The stomach was slimmed down by his forgetting to eat, but lifeless, toneless. The hairs running down toward the genitals were silver. He thought of how when he was drunk he liked to tell young women of his years as an athlete.

He climbed into bed, rolled onto his back, and pulled the covers up tight around his chin. The phone at length stopped ringing. He thought of how Jessica had said, when they made love, “Wow! Wow!” Poor creaturel Poor race! He smiled, vanquished. In his mind he saw the viaduct, the color of wheat in the late-afternoon sun, arch after arch crossing the river against dark blue mountains. It was a splendid creation, each stone hand-cut, hand-fitted, built when the river could still remember Indian canoes and drum music, and the people of the thriving town of Susquehanna looked forward to a time of even greater prosperity—the dazzling white restaurant rising above the depot; mansions precariously raised on the steep, dark hillside, reflected in the water; and up on the crest of the hill the red brick church, spire gleaming like a sword.

God damn the government,
he prayed. Destroyers of railroads, thieves and liars in cahoots with the brainless, heartless bankers, oil men, nuke men, auto men, men of the Pentagon; freezers of patents for wind, solar, geothermal, and the rest; poisoners of the earth, poisoners of people's minds … But the curse trailed off, he'd lost interest. There seemed to be no stopping them, and nowadays, thanks to their computers, not much chance of avoiding their sweeping, witless eye. Voice of the people. That was a comfort. It was the people, all America, all the world, that were insane.

When he closed his eyes he saw Mabel Garret lying in the dimly lit hospital room on the night she'd seen the ghosts.
God bless the Garrets,
he thought. They were good people, though possibly unbalanced, certainly not wise. All those children, each of them doomed to at least some small measure of scorn in this world of blind staggers and self-righteous firing squads. Blacks, Orientals, children with handicaps—the Garrets abandoned all sense and took them in. In a mad world, choose a generous madness.

Reagan was now smiling leader of the Reich—Mickelsson hadn't seen a paper in weeks or heard news on the radio, but someone had mentioned the Great Man's plans, had mentioned them blithely, as if nothing could be more natural. More nukes; deployment of the neutron bomb to please the Germans; friendly signals to the butchers of El Salvador. Why not?
Alles ist erlaubt.

He slept.

A little before midnight he awakened with a shout. He switched on the light and saw that his breath made steam. The windows were white with frost, glittering feathers. He got up and dressed as quickly as he could manage, as if there were something he must do right away, then went down, scratching his head, getting out his cigarettes, and made a fire in the stove. When it was crackling loudly, the stove doors wide open, sending rolling, yellow-orange light over the room, he sat on the couch—the cat came and settled nearby, close to the stove—lit another cigarette and tried to remember what he'd dreamed. For a long time, no matter how he tried to concentrate, nothing would come to him. Then his eye fell on the shotgun by the door and a piece of the dream snapped back.

It was something about a class: Brenda Winburn was there, holding a birdcage with a songbird in it—plump, black, crow-like—and there were others, people he didn't recognize, in one corner his mother (but too young to be his mother), writing letters in great haste. The room was narrow and extremely cold, a little like the nave of a cathedral, and they were sitting on crates of bright red apples. Nugent was saying something, urgently trying to get some point across, and the class was disgusted, wanting to get on with the course's more serious business, which had to do with Christmas trees, or someone in hiding. The matter was urgent. The room seemed to be sinking, ice rising inch by inch past the delicate purple windows. Mickelsson, in the dream, had lecture notes strewn on the rough plank floor all around him, words and numbers scrawled on pinkish checkbook paper. He'd apparently brought the wrong set of notes. He stalled, trying to get things clear, blocking Nugent's voice, trying to block the bird's bright chatter, stubbornly refusing to grant the floor to Brenda, who was waving her arm, eager to speak, pointing at Nugent's wide black shadow on the frosty wall, the whole wall glittering, except where the shadow was, like tiny mirrors or bits of bluish schist under torchlight. Nugent was talking about moving vans and had brought with him several wheels, which he held out in display, as if for sale. His eyes themselves were silver wheels. The black shadow at his back was in fact not Nugent's shadow but an opening, a door to a place Mickelsson hadn't known to exist. Mickelsson rushed to it, lest the door fall shut, and suddenly found himself lying face up in a grave. The bird sang; Theodosia Sprague looked down at him. Then everything went dark. His frantic fingertips found the padded satin lid.

That was all he could remember. “Crazy dream,” he said to himself, frightened all over again. Nothing in the dream made sense except the wheels. The hubs, which were of wood, reminded him of nuclear reactors. He straightened up a little, glancing at the kitchen door as if someone might be watching—the face in the hex sign, say. Somehow the dream was about his son, he decided. “Dear God, take care of Mark,” he whispered. “And Leslie, Ellen, Willard, Jessie, Geoffrey Tillson …” He was caught again in his trap of ritual, Mickelsson the Magician, and he dared not pull out. Then suddenly, as if taking a great risk, he stopped himself, broke off in the middle of Mabel Garret's name. He held his breath, feeling his racing heartbeat. His alarm increased. He rubbed his chest.

He stood up, purposeful, a little flame of anger leaping in him, and walked through the dark house to his study, where he snapped on the lights. He heard a rattle of mice scattering, but his eye wasn't quick enough to spot one. On his desk his electric typewriter sat half buried in mail. He took his old gray sweater from its hook in the closet—the room was ice-cold—pulled it on, then sat down at the typewriter, pushed the mail out of the way, bunching it up, letting some slide to the floor, found a sheet of paper, and inserted it. He flipped on the switch.
Dear Mark:

He stared at the paper. He could cover all the rallies, visit all the sites, maybe that would do it; he seemed to have given up on his teaching anyway—his teaching, friendships, love, even his enmities. Sooner or later, driving around the country from rally to rally and reactor to reactor until the Jeep ran out of gas, then hitch-hiking or simply walking like some wet-brained bum, he would spot his son's top-hat and blue-eyed, pink face, smiling thoughtfully, taking pictures with the ridiculous Instamatic, or wiring some “device,” as the truth-benders called it, then folding up his dollar-fifty toolkit and running like hell. …

You must be very proud.

I am.

It was that that he would write to his son, if he could write. But no words came, only pictures, visions. “Society,” “the Establishment“—those fat, hollow words became a sea of drab faces, dutiful bent-backed Mormons like stalks of wheat, hurrying obediently, meekly across an endless murky plain toward increasingly thick, dark smoke. There were thousands of them, millions—timidly smiling beasts, imaginationless, good-hearted, truly what they claimed to be, the saints of the world's latter days. In the dream or vision, whatever it was, they moved in perfect silence, like mile after mile of obedient Russian peasants, drab-coated, dim of eye, pitifully eager to be of use. The sky at the horizon, at the rim of the vast, moving horde, was gray-white, smouldering, the color of dawn in old, fading films. “Here now,” one might say to one's students, “is the real. Who could dream, having seen this grisly vision, of any possible ideal?” And the colorless accepters of what their betters decreed—Mickelsson's Mormons—were the least of it. To the east (he would have written) I saw an eager-hearted army as vast as the first, moving swiftly in a direction that would intersect the first where the smoke billowed thickest, but the men of this army wore loud-checked suits, all comically similar, and on their bright, fat faces little moustaches, and they carried attaché cases, lawbooks, and rolled-up sheafs of plans. Some walked on two feet, apparently for their health's sake; some came in Cadillacs, Chevies, and Toyotas. A thousand thousand came hurrying with their bald, smiling heads uplifted, as if seeing in the clouds above them some great light; as many more came bent double, like scurrying ants, all urgently reading what appeared to be ticker-tapes, press releases, leatherbound stock reports—elegant, thick volumes with pages as thin and as closely covered with small, smudged print as fine old Bibles. And behold, from the north, blowing trumpets and beating drums, loud and dazzling as the whole history of Bayreuth, came an army of Congressmen and Public Ministers, Sheiks and Emperors, ragged-bearded Terrorists, and a miles-wide contingent of Women with their breasts bared, triumphantly throwing gold coins in the air, and beside them another great contingent of Children shouting curious slogans—smiling like children in soap commercials and waving blood-red banners saying
WE HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN
or marked with the letters
KKK
or with fine, dark swastikas. And behold, I saw an old crooked man at my left who was picking up cigarette butts and candywrapper papers with a pointed stick, putting them in a brown plastic garbage bag, and I said, knowing this man would by profession be familiar with such things, “Old man, tell me, who are these?” And he said, “My son, those are the People Who Believe.” And he smiled, showing square yellow teeth.

“Here,” one might say to one's students, “is the world as it is.”

He turned off the useless typewriter and stood up. It was not the case, of course, that Michael Nugent had killed himself because he'd read too much philosophy, or too little. It was true that Martin Luther and Jake Finney were correct: the world was shit.

He walked, as if aimlessly, back to the livingroom and stood with his hands on his hips, looking at the gun. Those who commit suicide, he had read, condemn their children to suicide. Very well; he had no intention of doing it. But now he felt as well as knew the wisdom of the age-old question: Why not?

The livingroom was warm now—at least the chill was off. The rest of the house was still freezing. He picked up the shotgun, for no real reason, simply for the comforting heft of it, and noticed again with a start how much his hand was like his father's. All at once—it must have been the memory of his father's hand that triggered it—a great swoosh of revulsion rose up in him, a taste of bile, and he put the gun down. He was sick to death of unhappiness, ugliness, imprisonment. What was the question he must rephrase—buried metaphor he must penetrate—life-problem he must heal? Why was it that he was one moment almost serene in his despair, as he'd been when on the phone with Jessie, and the next moment drowning in guilt and dread?

If the wall were physical he would slam through it, crash through it in the Jeep. But it was not; more insubstantial even than the scattering of atoms that he would carry to the grave with him—though he lived to be a hundred—the image of Jessie and Tillson on the couch. Because even before that there had been no hope. “The Fall!” Mickelsson's grandfather would cry, shaking his finger but looking as if he knew no cure for it, for all his fine theories, all his talk about redemption. Sunlight filled the old man's wild, white hair as if all the energy of his life were flying out.

“Infantile,” Rifkin had said. “The cry of the child who remembers his omnipotence in the womb.”

“Why,” Mickelsson had asked, holding both hands out, sublimely reasonable, “why should people settle for anything less than the absolute happiness of the womb?”

“No reason, if you can get it,” Rifkin had said, and laughed.

It was clearer now than ever that no one could get it, it was not to be had, the problem of life would not “vanish.” He was defeated, wasted, miserably unworthy (according to some standard); and on the other hand nothing available on earth had even a faint, tarnished glint of the perfection he demanded, golden ear for his lutany. The idea that he ought to be reasonable, wake up, made his cheeks redden and his scalp prickle.
Sublimieren.

He turned, a moment before the phone rang, to start toward the phone.