Mickelsson's Ghosts (101 page)

“You being one of the leaders,” Mickelsson said, and shifted from the wreckingbar to the pick-axe, preparing to smash into the wall beside the ornate walnut and cut-glass front door.

Mickelsson had hit a nerve, it seemed. Lawler said sternly, “Beware of mocking the man with the gun, Professor Mickelsson.” At once Lawler made himself calm again. “There's something to what you say, of course. In any intelligent organization, one rises by acts worthy of notice. But do not make the mistake of supposing I do what I do for honor or recognition at Salt Lake City. I do not object to honor or recognition. I act, however, for much less selfish reasons—in the name of what is right.”

“Right!” Mickelsson snorted, and again slammed the pick-axe into the wall. “You're a fool! You know what you are? You're
pitiful.”

“You are mistaken, Professor,” Lawler said quietly. “But there's no point debating it.”

“That's crazy,” Mickelsson said, and to his quick indignation heard a whine in his voice; yet he pressed on: “People have been debating right and wrong for thousands of years!”

“Only fools,” Lawler said. He leaned forward as if to spit through the filthy mask.

“Giving up everything—fifty per cent of your income every year—giving up even your brains, your individual will, giving your very life to some tyrannical cult built on violence and fraud—you can sit there and tell me that's
right?”

“Once the machinery's in place, such questions don't come up,” Lawler said dully, then waved the pistol, suggesting that Mickelsson get back to work. “Once a man's
in
with us—given our various ‘support systems,' as the mealy-mouths say—there's not very much he can do, you see. Oh, a few slip through the net, turn against us. We put pressure on, of course. You can see where we'd be if such defections became common. But if the odd fish proves recalcitrant enough, we let him swim away. On the whole, however … On the whole the Saints are pretty much in
your
situation.” He seemed to smile behind the mask. “Not a prayer except, possibly, prayer.” He closed his eyes, rocking forward and back, then abruptly opened them. “We've talked enough,” he said. “Save your strength now, Professor. We have a great deal yet to do.”

“Makes you uneasy, doesn't it,” Mickelsson said, “the thought that these Mormons you admire may not exist outside your head.”

“They
exist,”
Lawler snapped. “Now stop talking or I'll shoot you.”

No prayer but prayer,
Mickelsson thought, and almost, in the extremity of his weariness, laughed. The bones of his hands ached; his palms were blistered and bleeding. His eyes stung as if filled with bits of broken glass, and his lungs felt heavy and stiff with dust, as if left too long in the corner of an attic. His legs were unmuscled, and he itched everywhere. God only knew how Sprague—if it was he who'd torn his house apart, under Lawler's gun—had gotten through it. Perhaps he hadn't. Perhaps that was the reason Lawler had burned the house: if the secret was up there, and Sprague too weak to tear it out, let the fire get rid of it. If Mickelsson's strength were to give out, then, the same would happen here. Lawler would shoot him, or perhaps somehow manage to cut his throat with the knife he must be carrying, or he'd set fire to the house and burn up whatever the presumed evidence was. As Mickelsson considered his weakness and the pain in his hands, the realization was a frightening one. The only hope he had was somehow to keep working, keep Lawler at bay with the faint possibility that they might find something. Not that they would. Mickelsson felt his consciousness settling, more and more intensely, on the box of old keys sitting on the glass-topped table. He must get near it as soon as possible, bury it under, say, fallen plaster from the ceiling. Sooner or later Lawler would wake up to it, and the game would be finished. Sooner or later the game would be finished in any case. It was true; he had no prayer but prayer, a thing he no more believed in than he believed in Freddy Rogers' stone falls, or blood falls, or the Binghamton paper's UFOs. He glanced out at the road and saw Lawler's antique gray car. “Christ,” he whispered to himself, “someone come
help
me!” Again he felt an impulse toward angry, maybe hysterical laughter. He was praying.

He thought: Suppose it were true, crazy as it sounded, that one could send out a sort of mental cry for help and someone, somewhere, might receive it? There were those who believed in such things, even certain scientists, or so he'd read. There were alleged cases of mothers who, though half a world away, heard the cry of their endangered or dying children. There was the alleged case of the Russian rabbit whose heart whammed at the precise moment each of her babies was slain, though they were thousands of miles from her and caged in a submarine. Mickelsson paused to wipe sweat and dust out of his eyes and wipe his blood-slippery hands on his trousers. The psychic cry for help was a futile and stupid hope, he knew. And shameful. Better the nihilistic courage of Dr. Destouches—though that too was shameful enough, obscene and, for all the hoopla, just one more cunning disguise for sentimentality. Psychic cry for help … Even if such things occasionally did happen, he had no power to make it happen for him. How many thousands of people died every year who would have lived if any such magic were available? Perhaps if one had studied with Tibetan monks … if one had taken care to build strong, deep friendships … It crossed his mind that his helplessness now was a judgment on him. But that thought too seemed too tiresome to trace to its end.

His strokes came more and more slowly, but the room was already well on the way to total ruin, the Christmas tree deep in dust. Once or twice, watching the pick end sink, he felt a flash of rage; but he was no longer even considering an attack on Lawler. He could hardly control the slam of the pick into the plaster, much less throw it hard enough and fast enough to beat Lawler's gun; and his legs were so weak he could barely stand, much less charge the black-suited fat man on the couch. The thought that the house must be torn apart, then burned, made him wretched. It was only a house; but his heart swore otherwise. Tears ran down his cheeks, making his eyes still more gritty, and his breathing came harder and harder. “Dear God, please,” he whispered, and then at once, for the cowardice of his sudden turn to Jesus, felt revulsion so strong that he again tasted vomit. The ugliness of it! He, Mickelsson, whining his Now-I-lay-me—Mickelsson who himself had shown no mercy—crying out now to a God he'd refused to believe in when he hadn't been in need. That was how they got you, he knew. Need.
Impotence is dangerous for the human character.

“Sinful pride,” his grandfather would hiss. Lightning flashed in the old man's dim eyes.

Now a terrifying sound burst out behind Mickelsson and he whirled, then was thrown into confusion: Lawler sat watching him, startled by his sudden turn but obviously deaf—stone deaf—to the scream filling the room. Lawler's eyes rolled, alarmed and dangerous. Mickelsson realized now that he'd heard that sound before: it was the scream of the poisoned rat the Spragues' child, thinking it was dead, had thrown into the stove. He saw the child himself coming into the room now, an image as solid as Lawler. The child had his gloved hands over his ears, and his eyes were frantic. He ran toward the kitchen. Then Mickelsson saw, not in the room with him but in painfully vivid imagination, the fat man he'd killed, eyes slightly bulging, mouth open, his pistol pressed hard against his bursting heart, his whole soul sending out its terrible, hopeless wail.

Lawler twisted his lips, threatening, and waved his gun, not playing now, growing angry, impatient, maybe frightened. “Stop fooling around!” he yelled. Quaking, Mickelsson turned back to his work. Now Mickelsson was whispering, weeping as he whispered, abject and shameless, “Please, someone! Please!” Though he knew it was lunacy, an obscene grovelling before Nothing, he concentrated with all his might on the psychic cry. Maybe Goethe's line, inspiration to Nietzsche, could be twisted to his use: “He who overcomes himself finds freedom.
Befreit der Mensch sich …
” Lawler was saying something, his voice wonderfully aristocratic, it seemed to Mickelsson—silvery elocution, at once soothing and distantly ironic, scornful—but Mickelsson refused to hear, pouring all he had into his uncouth purpose, getting that silent cry to some friendly ear. The harder he drove out his cry, the more his mind worked against him, undermining his effort with indignant upbraidings and images of rebuke until finally he couldn't hear Lawler's voice at all. Once, swinging the pick, he remembered, more with his body than with his mind, how he'd killed the dog on the sidewalk. Lying still, it turned into the fat man. He got a nightmare image of walking with a crowd at the Binghamton July-fest—colored lights, noises—an old bum coming up to him, suggesting with an oddly lascivious look that Mickelsson give him money. He felt in his left hand how he'd pushed the man away.
Please,
he whispered, straining so hard the muscles of his neck and shoulders throbbed. It seemed his brain was on fire. He saw a black man on a lawn in Golden Gate Park, his temples bulging with anger as he cursed Ellen's mime troupe: “Troublemakers! Arrogant idiots!” They too had cried out like the dying fat man, snarling at Mickelsson, snarling at Society, “the Establishment,” demanding justice—but, like Mickelsson himself, the audience couldn't hear, couldn't cut through intellect and standard usages to feel what the mime troupe, in its lubberly, holy stupidity was saying. … Mickelsson's philosopher-mind kicked in. … Could not grasp, Wittgenstein would say, the terms of the “language game”—applied, Gilbert Ryle would say, “the wrong category,” as when one tries to understand music as if it were arguing in Finnish. He struggled against his mind's angry and embittered denial of his reasonable right to cry out, but his mind raged on like an urchin in a violent tantrum, unwilling to be hushed. He tried to focus all his energy on the cry. His will repeatedly flagged, then rose again, shouting itself hoarse. Sublimation indeed! Very well, he was no superman. More easy to believe in God and the grace of the lady than in the self-saved
Übermensch.
He thought of his son the protester—now terrorist, for all he knew—and mixed in with the thought of his son and the nukes was the thought of his son's fear of horses, and how he, Mickelsson, had bullied the boy to courage, in the end even to prize-winning horsemanship. The pride he'd always felt when he thought of it before, the sense that the consequences had justified his action, now evaporated: all he could see was his son's eyes crying for mercy, darkness inside his mouth. “Monstrous,” he whispered, then remembered that, monstrous or not, if he meant to be saved he must concentrate all his being on the psychic cry, not that it would save him. (He saw the lawyer Finney ducking and running, covering his ears.) But his thoughts roared on, his wife's voice shouting at him, swearing. He had not won, as he'd thought. His son, his child, the pride of his life, had found a larger, even crueller father to resist. He would be crushed again—as sure as day—Mickelsson could not stop it. He thought of Leslie and her cunning use of French, how she'd seized the
Babar
he and Ellen had given her to cry out angrily, “Love me! Forgive me!
Look
at me!” To which he'd responded with a sudden hatred of the French. “My God, my God!” he whispered now, tears streaming, washing dirt into his mouth. He quickly forced his mind back to the cry.
Help me!
he made himself think.
Help me! Please!
He controlled an urge to howl at the stupidity and shamefulness of it.
Help me!
he made himself think. More real, more solid and substantial than Lawler, Nietzsche stood cackling in admirable mad scornful glee. Mickelsson was swinging the pick as if he'd just begun, all his tiredness gone, more aching, thudding power in his legs and arms than he could remember ever having felt before. He was briefly aware of Lawler talking. “Rightness is beauty. How else can we judge it?” Then the voice faded out like a distant radio station late at night. Mickelsson's whole body thought:
Help me! Please!
He felt such physical strength he could have lifted a truck. But his soul bellowed on. He thought of his mother's cry for help—he had not heard—then of Jessie's cry, then Tillson's.
Jessie,
he thought,
Jessie! Jessie!

The phone rang, then rang again. He glanced at Lawler. The man shook his head. The room was still full of floating dust, but there was no doubt in Mickelsson's mind that the ghosts had appeared, the middle-aged woman, the man in brown, and the child. They seemed to be watching him, fully aware of him now, and possibly frightened, as if
he
were the ghost. The phone went on ringing. Was it possible, he wondered, that the cry was getting through—to the ghosts and to whoever was calling? He couldn't answer the phone without Lawler's permission. The ringing went on and on, making Lawler jumpy, his eyes moving faster. Mickelsson concentrated on the psychic cry. Suddenly he was conscious of a headache so fierce he was amazed that he didn't pass out. Almost the same instant he noticed the headache, it was gone—
all
bodily sensation was gone. He could have been floating a thousand feet above the earth.
Help me, please,
he thought, far more clearly than before. He remembered, suddenly, the Marxist he'd met in the theater after the movie. He had a sense, right or wrong, that the man was crying out to him, or anyway shouting for rightness in the world, and at the memory of his own angry smart-aleck put-downs he felt such squalor of soul he involuntarily bent double, moving his head close to the wall he'd been about to tear out. The sheen of the wallpaper startled him, and—his thought elsewhere—he bent closer. The wallpaper brightened more. He felt alarm—terror—though for a moment he couldn't tell why. He drew his head back. The light on the wallpaper dimmed. Before he knew what he was testing, he moved his head forward again, and the wallpaper brightened as if a candle had come near. He was thinking all this while,
Please, please, please!
—pouring the thought out as if it were his life. He turned around to look at Lawler. The man's eyes were wide, astonished, but there was something else on his face, too: terrible despair. Then, as when one's ears pop on an airplane, Mickelsson heard the real world's sounds again. Someone was knocking loudly at the door.