Mickelsson's Ghosts (17 page)

She laughed. “No chance! You want to sleep in the guest room?”

He checked her eyes. “There's only one bed in the world I want to sleep in right now,” he said; when her face showed panic, he added quickly, though it was not what he'd meant to say—and perhaps, he would think later, not even what Jessica had wanted him to say—“and that's at my apartment.”

“You won't fall asleep driving there?” She frowned, eyelids partly lowered.

“How far is it? Half a mile?” He shrugged and leaned forward as if to get up, but he didn't yet.

“You've been drinking, though. Are you sure you're awake enough?”

“I'm terrific,” he said. “Listen, don't see me to the door. Stay right here. Close your eyes. You need a blanket?”

She shook her head.

Now at last, reluctantly, he did rise. He moved toward the head of the couch, where he could look down at her face. Her pallor startled him. What if his keeping her up all night made her ill? Jews were a sickly people. Brilliant and good-hearted, but prone to allergies and infirmities. He pointed at the bridge of her nose as if his hand were a gun. “Close your eyes,” he said. “I'll let myself out. The door locks automatically, doesn't it?”

“Mmm,” she said. “To tell the truth, I really am fading.”

“Good. Sleep, then. You're sure I can't get you a blanket?”

She moved her head, just a little, from side to side on the couch cushion.

“You haven't closed your eyes,” he said.

She smiled. Her eyelids fluttered, then lowered. She seemed asleep already.

He bent down, thinking of kissing her on the lips, then kissed her on the forehead. As he straightened up, he saw a shine on her cheek—the path of a tear. He stood as if frozen in a slight bow, startled, his hands clasped in front of him. After a moment he took his pipe from the coffeetable and hung it between his teeth, then crossed silently to the door and let himself out.

Mickelsson sighed, coming out of his dreams and memories, finding himself in Binghamton already, without any sense of how he'd gotten there. The shadow of the Jeep on the road beside him darted along too quickly, like something overtaking him. Traffic churned around him—pickup trucks, buses, hurrying cars—demanding his full attention as no doubt it had done for miles now, though his mind had been elsewhere. He hunted for his pipe, stuck it in his mouth mechanically, eyes on the road, and lit it. Monday. Plato and Aristotle at ten. Ruefully, he shook his head.

Now the campus opened out in front of him, an immense factory-complex of aluminum and brick. Possibly the ugliest campus in America. So he had thought when he'd first arrived, shuddering at his fall. He could not say that, with increasing familiarity, the campus had become more pleasing to the eye. But his heart calmed at sight of the place, exactly as—after his hours of classes and conferences—his heart would calm, late tonight, when he burrowed into the darkness of the Endless Mountains.

Plato and Aristotle at ten. A course for beginners.

Taught by Peter J. Mickelsson.

Incredible.

6

“But what was ‘Plato saying,' really?” he inquired of his class, or rather, looking over them, one eyebrow lifted, inquired ironically of the empty blackboard at the back of the room. He leaned forward, waiting, though they all seemed persuaded that the question was rhetorical—bent over their notebooks, pencils poised, ready to write down and underline and adorn with multiple exclamation points whatever it should turn out that, according to Professor Mickelsson, Plato was saying. The semester was only three weeks old. Most of his students were freshmen or sophomores, shining-faced innocents waiting eagerly for wisdom, or what they took for wisdom—things they could write down and make use of in life, like algebraic method or the rhyming saws one picked up, as they'd no doubt learned by now, in the Anguish Department (“ ‘Forlorn!' The very word is like a bell …”)—each of them dressed in the uniform of the age, formerly the uniforms of streetworkers or cowboys, bleached-out jeans and workshirts their mothers had bought them (so Mickelsson imagined) at Saks, watching him with interest, hair-triggered to laugh if he should happen to make a joke, or groan if he should ask them to take out paper for a quiz, and groan again when he said “Time's up!” Only one of the students in this class, the would-be suicide he'd met during the summer, Michael Nugent, was a junior—not that one would have guessed. He showed no sign of the typical junior's amused, glossy confidence. He seemed, if anything, even more earnestly out after wisdom than his classmates, watching Mickelsson like a crazed hawk, now grinning, now showing fear, sometimes looking around in troubled rage, as if, for some reason, he'd come to hate it that he'd been born a carnivore yet could not help seeing his classmates as chickens and mice.

Mickelsson was seated, as usual, on the front of his desk, his pipe in his hand, his heavy right leg swinging. On the tree outside his window, a half-dozen leaves had turned bright yellow. Two young sparrows darted back and forth near the glass as if trying to get a look at the clock. Alan Blassenheim, probably the brightest of this semester's crop—though hopelessly, frantically in love with his own wild, undisciplined opinions and mildly corrupted, Mickelsson suspected, by a business-world background (his father was “in plastics”) that would tend to make him unduly quick to compromise, too easily satisfied by the stylish and commercial—poor Blassenheim looked powerfully tempted, almost driven, to raise his hand, whether or not he was sure he knew the answer. He had the ways of an athlete: Get in there and fight, don't think! Mickelsson averted his eyes from Blassenheim's, lest he lead the boy into temptation.

“Put it this way. It may or may not be, as Miss Mariani points out …” He nodded polite acknowledgment toward the girl who'd raised the issue—a young woman thin of arm and leg, large of face, heavy of eyelid. She sat hungrily smoking a cigarette, awkwardly knocking the ashes off onto a makeshift ashtray of folded notebook paper. “That is,” he said, “it may or may not be that, as I. F. Stone argues, Socrates was a fascist and Plato, as his defender, must have been more or less the same. It's a question we can hardly judge directly, of course, since none of us was there.” He smiled and they dutifully smiled with him. “All we have is Plato's writings, so the only question we're competent to deal with is, ‘Just how fascistic is Plato's
Republic?' ”

He paused for an instant, making sure of their attention. Most of them were writing furiously in their notebooks. Miss Mariani made a show of looking interested, as if her question about Plato's fascism had been, for some time now, a matter of concern to her. Not that he blamed the poor girl. It was a bitch, trying to learn what to ask, what to think, what to do to get attention. It was cruelly unfair and always had been, the whole teaching-and-learning business. He wished the whole lot of them back in Eden, where all you had to know was the difference between apples. “You'll notice that Stone is very quick to use phrases like ‘Plato was saying.' Should that bother us at all? Any reasonable objections?”

He waited, hoping for any hand but Blassenheim's or Nugent's, the terrible two. Nothing, of course, not even from them, and of course nothing from poor Miss Mariani. He sighed. “All right. Plato—‘the dramatist,' as we called him earlier, as some of you may recall—” He smiled; they smiled. “Plato, or Socrates, or some Socrates invented by Plato and not necessarily to be confused with either Socrates or Plato—somebody, anyway—argues in
The Republic
that the masses can't be trusted. Is that fascism, in itself?” They waited and, when the pause lengthened, looked up expectantly. “At least we can grant that it's an excusable mistake,” he said. He raised his pipe to his lips and pulled. It was out. “Think of Hitler's Third Reich.” Usually when you dropped an allusion to Hitler their interest increased, as if the subject guaranteed that now, at last, you must say things worthy of their notebooks. “A mass of citizens full of ignorant opinions, mainly, of course, ‘the Wagnerian morass,' as Nietzsche calls it, anti-Semitism” (Nugent nodded quick, angry agreement). “… a madman willing to make use of anything for his own aggrandizement …” He found the matches, lit one, and held it above the pipebowl, hurriedly moving the flame from side to side. “To what extent can we pin such things on Plato? Certainly
The Republic
has no room for a Hitler; Socrates explicitly condemns that kind of thing, and he speaks persuasively on how it comes about, how the mob wants simple answers and the strong man, the bully, comes along and offers them.”

“Just like Reagan,” Nugent said, pretending to be talking to himself. Mickelsson decided to ignore it. There was much one might say of Mr. Reagan as bull to the Nietzschean “herd“—Nietzschean buffoonery vs. Hollywood buffoonery, that is, “harmonious classicism” housed in cowboy good intentions and fangless wit. But it was hardly to the point.

“Try this, then,” he said. (Nugent was still muttering.) “Does the fascism we're annoyed by lie in the stupidity of the masses, that is, their preference for cheap solutions backed by force—mental fascism? Obviously, Socrates frowns on that too.” Some of the class nodded. “But think, now. Perhaps we can nail Plato yet! Possibly the problem was deeper, the very concept, however blurry in the German mind, of transcendent ideals against which multitudes of people can be measured—Gypsies, Poles, Jehovah's Witnesses, not just Jews, though mainly Jews, certainly. Was the problem—the tendency toward fascism—the belief in ‘transcendent ideals' against which whole groups of people, as I was saying, can be measured and found to be ‘defective'? Transcendent ideals—immutable forms, the Realities behind Actuality: as some would put it—are much frowned upon these days. Even Heidegger, whose philosophy gave a certain comfort to the Nazis, had no patience for transcendent ideas; and the feeling's standard—the existentialists, the so-called hermeneutics …” He watched the class write down
existentialists, hermeneutics.
He swung his leg.

“Plato's the philosopher who taught us about transcendent ideas, so if it's true that they're the problem, then Plato has to go—maybe go live in the woods with the expelled poets.” He smiled. “Well, what do you think?” After a moment he glanced at the blackboard, thinking of writing the question down.
What do you think?
There was nothing there but the no smoking sign someone had written and, in Mickelsson's hand, Wednesday's assignment.

“Notice what we've said here; let me put it to you again,” he said. “Maybe there's something
always
wrong with transcendent ideas, something ‘deeper' than the particular situation. Anything bothersome in that statement?”

Nugent had his eyes screwed up. He seemed almost on to it, but he wasn't yet sure. As for the rest, they watched Mickelsson like children struggling—some of them irritably—to figure out the rules of an unfamiliar game.

“Well, all right, let it stand for now,” he said. “To continue the argument—” (Dirty trick, of course; Socratic.) He glanced at the window. The birds were gone. “In principle, nothing's more beautiful, we may feel, than the strict idealist view of things. But the question is—” Blassenheim's hand went up. Mickelsson pressed on: “The question is whether the Ideal exists in actuality or only in our clumsy, moment-by-moment emotions—continually shifting potential; in other words ‘out there' or ‘in here' or both: God's voice, so to speak, or the opinion, on a particular Tuesday, of some human—or both at once. Am I leaving things out?” He waited. No response. “Put it this way. Darwin might say—and Aristotle, as we'll discover, might partly agree (if the terms were made clear)”—he smiled, ironic—“that the Ideal is everlastingly evolving, so that in effect there's no such thing as an absolute, static Ideal, only the shifting implications of
Being.
But if that's
always
true, a fact independent of our personal existence …”

It was impossible to go on ignoring young Blassenheim's hand One knew pretty well what tack he would take, but no matter; nothing was happening anyway, and one could always work one's way back to the point at hand. Mickelsson nodded, giving Blassenheim the floor, the same instant glancing at Nugent, who smiled with sudden enlightenment and jerked his head, raising his hand, then drew it back down. His queer pallor and large, seemingly lashless eyes had the odd effect of making him appear to be watching the proceedings from far away—ancient Ireland, perhaps—though he sat among the others, presumably in the same dimensions of time-space.

Blassenheim looked at his desktop, deferential, and raised his eyebrows as if to make his face look still more meek, though his accent—Long Island Jewish—suggested to Mickelsson a kind of tough-kid irreverence, perhaps originally a defense against an overprotective mama and Long Island schoolteachers just like her. He glanced left and right, like a basketball player about to make his move, and he spoke slightly out of the side of his mouth, his
s's
thickly liquid, almost
z
or
sh.
“But isn't it two different questions, really—whether there's even such a thing as an Ideal and, if there is, whether an ordinary person can perceive it?”

“Yes, of course,” Mickelsson began. It was a good point, if the boy could figure out what to do with it, nail the old epistemological issues, who can know the Ideal and how, and separate out the content issues, are the ideals situational or transsituational? He should give the boy some help; but his thought hung, snagged, on Blassenheim's comfortable use of the word
perceive.
He'd grow up to be a lawyer, big firm in Manhattan. He already had the look. Clean cut. Shiny brown, abundant, blow-dried hair.

Blassenheim hurried on, deferential and aggressive. “If Darwin's view is right, there's nothing inherently good about a creature that survives except the fact of its survival.” He rolled out his hands, as if bargaining. (The Darwin argument faintly rang a bell; then Mickelsson remembered: his own book.) The boy said, “But how can you be sure that Reality doesn't have, like, built-in standards? Like maybe the closer a creature gets to one of those standards, the better its chances of survival.”