Mickelsson's Ghosts (23 page)

“It does, you know? Not literally, I suppose.” She blushed slightly. “OK, you've made your point. I'm not to worry about you.” Her smile made the dimple show. Her eyes, pale as the arctic, met his steadily.

“I'm grateful to you for worrying about me,” he said, and gave her an embarrassed nod. It was the last thing in the world he'd intended to say. He set down the glass, pocketed his matches, and stood up. He felt a moment's unsteadiness. “Well—” he said.

“You're right,” she said, leaning forward and rising too. “I have a nine o'clock class in the morning!” She took a step in his direction, then looked startled, maybe dizzy. Without knowing he would do it he held out his hand to her, as if to help her over slippery ground.

“Why, thank you!” she said, and smiled as he'd never seen her smile before, as if, for the first time in years, she'd been taken by surprise.

He could barely stay awake. He caught himself broadly weaving on the Interstate; if the police had been out, he would certainly have been arrested. But it was worse after he turned off, nosing toward the mountains. The road was tunnel-like, the sky overcast, as if a hand had been lowered over the world, blocking out the stars. Again and again he had to slow suddenly for curves he hadn't remembered, the guardrail to his right stark under the headlights and surprisingly close, beyond that the drop-off to the invisible Susquehanna. He had the sensation, not unusual when he'd been drinking, that nothing was quite real, a feeling borrowed from one he had at movies or at plays Ellen had dragged him along to—a sense that, looking away from the road and the darkness of the mountains, he might see people around him, a rapt audience looking where a moment ago he too had been looking, at the road, the darkness of mountains. It was a feeling he always found freighted with meaning, not that he didn't understand it well enough, and know what it was worth—the old Christian Platonists' idea of the
theatrum mundi,
reality as a shadowing forth, a clothing or fleshing out of something behind it, except that, of course, how could there be anything behind it? All the same, he had the sense that if he drove with all his might into a concrete abutment, he might, like an electron breaking free of an atom, crash through the stones into lightless deep space, clarity, absolute freedom. It was a thought he wouldn't have bothered with sober, and even now he half scorned it. And yet it was always the case, he found, that when intellect dimmed down and something older took over, the notion seemed faintly worth regard: by trees, stones, sky, he felt distanced, as if by words. He felt removed from the essential in the way a black and white photograph is removed from the barn it represents, perhaps a barn no longer standing, or as a star still visible may be removed from its present actuality: spectacular red flash, white dwarf. In this queer situation, he must survive by close attention to details he had no confidence in, the phantom steeringwheel, the phantom road. And must do it, alas, with his whole body tricking him toward sleep.

Dreams tugged more and more persistently, and, awakening with a start, his eyes snapping open from a protracted blink, he would swerve hard, overcompensating, then swerve again. He drove more and more slowly, bent forward over the wheel. “Have to be careful,” he said aloud, but thanks to the gin he felt no alarm. A peculiar calm came over him, in fact, as he moved into the hug of the mountains rising immediately to his left and, more distantly, across the narrow valley, to his right, comforting shapes as much felt as seen, closing in more and more snugly, like huge friendly milkcows on his father's farm many years ago, drawing him gently along the fenced, grassy lane toward home. He thought of Jessica, or rather saw her in his mind, tossing her head back, laughing.

Then suddenly, right in front of him, he saw two men in long black coats. They swung around, swift as startled bears—at first, in fact, he registered them as bears. The image of their open-mouthed, button-eyed faces stayed frozen in his mind as he slammed on his brakes, skidded crazily toward them, tires spitting gravel, then shot left toward the ditch beyond the left-side shoulder, trees leaping out at him, white in the headlights, then skidded again and shot right toward the guardrail, then back, with a violent jerk, toward the road. When the motor died, the big Jeep sat beached at an angle to the macadam, half in the ditch, shooting light up into the trees. He sat clenching the steeringwheel, shaking. He looked back at last toward where he'd seen the two men. For all the darkness, he saw everything clearly—the gray of the road, duller gray of the guardrail, heavy blackness of weeds and treetrunks. The two men had vanished. He thought a moment, then rolled down the window and called out, “Hello?” The sound of his voice clanged in the stillness. No one answered. He called, “You all right, back there?” Again no answer. The shaking in his arms and legs had become just a stirring now, his flesh entirely weightless. The two men would be hiding in the ditch, he imagined, or in the woods across the road. No sound. Nothing.

Strange that they wouldn't answer. He was aware that he was beginning to feel afraid before he knew why. Perhaps they were up to something. He forced himself to wait three or four minutes longer, then started up the Jeep, shifted into low-low and four-wheel drive, and half let the clutch out, preparing to drive up out of the ditch. There was a strange noise, something wrong with the engine, he imagined, and he shoved the clutch in again. The noise continued, growing louder. He switched off the key, then extinguished the lights. Even now it took his drunken brain another moment to understand that the noise came from outside somewhere, a whining engine roar, a little like the sound of an earthquake—he'd experienced small ones in California. Then he saw what it was. He blinked, half convinced he was hallucinating.

One close behind the other they came over the hill and down the narrow macadam road past Mickelsson; two of them, huge trucks black as midnight, driving with their lights off. He hadn't the faintest idea what they might be—one wild thought after another went through his mind. Huge army trucks on midnight maneuvers, he thought, remembering the great caravans of his World War II childhood; but those trucks hadn't driven with their lights off, and not on high-crowned narrow back roads. If these were army trucks they weren't on maneuvers anyway, but up to something more serious: one could tell by the whine that they were heavily loaded. Trucks moving nuclear waste? Not likely. They'd stay on 81, wary of hijackers. What then? He thought of switching on his headlights. Only when his hand refused to move did he realize how afraid he was. The second truck wailed past, a huge black rectangle solid as concrete, slowed for the curve at the bottom of the hill, brakelights darkly glowing like rubies, then vanished. Mickelsson continued to hear the wail for what seemed a long time. At last, all his muscles weak, his head full of confusion, he started up the motor and carefully pulled up out of the ditch. The troll-doll hanging from the rear-view mirror swung lazily. It was an ugly thing, but for some reason it made him think, with a pang of grief, of his daughter.

He parked behind the house. His body still trembled, and there was pain in his chest. He massaged it with one hand, rubbing slowly but hard. With a part of his mind he was aware that a herd of deer stood on the cant of the mountain above him, just this side of the trees, watching. At last he opened the door of the Jeep and got out. As he approached the back door, sorting through his keys in the dark, he heard his phone ring. He thought immediately, once again—or perhaps was thinking just
before
it rang—of his daughter. Who else could be calling him at two, maybe three in the morning? His son, perhaps; or Ellen, if something terrible had happened.

None of the keys seemed to fit the back door. The phone went on ringing. Four rings. Five. He tried the keys again, one after another, slowly and systematically, growing angry. The phone stopped ringing.

Furious, knowing it was his drunkenness that made the keys not fit, he gave up on the door and leaned back, looking around, wondering how he might break in. The house rose high in the night above him, like a docked ship, black as the mysterious trucks against the starlight. There were faint noises inside the house, creakings and settling sounds, not unlike sounds from the movements of a large animal stirring in its sleep. To his left, just this side of the high, darkly frowning triangular woodpile delivered two days ago, stood the door to the debris-filled workroom. Once he'd noticed it it seemed to call attention to itself, almost beckoning, like a door in a horror film. Carefully he moved toward it, then tried the knob. It opened. There was a rush of fleeing mice and—so he thought for an instant—a scent of bread baking. Almost at once the scent decayed to something else, an excessive sweetness a little like the smell of rat poison, or like the anal scent of devils' breath Martin Luther used to catch a whiff of, now and then, in his rooms. He decided to leave the door open, air the place out, and when his hand, feeling along the wall in the darkness, came to a window, he decided to open that too, to get a cross-draught. The smell of clear air bursting over his nostrils made him try one last time, before the other scent was gone, to identify what it was. He felt it right at the edge of his memory, but the scent, as it weakened—full of devils' slyness—changed again. Molasses cookies, he thought; mingled with the cloying scent of flowers at a funeral parlor.

He got a vivid, bleak memory of his younger sister's funeral, the casket set up in the family livingroom, in front of the high, clumsy windows with their old yellowed curtains of dusty, brittle lace. He stood looking down at the shiny white satin cushioning on which her body lay propped, miraculously straightened out—in life she'd been twisted by polio (he wondered, now for the first time, whether those who'd prepared her had had to break bones to get this doll-like serenity)—and his father's boyhood friend, still his best friend, a man named Hobart, who had a farm just down the road, had stood with his hand laid on Mickelsson's shoulder. There had been others in the room, he could not remember anymore who they were, and in the kitchen there were women, various neighbors, who had brought food—casseroles and baked goods.

He shook off the memory and, feeling his way, continued through the workroom's blackness. It was not properly a part of the house but the lower story of a wing oddly jutting out behind the rest, its small back window looking up at the mountain. He paused for an instant, hearing something, then realized it was only the rumble of a train in the valley. The door from the workroom to the livingroom was open; the lock hadn't worked in years. His feet found the buckled place on the livingroom floor.

When he switched on the light in the livingroom another memory jumped into him, another time and place where yellow light had leaped up on walls in exactly this way, like the first frame of a movie, starkly revealing black, curtainless windows. It was the office of his Providence psychiatrist, Dr. Rifkin; small, horse-faced, hair parted down the middle.

“These patterns you feel emerging, do they alarm you?” His voice resounded as if the room where they sat were stone.

“It bothers me that they're elusive,” Mickelsson said. He riveted his gaze to the doctor's scuffed shoes. “I just get them plain and then suddenly it's as if someone's turned the kaleidoscope.”

“Tell me this: Would
I
be able to see them?”

“I could prove to you that all maple trees have the same number of leaves,” Mickelsson said, evasive, “just as all human beings have the same number of arms and legs, except where something's been torn off.”

Rifkin thought about it, no doubt concentrating on the words
torn off.
Mickelsson glanced at him, reproachful.

“All right,” Rifkin said, waggling his hand, his tone impatient, “maybe you're right about maple trees.” He risked a little grin. “What does it mean? Is Somebody sending us a message?”

This time Mickelsson's look was rather more than reproachful. They'd spoken before of Wittgenstein.

“Try it this way,” Rifkin said irritably, and leaned forward. “Is it bad that you're unable to read the message? How does it make you feel? Guilty?”

“Uneasy. I don't say there's a message.”

Rifkin smiled. “Uneasy. That's natural, isn't it? You're a professional philosopher.”

“Most philosophers don't think dead animals are trying to tell them things.”

“That's true. That's a point.” He nodded, paused, then nodded again, as if seeing the problem in a new light. “Tell me about that—how it feels when dead animals talk to you.”

“I can't remember.”

“Come on now. You remember
that
it happens. So
how
does it happen?”

Mickelsson cleared his throat. “It's like trying to remember a dream. I'm walking along, thinking nothing, daydreaming …” He sank into silence.

Rifkin waited. Then after a moment: “Make an effort, Professor!” His face was childishly stern.

Mickelsson was unable to remember what they'd been talking about.

He seemed to remember the whole conversation clearly now, standing alone in the livingroom of the new house. Perhaps because now the pressure was off. He seemed to remember the doctor's every gesture, though perhaps this too was phantom and illusion. But even now he could not remember or imagine what it was like to hear a dead animal speak. The mouth did not move, certainly. Perhaps it had something to do with the eyes.

He remembered his wife's saying—calling late at night—“Talked to any interesting cadavers lately?” Anger had risen in him, he could almost have killed her; but he'd understood how painful and frightening it had been for her. “ ‘Madman Mickelsson,' they say. Can you imagine how that makes me
feel?”
She'd been standing in the kitchen, hugging herself, though the room was of course not cold. “What about the children? What about Mark? You're making him crazier than
you
are.”