Mickelsson's Ghosts (34 page)

John Kalen raised his eyes from his doodle with a look of surprise. “That's stupid,” he said. “Running away never solved anything!”

“Maybe not if an atomic bomb's coming straight at you,” Blassenheim said.

The class laughed more loudly. Even Nugent half smiled, glancing at Mickelsson. Biamonte, in the right rear corner of the room, leaned over his desk, stomping his feet in applause. If he let this progress, Mickelsson saw, things would soon be out of hand. Yet he did nothing, merely turned to look out the window. The tree in the courtyard was a blaze of yellow now. Soon they'd be looking out at snow. The room was already like a classroom in midwinter, stuffy and overheated.

The memory of waking with Donnie came to him, her blue-white body a deadweight on his own, her hair silvery in the early-morning light. After he'd left her he'd covered six pages with single-spaced outlining and notes, then scribbled additions, before driving in to school.

When he turned back to the class, Brenda Winburn, in the chair-desk beside Blassenheim's, was slipping a note into Blassenheim's fingers, her face dead-pan, as if Mickelsson were some bullying but not very dangerous cop. Mickelsson thought about it, or rather, paused to register it—in the room's heavy warmth, no real thought broke through—then cleared his throat and asked amiably, “Are you saying, then, that ‘it's all relative'?” A crazy thing to say, he knew even as he said it; an expression so cloudy in student minds one hardly knew where to start on it. It was a mark of his weary recklessness that he'd deliberately introduced the befuddling phrase—language that would blow up the arena, to paraphrase Whitehead.

But Blassenheim rushed on, like one of those movie-cartoon characters running on, oblivious, beyond the edge of the cliff. “I'm just saying it's not right, that's all. I mean, logic's got its place, like when you're a kid playing with an Erector set, but a lot of times it can trick you.” More laughter. Mickelsson quashed it with a look. “What seems reasonable to a tsar,” the boy pressed on urgently, leaning forward, almost whining, “may not necessarily seem reasonable to his peasants, but what can they do? He tells them, ‘Be reasonable,' with all his cossacks around him with their swords and big black horses, so the peasants have to stand there and look reasonable.”

Mickelsson shook his head. Class discussion was not his favorite mode, especially when the class contained a Blassenheim; yet he couldn't quite find it in his heart to squelch all this, get down, finally, to business. Perhaps, to take the optimistic view, he was mellowing. Or perhaps what Garret had said at Blickstein's party had gotten to him. “… they keep comin and comin, like termites. One morning you wake up and look around and—no castle!” Garret was a good deal more confident than Mickelsson that sheer unmethodical will could flatten castle walls. But Blassenheim's reckless eagerness—even granting its measure of exhibitionism—was its own excuse. He could not bring himself, this early in the game, to call Time, start sorting through Blassenheim's morass of claims. In the back of his mind floated the thought of his own son, at least as urgent and concerned about Truth as young Blassenheim, though quieter, more restrained in his style; not that it mattered: his professors cut him down, or listened to what he said with their brains turned off, as Mickelsson was tempted to listen to Blassenheim, thinking all the while of how much there was yet to get through before midterm, then finals.

He said reasonably, hearing in his voice the tyrannical patience he'd used all those years on his wife, “So tell me, Alan. Where
is
it, if not from reason, that we get these value assertions you keep telling me we're in some sense right to make?”

He sensed the irritable impatience of the class. They were a difficult herd, one moment laughing, as if Time were Eternity, the next insisting that he for Christ's sakes get on with it.

Again Blassenheim gave that left-right glance like a basketball player's just before a shot—or no, something less competitive: the look of a waiter carefully threading his way through a crowd with a loaded tray, or a New York Marathon runner making sure he doesn't trip those around him. “I don't know,” the boy said, “maybe the wisdom of the whole community, like, tested over time. You know what I mean?” His expression became silly, as if he thought he might have said that before, and he glanced at Brenda Winburn, who'd turned to stare dully out the window again; then he pushed on, seemingly despite his better judgment: “Like when Kierkegaard talks about Abraham and Isaac, I think he got it wrong. I mean like
he
thinks what's good about Abraham's walking to Mount Moriah is that sometimes a person has to listen to God, metaphorically or whatever, and shut his ears to what the ordinary person might think. But what
I
think—”

“Now hang on,” Mickelsson said, “we're getting a little far afield here. Let's go back to—” It was odd—startling—that Blassenheim had read
Fear and Trembling.
It was that thought that made Mickelsson pause and gave Blassenheim an entrance.

“Just let me finish,” Blassenheim said, “just this one, like, sentence.” He threw a panicky look left and right, checking the class. Nugent covered his eyes with one hand and stretched his mouth back as if he thought his classmate was, incredibly, faking stupidity.

Mickelsson helplessly shrugged, deferring to Blassenheim, or giving in to weariness, surprise at this unexpected turn of things, or to the stuffiness of the room. The boy could see for himself that the class had lost patience. (It was really with Mickelsson himself, he knew, that the class had lost patience. It was he that allowed the class to flounder, yet on quizzes gave low grades. In his mailbox this morning he'd found two more drop cards.)

Blassenheim said, “What
I
think is, all that's important about the story is it's a parable against human sacrifice, and what makes it right isn't that Abraham listened to the whisper in his ear, which was really pretty crazy, but that all these generations of scribes and revisers kept agreeing with the parable, looking at, like, their personal experience, and listening to the whisper of God in their own ears—and they left it in, so the parable got, like,
truer.”

Mickelsson felt gooseflesh rising. (He was admittedly an easy lay for notions of that kind. It was the point at which he and Nietzsche parted company. Say the words
common sense
or
community
and his eyes would grow moist, not that, in real life, he knew any community he did not hate.) “That's not bad,” he said. He glanced around the room. Apparently nobody else had gotten gooseflesh. Blassenheim was looking at him intently, as if hoping for an A—not the common kind of A; an A straight from God. Michael Nugent, behind him, sat leaning on his fist, morosely waiting for graduation, success, old age. Susan Kunstler, behind Nugent, was asleep.

“Alan's got the start of an interesting idea here,” Mickelsson told the class, feeling only a flicker of irritation at their sluggishness. (An idea that left much to be desired, of course; not exactly up on the metaethical, methodological, and epistemological issues central in philosophical ethics since 1903—but never mind.) He rose from the desk and moved toward the blackboard, looking around for chalk as he went. The light outside the window seemed to have brightened. “Let me try to rephrase it and develop it a little, in case any of you didn't quite catch it.” He found a tiny pebble of chalk in the tray and wrote on the blackboard,
Intersubjectivity,
underlined it, then drew a line and, at the end of it, wrote and underlined
Verification.
“Now watch closely,” he said. “Nothing in my hat, nothing up my sleeve …” Dutifully, without pleasure, they laughed.

As he spoke it came to him that Brenda Winburn, who'd seemed to be staring at him with fierce hostility—eyelids half lowered, long dark lashes veiling the eyes—was not seeing him, in fact, but gazing inward. Relief leaped up in him, and he began to speak more quickly and heartily.

Considering the heat, Mickelsson spoke with remarkable animation and focus, making circles in the air with the end of his pipe, putting Blassenheim's cloudy notion into language one could build on, make use of. Yet a part of his mind drifted free of all he said, half dreaming. Suppose it were true that God was really up there, a “lure for our feeling,” as Whitehead, not to mention Aristotle, had fondly maintained—bespectacled old Jahweh, scratching his chin through his mountains of beard, watching Blassenheim climb carefully, shakily toward him, feeling his way around boulders, scooting downward now and then on loose scree. Mickelsson's voice resounded as in a cavern. He listened as if to a stranger, aware that he was in a sense talking in his sleep. At the edge of his consciousness, as on old, blurry film, he saw Brenda Winburn pulling herself deeper and deeper, with powerful strokes, like a pearl diver, down past the kingdoms of mammals and fish, down past the strangest of antique, blind serpents, toward God only knew what primordial, half-animate beast. He saw her reach out and seize something, and the next moment it seemed that what she held in her fist, swimming up, was the bright yellow courtyard, the tree.

He acknowledged Nugent's hand. He felt, though he did not hear, the collective groan.

“It's interesting, all that about shared community values tested over time,” Nugent said. He sat rigid, slightly tilted to one side, stiff with concentration, his arms—poking out of the short-sleeved blue shirt—very white, his face and elbows pink. “But what I wanted to say is … it doesn't seem to me you can call either Plato or Aristotle a fascist.” He was indignant that anyone should think otherwise. His pale, lashless eyes grew round. “The point is … the point is, Plato and Aristotle have a test you can try out on your own, like a repeatable experiment in chemistry. They start with the same assumption everybody makes, even dogs and cats, that some things may be true and some things may not be; only Plato and Aristotle are better than dogs and cats at thinking logically.”

The pressure of his nervousness made Nugent's face redder and redder, and he began, just perceptibly, to sway, eyes rapidly blinking. Mickelsson lowered his gaze, lest his looking at the boy increase his discomfort. “It's bad to dismiss them out of hand,” Nugent said, “dismiss the whole idea of discernible truth just because one doesn't want to go through the trouble of thinking.” Blassenheim turned, injured, to look at Nugent. Hadn't Blassenheim stood up for Truth just last week, and Nugent, in his arrogance, made fun of the ‘eternal verities'? Nugent hurried on, “It's the assumption that some things are true—discernibly true—that keeps us going, makes life even possible.” He flashed a panicky grin, catching Mickelsson's brief glance. “I mean, that's where we get our sense of dignity, from the feeling that we're
good,
the feeling that our team's better than the other team. Angels of Life versus Angels of Death, things like that. But the thing is—this is what I wanted to say—even though Plato and Aristotle mean to be logical and reasonable, so you can repeat their processes, when you really look at it nothing ever works. It's as if between their time and ours all the names of the chemicals got shifted around, so that what we call oxygen is really lithium hydride, and … For instance, take the word
moral.
What's the connection between the way Plato uses it in the
Symposium
or Aristotle uses it in the
Ethics
or
Poetics
and how we use it now, when we say ‘She hasn't got any morals'? Or take ‘virtue.' ”

Mickelsson raised his head, about to break in, but Nugent pressed forward, raising his voice a little. “They may work differently—Plato's like a poet, or the person who writes a national anthem, and Aristotle's more like a novelist, or a symphony composer—or anyhow that's how it seems to me. …” He looked proud of himself. No harm. For him it was an original insight. “But all the same when they say ‘virtue,' they seem to mean more or less the same thing. If Kierkegaard uses it at all it's like somebody handed him the wrong test tube.”
Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard,
Mickelsson thought.
Is that shit still “in”?
“Or what does a person mean by ‘virtue' when he's talking about the greatest good for the greatest number? I guess Aristotle wouldn't say, any more than Jean-Paul Sartre, that people are necessarily born with virtues—if they were, Aristotle wouldn't have had to write that instruction book for his son—but in Sartre, from what I can tell, it's like virtue is something that just vanished out of the universe.”
Sartre! Christ save us! Sartre!
“That's the reason Kierkegaard's so strange: he tells you right out that he doesn't know what virtue is, maybe it's God's whisper in Abraham's ear, maybe it's just insanity. I think he”—Nugent nodded toward Blassenheim—“might be right: maybe Aristotle really didn't
know
what he was talking about, he was just saying how we do things in Athens or wherever. He even uses that word—‘we,' like ‘the reason we believe'—as if he were speaking for all grown-ups. But if he
did
really know what he was talking about, it seems like it must be lost knowledge, like how to fuse brick. It's like what Kafka says, there's this machine that really used to work, but it doesn't anymore—something fell off and nobody noticed, or the parts are worn out and nobody knows how to make new ones. It's like words, language, ideas that used to make perfectly good sense—” He raised both hands, as if to guard himself from something invisible. “I realize it's confusing, the way I'm saying it, but—” He abruptly looked down, then with a jerk, his face whitening, sat back in his chair. “That's all.”

There was an embarrassed silence. For a moment Mickelsson couldn't think how to break it. His stomach was in a knot. Some of the students were looking at him, waiting; some looked at the floor. He pushed from his mind the observation that too many chairs were empty. At last he nodded and said seriously, “Very good, Mr. Nugent.” He couldn't seem to remember the boy's first name. After another moment he nodded again and said, “Very interesting!” He glanced around the room. “Anyone like to comment?”