Mickelsson's Ghosts (37 page)

His pipe had gone out. He held a match to it, his hand slightly trembling, then said: “Well, so much for the ‘what' component in every moral decision.” He looked up from his cards. The soft, pale white Jewish woman whose name he did not know was also accessible. His penis was as hard as a petrified tree. “It comes down to simply this: if we don't get reality right, if we
misunderstand
the case we're examining, all we say will be poppycock.” He looked at his watch. Thirty minutes to go, then a fifteen-minute break. Could the watch be broken?

“Let's turn to the ‘why' and ‘how,' that is, ends and means.” He was skipping cards now. He had several more on the ‘what' component. He chattered as he hunted. “Take government, for instance. Every government is basically intended … Every government is basically intended to promote the common good, but the preservation of the government—as you all know, as loyal Americans”—he looked up for a second and smiled—“giving your money to support the I.R.S., the F.B.I., the C.I.A.—as you all know, the preservation of the government can easily come to seem more important than the common good it was designed to insure. If you look at history, you'll find this is a
pattern,
not an exception.” Now he'd found his card. “Or take jobs. A job is a means to survival and, hopefully, personal fulfillment. But we all know how a job can become a man's life. Think of the popular term ‘workaholic' ” He turned the card. “Or take wealth. Wealth is obviously nothing but a
means
to happiness and well-being. But when wealth becomes an end, as it often does, people under its sway will sacrifice both happiness and well-being—even life itself—for money.” Impatiently, looking at his watch again, he turned to another card.

“Or take armaments. The avowed purpose of armaments is always to bring security and power.” He almost flipped this card too, then changed his mind. “Tsar Nicholas the Second of Russia in his proposal for the first Hague Conference in 1899 spotted the fatal flaw in equating arms and safety: ‘In proportion as the armaments of each power increase, so do they less and less fulfill the objects which the Governments have set before themselves. … It appears evident that if this state of things were prolonged, it would inevitably lead to the very cataclysm which it is designed to avert, and the horrors of which make every thinking man shudder in advance.' Think about that,” Mickelsson said, looking up, “in relation to our present situation—sixteen tons of T.N.T.—atomic equivalent—for every man, woman, and child in the world!” For reasons not instantly clear to him, tears sprang to his eyes. “Think about it,” he said, catching himself, forcing himself to smile. “If we were true philosophers we might well be terrorists, trying to bring down the nukes.”

His son, in the photograph, stood eerily alone, framed by the two SWAT men bending to lift the girl. His hair, flying wildly in all directions under the top-hat, and his eyes, aloof and shadowy—his chin slightly raised, like that of a nineteenth-century prince posing for a painting—gave him a mad look, or rather, to be precise, the look of some good man profoundly wronged by people who could not know better, forgiving his persecutors and waiting, with a still and terrible rage, for his meeting with God.

“The question ‘who,' ” Mickelsson said, “enters into the calculus of ethics to make us address the following realities: What is right for one person may be wrong for another. What is right for a person now may be wrong for the same person at another time. Some persons are, in ethical calculations, worth more than others. …”

He remembered his ex-wife's sobbing on the telephone, his own senseless cruelty to The Comedian.

Then suddenly he felt nothing. As if from a distance, he heard his voice droning, changing now and then to a different drone, for emphasis, or irony, or to present a seemingly spontaneous example. He listened to himself like a man judging the performance of a colleague, then let his mind wander. He saw again the wary look on Mark's face, the look one might give to an injured boa-constrictor. The other Mickelsson talked on, paused for questions, told a joke. He forgot to give the mid-period break. No one objected, though Pinky Stearns glanced at him from time to time with tentatively unfriendly puzzlement. When the bell rang, Mickelsson glanced at his watch, startled. “Thank you for your patience,” he said. “Thank you all for your patience.”

He'd been seated in his office for more than an hour, with the door closed and the light off—seated doing nothing and thinking nothing, staring at the wall—when a timid knock came. He considered not answering, then thought perhaps it might be Jessica, whose conversation might be a comfort just now, and so he called, rather softly, as if he hadn't quite made up his mind, “Come in.”

As soon as he saw the worried, uncertain way the doorknob moved, he knew it would be Nugent. “Christ,” he whispered, then leaned forward onto his left elbow and swivelled around in his chair so that he partly faced the door. The boy opened it wide, not seeing him at first in the room's late-afternoon dimness. His black friend—Mickelsson had forgotten the name—was with him again. He looked in over Nugent's shoulder, and when he was sure that it was really Mickelsson there at the desk, he smiled and bobbed his head, then backed away, giving them privacy.

“Did you want the light out?” Nugent asked, hovering between the hallway and the office.

“It's fine. My eyes are tired,” Mickelsson said. “Come in if you like. What can I do for you?”

“Thank you.” He advanced a step or two, looking around the room as if to make sure no one waited in ambush. Then, apparently deciding he was safe, he closed the door behind him and came the rest of the way at a more normal pace. “May I sit down?” he asked.

“Be my guest,” Mickelsson said wearily.

“I won't take long,” the boy said, and seated himself, rigid as usual, folding his hands and locking them between his legs. He looked not at Mickelsson but exactly at the point on the wall Mickelsson had been staring at earlier.

Mickelsson got out his pipe and tobacco.

“I'm sorry about this morning,” Nugent said. “I realize I wasted valuable class time and talked nothing but stupid nonsense.” His lips trembled and it came to Mickelsson that, damn it all, the boy was going to cry again.

In spite of his annoyance—the feeling of claustrophobia that came over him every time the boy came near him—Mickelsson said, almost gently, “That's not true.” He concentrated on his pipe, lest the boy throw him a look.

“I hadn't thought it out,” Nugent said. “I lost my temper, sort of—all those things they were saying. … I'm sort of new at all this. I'm not a very well-educated person, as I imagine you've noticed. I've read a lot of novels and poetry and things—nothing systematic—and I've been pretty good at physics—I can tell you why the lifetime of a resonance particle is not necessarily the smallest possible unit of time—” He gave a choked laugh. “There I go again.” Mickelsson could feel the boy looking at him now but kept his eyes on the bowl of his pipe, packing it, preparing to light a match. When he did, the flame was surprisingly bright, glaring on the glossy stipple of the wall. “Anyway of course it's not true that Plato's method is different fundamentally from Aristotle's—I finally read the
Parmenides,
as you suggested we should do, and I, I saw—” Suddenly he raised his hands to his face, not lowering the face, simply covering it, holding his breath, his red elbows shooting out sharp as knives to either side.

“Take it easy,” Mickelsson said, gently but with distaste.

“I'm sorry,” the boy whispered. His neck and arms were surprisingly small, and white, as if never touched by sunlight.

“Take your time,” Mickelsson said, and sighed. “It's all right, believe me.” Seeing that the boy was still unable to speak, he said, “Life's full of troubles, we all find that out eventually, but in due time we live past them.” He got out his pipecleaners, took the pipe from his lips, pulled the stem off and busied himself with cleaning it.

“I know you have plenty of troubles of your own,” the boy said, still pushing apology.

Mickelsson remembered the boy's saying, earlier, that he knew how Mickelsson lived, knew everything about him. He thought of asking now what Nugent had meant; it was never good to leave fingernail parings in the hands of witches, but instead he laughed and said, “Boy, you said it!” He looked sideways at Nugent, who had taken his hands from his face now and was staring into his lap. Mickelsson dropped the pipecleaner into his wastebasket, shook his head ruefully, and said, “I've been trying to deal with the I.R.S. They're incredible—simply incredible! They spy on me.” He laughed. “No doubt that sounds like the height of paranoia, but it happens to be true. Every now and then they show up in one of those dark, unmarked cars and sit watching me. I suppose it's some kind of scare tactic.”

“You're sure it's them?” Nugent asked, slightly turning, not quite raising his eyes to Mickelsson's.

“Well, pretty sure,” Mickelsson said with a little laugh and relit his pipe. “I had a visit from them, not too long ago—came to see me at my apartment. The car they were driving then was pretty much like the one that comes by now.”

“What are you going to do?” It did not seem just polite conversation.

Mickelsson saw now that perhaps he'd made a mistake, telling Nugent about that car. It might be construed as an invitation to friendship, an undermining of the teacher-student relationship. In the hope of blocking that development, he told him more. “Well,” he said, falsely chuckling, “I thought it would be best to deal with the thing directly, so I shot off a note to the I.R.S. office most likely to be responsible, the one in Scranton, since now I'm living in Pennsylvania. I simply told them I know what they're up to and asked them to stop.”

Nugent thought about it, no doubt privately analyzing, as Mickelsson had done over and over, whether it was a good idea or likely to make things worse. At last he said, just above a whisper, “Creeps.”

“They
are
creeps,” Mickelsson said, pleased to have been given the word for them.

Now a silence fell between Mickelsson and the boy. It was Nugent who finally broke it. “Well,” he said, “I just wanted to say I'm sorry—and I'm sorry about making a scene here now, too. It's been a—” He stiffened slightly, making sure he had control. “It's been a bad year.”

Mickelsson studied him. Nietzsche would say—or Freud, or any other man of sense—that the statement was an emotional con. He drew the pipe from his mouth and, against his better judgment, said, “I heard about your father. I'm sorry, Nugent.”

The boy nodded. After a moment he said, “I also had a friend die, my chemistry teacher—he was murdered; you probably heard about it, maybe I told you. Professor Warren? He'd just gotten married a week before—”

A chill ran up Mickelsson's spine. Warren. That was it, of course: the strange, bedevilled woman he'd met at the Blicksteins' party. Evenly, he asked, “Wasn't he investigating something down near where I live, in Susquehanna?”

“I don't know about that,” Nugent said. He closed one hand over his nose, breathing shallowly again, fighting emotion. “He was always looking into something or other. He had more energy than—” He fell silent and tightly closed his eyes. In a minute he would whisper again, “I'm sorry,” and would cry.

To prevent it, Mickelsson said sternly, “It's been a bad year for you, Nugent. I'm very sorry.”

“Well,” Nugent said, and sniffled. Abruptly he stood up. “Thank you,” he said, for an instant meeting Mickelsson's gaze.

“No problem,” Mickelsson said, and waved his pipe. “Any time I can be of help …”

Nugent nodded stiffly, then turned, off balance, and hurried to the door. He fumbled for the doorknob as if unable to see it, then opened the door, half turned back, nodded stiffly again, then quickly stepped out into the hallway and closed the door behind him.

Mickelsson sat for a few minutes longer in the now quite dark office, thinking, or trying to think. A chemist. Then at last he heaved his bulk out of the chair, dropped the tobacco-pouch and pipe into his pocket, and settled his spirit on the long, lonely drive home.

2

Now that the leaves had turned, exploding in a variety of yellows and reds here and there broken by the dark green pines, the Susquehanna Valley and the mountains rising on each side of it were more beautiful than ever. In farmers' yards lay piles of bright orange pumpkins, and on every roadside stand, from Binghamton to Susquehanna, Mickelsson saw more of them—also apples, bright yellow pears, plastic jugs of cider. Here and there, seated on a porch or up on the gable of an old, gray barn, sometimes on a porch roof or sleeping against a tree, he saw pumpkin people—brightly dressed, straw-filled characters with jack-o'-lantern heads. Cars with New Jersey license plates cruised slowly up and down the mountain roads, pausing now and then to spill out tourists with cameras. Often they stopped outside Mickelsson's house, to take pictures of the pond and waterfall, the viaduct and river in the distance. Mickelsson kept clear of them, more reserved than any native. (He'd seen no sign, lately, of the dark green, unornamented car that had earlier come to spy on him.) Every night, deer came to look down at his house. Mornings, the grass would be white with frost.

Halloween came and went. He might easily have forgotten about Halloween—he'd lost all track of time, floating in it as in Nietzsche's sea of recurrence. If there were masks in store windows, Mickelsson didn't notice them. But two nights before the real one—if he wasn't mistaken about the date of Halloween (it had always been Ellen who tended to such things)—Mickelsson, driving through Susquehanna after dark, came suddenly on a troop of four- or five-foot-high witches and goblins, monster creatures, white-sheeted ghosts. They scattered away in all directions from the glow of the headlights. Hastily, Mickelsson laid in candy and apples, preparing for the blackmail of trick-or-treat, and just to be on the safe side padlocked the barn in which the old blue Chevy sat—in his country childhood, Halloween had been a favorite time for vandalism, especially the destruction of seemingly useless machinery. Then he waited, busying himself around the house and listening for a knock. His head was crowded with painful, happy memories—scenes, images, fragments.