Mickelsson's Ghosts (61 page)

“Definitely not!” he said. “Look, no more of this game, OK? It's creepy.”

Jessica pushed her head against his shoulder. “You're right. I hereby renounce all creepy games.” She sidled her eyes toward him. “You want to go to bed?”

“Let's!”

But the game was not quite over. In the upstairs bathroom, brushing his teeth, the cold water plunging noisily into the sink, Mickelsson had a thought that was almost a voice. It was a line from Nietzsche.
“This
life is your eternal life.” It was a line he'd never understood, nor did he understand it now. Nietzsche's whole doctrine of eternal recurrence was a bafflement to him and, so far as he could see, to everybody else, even Kaufmann and Danto. But tonight, the line had the odd effect of sending a chill up his spine and drawing him to the window that looked out onto the field at the back of the house, between the house and the rise of the mountain. It was a soft, warm night stirred by gentle breezes and lighted by a full moon. Fifty feet from the house, directly in line with the window where Mickelsson stood looking out—bending closer to the glass now, startled—someone, a farmer, from the looks of it, was digging a hole. Mickelsson's thoughts flew into confusion and it took him a moment to realize that the man had no right to be digging there, on Mickelsson's own property—and another moment to realize that the hole was a grave. In the swaying weeds five feet from the head of the hole lay a small coffin, presumably a child's—too small, anyway, to be even a small woman's, too large to be the coffin of an infant. Without letting himself think further, Mickelsson spat out the toothpaste into the sink, grabbed his shirt and, without a word to Jessica—he'd forgotten she was there, in fact—ran through the bedroom, out into the hall and down the stairs, his feet hitting like thunder. He was halfway out the back door of the kitchen when he realized that the world had magically snapped into winter. There was no full moon, no gentle summer breeze. Overhead he could see only blurry stars, and in the field where the gravedigger ought to be there was nothing at all—short gray weeds, scraps of snow. Now at last he came awake to Jessica's cries of alarm from the house: “Pete! What's the matter?”

She was in the middle of the kitchen, the quilt from the bed clutched awkwardly around her. When he'd closed and locked the door, then turned back to her, she said, “What happened? You look awful!”

He put his hands on her arms. The kitchen they were standing in was not the kitchen he'd run through on his way outside.

“It's nothing,” he said. “I thought I heard a bear, or a skunk or something. Let's go up.”

When he at last lay down beside her, his skin against hers, the warmth and sweetness of it, and his residual fear, made him dizzy.

8

He'd been going through his fifteen-year-old Martin Luther notes and reading through his grandfather's yellow tablets on the subject, an activity which took him days and profoundly depressed him. How soon the best opinions of a normally intelligent, well-read man turned commonplace! Archaic, studiously eloquent—hiked up with
'tis
's and
lo's
and
yea's
—the old man's broodings recalled the most vacuous poetry of his age: earnest, noble-hearted flounderings in the common bog. This morning he'd gone back to work on his own book, no longer a blockbuster—duller, he suspected, than the telephone book of an unfamiliar city, certainly duller than anything anywhere by Dr. Martinus. It was cruel that a rotten human being like Martin Luther should rivet one's attention, even now, after all these centuries, and the thoughts of a good man like Mickelsson's grandfather, hardly in his grave yet, as angels count time, should stupefy the soul.

Around noon Tom Garret had called him to remind him to vote, which Mickelsson promised to do, though in fact he'd forgotten to register. It gave him no grief. Carter had his faults, but it was unthinkable that the American people would be so stupid and self-destructive as to vote in Reagan. After lunch Mickelsson had worked on the house, still brooding more on Luther than on his own book, increasingly shocked by how powerfully the man's spirit worked on him, both the gentle side—copier of folk tales, translator of the Bible into beautiful, moving German, advocate of infinite gentleness in the teaching of children, doting parent himself—and the dark, terrible side, manic-depressive plunging toward psychosis, fighter, hard drinker, well of hatreds—the Italians, French, English, above all the Jews. Thinking about Luther—and himself, of course—he ate Di-Gels one after another. He was drinking while he worked, as his habit was. He'd drunk only beer, then at suppertime switched to gin and tonic. He turned on the portable radio to listen to the returns. By nine that night he was drinking martinis, as Luther would have done with great lust, if God had allowed their invention in time. He sat at the kitchen table listening in mounting astonishment to the evidence that the American people had gone mad. “Idiots!” he shouted, and slammed the table with both fists at once. He drank on, sometimes pacing, clutching at his hair with his right hand, swearing at the walls and windows. Carter conceded. Mickelsson hardly noticed that he was drunk—he could still see, still stand upright, still howl his anger, though his eyes were full of tears—but drunk he was: his heart bellowed for something, he didn't know what at first, and then he realized: the base, uncomplicated love of Donnie Matthews. His mind, inhibitionless, could see no objection. And so he found himself tapping importunately with his cane's silver lioness-head at her door.

Oh, he knew, he was cognizant, that it was debauchery. (He tapped louder, sweating gin.) He had become once more the suicidal Dadaist, representative hero and symbol of his nation—perhaps the secret center of all men and nations—fallen out of orbit, drifting like his civilization toward absolute catastrophe (all the professional predictors agreed, the U.N., the Carter Report on the Future, alas: by the year 2000 wide-spread starvation, plague, universal war, for all practical purposes the end of the world), all of which, however, he accepted tonight with mournfully comfortable fatalism. Let it come! Let the final explosions be colorful! (“And Lord, may my death be not painful!”—Luther.) It was the nature of life and always had been, insofar as life in the world was worldly: the beginning of things in the blood-washed breaking of membranes, the precarious middle span with its tortuous, ultimately futile imposition of order, the protracted close of life—entropy, chaos, the final loosening of the sphincter.
Alles ist erlaubt.

He was banging hard now at Donnie Matthews' door.

“Who is it?” she called from somewhere not far away. Perhaps she was sitting in her chair in the livingroom, reading.

“It's me,” he called back. “Are you free?”

“Just a minute.”

He was leaning far forward, his left hand on his hatbrim, his right ear close to the door. He was unaware that he was leaning farther than balance would permit until he found himself falling, drunkenly tumbling, lashing out with the tip of his cane to protect himself, shifting his left foot at the same time, but somehow getting it wrong, so that the next thing he knew he was on the carpet, the thud of his fall still echoing like thunder, the door suddenly opening and Donnie Matthews looking down at him, surprised.

“Jesus!” she said, bending down toward him. “What happened?”

“Floor tipped,” he said. “Or maybe it was solar wind.”

“You're drunk!” she said.

“That's also a possible explanation.” He was up on his knees now. She studied him with narrowed eyes, then suddenly decided to reach down for his right arm and help him.

“Come on in,” she said, “before the neighbors see you.”

He laughed and turned to look in the direction of the door at the opposite side of the landing. It was safely closed. Then, letting her help him a little, he entered her livingroom and stood waiting while she closed and locked the door.

“You really are something,” she said, and smiled now. “Let me help you with your coat.” He stood locked into balance, like an old horse asleep, while she drew the overcoat down from his shoulders, shook the sleeves from his arms, then folded the coat and laid it on the straight-backed chair beside the door. Then she came to him and put her arms around him. Her cheap, young-woman smell was foreign, as intensely “other” as the room. “Where
were
you all this time?” she asked. “I kept expecting you to phone or something.” She was wearing striped pajamas and a gray bathrobe, attire that gave her a childish, innocent look that, when he thought of what she looked like naked, stirred him suddenly toward lust. Her hair smelled of shampoo.

“Sweet, sweet,” he said, grinning, breathing heavily, moving his hands on her back and round shoulders, then down her sides to the smell of her back, then her ass, drawing her against him.

She moved one hand to his crotch, gently rubbing his growing erection through his trousers. “Come to bed,” she whispered. “Fuck me.”

In the bedroom she stood still as he clumsily undressed her, licking and kissing each part of her body as it came into view. When she was naked he kneeled in front of her, licking her treasure box, at the same time unbuttoning and taking off his shirt. “God, oh God,” she whispered, gripping his head in her hands. Her knees went rhythmically out to the sides and in again. Whether her passion was real or only accomplished acting he did not care. He got out of his trousers and underwear and, still with his shoes and socks on, rolled with her onto the bed. Almost as soon as he entered her, lying on his back, Donnie on top, sitting upright, flapping her arms like a bird, he came, and before another minute had passed, he was asleep.

When he woke up, hours later, the first thing he knew was that his head was splitting, his eyes so sensitive that even the dim yellow light from the bedside table shot into his head ferociously, so that his eyes, as if of their own volition, snapped shut again; and the second thing he knew was that Donnie had his stiff penis in her mouth, slowly lifting and lowering her head, wetting it with her spittle, at the nadir of her movement taking his full length. If he came, he knew, his head would, that instant, explode into vastly greater pain; yet he could not make himself stop. His heart began to beat more rapidly, then more rapidly yet. He pressed the heel of his hand to his chest and breathed through his mouth. Her hair fell softly over him. Her right leg, young, magnificently shaped, lay next to his left arm. He reached over with his right hand and touched it, moving two fingers up to her wet vagina, then in. She wriggled, demanding more, and moved her head up and down more quickly. Insane, he thought. Foul! Bestiall Yet it did not seem that. Even when he moved one finger into her anus, it seemed not ugly, not inhuman. “I love you,” he said. He felt the pulsing in his left testicle that meant that in a moment he would come, and he felt the sudden increase of pain in his head that meant he
was
coming, then blinding, shrieking pain, Donnie clinging to him, sucking and gagging—and suddenly he was violently ashamed, disgusted beyond words, and was at the same time filled with fear, his chest and head screaming, on fire. He clutched Donnie's leg in a false show of passionate gratitude, to hide from her his wish that she were dead. She brought her face up to his now, smiling, and gave him a kiss that almost made him retch.

He lay still beside her, holding her, and for decency's sake, or kindness' sake, kept himself for as long as possible from asking if she had aspirin. At last, when he could hold out no longer, he said as if jokingly, “Wow, have I got a headache! You got any aspirin, honey?”

“I think so.” She kissed his cheek, then rolled away from him, sat up, and went into the bathroom. A minute later she returned. “Here,” she said. When he opened his eyes he saw that she held out three aspirin in one hand, a glass of water in the other. He raised his head from the pillow, and she put the aspirin in his mouth, then held the glass to his lower lip.

“Thanks,” he said, lying back again, closing his eyes.

She straightened the covers, then crawled into the bed beside him, fit her body snug against his, and pulled the covers up over them both.

They lay still for a long time. His chest still ached, but his heart had grown calm again. Little by little the pain in his head sank to tolerable. He began to draw toward sleep—first the falling sensation and the sudden jerks as he grabbed for balance in indistinct dreams, then fitful, slightly deeper dreams—obscure, mumbling voices, uncertain phantom shapes.

“Pete,” she said in his ear, “are you awake?”

“Mmm,” he said. He resisted the climb back to consciousness. He felt stifled, desperately in need of rest. The headache, though reduced, was still with him. He imagined it as black, swollen, like corn-rot inside his skull.

“Can I talk to you?” she asked.

“Mmm,” he said again. But he was back in the world now, miserable.

“You didn't answer my letter.” When he said nothing, she said, “Pete?”

“I heard you,” he mumbled. “I must not have gotten it.”

“Oh,” she said. That stopped her for a while, long enough for Mickelsson to drift back toward sleep. “Shit. I wish you'd gotten it,” she said. Her tone was cranky, as if perhaps she suspected that he had indeed gotten it and had simply failed to open it. “Do you want to know what I wrote you?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said. “What?”

“I'm pregnant.”

He had his headache back. He let a minute pass, maybe more. She did not repeat what she'd said. She knew pretty well that he'd heard. At last he said, softly, neutrally, “I'm sorry to hear that.”

They both lay unnaturally still.

“Mmm-hmm. I'm really late. Almost three weeks.”

He had a distinct impression that he had reason to know that what she claimed was impossible. How long ago was it that he'd handed her that plastic box of contraceptive pills? But he'd lost all sense of time. The gin, probably. It would make his head hurt more to strain to remember. “Sometimes these things fool you,” he said. His voice let out a hint of the anger he hadn't earned a right to. “Sometimes just worry can do it.”