Mickelsson's Ghosts (65 page)

“You know me, Dad. Non-violent type.”

“But it seems you have found it necessary to disappear.”

“Don't worry. No violence directed at human beings.”

“Buildings and machines?”

“Come on, Dad. They're no good anyway. Radioactive.”

“That stuff's catching, isn't it? If a person gets too close?”

“Listen, Dad.” Mark seemed suddenly distant. “Are you OK? Really?”

“Am
I
OK. Jesus!” But Mickelsson grinned in spite of himself, shivering. “I bought a house. Haunted. I kid you not.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, mainly I mean I bought this house. Let me give you directions to it, just in case. OK? You got a pencil?”

“What do you mean it's haunted?” His voice was worried.

“Have you got a pencil?”

“Sure,” Mark said. “Just a minute.” His voice went far away, the words unintelligible; he'd probably put his hand over the phone. Then: “OK, what's the address?”

Mickelsson told him, turn by turn. Then: “Mark, where are you?”

“I'm fine, Dad. Really.”

“I know. I believe you. But how can I get in touch with you? Send you money, for instance.”

“I'm OK. I really am.”

“What if something happens to you? How do I find out?”

“Dad,” Mark said.

“OK,” Mickelsson said. “OK. Listen, honey”—he regretted the “honey,” or half regretted it, but urgently pressed on—“it's all right to fight the bad guys, but remember, you've got a life—”

“That's not true, really,” Mark broke in. “Nobody's got a life if things continue as they're going. I'm not sure you understand or, OK, agree; but it's all or nothing. I think it really is. I might be wrong. People like me have been wrong before. But if I'm right, I have no choice—you know, Dad? Look, I'm not a terrorist. I'd never hurt a fly. But they have to be stopped, people have to see what's really happening, and I'm not sure it's possible to stop them in the way I'd approve of. They're too big, whole federal government wrapped around them like eggwhite, feeding 'em. I think, well, it's a war for life. You know how proud you were of your uncle that lied about his age and went off to fight in World War Two? Well, this is a war for the planet. That's what I think.”

“You say you're not a terrorist,” Mickelsson said.

“OK, I'm a terrorist. I don't think of it that way.”

“Honey,” Mickelsson said.
“Honey
—!”

“It's OK, Dad. Really, it's OK. I haven't changed.”

After a minute Mickelsson said, “I know. Listen. Be careful. OK?”

“OK.”

“Listen—”

After a long pause, Mark said, “I'll call when I can. OK?”

“OK.”

“Bye, Dad. I love you.”

When he was able, Mickelsson said, “I love you too, Mark.”

The line went dead.

“Good-bye,” Mickelsson said.

In the morning he awakened pinned by his own immense weight to the bed, numb from head to toe, as if he'd gone to bed drunk and had never stirred all night long. It took him a good while to remember what was amiss; the phonecall. Then feeling flooded into him, the power to move. He thought at once of calling Ellen, then thought better of it. He thought of calling Jessie, then again stopped himself. “Christ,” he whispered, something like a prayer. He saw his son moving among dangerous, shadowy strangers far away—Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, North Dakota … wherever the nukes were; but they were everywhere. Some deep misery pulled at him, nothing he could put in words, though in a way he understood it: his son, stepped back from the world as he himself was, but more terribly, perhaps more hopelessly. Mickelsson would never again be as innocent as his son, or as loving of poor stupid humanity. He, Mickelsson, was old and crafty, or capable of craft. He, not his son, should be the terrorist. Passive resistance; very good, conceivably helpful. But he knew now, though he knew no details, that his son was beyond that—rightly, for all he knew. The gentlest child who ever lived.

Against his better judgment, overcoming his cowardice, he dialed Ellen's number. It was her friend that answered, The Comedian.

“Hello?”

“Hello. Willard?”

“Professor?” the voice asked.

“Is Ellen there?”

“She's out right now. Can I give her a message?”

In his mind, Mickelsson saw the young man bent toward the receiver like a Japanese, his black beard shiny, his shirt puckered in by suspenders. His voice contained a slight tremble. Fear, or concern for Ellen's welfare. Maybe hatred.

“Mark called last night,” Mickelsson said. “Tell her he's OK.”

“He called here too.”

“Oh,” Mickelsson said. Irrationally, he felt betrayed. “OK. All right then.”

“Thank you for calling,” the young man said. He spoke gently, as if concerned about Mickelsson's welfare too.

Not far away, Ellen's voice asked, “Who is it?”

“Good-day,” the young man said.

Deliberately, almost without emotion, he struck the receiver hard against the wall to break the young man's eardrum, then hung up.

On the desk in his office he found a note from Lawler, asking him to drop by LN
₂₂₇
—Lawler's office—at his convenience. After his Plato and Aristotle class (uneventful; they were working on their term papers now, and were content to let him lecture), Mickelsson went up to see if Lawler was in. He must try to make it brief. Jessie would be driving out this afternoon to help him set up for the party at his house. Would they make love? Desire and shame warred in his stomach. He took a Di-Gel.

By some computer mix-up, or perhaps by some odd preference of Lawler's, the office was isolated from the rest of the Philosophy Department offices, surrounded by the messy, oddly gray offices of mathematicians. Lawler's door was closed, as usual. No notes, sign-up sheets, or grade-lists were thumbtacked to the small, framed square of cork under the office number. No
New Yorker
cartoons, no posters or pictures, no decorative quips like the one on the door across the hallway from Lawler's:
What is the speed of thought?

Mickelsson knocked and, after a moment, as if slightly alarmed, Lawler called, “Come in. It's open.” The voice was high and thin.

Mickelsson turned the knob, opened the door a foot or so, and poked his head in. In the dimness of the astonishingly cluttered, book-filled room, Lawler sat turned sideways at his desk, thoughtfully chewing a pencil, looking down at the large volume he had open in front of him. Though he did not seem to have glanced up from the book, he said, “Ah, Pete! Sit down.”

Mickelsson opened the door further and entered, gently closing the door behind him. Lawler was dressed, as usual, in his shabby black suit, his shiny steel glasses cutting into the sides of his pale, bloated visage. He was graying and balding—the gray hair unkempt, as if wind-blown—yet he was curiously baby-faced, as if nothing had ever happened to him, no griefs, no joys, no wind to dishevel him but the harmless wind of words. He sat in his old-fashioned mahogany deskchair with his lumpy black shoes resting on a low footstool—he was too short to reach the floor—and his posture was oddly prim, erect, a somehow quaint suggestion of the shy, brilliant fat boy he'd once been and, in some ways, was yet. An antique plush chair stood over by the bookshelf at Lawler's back, a chair that looked much too rickety to sit in, but the only one available. Mickelsson drew it up to Lawler's desk and warily sat down. The chair was not the only antique in the room, he saw now, as his eyes became accustomed to the dimness. Over by the window stood a tall grandfather's clock with a great brass shield for a pendulum and ornate brass disks above the face, gauges of the progress of the moon, perhaps; Mickelsson had no idea. Above Lawler's desk hung—or mournfully loomed—a large oil painting of a castle almost invisible in darkness and fog.

“How are things?” Mickelsson asked. He watched his colleague's face closely, with interest, to see if, this once, he would look up.

“Mmm, yes,” Lawler said, and struck directly at his business, speaking in the fussy, at once timid and sober-minded fashion of a schoolboy certain of nothing in the world but his facts. Jessie had of course been exactly right about him: a lonely man cloaked and disguised in fat and abstraction. “I asked you to come by,” he said apologetically, “because I'm rather concerned about our mutual friend or, that is, student, Michael Nugent.”

“Oh?” Mickelsson said, and waited.

“Do you think he seems well?” Lawler asked. Startlingly, his eyes rose to stare straight into Mickelsson's with what seemed to him—perhaps he was mistaken—dreadful grief.

“He seems to me quite intelligent,” Mickelsson said, hedging.

Lawler moved his hand in a minute gesture of impatience. “Yes, unquestionably. But I've been wondering, observing him—of course it's only conjecture. …”

“Yes, I see,” Mickelsson said, and looked down. “Has Dean Blickstein talked to you, by any chance?”

“Nooo.” There was a hint of alarm in his voice, as if he'd guessed what was coming.

“He's apparently going through a difficult time,” Mickelsson said. He felt, all at once, awash in guilt. Here was Lawler, of all people, the great, aloof intellectual, distressed about the welfare of one of his students, while Mickelsson, superficially more social, by far more conscious of the world around him, even conscious, some of the time, of the parallel between his students' unhappiness and the unhappiness of his son, turned his back on his students as on everything else. He said, blushing, “According to Blickstein, Nugent's father died recently. The boy was extremely depressed by it; in fact it seems he attempted suicide. And then apparently he was hit rather hard by the death of one of his teachers, Professor Warren.”

“Warren?” Lawler echoed vaguely. Again his voice was apologetic, as if the name were no doubt one he should know but, unfortunately, did not.

“It seems they were fairly close,” Mickelsson said. “I'm not sure how close. Apparently, Warren was homosexual, like Nugent.”

“Oh?” Lawler said. He seemed puzzled and a little dismayed by the revelation; he was perhaps not sufficiently of the world to have noticed Nugent's tendency. “That's a burden, I suppose, in our society.” His mind was elsewhere. After a moment he said, looking down at his book again, “It sounds as if there's not much we can do. Is the boy getting counselling?”

“We could suggest it. I haven't, myself.”

“Counselling might help, I suppose.” He didn't sound hopeful. Perhaps he too had known his Rifkins. “Warren,” he said, still trying to place the name. “Was he in our department?”

“Chemistry,” Mickelsson said. “Nugent was in engineering before he came to us.”

“Ah! I see! Yes, I knew that. Chemistry, then. I see. And you think they were lovers?” Lawler's face darkened in embarrassment.

“I wouldn't say that, though of course I wouldn't know. Just good friends, I think.”

“Good friends. Yes, I see.” He raised his right hand, unaware that he was doing it, to rub the space between his eyebrows, pushing up the bridge of his glasses, as if he had the start of a headache. “If there were only something one could do,” he said. He seemed to be speaking more to himself than to Mickelsson.

“Yes,” Mickelsson said.

Slowly, thoughtfully, Lawler began to nod. “Well, thank you for coming,” he said. “I suppose all we can do is watch him, try to be whatever help we can.”

“We can do that much, yes.”

On the way back to his office, Mickelsson pressed his fist to his forehead, hardly knowing what he felt. Mainly he felt like a child returning from the principal's office, found guilty and not properly punished. “Very well, very well,” he muttered angrily, but which of his failures he was confessing was not clear. One thing was certain. He ought to take Michael Nugent aside, have a heart-to-heart talk with him.
Ought,
he brooded. A stupid word, no force. A word for weaklings, Nietzsche would say. A word for survivors, something he apparently was not. No paradox, for Nietzsche.
The species does not grow in perfection: the weak are forever prevailing over the strong.

Jessie arrived three hours later than she'd said, an annoyance not because he had anything planned but because it forced him to another painful recognition: she was one of those people who had a knack for making you worry. He'd pretended to read, glancing now and then at the clock beside the door, sometimes bending close to the window for a look at the weather—clear and frozen as a crystal—sometimes coming alert at the sound of a car, but then time after time the car went on past, another meaningless Not-Jessica, as Sartre would say. When she arrived, she came roaring up to the back door and beeped the horn twice (she drove something small and European-looking), and when he opened the back door and went out to her—no jacket over his T-shirt, hunching his shoulders against the bitter cold and rubbing his hands, whining but widely grinning, “Where were you, Goldfarb? I thought you were dead!”—she opened the car-door (the inside light went on) and called out, “Come on, Mickelsson, lend a muscle!”

The back of the car was piled high with boxes and paper bags which, after they'd carried them in and opened them, he found to be filled with Christmas decorations, napkins and tablecloth, a fruitcake from Texas, a large gilded menorah, which she set up in his window and filled with candles—what he thought of that he wasn't quite sure: he was no bigot, at least not in relation to Jews, and he didn't give a damn what his neighbors thought; but all the same, all the same … She'd brought a creche, which she was now setting up on the coffeetable, handling the figures gently, like a child at her dollhouse, sometimes leaning back to study her arrangement critically, like a painter at her easel; and comparing his feelings about the menorah to hers about the creche, a wave of self-revulsion rose in him. He leaned over beside her, resting one hand on his knee, and waved foolishly down at the glossy, brightly colored figures. “Nighty-bye, Jesus,” he said. She looked up at him, smiling, a sort o£ shadow moving over her features.