Mickelsson's Ghosts (74 page)

“You don't know,” she said. “You're not Jewish.”

There it was again. He shook his head. “He's rabbinical,” Mickelsson said. “He'll be just.”

“He hates Jewish women.”

Mickelsson laughed. “Shall I shoot him for you? Shall I shoot them all?”

“That's not funny, Mickelsson. You don't know how great the odds are that I'd say yes.”

Again he shook his head, touched by the way she instinctively blocked pity.
The pity that makes us melancholy and ill.
“Is there anything I can do?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said. “Help me. Threaten people! Write to your Congressman!”

“They're making you cynical, Jessie,” he said.

“If you want to do something, do something,” she said. “I leave the details to you.”

“I will. Whatever I can,” he said. “Don't worry.”

“Whatever,” she said. Then, after a moment: “Anyway, none of that's what I called you about. What are you doing for Christmas?”

“I don't know.” His voice, he was sure, betrayed his alarm at the question. “I thought I'd try to miss the whole thing. Get roaring drunk, maybe.”

“Aren't you just a little tired of that solution?”

He sighed, staring blindly at the mail he'd been mindlessly sorting. “What's the expression, ‘Don't shake my china cabinet'?”

“Something like that. Listen, you want to spend Christmas with me?”

He frowned, trying to think.

“Hello?” she coaxed.

“No,” he said at last. “I don't think I could handle that, Jessie.”

“OK,” she said. “Just a passing thought.”

“Thanks, though. I really appreciate—”

“Skip it.” The voice was unusually sharp, as if she thought he were trying to start a fight. “Well, that's all I had to say, I guess.” Then as usual she relented. “Listen, Pete, if anything happens—those ghosts, I mean … or anything …”

“I'll phone you right away.”

“I mean it,” she said. Then apparently a new thought occurred to her, or she remembered something in his voice earlier that had left her unsatisfied. “You're sure you told me everything that happened—when you saw them, I mean? They didn't try to do anything—hurt you, I mean, or talk to you?”

“They
didn't,” he said, then instantly could have kicked himself.

As though he were staring right at her he saw her lunge forward, her face suddenly tense. “Pete! What are you saying? Somebody
else
tried to hurt you?”

“No,” he said quickly, raising his hand palm out to calm her, as if she too could see across miles and through walls. “But somebody talked to me.”

Even more reluctantly than he'd told her about the old people, he told her about his phone conversation with Michael Nugent.

After he finished she was silent for a long time. “You're not making this up?”

“Do I sound like it?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Something else,” he said abruptly, “a cat's moved in with me. Big gray and white one, big as a house.”

She was silent again, then said, “I know about the cat. I saw him when you were at the hospital with the Garrets.” Again her tone was faintly accusing, as if his mentioning the cat seemed to her frigid. She was right. “That's awful about your student,” she said. “Peter, are you positive you didn't dream all this?”

“Not positive, but I don't think so. It's a terrible thought, isn't it? Ghosts worrying, wandering around in the dark, crying—”

“It sounds like a nightmare. It can't be like that. You know those books about people who died and were brought back to life—Dr. Ross, is that it?”

“You're an optimist, Jessie.”

“Do you honestly believe …” she began, then let it trail off. “Well,” she said, and after a few seconds, with a laugh, “Thanks for cheering me up.”

It was evident that his gloom had infected her, his spirit reaching out, as Nugent's had done, filling her house with shadows.

“Well, I better let you go, kiddo,” she said.

“OK. It was good to talk to you, Jessie. Sorry I haven't been more fun. If there's anything at all I can do for you—”

“I'll keep it in mind. Bye, Pete.”

“Good-bye, Jess. Keep the ole chin up!”

The dialtone came.

His gloom hung on for hours, like the cabbage smell in the hallway outside Donnie's apartment. Not even weight-lifting could free him of it. If he were Nietzsche, he thought, he would write some malicious, sarcastic tract—against “Faith” in Martin Luther, for instance:
an incapacity for Christian works
—
a personal fact shrouded by an extreme mistrust whether every kind of action is not altogether sin and from the Devil.
That was Mickelsson's situation, of course—not to mention Nietzsche's, though Nietzsche had shrouded it in clowning and rant. It was the situation of the modern world, announced by Nietzsche's hammer resounding on the door of the emptied church. Bullshit rhetoric.
Good-bye! Keep the ole chin up!
No doubt Dr. Martinus had secretly suspected it, that not only his enemies' opinions were “donkey fart,” but his own ravings about the world as shit were of the world. Had begun to suspect the truth within fifteen seconds of the famous lightning bolt that nearly burned his cock off (so he'd joked) and startled from his lips the vow that if God would spare him he'd sign up as a monk. Certainly must have suspected it later, gouty, with coarse features—“trying to lend them a suffering and tender expression,” a not too friendly visitor wrote—or in his own words “gross, fat, gray, green, overworked, overloaded, overwhelmed. …” With good-peasant honesty had paid for the secret fear that all he maintained might be bullshit by ladling scatology into everything he said, more foul than the devils who threw their bedpans at the doctor, as he threw his at them, or so he claimed; more foul-mouthed than mad, tortured Jonathan Swift—and foul-mouthed even before he'd been struck by kidney disease, when he was driven insane by (as was fitting) his own piss. A man of profound depressions, and for reason enough: Machiavellian, steeped in all seven deadly sins, even a rather peculiar twist of lechery, arranging with his friend that they screw their wives at the same time and think of one another; even in the noblest causes a liar and, like Nietzsche, buffoon: “Not only children, but also great lords, are best beguiled into truth, in their own best interest, by conveying it to them through foolishness. Fools are tolerated and listened to by those who cannot suffer the truth from a wise man.” Always in action, a veritable dynamite keg of will—he'd scribbled and scribbled, volume after volume—though unable to justify works of any kind. … Lover and lute-player, small flashing eyes, thick crooked lips, Renaissance roué composing tunes for his heavenly sweetheart—and battling with Kate about a husband's right to take mistresses. The filthiest, basest of swine, in short, whatever his genius—as Mickelsson's grandfather would admit, wincing. Much to the old man's credit. He was the only practicing Lutheran Mickelsson had ever met who would admit the truth about the founder. The old man had said (it was a family legend: the only near-joke he'd ever been heard to utter), “Think what he'd have been if he hadn't been kept busy with all those books!”

The fact remained: action was a problem. What was one to do if he knew that every movement of the spirit was poisoned at the source, as if by uremia? Luther had an out: he could claim that in whatever good he did he was the instrument of God, and in the rest the tool of devils. And Nietzsche, turning with all the rage of his brilliant, ferocious mind against Luther, had a hiding place: though
his
works might be filth, all malice and satire, his devil-dance and chittering pointed the way, by ironic contrast, to something nobler: the serene, spiritually mighty
Übermensch.
But it was a long time now since the announcement of that as yet unfulfilled possibility.

Perhaps not quite unfulfilled. One might point to Mickelsson's old teacher McPherson, or to the supermen of science, like Einstein, who had claimed that he'd perceived as a young man the vanity of hope and striving. “I also perceived the cruelty of such effort, which hypocrisy and glittering words concealed more carefully in those days than they do now.” And so had turned first to conventional religion, which had failed to withstand his “youthfully critical scrutiny,” then had fled to a surer harmonious sphere, “that beautiful order glimpsed by Kepler, Galileo, Newton. …” The trick had worked better for McPherson than for Einstein, apparently. But say it was true that devotion to some mighty realm of thought meant escape from the vanity of hope and striving. What switch turned on the gift for caring about the possibly beautiful structure of the universe? Or for that matter the left horn of the dung beetle? He, Mickelsson, had been through all that: had written books that were sound and original, books that had been scorned and misunderstood, and had learned that, in a sense, the lack of reward didn't matter much. It was the
practice
that mattered. MacIntyre's word. In the practice of philosophy, as in the practice of law, or novel-writing, or almost anything else, one gained things inexpressible to anyone not in the practice; no harm that what you gained would die with you, to be regained, inexpressibly, by someone else. But when one day all interest in that casual gaining dried up, what then? What switch could turn life back on? And if one knew it was a simple mechanical switch—some pill, or “love,” or “the sense of community”—would one deign to reach up to the switch? That was the world's inheritance from Nietzsche, though Nietzsche had not faced the matter squarely. If God was dead, human dignity gone, all values emptied, why not just say “Fuck it”—push the button? The existentialists—Zarathustra's most tedious apes—had an answer; but they hardly counted: war babies. Any fool could get it up in time of war. It was like the glorious secret of present-day East European fiction:
1943. Woman finds piece of bread; sneaks off; joyfully eats it.
No one had the right, anymore, to be quite that sentimentally elemental.

Better to act with fully conscious stupidity: for instance, steal the fat man's stolen money. A tide of darkness washed over him. It was of course no longer a case for Dostoevski. Raskolnikov was a nice boy; his poverty was real and legitimate. No Russian, not even a modern Russian, could get himself into a position like Mickelsson's. He was still up to his old tricks. Knowing that his bills were more than he could handle, he would refuse to look at them for weeks at a time, even when the bills came by registered mail; meanwhile his salary would go into his account automatically, so that the account would build like a rich man's—though Mickelsson, that very moment, might be sweating at the risk of a twenty-dollar check. Then, because nothing had gone wrong for a time, he would write checks to everyone—mainly his wife and his wife's old creditors, putting off his own, which were more recent—and six out of ten of the checks he wrote would bounce, five-dollar service charge each time. Meanwhile the pile of mail remained virtually untouched.

Would he feel guilty, he wondered, if he stole the fat man's money?

The question was absurd. Of course he would! So he told himself, angrily gesturing—standing back from himself, watching the performance. It would be good, God knew, to have Donnie and the child taken care of, generously taken care of and out of his life.

He saw himself smashing through the fat man's door, then shook his head, banishing the thought as he would a nightmare. One impression remained: he would not feel especially guilty.

In his mailbox the next morning, he found a card from Ernest diSapio of the I.R.S. “Possible irregularities in all tax-forms filed by you since 1970. Suggest you drop in or phone.” He read the card three times, thought about the fact that it had been sent on a postcard, for all to see, then laughed.

It was perhaps his anger at diSapio that got him moving. He dressed himself up as if for church, went out into the biting, snapping cold, ground futilely for several minutes on the starter of the Jeep, then tried the blue car, which came to life at once. He got out to shovel himself a path to the road, then got in again and backed out of the barn. He did then something the strangeness of which he would recognize only much later. Perhaps, as Jessie would claim, it was a psychic hunch that made him act. Perhaps it was luck shading toward grace, the same mystery that would prompt him to give the thing to Lepatofsky's daughter a few hours from now. Driving past the Jeep, he saw the troll-doll hanging from the rear-view mirror, and on impulse got out, unsnapped the pull-chain that attached the troll-doll to the Jeep and transferred it to the rear-view mirror of the Chevy. Then he drove down to Susquehanna.

Though he knocked again and again at Donnie Matthews' door, there was no answer. Very well; he had errands enough to keep him busy. He would come back. Slowly, over roads that were glare ice over hardpacked snow—except on steep hills, where cinders had been put down—he drove to Montrose. There he found the lawyer he'd dealt with before—deaf, blind, coughing Mr. Cook—and gave him the card from diSapio, gave him Finney's address and phone number, and briefly outlined, shouting and gesturing, his problems with the I.R.S. “There may be ways around that,” Mr. Cook said, tapping his fingertips over his chest. “If you were under psychiatric care, as you say, we might just,
ipso facto,
have a toe hold.” The fines and penalties might be questioned,
inter alia,
perhaps negotiated. He smiled. A man who loved his craft.
Ipso jure,
they had several means of stalling for time. Mr. Cook could of course promise nothing, but looking a long way down the road …

He went back to his car feeling obscenely grateful, blessed. He'd left only one thing undone that he wished he might have done. He'd like to have asked about those ghosts. But the question was too awkward, and then there was the barrier of Cook's deafness. During the half hour he'd spent in Cook's office, the sky, he found, had darkened, huge bluish-brown clouds like bruises overhead—more like thunderclouds than like snow-clouds. They made the whole town mysteriously dark, as if some Biblical miracle were about to happen, or the sun were slipping into eclipse. Even this sudden, surprising darkness did not dampen his mood, that is, steal from him his sense of born-again relief, now that his troubles—some of them anyway—were in professional hands; but the darkness did do something queer, for a matter of seconds, to his imagination. When he'd backed into Public Street and was just nosing the Chevy toward the courthouse, he suddenly hit his brakes, believing he saw something that he knew could not be there. In front of the courthouse steps there was a tall, black gallows, and hanging from it, perfectly still except for a slight movement of her dress in what might have been a light summer breeze, he saw a woman. He saw the hanged woman with perfect clarity—bulging eyes, dark tongue—and then the body and gallows were both gone, the sky softening to wintry gray. He understood that it had been some kind of vision or waking nightmare. Already he had trouble believing he'd really seen it, the whole thing scattering from his mind like the atoms of a dream. On the sidewalks no one looked up at the sky, no one had noticed anything.