Mickelsson's Ghosts (87 page)

He saw in his mind poor sickly Nietzsche, dreaming on one of his long, solitary mountain walks, pausing to lean his stick against a rock and scribble more notes to himself—yellow-eyed and bent with thought (always nauseous, changing to new diets), looking up, rapt and envious, at his vision of the beefy, brainless hero he could never be and partly hated, the Prussian officer with his fine moustache and fat white horse, too stupid and arrogantly sure of himself to put two thoughts together or even mind his inability, beaming with joy of life, prancing his horse through the high, frail flowerbeds of mountain-dwelling peasants, expressing without even knowing it his Will-to-Power. “Ah yes!” cries the hunchback in black, his thin Protestant smile atwitch, all complexity falling for the moment out of his head. This, the mighty Prussian officer, was life, this witless, jubilant golden lion; and he, Nietzsche, with his ghastly stomachaches, headaches, and chills, his complicated worries about the opinions of Kant and Martin Luther—Nietzsche with his fevers and lost-sinner anxieties and congenital shortness of breath—was Life's enemy and failure, humiliation. He shakes a yellow bony finger and cries, dancing on spindly legs, “God dies of pity, made ill through the suffering with which He has too much empathized! To demand pity of the strong is to demand that they become weak!” He smiles, rolls his eyes, shakes out a second yellow finger. His baggy black pants and black coattails flap in the wind. “And in the second place, or possibly the third”—he has lost count and, in his abject love for the Prussian officer, is resolved not to care—“to elevate compassion to society's first principle is to deny the Will-to-Life: in fact, to will Death!” He begins to walk in a tight little circle, hands clasped behind his back, head thrown forward like a duck's. Bony-white. “Life itself is
essentially,
not incidentally, appropriation, injury, the overpowering of the alien and weak. Life is oppression, hard-heartedness, the imposition of form, one's
own
form.
This
is why the world gets worse and worse. Mankind, like every other type of animal, produces a surplus of the abortive, diseased, degenerate, feeble, and necessarily suffering.
This
is why ‘spirit' steals the march on the pure blind and purblind activity of the Prussian officer—‘spirit,' by which I mean ‘caution, patience, cunning, dissembling, masterful self-control, and whatever is cheap, false mimicry of life.' ” He falls to his knees as if struck by a lightning bolt or the accidental backlash of the officer's merry whip. “I'm a slave, that's my secret. The well-born officer feels himself happy. He has no need to construct his happiness artificially, by glancing at his enemies and then, as we men of resentment are obliged to do, persuading himself, lying to himself, saying to himself, as we lesser men do, that he's better off, at least, than Herr So-and-So. Slave morality thrives on external stimuli: its action is, through and through, reaction. The officer
requires
no external reality: he is therefore,
himself,
the Worldl” All a metaphor, granted, for his true supermen, the philosopher, the poet, and the saint. But what a metaphor!

Yet there were indeed supermen; men who, like Mickelsson's father, had given up thought long ago: men who simply acted—not out of pity but with infallible faith and love: in the way (not an exclusive way) of—at their best—the Christians Nietzsche denied the existence of, except for that first sweet idiot Christian on the cross.

Then the dark thought crossed his mind that it had been for his mother that Mickelsson's father had worked on the house, room after room—painting and wallpapering, changing walls around, refashioning doors and windows; and now the house stood empty, discoloring and sagging on its hill, his mother living in one room, a guest of relatives. While Mickelsson, for the sake of no one, fixed up this house.

He shied from the thought; then, catching himself, closing his fists, returned to it. Perhaps he should bring his mother here to live with him. (He remembered her sitting in the livingroom of the big old house in Wisconsin, reading or writing letters, sometimes looking up with a start when the clock struck, saying to herself, like one brought out of eternity for a moment into time, “Well!”—not with disapproval, simply registering time's existence before leaving it again. The wardrobe top was filled with pictures of family and friends. On the top of the spindly mahogany desk where she wrote, filling the stationery's center space then filling up the margins, or on the stand beside the overstuffed chair in which she read her
Thoughts for Today
or
The Upper Room,
there would be flowers from her garden in a pressed-glass vase.) It had not been possible, when he was still with Ellen, to ask his mother to come live with him; but he could do it now. Why not? It was true that she tired and annoyed him a little, telling and retelling the same old stories, dwelling endlessly on what seemed to him trivia—what the mailman had said, how repairs on the local church organ had come to less than the estimate, how the Pedersens' dog had a rare disease and the Pedersens had not yet told the children. But it was true too that she was a comfort to him. In his mother's presence he found all the great modern problems small. Life's supposed meaninglessness was not an issue: the sunlight on her book was enough. Funerals, marriages, even torture in El Salvador, Argentina, and Brazil—the tyrannies the new man in the White House praised and aided, as had his predecessor more secretively—fell into place. One did what one could do, and what one couldn't do was in God's hands. Solemn thoughts on how God might perhaps not exist were of no interest, like the thought that, possibly, walking in pensive solitude through a field, one might be killed by a mysterious blue boulder—the discharge of a chemical toilet—fallen from an airplane full of businessmen, pretty girls, and academics, a mile overhead. She would brighten the place in a way the new wallpaper, paint, and sanded floors could not match. What would she feel about the ghosts? Not much. Perhaps she would engage them in conversation.

Thinking about his mother, he saw the house in a new way; that is, took new pride in how much he'd accomplished on, relatively speaking, so little money. True, he owed Owen Thomas his soul, and because of the house still hadn't paid that five hundred dollars to the Stearnses for the Jeep repairs. All the same … Though more of the rooms than not were empty, he'd wonderfully brightened them—his father and Uncle Edgar would approve. So would the I.R.S., of course, if they decided to seize it. It would be worth far more now than when he'd bought it. For the first time he realized just how painful that would be. He was proud of everything about the place—the harmony of colors flowing from room to room, the professional neatness of his carpentry and painting. That he'd managed it all in so little time was astonishing. His first quasi-mystical feeling about the place had been right: it had become his expression, a projection of the self he meant to be, visible evidence that what he hoped for in his life and character might perhaps be attainable.

He closed his eyes to sleep again, and instantly his mood darkened. He remembered again all he ought to do—go in and help Jessie, if it was not too late; see the dean, perhaps the president, on this business of Philosophy Department courses usurped by sociology, make a call to the Garrets—he hadn't spoken to them since the night of the party. He should call his attorney in Montrose, find out where he stood with the I.R.S.; deal with the once-again piling-up mail; figure out where his finances stood, how much he owed, how he might hope eventually to pay it, what he could do about the money due his wife, not to mention the fuel and electric bills. He relaxed toward sleep. It was hopeless, of course. He remembered the murdered fat man.

When he next awakened—he seemed to have slept for a long time, dreamless—it was still pitchdark. He had an immediate sense that some danger had awakened him. He sniffed for smoke, thinking that perhaps the woodstove downstairs had overheated and set the couch or the stack of newspapers on fire; but the air around his bed was cold and clean, and no hint of light came through the open door into the hallway. He waited, listening, but no, it was not fire. Then his scalp crawled and he knew—he had been through this before—there was someone in the room with him, a darker place in the darkness, and the next instant he knew who it was: Theodosia Sprague. Her rage was all around him, like a field of force. A slight weight pressed down on his foot through the covers and an icy sensation like snake poison raced up his leg: she was touching him! He would have cried out, but his voice froze in his throat. The hand lifted and, perhaps, moved away.

He was terrified now, weak as water all over, though he knew even in his fear that she would probably not harm him, would not wish to even if she could. Her rage had nothing to do with him. So he reasoned, not that he convinced himself. He was part of her world, therefore vulnerable to her madness. He waited, holding his breath, gazing at the solid black wedge in the surrounding darkness, both hands pressing hard on his chest to calm the surging of his heart. As his thought unclouded he realized that part of his shock and bafflement came from his feeling that her presence was almost a greater violation of natural law than the fact that a ghost might appear in the first place. Somehow without realizing it he'd settled it in his mind that now that he knew the whole story, more or less—assuming it wasn't all madness or a dream—now that he knew of the death of the boy, the old woman's long-delayed murder of her husband-brother and her subsequent hanging—the hauntings would end, their spirits at rest. Not so, apparently. She was here in the room with him, as angry as ever. Now he was feeling the familiar pain: arthritic fire in every joint. He couldn't straighten his fingers or back. He should have known. Nu-gent's ghost should have taught him, assuming that too was not madness or a dream. The Spragues' tragedy would never end because their deaths had solved nothing: killing the old man had not in the least solved the old woman's problem; even when the knot on the hangman's rope snapped her neck, the silent welling of rage or howl to the universe for justice was still in her, stronger than before.

He sat up, his head painfully bent forward, his eyes straining to penetrate the darkness, but still he saw nothing, felt only the rage pouring out of her spirit like thick black vapors from a poisoned well. He felt some shift in things and struggled to understand it, every nerve alert. At last he understood. The center of evil was moving, drifting toward the door, perhaps vaguely searching for its companion in damnation, the brother who'd failed life, loved too feebly, whom the old woman hated and meant to kill. Again and again. Kill until at last it dawned on her—as perhaps it had almost done when she'd reached toward Mickelsson—that there were others deserving of her rage.

Later, Mickelsson could not remember lying back down. Perhaps the old woman's visit was also a dream.

He found Wittgenstein on his mind, another of Nietzsche's children. Why was it that his thought kept turning, lately, to Wittgenstein, in whom he'd never felt any interest? It was almost as if someone else kept bringing him up. Wittgenstein with his desiccate world of facts, not things, his propositions, empirical “states of affairs,” his later “language games,” but throughout it all his stubborn insistence that anything beyond the limits of mathematics or articulate thought, anything in the province of his utterly mysterious God, must be consigned to silence.

Random lines from the
Tractatus
came to him, dredged up from heaven knew where—with heaven knew what inaccuracy or disjointedness. He let them come as they would, his brain leaden. It occurred to him—he did not dwell on it—that somewhere in his thought, a darker place in the surrounding darkness, the form of Geoffrey Tillson sat, un-moving, patiently waiting, like someone arrived ahead of time at a funeral.

The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists
—
and if it did, it would have no value.

If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental.

What makes it not-accidental cannot lie
within
the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental.

And so it is clear that ethics cannot be put into words.

If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, the eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way our visual field has no end.

God does not reveal himself in the world.

Again he had the strong sense that someone was in the room with him—had perhaps been sitting very quiet, watching him, for some time. It was not the old woman; there was no trace of her crackling anger. After a moment's thought he was sure it was not the old man either. He listened, hardly breathing, but whoever it was—if it was anyone—made no sound. (Luther's advice: “When the devil comes at night to worry me, this is what I say: ‘Devil, I have to sleep now. That is God's commandment, for us to work by day and sleep by night.' If he keeps on nagging me and trots out my sins, then I answer: ‘Sweet devil, I know the whole list. Also write on it that I have shit in my breeches. …' ”) Mickelsson stirred himself, raising both hands from under the covers to rub his face and eyes, bring feeling back. How strange, he thought, that he reasoned soberly on whom it might be when he knew perfectly well that it couldn't be anyone. He was far gone, then. It was curious that a man could go mad and watch the whole process like a scientist. When it reached its extreme and, as he'd done before, he dressed himself up in outrageous attire and committed some oddity, talking to dead animals in the middle of a street, and he was dragged to some hospital and brought to his senses again, would the whole experience be flown from his head? How could thoughts so lucid fall out of reality entirely, like the popular songs and dance-steps of ancient Rome?