Mickelsson's Ghosts Read online

  It began to seem to him that when he’d first stood there, blocked by the thing on the sidewalk in front of him, a car had passed. Surely he was wrong: surely the lights would have shown him what kind of dog it was. No, then; there had definitely been no car. Yet somehow he couldn’t convince himself. He remembered distinctly how, then or at some other time, headlights had shown him the rough bark on the tree just ahead of him, right beside the tilting, crumbling sidewalk, then the bark on the next tree and the next. He looked again at the silver cane-handle, dented now, the left eye of the lioness blanked out, as if blinded.

  “Jesus,” he whispered, almost prayerful, covering his eyes, reliving the moment of the dog’s silent fall. Something nagged for his attention, then at last broke through: a siren, not far off. He listened as if his heart had stopped, then at last realized that it was moving away, not coming nearer—and not a police siren anyway; the ascending and sinking wail that meant somebody’s house was on fire.

  He got up, weak and heavy-limbed, his gorge full of acid, carried the walking-stick to the closet of the bedroom, and hid it in the darkest corner, behind an outgrown suit, the long brown bathrobe he never wore, and a box of old windowshades that had stood there, abandoned, when he’d moved in.

  It was nonsense, of course, all this anguish of fear and guilt. No one had seen. And it had been, strictly speaking, an accident—at worst, an act of legitimate self-defense. The city had a leash law. Even if someone had seen him do it, no one could say he’d done anything wrong; the law was on his side. He compressed his lips. He was beginning to sound like Heidegger in the days of the Führer.

  The kitchen smelled of old coffee grounds, stale tobacco, must and mould. Again vague alarm rose up in him, the peripheral sense of dread that comes when a dream begins to decay toward nightmare. At last the cause of his unease reached his consciousness: a mouse was stirring in the garbage bag or in one of the junk-filled drawers under the sink.

  He looked up in alarm, freezing for an instant, then drawing back his head from the innards of the once-again jammed-up Xerox copying machine, hearing his name called—Geoffrey Tillson, his department chairman, bleating in a voice as thin as a bassoon’s: “Professor Mickelsson, could I ask you to step in here a minute when you’re free?”

  His heart raced, but at once he steadied himself. By the chimpanzee grin old Tillson wore on his gray-bearded face (thrust forward and slung low, level with the rock-solid hump on his back), Mickelsson made out that, almost certainly, it was nothing, just some ordinary nuisance. The chairman, it must be, had a student in there with him, or a disgruntled parent, or someone from the State Education Office, in any case someone to be dealt with gently, petted and stroked, the kind of thing Mickelsson, mainly by virtue of his standing in the department, was thought to be good at. (It was summer vacation. The bastard had no right.) He stole a last look at the snarled-up paper trapped among plastic cams and mysterious metal pins. All day long things had been going wrong for him, as if even inanimate objects were hostile, wary of him. Then he straightened up, took his glasses from the top of the machine, and put them on—bifocal lenses for which everything in the world was slightly too near at hand or far away.

  “I guess I’m more or less free now,” he said, still blushing, and faked a laugh—two sharp hacks. He saw that the secretary’s eye was on him, over behind the desk to the left of Tillson’s open door. She seemed to be watching him suspiciously, and he blushed more deeply. He asked, as if to account for the blush, “Charlotte, do you think you could clear this thing for me?”

  “Surely,” she said, and at once stood up, automatically smoothing her skirt with one hand, giving him one of those pitying, superior smiles. No doubt she was a man-hater, her nice, secretarial smile masking private scorn. All pretty, well-built young women were despisers of men, these days, or all except the born-again Christians. His female students’ papers were full of it. They batted their lashes and swung their rear ends, but their hearts seethed. Not that their anger was necessarily ill-advised. Here he was now, hunched over, looking irate and imploring, as domineering males had been doing for centuries, ever since they’d learned it was frequently quicker than hitting those fat little asses with sticks. He thought of saying, sheathing anger in a joke, “I’ll pay you of course. Keep track of your time!” But the girl was still covertly eyeing him, and he decided he’d better not. They already had reason enough to believe he was crazy.

  He worked on his expression, rolling down and buttoning his cuffs again, then moved toward Tillson’s inner sanctum, smiling, holding his hand at half-ready, prepared for the necessary handshake. He entered with his head tipped forward like a bull’s, one eyebrow raised, eyes dead serious, the rest of his features assembled to a hearty grin. They could always count on old Mickelsson, he thought; madman Mickelsson, born for better things, maybe for selling used cars. He was aware of Tillson’s watchful eye and the queer, no doubt accidental gesture of the right hand raised toward his grizzled chin, two fingers lifted above the rest and aiming outward, like a claw raised to strike, or a papal blessing, or the sly cobra sign of ancient Tibetan art. The young man who turned to shake Mickelsson’s hand had such glassy eyes and pallor of skin, color like a dead man’s, that Mickelsson was for an instant almost thrown. Careful, he thought, and tightened the screws on his expression, letting no muscle slip.

  “Professor Mickelsson,” Tillson said, beaming with fake pleasure, “this is Michael Nugent. He’s transferring into philosophy from engineering.” He continued to beam, head twisted painfully up toward Mickelsson’s, as if tickled pink to have the honor of introducing two such marvels. Tillson’s black trousers were baggy at the knees. His shapeless black coat hung forlorn on the back of his chair. His tie was wide and wrinkled, not quite clean.

  “Glad to meet you, Michael,” Mickelsson said. He gave him a nod and put the smile on energize. “Good to have you with us! Glad you saw the light!”

  The boy mumbled something, accepting Mickelsson’s football-coach handshake without returning it—not just responding limply, but actively refusing to respond (or so it seemed)—and his eyes, meeting Mickelsson’s, threw a challenge. Clearly something was eating the boy. The leaden skin, the reddened eyelids, the nervous, weak mouth like a child’s all gave ominous warning. He wore a blue, pressed workshirt with starch in the collar, and neat, pressed slacks, such clothes as nobody in philosophy had worn since the fifties. His elbows and knuckles and the tip of his nose were red, as if scrubbed with Fels Naptha. Mickelsson drew his hand back.

  “Professor Mickelsson, as you may know, is our department’s most distinguished philosopher,” Tillson said, and he put one hand on Nugent’s arm, the other on Mickelsson’s, preparing to press them subtly toward the door. Mickelsson smiled on, though he knew pretty well what the praise was worth, and he kept his eyes, with their familiar look of (he knew) intense, crazed interest, on the young man’s face. What a world, Mickelsson was thinking. Tillson and himself, arch-enemies, shepherding another poor innocent—fugitive from the clean, honest field of Engineering—into the treacherous, ego-bloated, murder-stained hovel of philosophy. But Mickelsson was a team man, at least when he was set up for public view—had been one all his life, even here in the Department of Philosophy he none too secretly despised. The show of happy solidarity rose in him instinctively, which was one of the reasons Tillson called on him in delicate cases like this one, whatever the delicacy of the moment might be (he would learn soon enough, he knew).

  “What I thought, Pete,” Tillson said, “was that maybe you could run over Mr. Nugent’s program with him—help him figure out what he’ll need, what he might take first, and so on. What he might manage to get out of. Ha ha. Little fatherly guidance.” His face took on, briefly, a startled look; then he jerked the smile wider, the edges of his moustache twitching from the strain, and asked Nugent, “Did I remember to give you your papers back?” He looked over at the low table in front of the couch where he liked to take cat-naps—the ta
bletop was littered with professional magazines and a clumsy stack of student papers—then over at the desk, finally at the young man’s left hand, rising now as if of its own accord to show a ragged sheaf of forms and the computerized Fall Schedule of Courses. “Ah, good, good! If my head weren’t screwed on—” He raised his smile toward Mickelsson again, gave a little wink, and, as if without knowing he was doing it, began pushing Mickelsson and Nugent gently out of the room.

  “Fine! No problem!” Mickelsson said, so heartily that probably not even Tillson understood that nothing could be farther from the truth.

  As soon as the three of them were outside his office, Tillson pretended to have a memory flash and, catching Mickelsson’s arm again, said, “Oh, there’s something I meant to ask you, Pete.” He turned to the boy. “Would you excuse us just a moment? It shouldn’t take more than a second or two.” He laughed. He was already leading Mickelsson back in, drawing the door shut behind him, tossing the boy one last apologetic nod. “Sorry about this, Pete,” he said when the door was closed. “I know you don’t deal with undergraduate advising—”

  “What’s up?” Mickelsson asked, hoping to cut past the chit-chat. He shifted his eyes away, forcing himself not to stare at Tillson’s hump.

  “You do go straight at things, don’t you,” Tillson said, but smiling, edging away toward his desk. He cranked his head around, rolling his eye back at Mickelsson like a sheep. “I got a call from the dean about Nugent, out there. It seems he’s been going through something of a crisis—attempted suicide, apparently depressed about the death of his father. A sad, sad business.” He shook his head, involuntarily raising two fingers to his beard. “I don’t know all the details, I’m afraid. It seems Blickstein and the boy had a talk, and I understand the boy’s dead set on”—Tillson’s ironic smile twitched briefly—” ‘the consolation of philosophy.’ ” Again he rolled his eyes up at Mickelsson. “I’m sure you’ll agree that’s more your line than mine. Maybe more your line than anybody else’s in this department.”

  “It’s true,” Mickelsson said, unable to resist, “I do still try to deal with life-and-death issues from time to time. But it hardly makes me a psychiatrist.”

  “Yes of course. I realize—”

  “It sounds to me as if the young man shouldn’t be in school at all,” Mickelsson pushed on, slightly reddening. “If we’re so hard up for students we’ve got to rob the state hospitals—”

  “Now listen! Take it easy!” Tillson said, surprised, reaching out to touch Mickelsson’s forearm. “It’s not a question of state hospitals!” He peered into Mickelsson’s eyes as if trying to read his peculiar, twisted mind. “I must say,” he said—the smile twitched, then vanished—“I have no idea whether or not he belongs in school—”

  “Yes, I see,” Mickelsson broke in. “I’m sorry.” Before he could stop himself, he wiped his forehead with his shirtsleeve. “You’re right, I’m probably the one who should advise him.” He forced a laugh.

  “You’ve been under a strain,” Tillson said, somewhat questioningly, as if to see if that were it.

  “It’s that God damned apartment,” Mickelsson said, and laughed again.

  “You ought to get out of there,” Tillson said. For an instant he looked much older, distinctly smaller. “You oughtta get a really good lawyer, Pete. It’s just not right.”

  Mickelsson looked down, abruptly formal. “We’ll see,” he said. “Right now I’d better go deal with our angry young friend.”

  Nugent sat rigid, as if straining every muscle to appear relaxed, nothing moving but his rapidly blinking red eyelids. His red-knuckled hands lay loosely folded, and his knees hung far apart, the outsides of his upper legs jammed against the fronts of the chair-arms. He sat to Mickelsson’s right, in the wooden chair Mickelsson privately called his learner’s seat. He had a disconcerting way of staring straight at you, or into you, his childish, vulnerable-looking lips slightly parted. His eyelashes were colorless, almost invisible.

  He said nothing as Mickelsson—puffing from time to time at his pipe, making furtive, tight gestures—explained the content of the philosophy courses available during the coming semester, the general requirements for the B.A. degree, and, in joking, careful fashion, something of the character of the teachers Nugent would run into. He recommended Garret’s survey of modern philosophers, Lawler’s Aquinas—“more for Lawler than for Aquinas,” he said, and laughed—then, grudgingly, mentioned Tillson’s logic course. Almost without knowing he was doing it he avoided mention of the lower-level Plato and Aristotle course he himself would be teaching, nor did he mention the pop courses thrown in to attract non-majors and swell the F.T.E.—The Philosophy of Death and Dying, Human Sexuality, The Essential Karl Marx. As he spoke he made notes for the boy to take with him—carefully pencilled, succinct phrases that cut deep into the yellow, legal-sized pad he wrote on. Though the world was muggily baking, out beyond the partly drawn Venetian blinds, the office was cool, all shade, almost tomblike. A flat smoke-cloud hung above their heads. On most of three sides the room was walled by books.

  The boy asked, breaking in on him, “What about the Plato and Aristotle course?”

  “Hmm,” Mickelsson said, looking down at the schedule, leaning his forehead onto the fingertips of his left hand, elbow on the desk. He laid the pipe on his growing stack of unopened mail. (It could wait. He wasn’t supposed to come in to his office anyway during the summer.) “Well, yes, that’s open,” he said. “Of course the Plato-Aristotle course is basically for freshmen. I’m afraid you might find it—”

  “It’s unusual, isn’t it?” Nugent asked. “Senior professors teaching freshmen? Most departments I don’t think they do that. They throw the freshmen to the grad students.”

  “Well, actually,” Mickelsson said, then stalled. The young man’s stare was unnerving. At last, heartily, cocking his eyebrow, he said, “Never underestimate the power of conviction, Mr. Nugent! No matter how good he is—no matter how mightily he believed in the beginning—when a man’s taught for fifteen, twenty years, he can begin to leak steam at the joints. These graduate students … The biggest problem we have with our grad students is they put too much time into their teaching and not enough into their coursework.” He grinned.

  Nugent raised his arm for a quick, impatient wave, then returned it to artificial rest. An extremely odd gesture, Mickelsson thought, dropping the grin and staring hard at the computer-printed words PLATO/ARISTOTLE, 10 A.M., M.W., RM. 27 F.A. BLDC. (MICKELSSON), NO PREREQ. Before he could make out what to think of Nugent’s fierce little wave, the boy was saying, “A friend of mine told me that most of this department does ‘analytic,’ you’re practically the only one that does real philosophy.”

  “Well, ‘real,’ ” Mickelsson said, picking up the pipe again, allowing himself an ironic half-smile. He glanced at the middle of Nugent’s forehead and let the sentence trail off.

  “I’m after the real thing, whatever level it is.” Something faintly distressing had entered the boy’s voice, a sort of catch, as if he were fighting strong emotion.

  Mickelsson sat very still for an instant, then put his pencil down, slowly leaned back in his chair, lowered his chin to his chest, and, holding the pipe, interlaced his fingers over his paunch, avoiding the young man’s eyes. After a long moment’s thought he said, more weary than ironic this time: “ ‘The real thing.’ ” He stole a furtive glance at his watch: 2 p.m. Again he raised one eyebrow, sliding his eyes toward the boy. “Mr. Nugent, let me tell you something. If I were you, I wouldn’t pin my life’s highest hopes on philosophy. It’s all right as entertainment—keeps you off the streets—but it’s always been better at framing questions that have a chance of making sense than at figuring out answers. In fact there are some philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein, for instance, who claim that getting the question right is the answer.” He’d meant to smile as he said it, but no smile came. He glanced down at his watch again. The hairs curling over the leather strap were silver. “B
elieve me, I can tell you from bitter experience—” he began soberly.

  “Philosophy’s the only discipline there is that even cares about figuring things out,” Nugent said. He seemed to grow more pale by the minute. “All the others, except maybe chemistry, are just tinkering. History, mathematics, English lit, poly sci—” The very names seemed to stir his indignation. “Don’t worry, I’ve thought it through! It may be that—” He paused, swallowed, then forced himself on, slightly sneering: “It may be that certain individual philosophers are not what they ought to be“—he gave Mickelsson what might or might not be an accusing look—”but philosophy itself per se is the highest activity known to man, and certain individual philosophers, at least—” He broke off to get back control of his voice, then continued as if angrily, “I don’t mean to fawn or anything, but I know how you live, I know how much—” Again he was forced to break off.

  Mickelsson sat perfectly still, dreadful revelation spreading through him. Was it worship, then, that made Nugent stare? He said rather sharply, “It sounds to me like what you’re looking for is religion. You know how Kant described philosophy? One man holding the sieve while the other milks the he-goat.’“

  Nugent said nothing, simply went on staring at him, blinking.