Mickelsson's Ghosts Read online

  Mickelsson’s scalp tingled unpleasantly. He cleared his throat and sat forward, laying the pipe aside with finality, shot his cuffs, then picked up his pencil and scowled at the notes on the pad. “I’d definitely recommend that you take Lawler’s Aquinas,” he said, businesslike, conscious that he was blushing a little, “and Tillson’s Introduction to Logic.” He underlined them, then put brackets around them. “As for the Plato-Aristotle course—” The hand holding the pencil gave a tight little wave, dismissive.

  “Maybe I could get the book and read into it a little, before the semester starts. If you could give me the title—”

  Mickelsson scowled harder, every nerve alert, like a diver in the presence of large, groping tentacles, then abruptly gave way and wrote down the title of the course, the time and place, and the two required texts. “It’s two titles, actually,” he said. He erased the crossed l in Plato and retouched the loop. Then he said, glancing at Nugent, “I see you haven’t taken any Greek.” He said it for no honorable reason, simply to throw a small impediment in the way of the young man’s devouring earnestness.

  “Not yet,” Nugent said, and looked uneasy.

  “Let’s put you down for Greek, then.” Neatly, pressing firmly, he wrote down Greek 101, M.W.F., 4-5 p.m., Rm. 226 Lib. N. (Levin).

  “I want to thank you for this,” Nugent said, his voice husky, his body pale and motionless, eyelids rapidly blinking.

  “It’s nothing, believe me,” Mickelsson said, and glanced at his watch.

  That afternoon he began his house-hunting.

  In the beginning his premise was that buying was impossible, he was looking only for a place to rent. He had nothing, not a penny, with which to make a down payment, and even if he did by some miracle find money, chances were, if he bought a place, the I.R.S. would swoop in on him and snatch it. He’d never made up to them the money his ex-wife had “borrowed” from his tax account three years ago, nor had he paid his taxes for the last two years; in fact, until his lawyer had broken his daze with hell-fire warnings, he’d been too depressed and disorganized to file. But when Mickelsson had looked for houses for a week, finding nothing that would do—tarpaper shacks, falling-down cottages on still, gloomy lakes, low-ceilinged dungeons of cinderblock, one uninsulated, half-converted barn—nothing, nothing, and no prospects ahead (realtors were so uninterested in rental property he could hardly get them to drive out with him and look), he began to have second thoughts.

  There was, in fact, one place where he could get a few thousand. He’d started, some years ago, a small account he’d be able to draw on if his mother should need a nursing home. It seemed unlikely that she would, given her spirit and her evident happiness where she was, with relatives in Wisconsin; but one never knew. Now, uncomfortably, disliking himself for it, he began to think about turning to that account. It was not as if his mother were destitute—she was, one might say, better off than he was. And the I.R.S. could as easily snatch his mother’s money (as he’d always thought of it) as it could snatch a house. Besides, what would it gain them, snatching a shabby little farmhouse he had practically no money in? Soon he’d settled on flight to a house of his own as if the matter were out of his hands, blind destiny. No use worrying, he told himself; the “examined life” was easily overrated.

  Now he began to hunt with considerable intensity, pulling together all his powers of concentration, poring over booklets and brochures, burrowing through newspapers, writing himself notes in his Pocket Calendar and Daily Reminder, then hurrying from one end of the county to the other to poke through damp cellars, bump his head on attic beams, wipe and shake sticky cobwebs from his fingers, blush, apologize, and back away (“Thank you, I’ll call you, yes good, good, thank you”—cringing inwardly, with each exaggerated bow, at his moral cowardice), even now finding nothing that would do, nothing but termite-fodder, overpriced trash.

  He did not like that increasing tendency to lie to himself and others—“I’ll call you, yes good.” An existentialist, of course, could defend it without a blink; another kind of thinker could argue its rightness in a community of liars; another might assert its suitability to a stock behavioral mode voluntarily elected; but Mickelsson—glowering with rage turned inward, fists clamped tight on the steeringwheel—had never been friendly to the notion that human beings are free to turn into tomato plants at will, or even to the best utilitarianism, and least of all to R. M. Hare’s opinion, Oxonian and therefore unassailable, that morality is life-style. He wouldn’t have denied, if anyone other than his psychiatrist had asked him, that his search had all the earmarks of a mad compulsion, though of course one could always manufacture fine theories, delimiting categories, obs and sols.

  “Perhaps,” he’d said on the phone to Dr. Rifkin, back in Providence, “where I live is the only thing left that I have any real control of.” He blew out smoke, angrily drumming his short, hard fingers on the tabletop, his head down, like a bull’s. It had seemed the kind of reason Dr. Rifkin would accept. Dr. Rifkin was a fool, an absurdly sloppy thinker if indeed it could be said that he ever thought at all; but Mickelsson was in the habit of consulting him now and then, touching bases in the fashion of a sandlot ballplayer on a diamond whose bases are yards out of position but familiar.

  “Come on now,” Rifkin said, his voice adenoidal, as ironic and peevish as a meow. He was always saying “Come on now.” A tiresome—tirelessly tiresome—little man, slightly crabby, though good-hearted to a fault, fresh from his internship somewhere in Texas, still stained by the tan, when Mickelsson had first met him. He was painstaking; would’ve made an excellent dentist. Perhaps, like Martin Luther, he was dizzied by the stink of human breath. It was Mickelsson’s ex-wife that had chosen him, or confirmed the choice of the hospital where Mickelsson had been placed.

  Rifkin, at the other end of the line, would be sitting with his knees together, protecting his cock—long, if one could judge by his ears, nose, and thumbs—hair parted in the middle, two fingercurls in front, delicately pushing his glasses up his nose with a carefully manicured, spatulate middle finger, his thick lips puckered (moustache poised, uplifted) as if ready to give the receiver a quick little love-peck. His eyebrows would be arched in faintly ironic astonishment—possibly amusement, possibly reprobation; he purposely kept it ambiguous, playing it safe. He played everything safe. He never spoke of “Freud,” like a normal human being, always of “Doctor Freud.” On the mahogany-panelled wall behind him hung a framed pen-and-ink sketch, probably something his wife had picked out. Again the scratchy, ironic cat’s voice: “Come on now, Professor. What’s the real reason?”

  Mickelsson imagined himself saying, “All right; I murdered a dog.”

  Even before he’d decided whether or not it was funny, or whether or not it could be construed as relevant, he’d decided on discretion. He said, tapping the tabletop again, “I suppose the truth is I’d like to spite my wife, maybe go to jail and shame her.”

  “That’s not impossible,” Rifkin said. “Very interesting.” He’d be sitting with his eyes closed to chinks, grinning like a fox with indigestion.

  “Maybe spite my children too,” Mickelsson said, “lose my earning capacity and deprive them of college educations.”

  “Mmm,” Rifkin said, suspicious now, from the sound of it. “It’s something you might think about, anyway.”

  “I will, believe me.”

  “Is that irony I detect?”

  “If you detect it, then it is.”

  “Come on now, Professor,” Rifkin said crossly, whiningly, “let’s not logic-chop.”

  “All right. Sorry,” Mickelsson said. He glanced at his watch. “OK, so I’m jealous of my children.”

  “As I say, you might think about it,” Rifkin said.

  Mickelsson shook his head. What a profession! After he’d gotten rid of Rifkin he’d gone back to looking through the paper for a house, writing himself notes, occasionally giving a little whistle or muttering to himself. “ ‘Priced to sell.’
I’ll bet! Right before it vanishes in the quicksand!” It was a habit of long standing, this talking to himself, just above a whisper, often in high-flown orotund phrases, often with close-to-the-chest little gestures. One of the things he liked best about his business was the grand tradition of ornate formulations, the effloriate rhetoric of a Goethe, Santayana, Collingwood, or Russell, not to mention Nietzsche—dimly recalled in the prose of living philosophers like Blanchard or, among the younger crowd, Richard Taylor, Peter Singer. In this as in everything, needless to say, he was hopelessly out of fashion, following the no-longer-believed (dis-cred-ited, from creed, Heideggerians would bray); nor did it help when he quoted the ghost of Adam Smith on ethics books that are “dry and disagreeable, abounding in abstruse and metaphysical distinctions, but incapable of exciting in the heart any of those emotions which it is the principal use of books of morality to excite.” Rhetoric was of die Welt, not die Erde, and therefore, in the new, upside-down universe, sin and error. Brahma was out; the jigglings and gyrations of Shiva were in.

  And so the hunt continued. His books and papers lay strewn on the table as they’d been when he’d given up trying to work on them. The sink was filled with dishes, and rather than wash them he bought paper cups and plates. He no longer went out for walks on hot nights but climbed into his rattletrap car, an old Chevy he’d bought for seventy dollars from a student, and drove out to look at houses he couldn’t go through until tomorrow. If the house was empty or there was no one about, he would park in the weeds across the road and sit looking for half an hour, going over in his mind what one might do to save it and dimly imagining what his life might be like if he were to take the place. Mornings, he would dress in the slightly dandified fashion he favored—dark shirt, ascot tie, a light summer suit only slightly frayed, dark blue hankie in the pocket, and on his head—pressing down his erumpent red hair—the vaguely Westernish broad-brimmed hat that signalled his difference from other philosophers (as if any such signal were needed), aligning him more nearly with the Southern or Western poets who came, every week or so, to read their flashy junk to the Department of Anguish.

  He pursued the hunt as if doomed to it, locked on his senseless course like a planet. Not quite senseless, perhaps. One might speak of the quiet without which creativity cannot hear itself think; one might mention the example of Wittgenstein, who had come to a whole new vision while designing and building his sister’s house. But those were not really Peter Mickelsson’s reasons—unless in this too as in so many things, he was deluded. Never mind, for the moment. (That was the slogan of his crisis: for the moment.) It must suffice, for the moment, that, reading in the paper of a house for sale—“Country living, 10 acres …” or “Cottage, 2 bedrooms, trout stream, outbuildings”—he felt an urge, almost irresistible, to go look. Whatever the meaning of the compulsion, it kept him moving, kept him just ahead of the shadow at his back, despair.

  It also kept his smouldering anger fed. Who would believe the desperation and shamelessness of humanity! He saw so-called farmhouses in the middle of town, chopped-up rooms, shoddy plastering, panelling made of paper, light fixtures too tawdry for the grungiest motel; went out to see something described as “small ranch, top condition,” and found a trailer. He saw dry-rot, termites, flood-wrecks, asphalt front yards (“tennis courts”); pleasant little cottages on two hundred acres of swamp (ninety thousand); a decaying stone house on an island, no road or telephone. … Maybe it was the not quite predictable nature of the certain outrage that kept his interest up. Or maybe his half-unconscious awareness that wrath was good for him. “Repression is a dangerous habit,” Dr. Rifkin said. “Go ahead! Get mad at me!” He said it repeatedly, as if imitating someone who had greatly impressed him, back in Texas. He did not seem to notice his patient’s heavy sigh.

  Then when Mickelsson had nearly given up, had blown up at almost the last of his realtors, he came upon the Bauer place. (It was late afternoon. He couldn’t be sure what day it was. According to the days-of-the-week window on his Japanese watch it was .) He approached the place not directly, through the town of Susquehanna, but by a mountainous back route, one that looked relatively easy on the map, though in the driving it proved otherwise.

  Perhaps it was the light, some special, seemingly magical tint that he remembered from somewhere long ago; or perhaps it was the way the dappled sunlight flickered on the road or in the glowing-green maple leaves above, some centuries-old neurological trigger, hypnotic, probably dangerous to epileptics. He’d been driving for something like an hour and a half on the high-crowned, pot-holed asphalt roads that wound as if aimlessly through the Pennsylvania mountains—steeply banked curves where the road looped smoothly back on itself like the flightpath of a hawk, sudden dips and rises, short sunlit stretches shaving valley floors—then gentler curves, the roadway following a creekbed for a time, passing small settlements where nothing seemed alive: large, decaying houses and collapsing barns, lawns held in by stone-locked retaining walls and shaded by great, dark sugar maples; passing old graveyards and white wooden churches, crossing stone bridges, skirting small lakes where there were dingy, crooked cottages, trailers, butane tanks, drunkenly listing, bone-gray docks; passing, on higher ground, small, paintless houses with handmade signs nailed to trees in front: NIGHT WALKERS; RABBITS FOR SALE; LOCUST POSTS, $1.00. Increasingly it seemed to him a part of the world time had forgotten, or rather—despite the visible decay—had spared. It stirred in him memories, at first only a general mood—exhilaration, a sense of rejuvenated options—and then, all at once, a specific moment: running naked, as a boy, in his father’s overgrown apple orchard, given over, by the time of his memory, to cows—running naked, his clothes and glasses hidden in the shadow of a tree, imagining as he ran the nakedness of his tall older cousin Mary Ann, or some naked female stranger from beyond the marsh. He remembered the astonishing smoothness of cowpaths; then he remembered vividly the glorious sensation, impossible to explain or justify to unfortunates who’d never been granted it, of stepping barefoot (walking now) into a day-old cowplop, sun-warmed cow manure squeezing up between the toes. Strange that it should come back so clearly now—ironically dragging with it (thesis-antithesis) an image of his grandfather in his dark, plain suit, sitting stiffly upright at his desk in the manse, books laid out in front of him, dusty late-afternoon sunlight slanting in, his steel-rimmed spectacles insensibly cutting red wounds into the sides of his peculiar, leftward-aiming nose. (He’d been the dullest man on earth, except for one oddity. In his seventieth year he’d developed second sight.) Nothing in these mountains was the same, really, as the broad, green farm and outdoorsman country—or the stiff, trim villages with their obscurely Vikingish shutters and gables—where Mickelsson had grown up in Wisconsin. Yet here under the changeable sky, moving through pockets of sudden warmth, then sudden cold, he felt himself hovering on the brink of something, as if the stubborn will by means of which he’d survived his troubles were at last getting ready to pay off.

  He drove on, plunging between walls of damp shale into the darkness of suddenly sloping woods, the chill of another bright swirl of fog, then up onto a high, clear overgrown meadow where there were lilacs, a solitary chimney, low stone walls that had once been bounded by orchards or pastures. Light, then shadow, flashed on his windshield and glasses.

  “If I were you I’d try Pennsylvania,” Tom Garret’s wife had told him weeks ago. It seemed to him incredible now that he’d dismissed her advice out of hand. But she was a strange woman—creepy, in fact: shy and furtive as a mouse; large, gypsy-black eyes. She was said to be “intuitive,” almost psychic. (Mickelsson had his doubts.) At parties she would hide in the corner of the room, hugging herself inside her shawl. “It’s the most beautiful country in the world—but very queer, people say.” She slid her eyes toward the others, making certain she wasn’t overheard, then put her hand on his arm—a bony, small-fingered hand that made him think of a rat’s. “Full of witches and heaven knows what.” She smiled. “That�
��s where I see you, Peter. Really!” “I’m sure you do,” he’d said, edging away. Not the least of her oddities was the smell that came from her, something faintly like wet, burnt wood.

  Now the road dropped sharply, like a twisting waterfall—so he would remember that first encounter later, when the descent no longer seemed so frighteningly steep—passed through a cavern of interlocked trees and fog, curved around abruptly, and emerged into strange, charged light. It was not at all the light of Wisconsin. If the light there was unearthly, it had a luminous, strained, Scandinavian unearthliness, so that it seemed no wonder that men like his grandfather (before the coming of his gift) should ponder God—even God’s love and grace—in a fashion almost chillingly logical, respectful; and that even common grocers should carry about them an aura of the scholarly, a wintry crispness and clarity that one might mistake—here among the yellows and misty greens of Pennsylvania—for icy-hearted. He slowed, the car’s weight laboring against the brakes, pulled the rumbling old Chevy onto the shoulder, and switched off the engine, knowing though not yet quite believing that this was the place he’d discovered in the Snyder Realty brochure (“Beautiful old farmhouse, 4 bedrooms, outbuildings, pond, woods, pasture”). After a moment he got out to stand beside the blue, pitted fender, looking down at his prospect from a quarter-mile away and a hundred yards above. The engine clicked noisily. There were blackberries by the roadside, grown up in profusion as if to hide the broad scar of an abandoned gravel pit with a chain across what remained of the entrance and a sign, NO DUMPING! He picked a handful of berries and absently ate them as he looked. He could now see the realtor’s red and white sign.

  “Son of a gun,” he muttered, and shook his head.

  Long blue shadows reached from the woods above down the cant of the mountain—pale, new-mown hay—toward the house and barns. Between the house and the nearest shed, a creek glittered, and directly above the house, startling as a wolf in the late-afternoon light, stood a perfect, white full moon.