Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

From the moment they passed through the high iron gates of the hospital grounds, nothing was real: time slowed down, shapes took on an extraordinary sharpness and a seeming weightlessness, or every shape but his uncle, who stood in his bathrobe and pajamas, unkempt, hollow-eyed, as firmly centered and infinitely heavy, though small of stature, as some innocent, terrifying image in a nightmare. Though he was thin, his whiskered flesh sagged on his face (that was the effect of some drug he had to take, Mickelsson’s father said), and his hair was bristly, littered with something scaley, dandruff-like, though apparently it was not dandruff. But none of that had been as troublesome to look at as his eyes.

“Well,” Mickelsson’s father would say as they drove home again, “I thought Edgar looked better, this time.” “Did you?” his mother would say, giving him a glance. “Well,” his father would say, as if it didn’t much matter, really; eventually all would be well, that was the nature of things. Optimistic fatalist.

Mickelsson found himself standing in perfect darkness, in the pitch-dark shade of an abutment that rose steeply to give its heavy rock support to what was now empty air, below it the vast flat landfill floor that was once to have been the plaza. A perfect landing place for UFOs, he thought, and for a moment his memory entertained images from the final scenes of Close Encounters. In the blackness a few feet below him, invisible water lapped at the gravel, stone, and trash he stood on. For all the cold, the river had a smell, a fetidness like human bad breath. Across the flat, still river the black mountainside was beautiful with yellow houselights and cold white streetlights. The lights of a truck came slowly down the street, parallel to the river, then vanished behind trees and buildings. He half remembered, then brushed from his mind, the trucks he’d seen driving with their lights off. Maybe he’d dreamed the whole thing. A drunken nightmare.

He breathed deeply, clearing his head. How many times in fifty years, he asked himself, self-consciously, trying to pull back his earlier, sweeter mood, how many times did a man stand pondering in the night beside some river, remembering former nights, former rivers, counting up his losses? A man was never more alone, he thought, than when standing by himself looking at the lights of a community across a river, or across a lake, or from the deck of a ship. Had he thought exactly that same thought before, in exactly those same words, perhaps years ago? No, it came to him, he’d read them, or something like them: James Boswell looking at the stars before going up to his latest mistress. What a life! He turned to look up, ruefully, at the lights of Susquehanna.

And what if, for once, he, Mickelsson, were not to go up to his mistress? What if he were to take one small step toward bringing his life into control—reassert his dignity? It was community that kept one well and sane; that was the message of the book Michael Nugent had forced on him. Community was what he’d lost, leaving Providence, and what he’d fled, leaving Binghamton, and what called to him now in the form of yellow lights rising straight up the black wedge of mountain, lifting toward the lesser, gentler darkness of sky and embedded, icy stars.

He moved, frowning with thought, out of the shadow of the abutment onto the wide, gouged-out plaza site. His foolish infatuation was the heart and symbol of all that was wrong with him, his increasingly desperate embrace of chaos. It was she that made a clown of him, in Michael Nugent’s sense, the imitation lover who gallantly allowed the whole town to laugh at him—anything for love!—middle-aged Mickelsson dressed up in ascot and threadbare formal coat for his teen-ager lady of the dark chipped tooth. Had he indeed gone mad, he asked himself. “Love for the unlovable.” Surely it was not true that he was one of those! Though he’d almost not dared to think about it, Jessica Stark had shown by certain signs that she was not entirely indifferent to him, there was at least a faint chance. Gail Edelman, dropping her gaze when he glanced at her, smiling at him with a hint of special interest when he politely passed the time of day with her—neither he nor she showing by any word or sign that they remembered the night of his drunken visit. … It was of course not real love that he felt for Donnie Matthews but some irrational need, some sickness. Rifkin would know. (He had not yet mentioned the matter to Rifkin.) It was his firm persuasion, as an ethicist—or almost firm—that one could choose right conduct, will the higher man’s self-mastery, if one would, in spite of the witless heart’s wail.

He stopped walking, standing in the middle, now, of the gouged-out desolation. It was true, he saw with sudden clarity: he must not go to her! His children and ex-wife had need of his money, the money he was squandering, these days, on Donnie Matthews. He stood with his hands pushed deep in his overcoat pockets, his shadow, thrown by the street-lamps above, stretching across the bulldozed span of gravel and bits of ice-speckled brick. It was decided, he would not go. He would walk back to the Jeep and drive home. Relief flooded through him. There was hope for him yet, then! Slowly, somewhat against his will, he drew his left hand from his pocket and raised it toward his face for a look at his watch.

Ten o’clock! Panic rushed up into his chest and all his wisdom melted. “Shit,” he whispered, and began to walk with quick strides back in the direction of the bridge. It was surprisingly far away.