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

last, angrily, hoping to be rid of that feeling once and for all, he took the flashlight from the shelf at the head of the cellar stairs and searched the house inside and out. There was nothing to be found.

He poured himself a drink, but after one sip discovered that his stomach was too sour to put up with it, and poured the remainder down the sink. His mind was still weird from the weight-lifting, catching movements that weren’t there, at the periphery of his vision. At last, one by one, taking his time, he turned the lights off—he’d turned on every last light in the place, even the watchlights on the barns—and with no light remaining but the lamp on his bedtable, he shrugged off his bathrobe, then picked off his glasses, pausing once to listen as he did so, his brow deeply furrowed—listening not only with his tufted ears but with the nerves of his back and the tips of his fingers. Then he crawled meekly under the covers, turned off the lamp, and lay belly up with the back of his head on his hands, elbows out, keeping his ears free. He stared at the pitchdark ceiling as if he had no intention whatever of going to sleep.

In the valley the 3 a.m. train went by. He listened as it sang along glens and cliffs, sliding eastward toward New York City, a huge, humming, dark-iron snake. Once there had been glowing-steel passenger trains on this line, rushing yellow windows. No more. He thought of New York’s lights, not many of them now, cavelike alleys, tombstone-dark buildings. The train must be a hundred cars long. Lonesome sound, as the folksongs liked to say. How empty it made the night!—alas, an emptiness not just physical. Peter Mickelsson was no longer a child on the Wisconsin farm, cows scattered like old gray boulders across the moonlit pasture, hushed with rumination. Time had actually done to him what old people in his childhood had jokingly spoken of its doing—eyes glittering, as if merry—had poured the magic out of the world like well-water from a dipper. For him as for all those country songwriters and weary black blues-singers, not to mention high-class tragic poets of former times and places—Greece, Japan, China—or brooding philosophers, Diogenes in his barrel, Marcus Aurelius knee-deep in chickens, Boethius in jail—the day had come when suddenly the obvious goodness of life, the splendor in the grass, innocence of eye and ear were vanquished, gone as if they’d never existed, like Occident light from a Stoic’s leaded window or spirit from a father’s blue eye. How did human beings go on after such things—family deaths, ruin, the collapse of marriage with a woman once loved. …

It was unthinkable that nothing could be done about it. That was why Ellen and her friends had despised him, in San Francisco. They would sit “rapping,” drugged, far into the night, sprawled on the floor and on the lower reaches of the furniture, or flung like sated jackals on the lawn in back, dreaming up grand schemes to make the world a softer place. He would bait them with Nietzsche: “The wish to eliminate suffering is the wish to eliminate life,” and, “Pain is a good part of what holds societies together.” He would mockingly suggest—but he meant it more seriously than they knew—that they’d misunderstood human nature. “You’ve forgotten about Schadenfreude,” he said—he loved pulling fancy language on them, dropping it casually, as if any half-educated fool ought to know the term.

One of her friends, a tall, black-bearded young man named Vince, was particularly offended by all he said and stood for. “Far out!” he would say, looking up-from-under with foggy blue eyes, maybe trying to focus his minotaur-bulky shape. “Like, man, how can you go to, like, a great play—King Lear or something—and not come home horrified by the cowshit all around you?” From the darkness of the lawn beyond where Vince sat came a faint, weary chorus of yeah’s. Ellen said nothing.

“Art makes heavy the thinking man’s heart,” Mickelsson said. “Nietzsche.” He might easily have used Nietzsche in their defense, of course—for instance his idea on the imposition of form and order as a cause of suffering—but the temptation to defend was not strong.

The night in which they plotted and grieved over the oppressed was ironically sweet and still. The house looming against the stars was grandly Victorian, pre-fire; it was on the other side of Twentieth Street that the smaller, newer, though equally shabby buildings began. To the left of the house from where they lay in the yard (or, in Mickelsson’s case, stood) an immense old evergreen pointed darkly at the moon.

“Don’t you have something to do, Peter?” Ellen asked.

There was no arguing with them. Because reason had been misused by corrupt forces in the Establishment, Ellen’s friends now scorned the use of reason, scorned self-analysis, even rational self-defense. They would not talk, would only sneer or attack, bully both their enemies and each other.

In their filthy little playhouse, ex-Protestant church—walls of black, a few spotlights, tape-recorder, old cracked folding-chairs for the audience—Vince and a black called Errol appear on a coolly lighted set which consists of a lamppost, a wheelbarrow, and a mirror, the two of them in shabby clothes, Vince (tall, bearded, with knobby knees and elbows) leaning on the lamppost, center stage, Errol pushing the wheelbarrow around and around him, for no apparent reason. Occasionally, Vince looks in the mirror; he will not let Errol look. Sometimes they do the play with words (mostly obscenities), sometimes as mime. Vince (this is the play) hates the audience. When he uses words he calls them “dumb mashed-potato fuckers,” “wet, middle-class steamy shit on an onion roll,” et cetera. (Vince has a flair for the vividly vile. This does not necessarily make him likeable.) Errol begins in agreement with Vince, gradually shifts to preferring the audience to Vince, decides to abandon the stage. Vince will not allow it.