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

Errol has always been on the stage, and the audience is a bunch of et cetera, et cetera. Errol slips off his boots and makes a dash to join the audience; Vince shoots and kills him. (The death is frighteningly convincing.) The End. When the performance goes well, the audience feels insulted, financially and artistically cheated, hurt, diddled with, confused (What does it mean? What is the symbolism of the mirror? Who is Vince?), sickened and enraged.

Does the play raise the social consciousness of the audience? Who knows? Sometimes the troupe barely escapes alive, and this, Mickelsson sees plainly, begins to be their kick. One day, not long after Geoffrey Stewart, the street poet, has denounced them, talking of “the imitation of Jesus Christ,” Ellen’s crazies see, by whatever epistemological means it may be that convince them, that they must work not on middle-class audiences but directly on the oppressed. The ordinary black on the street must learn to let it all hang out, quit repressing, stand up and shoot. San Francisco street theater is born.

They put on whiteface, wear odd costumes: a fat, rich Wall Street banker’s attire, the kosmoi of a wealthy, aristocratic lady (cigarette holder—Ellen’s, ironically—and lorgnette); they go up to gentle, ordinary blacks who are minding their own business, maybe walking the kids in Golden Gate Park, and the actors engage the innocent victims in improvisational dialogue. There are flowers everywhere, the smell of new-cut grass on the rolling lawns between eucalyptus trees, the smell and soft wind of the Pacific.

“Hey, nigger!”

The man tries to edge away, shooing his kids ahead of him. It’s not necessarily that he thinks he’s in danger or even that he doesn’t understand what they’re up to; he may even understand that they’re doing it all for his people’s good. He’s no fool, he reads the paper—during his lunch-break in the basement at I. Magnin’s, or at the Legal Aid office, where he’s a lawyer, head of the housing attack force—it’s just that, for himself and his kids, he wants no part of this.

“Hey, you! You-boy!” They move in on him.

He knows this foolishness better than they do, these high-assed kids with their mission and their expensive acting lessons. His grandfather was a make-’em-sweat preacher in Georgia: “You! Sinner! You wid dat bottle!”

The black man in the suit and tie, holding his two children’s hands, knows the game. Who doesn’t? Since they’ve cut off his escape, he tries asking them to leave him alone, please. He tries to reason with them. His kids are afraid now. Bystanders pause to watch, a few drawing near. The actors and actresses are ecstatic. The street play has begun! If they’re lucky, punches will ensue, people will throw stones at them. Mickelsson, sick with disgust and pity, fades back into the crowd.

“Why do you stay married to her?” a friend had asked—Carol, a female grad student in poly sci at Berkeley, whom he’d often talked with over coffee or sitting on the grass by the library; nothing heavy, though both of them had thought about it.

“I keep hoping it’s just a passing phase,” he said.

She looked at him, waiting in the soulful, non-directive Rogerian way that had been popular at the time.

“And then there’s the fact that we’ve got kids,” he said.

She nodded.

“I keep pretending it’s not happening,” he said, and ruefully smiled. “I rarely see their ‘performances,’ and when I do, I pretend each time that this one’s probably exceptional.”

“Sounds like they all are.”

He nodded, looking down. He loved her large, solid knees.

He had been right at least that with Ellie it had been just a passing phase. Today she lived in a mansion of sorts and gave tea-parties. If she directed or produced a play, it was The Seagull or Krapp’s Last Tape. She was no longer one of those who struggle against the way of the universe, the unalterable outward drift of wreckage, the greenhouse effect here on this one piece of junk—the irreversible rise of COs in the atmosphere, the accelerating transformation of everything on earth to rot. “Betrayed!” her actors cried now, without hope, shaking their well-trained, long-fingered hands up at the spotlight. Perhaps in a deeper sense she was still up to her old tricks, drugging the world with beautiful might-have-beens. (Nietzsche on Art: “Humanity owes much of its evil to these fanatical intoxicates.”)

He rolled his head on his pillow. The irony was, he missed those awful days in San Francisco—missed Ellen’s stupid, passionate friends. Believers.

“He that reflects not in his heart,” the ancients said, “is like the beast that perishes.” Not true. Everything is like the beast that perishes.

There were sounds downstairs, something rhythmical; like walking. When he concentrated, it stopped. He rubbed his eyes. It was nothing. No doubt the brain still kidding around after its surcharge of laboring blood, too much weight-lifting.

Poor Jessica.

She’d been young, happy, travelling far and wide with her handsome tree-scientist—today Nigeria, tomorrow some committee of the United States Senate—and now all at once, reluctantly, she was surveying with her nervous, flashy eyes the paunchy host of bachelors and cast-offs for some arm not unduly unpleasant to lean on as she drifted toward declining beauty, old age.

Mickelsson closed his eyes tightly, saw strange things, and reopened them, despairing of sleep. He must put his student Michael Nugent on to Nietzsche, it occurred to him—Nietzsche for recognition of the central “perdurable evil,” as the boy would say, the essential human character, “so delicate, sensitive”—what was the phrase?—“so delicate, sensitive and something-or-other that we have need of the highest means of healing and consolation.” Nietzsche for nihilism transmuted, “the new way to Yes.”

He turned his head to look down the hallway through the partly open door, trying to penetrate the darkness. In a kind of waking dream he seemed to hear voices, two of them. Not really voices; sounds of some kind. He could not make out words. It was queer, those voices, or voice-like sounds—possibly some taut wire picking up a radio signal. It