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

are wrong,” she said. “God might have rules a snake can never figure out.” She leaned forward like a daughter pleading—as if Mickelsson and Reason were stern authorities who could be gotten around by bright eyes and a timid smile. As was no doubt the case. “If some genius figures out and tells us about a divine idea but it’s against human nature—how people really are, I mean, with all their programmed individual differences—it can’t last, he won’t be accepted.”

“Ah!” Mickelsson said, and raised a finger as if shooting the ceiling, “then in effect the ‘moral absolutes’ ”—playfully, he put on a German accent—“can exist, if at all, only in the actual behavior of human beinks!”

“Not necessarily,” she said at once, narrowing her eyes. “Only the moral absolutes we’re capable of achieving. Maybe that’s why people are so restless and weird.”

Mickelsson smiled, his eyebrows lifted, as if unable to believe he’d been beaten fair and square. “Well done!” he said, grinning; and taking careful aim with his index finger, he shot Brenda Winburn in the nose.

Nugent had his hand over his mouth. Mickelsson gathered his books, realizing that he’d been caught, and, seeing that they were out of time, gave a nod, dismissing the class.

As the students were filing out he said to Blassenheim, who stood dawdling, waiting for Brenda to get her pen capped and tucked into the proper compartment of her purse, “It’s not fair, you know, you two ganging up on me like that.”

“We didn’t really plan it,” the boy said. He stood with his head drawn back a little, smiling uncertainly, as if with part of his mind he would like it to be thought that they had planned it.

“Like termites, these students,” Mickelsson said, speaking past the pipe and waving both hands, wiggling the fingers. “They keep coming and coming, and then one day you look around and—no castle!”

Alan and Brenda laughed pleasantly, as if from a great distance, then drifted toward the door, where Michael Nugent stepped aside for them. Mickelsson saw with a sinking heart that Nugent was waiting to ask some question.

“It’s interesting the way you handle class,” Nugent said, walking beside Mickelsson as he hurried back to his office. Nugent’s long legs moved oddly, yet with a curious grace, like the legs of a giraffe at the zoo. One hand was pressed hard to his chest as if to stanch blood. “I guess I don’t understand it, exactly, but it’s interesting.” He threw his head forward for a look up at Mickelsson’s face. “I mean, you don’t really say what’s true, really, though you say it in your books.”

Mickelsson remembered his intent to put Nugent on to Nietzsche. “Maybe I don’t actually know what I do in class,” he said, and smiled.

Nugent waited, floating along beside him with his arms lifted a little—he carried no books today—his face, at the end of his long, white neck, like the face of an alarmed sunflower. It crossed Mickelsson’s mind that Nugent’s worsted jacket was exactly like his own.

“There’s a philosopher I’ve been meaning to recommend to you,” Mickelsson said, squinting at the boy. “Friedrich Nietzsche. Your remark about the way I teach our class made me think of it. Like many intellectuals, he had a profound distrust of the uses of intellect, or, as he’d prefer to say, ‘consciousness.’ ”

Directly ahead of them as they walked down the sidewalk toward the library building, one of Mickelsson’s colleagues, Lawler, the Aquinas man, came tentatively barging, walking straight down the middle of the sidewalk, his nose in a book. Edward Lawler was the soul of oddity: though he was apparently not religious, he was a specialist in medieval philosophy. He was short, five-two at most, and unhealthily fat, balding. The little hair he still had was gray. Like Tillson, their chairman, Lawler never wore anything but black—black suits even shabbier than Tillson’s. (Sometimes, driving past his house, one would see him on his porch steps wearing his bathrobe, reading a book.) His shirts, on the best of days, had only two buttons left, though it was said that for special occasions he could dress like a prince. Weddings of his most beloved students, funerals …

“Hello, Edward,” Mickelsson said.

Lawler walked on, not looking up. “V’yanna,” he said. God only knew what language it was. Lawler was a master of languages. There was hardly a known one he couldn’t work out, given time. When they’d walked a few steps further, Mickelsson looked back. Lawler had stopped, belatedly understanding that someone had addressed him, and stood bowing formally, oddly military, still buried in his book. “Guten Tag! Hi, there!” Then—still without really seeing them, it seemed—he waddled on. Mickelsson smiled.

“Lawler,” he explained to Nugent. “Brilliant man—philosophy. You must work with him sometime.”

“I’m taking his course,” Nugent said. “You signed me up for it.”

“Ah!” Mickelsson said.

They walked on.

Thinking about Lawler, Mickelsson had completely forgotten now what they’d been talking about. For all he knew, they might by accident be walking toward the market together—except that he noticed that they were heading toward the library building, which fact brought back reality, dimly.

“I’m afraid I forgot what we were saying,” Mickelsson said.

Nugent smiled palely and nodded. “We were talking about Nietzsche—and our class.”

“Ah yes.” He pursed his lips, walking more slowly for a moment. Nugent adjusted his pace. “There was something that bothered you,” Mickelsson said, not remembering, playing the odds.

“Well, they were talking about ‘moral absolutes,’ that’s all,” Nugent said, “the idea that they’re built into Nature, and so on. Which is a long way from talking about values as human assertions. I guess I thought that girl—what’s-her-name, the swimmer—was sort of on to it, how human beings can see only what they’re constructed to see, and maybe it’s entirely wrong, maybe green is really yellow, in God’s eyes, but since there’s no way human beings can know it, it doesn’t matter. If our actions aren’t informed, they’re not really actions. I was surprised how you handled it, that’s all.”

“Yes,