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

think further, Mickelsson spat out the toothpaste into the sink, grabbed his shirt and, without a word to Jessica—he’d forgotten she was there, in fact—ran through the bedroom, out into the hall and down the stairs, his feet hitting like thunder. He was halfway out the back door of the kitchen when he realized that the world had magically snapped into winter. There was no full moon, no gentle summer breeze. Overhead he could see only blurry stars, and in the field where the gravedigger ought to be there was nothing at all—short gray weeds, scraps of snow. Now at last he came awake to Jessica’s cries of alarm from the house: “Pete! What’s the matter?”

She was in the middle of the kitchen, the quilt from the bed clutched awkwardly around her. When he’d closed and locked the door, then turned back to her, she said, “What happened? You look awful!”

He put his hands on her arms. The kitchen they were standing in was not the kitchen he’d run through on his way outside.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “I thought I heard a bear, or a skunk or something. Let’s go up.”

When he at last lay down beside her, his skin against hers, the warmth and sweetness of it, and his residual fear, made him dizzy.

8

He’d been going through his fifteen-year-old Martin Luther notes and reading through his grandfather’s yellow tablets on the subject, an activity which took him days and profoundly depressed him. How soon the best opinions of a normally intelligent, well-read man turned commonplace! Archaic, studiously eloquent—hiked up with ’tis’s and lo’s and yea’s—the old man’s broodings recalled the most vacuous poetry of his age: earnest, noble-hearted flounderings in the common bog. This morning he’d gone back to work on his own book, no longer a blockbuster—duller, he suspected, than the telephone book of an unfamiliar city, certainly duller than anything anywhere by Dr. Martinus. It was cruel that a rotten human being like Martin Luther should rivet one’s attention, even now, after all these centuries, and the thoughts of a good man like Mickelsson’s grandfather, hardly in his grave yet, as angels count time, should stupefy the soul.

Around noon Tom Garret had called him to remind him to vote, which Mickelsson promised to do, though in fact he’d forgotten to register. It gave him no grief. Carter had his faults, but it was unthinkable that the American people would be so stupid and self-destructive as to vote in Reagan. After lunch Mickelsson had worked on the house, still brooding more on Luther than on his own book, increasingly shocked by how powerfully the man’s spirit worked on him, both the gentle side—copier of folk tales, translator of the Bible into beautiful, moving German, advocate of infinite gentleness in the teaching of children, doting parent himself—and the dark, terrible side, manic-depressive plunging toward psychosis, fighter, hard drinker, well of hatreds—the Italians, French, English, above all the Jews. Thinking about Luther—and himself, of course—he ate Di-Gels one after another. He was drinking while he worked, as his habit was. He’d drunk only beer, then at suppertime switched to gin and tonic. He turned on the portable radio to listen to the returns. By nine that night he was drinking martinis, as Luther would have done with great lust, if God had allowed their invention in time. He sat at the kitchen table listening in mounting astonishment to the evidence that the American people had gone mad. “Idiots!” he shouted, and slammed the table with both fists at once. He drank on, sometimes pacing, clutching at his hair with his right hand, swearing at the walls and windows. Carter conceded. Mickelsson hardly noticed that he was drunk—he could still see, still stand upright, still howl his anger, though his eyes were full of tears—but drunk he was: his heart bellowed for something, he didn’t know what at first, and then he realized: the base, uncomplicated love of Donnie Matthews. His mind, inhibitionless, could see no objection. And so he found himself tapping importunately with his cane’s silver lioness-head at her door.

Oh, he knew, he was cognizant, that it was debauchery. (He tapped louder, sweating gin.) He had become once more the suicidal Dadaist, representative hero and symbol of his nation—perhaps the secret center of all men and nations—fallen out of orbit, drifting like his civilization toward absolute catastrophe (all the professional predictors agreed, the U.N., the Carter Report on the Future, alas: by the year 2000 wide-spread starvation, plague, universal war, for all practical purposes the end of the world), all of which, however, he accepted tonight with mournfully comfortable fatalism. Let it come! Let the final explosions be colorful! (“And Lord, may my death be not painful!”—Luther.) It was the nature of life and always had been, insofar as life in the world was worldly: the beginning of things in the blood-washed breaking of membranes, the precarious middle span with its tortuous, ultimately futile imposition of order, the protracted close of life—entropy, chaos, the final loosening of the sphincter. Alles ist erlaubt.

He was banging hard now at Donnie Matthews’ door.

“Who is it?” she called from somewhere not far away. Perhaps she was sitting in her chair in the livingroom, reading.

“It’s me,” he called back. “Are you free?”

“Just a minute.”

He was leaning far forward, his left hand on his hatbrim, his right ear close to the door. He was unaware that he was leaning farther than balance would permit until he found himself falling, drunkenly tumbling, lashing out with the tip of his cane to protect himself, shifting his left foot at the same time, but somehow getting it wrong, so that the next thing he knew he was on the carpet, the thud of his fall still echoing like thunder, the door suddenly opening and Donnie Matthews looking down at him, surprised.

“Jesus!” she said, bending down toward him. “What happened?”

“Floor tipped,” he said. “Or maybe it was solar wind.”

“You’re drunk!” she said.

“That’s also a possible explanation.” He was up