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

gray paper containing some old, no longer intelligible notes, but he wrote nothing. He heard Michael Nugent’s voice again, wretchedly pleading from the shadows for a grade. “I know it’s not fair to ask—I mean I know its abnormal. …” He tried to think about it, but he could find no hand-hold. For an instant he had a vision of ghosts everywhere, all through the valley, filling all valleys, crowding every street—stewing, groaning, clutching their hands over business undone.

“Good, we’ll be expecting you!” Tillson said. “Good-bye, then.”

“Good-bye, then,” he said.

The receiver wobbled in his hand as he hung up the phone. He went to the couch in the livingroom—the cat was nowhere to be seen—and lay down. Stretched out, shaky, he remembered how, after his sister’s death, his father would come in, day after day for months and months, and lie down on the old swaybacked davenport at mid-day, when the work was heaviest, and sleep. So anguish was everywhere, he knew now, stretching across the earth and back into time, back to the large-brained, gentle Neandertals dragging their old and crippled from place to place, burying their dead in encircling flowers, bewailing life’s sorrows with mouths incapable of more than two tight, flat vowels. Anguish among people, high apes and low apes, geniuses and fools; anguish among squirrels in trees when John Pearson blasted parents and children out of them; anguish of bulls on the slaughterchute; out at sea the huge, unimaginable anguish of whales. And now he knew, if he was willing to believe his eyes and ears, that it extended even to the kingdom of the dead. Not surprising, after all. One read about séances in the days of William James—wailing voices from various parts of the room, whimpering lost children wandering, crying out for long-missing toys; older voices trying to drive some message across, word of some letter, hiding place, unconfessed sin. Such was the fruit of all those eons of evolution, from hydrogen to consciousness: galaxies wailing their sorrow. Music of the spheres.

In this as in everything, Mickelsson thought—damning his self-pity but helpless against it—his father had been a better man than he was. He had grieved from love, over things he couldn’t have prevented; not from guilt. It was guilt, self-hatred, that made Mickelsson’s limbs too heavy to move. Theoretically their professions were similar, farmer and teacher. Pastores. The sheep look up …

He thought of his own favorite teacher in graduate school, McPherson. He’d been fifty-five or sixty when Mickelsson had first known him; reputed to be homosexual, though one never heard any real evidence. A bachelor, Southern genteel, like Tom Garret, but of an earlier vintage—three-piece suits, Phi Beta Kappa key, both his house and his office crowded with books; one could hardly see the walls. He’d been notoriously stern. If someone dropped a pencil he would stop the class. But also he’d been famous for kindness, like old Lawler. Mickelsson remembered, with a flush of embarrassment, a cocktail party he’d gone to once, in his grad-student days, where he’d set himself down next to McPherson’s chair and had made some rash, casual remark about A. J. Ayer. McPherson had bent toward him—he had a plate on his knees, a glass of whiskey on the floor beside his shoe—and suddenly it had come to Mickelsson that the man was listening, actually interested, as if he thought he might learn something. Panic flared up in him; he’d had nothing much to say about Ayer, really. He’d stammered, had felt almost faint for an instant; and then some kind demon had entered him and he’d found himself saying things he hadn’t been aware that he knew—the slippage in natural law, why it implied not freedom but a bizarre randomness—McPherson nodding, jabbing his fork in the air in front of him—“Exactly!” or “Ah, but that’s a moot point!” or, once, “Poppycock!” Afterward, back at the quonset hut, lying in his bed a little drunk, Mickelsson had realized that McPherson had granted him, as if nothing in the world were more natural and right, the first serious philosophical conversation he’d ever had with a real philosopher. He hadn’t been able to explain to Ellen or anyone else the special, almost miraculous quality of that conversation. “Faggots are like that,” Ellen had said, smiling her big, white smile. “Instant charm.”

Toward the end, McPherson had gone nearly blind. The last time Mickelsson had seen him, his eyes, through the glasses, were like large, blurry eggs, and everywhere he went he had to be guided; but there were plenty to guide him—forty years’ worth of students, all of them eager to exchange a few words with him.

It was a strange thing that, with models like McPherson, Mickelsson should have failed. Rifkin had given him a dozen theories, ways of letting himself off; but they were all, as McPherson would say, poppycock. Whatever might be true for other people, it was always the case with Mickelsson, he was persuaded, that in his darkest moods he saw most clearly. Only then did everything stand still for him, the patterns creep out from behind their obscuring foliage. Rifkin scoffed; but it was a first principle of philosophy that no hypothesis should be rejected if all the available evidence supported it, and search as he might, he could find no evidence that the primary fact of his nature was not selfishness, bestial self-love, blindness to the ordinary needs of those around him. “Come on now,” Rifkin had said once, exasperated into showing his colors, “people are like that.” He pointed with a rigid arm and finger at the waiting room. “You should see what comes through that door!” He spoke as if with scorn (the tone, Mickelsson understood, was accidental) of Dr. Freud’s late theories, the universality of neurosis in human beings, the lifelong struggle of Eros and Thanatos, finally one thing, the incurable disease which began with the theft of the infant’s feces, how every love afterward was an imperfect and therefore doomed