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

what then? What switch could turn life back on? And if one knew it was a simple mechanical switch—some pill, or “love,” or “the sense of community”—would one deign to reach up to the switch? That was the world’s inheritance from Nietzsche, though Nietzsche had not faced the matter squarely. If God was dead, human dignity gone, all values emptied, why not just say “Fuck it”—push the button? The existentialists—Zarathustra’s most tedious apes—had an answer; but they hardly counted: war babies. Any fool could get it up in time of war. It was like the glorious secret of present-day East European fiction: 1943. Woman finds piece of bread; sneaks off; joyfully eats it. No one had the right, anymore, to be quite that sentimentally elemental.

Better to act with fully conscious stupidity: for instance, steal the fat man’s stolen money. A tide of darkness washed over him. It was of course no longer a case for Dostoevski. Raskolnikov was a nice boy; his poverty was real and legitimate. No Russian, not even a modern Russian, could get himself into a position like Mickelsson’s. He was still up to his old tricks. Knowing that his bills were more than he could handle, he would refuse to look at them for weeks at a time, even when the bills came by registered mail; meanwhile his salary would go into his account automatically, so that the account would build like a rich man’s—though Mickelsson, that very moment, might be sweating at the risk of a twenty-dollar check. Then, because nothing had gone wrong for a time, he would write checks to everyone—mainly his wife and his wife’s old creditors, putting off his own, which were more recent—and six out of ten of the checks he wrote would bounce, five-dollar service charge each time. Meanwhile the pile of mail remained virtually untouched.

Would he feel guilty, he wondered, if he stole the fat man’s money?

The question was absurd. Of course he would! So he told himself, angrily gesturing—standing back from himself, watching the performance. It would be good, God knew, to have Donnie and the child taken care of, generously taken care of and out of his life.

He saw himself smashing through the fat man’s door, then shook his head, banishing the thought as he would a nightmare. One impression remained: he would not feel especially guilty.

In his mailbox the next morning, he found a card from Ernest diSapio of the I.R.S. “Possible irregularities in all tax-forms filed by you since 1970. Suggest you drop in or phone.” He read the card three times, thought about the fact that it had been sent on a postcard, for all to see, then laughed.

It was perhaps his anger at diSapio that got him moving. He dressed himself up as if for church, went out into the biting, snapping cold, ground futilely for several minutes on the starter of the Jeep, then tried the blue car, which came to life at once. He got out to shovel himself a path to the road, then got in again and backed out of the barn. He did then something the strangeness of which he would recognize only much later. Perhaps, as Jessie would claim, it was a psychic hunch that made him act. Perhaps it was luck shading toward grace, the same mystery that would prompt him to give the thing to Lepatofsky’s daughter a few hours from now. Driving past the Jeep, he saw the troll-doll hanging from the rear-view mirror, and on impulse got out, unsnapped the pull-chain that attached the troll-doll to the Jeep and transferred it to the rear-view mirror of the Chevy. Then he drove down to Susquehanna.

Though he knocked again and again at Donnie Matthews’ door, there was no answer. Very well; he had errands enough to keep him busy. He would come back. Slowly, over roads that were glare ice over hardpacked snow—except on steep hills, where cinders had been put down—he drove to Montrose. There he found the lawyer he’d dealt with before—deaf, blind, coughing Mr. Cook—and gave him the card from diSapio, gave him Finney’s address and phone number, and briefly outlined, shouting and gesturing, his problems with the I.R.S. “There may be ways around that,” Mr. Cook said, tapping his fingertips over his chest. “If you were under psychiatric care, as you say, we might just, ipso facto, have a toe hold.” The fines and penalties might be questioned, inter alia, perhaps negotiated. He smiled. A man who loved his craft. Ipso jure, they had several means of stalling for time. Mr. Cook could of course promise nothing, but looking a long way down the road …

He went back to his car feeling obscenely grateful, blessed. He’d left only one thing undone that he wished he might have done. He’d like to have asked about those ghosts. But the question was too awkward, and then there was the barrier of Cook’s deafness. During the half hour he’d spent in Cook’s office, the sky, he found, had darkened, huge bluish-brown clouds like bruises overhead—more like thunderclouds than like snow-clouds. They made the whole town mysteriously dark, as if some Biblical miracle were about to happen, or the sun were slipping into eclipse. Even this sudden, surprising darkness did not dampen his mood, that is, steal from him his sense of born-again relief, now that his troubles—some of them anyway—were in professional hands; but the darkness did do something queer, for a matter of seconds, to his imagination. When he’d backed into Public Street and was just nosing the Chevy toward the courthouse, he suddenly hit his brakes, believing he saw something that he knew could not be there. In front of the courthouse steps there was a tall, black gallows, and hanging from it, perfectly still except for a slight movement of her dress in what might have been a light summer breeze, he saw a woman. He saw the hanged woman with perfect clarity—bulging eyes, dark tongue—and then the body and