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

agent—the submissive means by which evil powers he could not understand did their work. Insofar as it was this faintly psychotic sense of abandonment that ruled him, any risks he might take were impersonal. If he was of two minds, one that had fled elsewhere, leaving only the smell of its horror, the other clanking on, and if in that second mind he was sunk deep in the swirling mud of actuality, acting helplessly but with full intent and will, like a pilot fighting his plane through a tornado, the ethical result was all one. Volition was for angels. He must do whatever the instant required, without thought.

Back at home, after he’d left her, and after the shock had partly lifted (he’d lain in his bed unmoving, staring into space the whole night), he’d realized that he should have talked more with Donnie, calming her, making sure she understood her accessory involvement, feeling her out and guiding her. There were a thousand tricks she might pull, if she were frightened enough. She might take however much of the money she pleased, then go to the police with whatever was left and tell them what he’d done. Aside from Donnie, no one but the dead man could say how much there had originally been. “What would I say if she did that?” he asked himself, clenching his teeth with the effort of his concentration. Or she might run with the money and get her abortion in spite of her promise, making his act—terrible enough already—sickeningly casual, obscene. That would enrage him. He did not want ever again to do violence to anyone. A hundred times, that sleepless night, he saw with dizzying vividness how the man had clutched his chest with the side of his useless pistol, his twisted face a mute cry of anguish to the universe, a wail for mercy. The memory made him gag. Nevertheless he would be beside himself, he knew, if Donnie were now to make a joke of it. She ought to be made aware of that, so that she could enter the proper quotient of dread into her calculus.

He had no real idea, as he emerged from his lair to seek her out, what he meant to say to her. (In the rear-view mirror he was red-eyed, un-shaven.) He tried one imaginary conversation after another, each more fatuous and improbable than the last. It grew increasingly clear that, despite his despairing indifference, it was for his sake as well as hers that they must talk, so that, now that his head was clear, he could gauge her mood and figure out how much he could tolerate from her, exactly what forbearance he was capable of. If she intended to go to the police … what then?

It was not as if, like one of those low-born, ever-the-same TV murderers, he had something to protect—his possible future with Jessie, his job and reputation. He cared not a whit about any of that. He was now absolutely on his own, cut off utterly. The question was simply, how much would he put up with? Where no law was left but the animal sense of one’s own life’s worth—a sense now both poisoned and illuminated by guilt, by experience of the truly disgusting (he now understood) fear of raising one’s head among the common, “decent,” ever-witlessly-judgmental herd—how much, if anything, would he think himself worth? He grew angrier and angrier, like one scandalously misused. He found himself increasingly indifferent and unafraid.

But when he reached her apartment at seven that morning, he found Donnie Matthews’ door locked and Donnie gone, and though nothing in specific suggested that her absence today was any different from her ordinary absences—except, of course, for the time of day, and the fact that the plastic rose she’d taped to her door was gone—he felt convinced that she was gone for good, or anyway gone for a good long while. After knocking repeatedly, speaking softly to the door, listening for footsteps on the stairs behind him, he turned away, walked down one flight, then stopped again. The fat man’s door, twelve feet down the hallway, was as solemnly closed as Donnie’s, though he knew that at a touch it would spring open, both the catch and the chainlatch torn loose. How long would it be before the stench of the body—or some wandering draught, or some Jehovah’s Witness visiting with a pamphlet, giving the door an accidental push—brought the police? Gloomy daydreams moved through his head: how he might come here at night and bundle the body, wrapped in a blanket, out through the window onto the tar-and-pebble roof, drag it across the roof and drop it with a thud into the alley below, load it into the back of the Chevy or Jeep, if he was able to get the Jeep running, and haul it away someplace, dump it where no one would find it. But even as, out of the corner of his mind’s eye, Mickelsson attended to these macabre dreams, he was moving on down the stairs, his left hand sliding gently, ready to grip hard, on the worn railing. Perhaps he should have taken the fat man’s gun. In the entryway he paused, the mailboxes a little behind him, and cautiously peeked out. The town’s one patrol car was edging by—today it was Cobb driving, not Tinklepaugh—heading toward the outskirts of town. He waited until the patrol car was well out of sight, then ducked his head and stepped out, like a man full of business, onto the sidewalk. The sky was gray and low, building up toward a renewal of the blizzard. A puff of snow moved up the street, slow and formal as a skater. With two hands he pulled his hat down harder, his ears still unprotected, waiting for the first freezing gust.

Behind him, a voice cried out, “Hey! Professor!” He started so violently he almost fell, but he managed to catch himself, then turned to look back