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

Christmas!” He imagined the dead fat man stumbling toward them calling out for help. “Mercy!” he would moan, blackness in his mouth. Mickelsson shook his head, driving the crazy image back to darkness.

He remembered that Mark would not be there, would be God knew where.

He bent still farther toward the windshield, discomfort in his chest. He could see his partly bared teeth in the windshield, his glistening eyes. Wince of a killer. Poor super-ape, programmed to love and forget! Whole generations came and went on the earth, and—because, once they’d settled in, made a place for themselves, they never left home, never wandered lost from the valleys they’d chosen or inherited from their fathers—they, those former, safe generations, had never learned the truth: that all this mighty turmoil of the heart is illusion: love of kin, the home dirt, the hymns of one’s particular sect. … Once, Peter Mickelsson’s heart had leaped at sight of the dusty wheat-yellow hills of California, just as years before that it had leaped at the fairyland green or, in winter, the shadow-dappled white of Wisconsin. But he’d moved one or two (three, four) times too often, and now when his business took him to places where his heart had once leaped—if you could call this nonsense he lived by a business—he was in and out like the Fuller Brush man, Wham bam thank you ma’am, indifferent as he’d be to Daytona Beach or Hackensack. Interesting that the meaning of life, genetically implanted, should be so dispiritingly simple, a certain slope of land, a particular sunlight, the sixth physical sense, the sense of belonging. Even he, for all his travels, was not fully immune—no one was, of course—feeling his idiot heart warm, after only these few months, as his car nosed into the fold of the mountains and, winding up the steep, dark Susquehanna Valley, warm more as he climbed the still flank of his own pile of earth. Yet he could leave, he knew; never bat an eye. He could forget all these people, just like that, become fond again of strangers and leave them too. O Love, let us be true to one another until Tuesday!

His face froze in another wince, dripping tears, partly anger at the brain’s endless posturing. Shameless, sentimental bullshit. That was what community was for, to tell the visionary madman “Come off it!” John the Baptist bawling in the wilderness. Cassandra blubbering by the sea.

So the young moved out from their fathers’ houses to new places—Utah, Southern France—and put down roots, sucked in air, fell in love with the scent of coalsmoke or sassafras, whatever; and so long as they remained there in the new land Jehovah had set aside for them, all was well with them, they knew who they were, what they were there for. In other words knew nothing; questioned nothing, learned nothing. Such was the program. Flight from the nest, new nest-building, then steadiness, the old heart mellowing into loam to feed the trees of the great-greatgrandchildren’s nests. The world had been meaningful by inspection then, because no one but the sad-eyed, lamenting Jews had been constrained to move endlessly from place to place, from home to alienating consciousness; tear up again and again those roots they’d so thirstily put down, forget names and faces betrayed, betraying. … Alas, the fidelity the heart required was no longer among the world’s possibilities. Now all people were Jews. How many would survive the new, universal holocaust? Not Mickelsson, he feared—thinking the same instant, Self-pity! Weeping. (Clear vision was the hermit’s hope. Sentimentality the risk. For hermit, read crowd-pressed modern man.) He thought, in contrast, of his father, dying in the hospital, surrounded by friends, tubes in his arms and nose.

The unfortunate thing about the mentally ill, he thought, imagining he was speaking to Rifkin, is that they’re vile.

Rifkin shrugged. “Who’s not vile?”

He left the dark, outer houses of Susquehanna behind him—in the windows, the flickering blue light of TV sets, all sweet sorrowing America’s opiate, even Susquehanna’s, though not his, up on the mountain, where one could only get the sound and where even that, what one could get of it, was blurry, like a confusion of sea-nymph voices in a cave. Just as well that he should be denied even television’s comfort. Having abandoned his friends, his wife, even himself, he was one of the world’s new beings, not fit to survive, but sufficiently clear-headed to tell the tale. He looked over at the shotgun, the barrel just a shadow now, standing upright, silhouetted against the window, like a narrow hitch-hiker.

He began to drive faster, more recklessly than usual, sliding on icy corners, still wiping his eyes from time to time. Barrelling around a corner not far from where the doctor had nearly hit him all those weeks ago, his headlights lit up—black against the sugar-crystal whiteness of snow—two hatless, long-coated young men climbing a snowbank to get out of his way. They teetered precariously, flailing their arms, much too high on the bank to be in danger, though they apparently didn’t know it. Their invasion of his territory made anger flash. Mickelsson rolled down the window and shouted as he shot past, “Wo kein Kläger ist, wer wird da richten?” It was a stupid, adolescent thing to do. Crazy. If he were drunk, perhaps … Poor devils! But he was smiling, pleased with himself. He did no harm; they had each other—as poor dying Miss Minton had had the principal, the School Board, the parental conspiracy of silence. They had behind them, these two souls in black, the whole shadowy army of Mormon, a drab, sober-minded community stretching to the ends of the earth, from Susquehanna to darkest Peru. God bless community, never mind what—the Century Club, the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Mickelsson and his ugly cat. He shook his head and saw his reflection in the windshield shake its head.

When he was inside his house and had closed the door, he stood for