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

4

Mickelsson slept through the whole next day and the night that followed, his telephone off its hook. At times he would awaken briefly to sharp, nameless dread, like one buried alive, and then he would remember, his spirit would struggle, and before he could even know clearly what he felt, drug-heavy sleep would avalanche down over him again. What he ought to feel, he believed as lucidity crept back, was disgust; but he did not. It was chiefly a crippling shame that he felt, for moving in on them like an angel of the Lord while they clasped in their arms what little peace and goodness they could find in the world. His anger and revulsion, Rifkin would say, had turned into repression. But Rifkin would be wrong, as usual. His first thought, when he peeked in at them, was that Jessie was beautiful. It was as if all he had been through, these past months, had stripped him of the last vestiges of herd opinion, so that from his dark pit of guilt he saw with eyes like an innocent’s: saw her grace and gentleness, and no more judged the act they were engaged in than he’d have done if no one had ever told him it was “wrong.” He’d achieved, perhaps, Nietzsche’s higher unconsciousness. It was as if his grandfather’s righteous, stern opinions—ideas he himself had ingeniously elaborated, even after he’d abandoned theism, by his ethical speculations—had been washed from his memory, thrown down, ground to bits, as by a tidal wave. He had looked at the pair with the same clear child-eyes that had looked, thoughtfully, open to anything, at the picture of the snake painted on the wall of the church. Now, in his bed, his mood more complex—his guilt no longer foremost but still coloring the rest—he saw Tillson in a new way, as a pitiful man, no fool, fighting like a half-drowned rat for the possible—fighting for the department, giving slack to his rainbowed youthful ideals, compromising, feinting, fighting by every means at his disposal to save whatever might be saved in these foundering times; and fighting heroically though no doubt futilely for Jessie as well, not because she was his lover but because what she stood for was right—while he, Mickelsson, stood aloof from it all, too grand for petty skirmishes, too self-absorbed and disdainful of the trivial to risk getting pigshit on his soft, pink hands. He felt his animal spirits flying inward toward his heart, squeaking like bats, his limbs becoming dry, quiet stone in their absence, and again he slept.

Minutes or hours later, when he awakened again, and again lay staring upward in the darkness, his mind and heart took up where they’d left off. He thought of all he ought to have done, ought to be doing, all he ought not to have done and could never atone for. He thought of the book he’d begun, messy hill of manuscript pages down by the typewriter, originally the “blockbuster” Donnie Matthews had inspired, gradually modified to something duller, more closely reasoned, probably no more useful or important. He resisted the impulse to destroy it. Maybe the worldview of Jake Finney was right: maybe life was shit and doom inexorable; but if anything could clean up the world, stop Armageddon, clear vision was the hope: a book honest politicians (if any could be found) might read, think about, understand; or stock investors, ordinary citizens, the people on whose blindness and indifference the Kingdom of Death, physical and spiritual, depended. A man owed something, that was the thing. Not only to the future; to the past as well—to those who had put their trust in him. It was an idea Mickelsson’s old teacher McPherson had talked about once, in connection with Homer. Mickelsson, thinking about his father, operatically singing while he plowed, his mother, dressed up, all aflutter, hurrying them to the car so they wouldn’t be late again for church, McPherson soberly wincing in front of class, struggling to get an idea just right—like Wittgenstein, he was famous for never teaching the same thing twice, never simply passing on dead information—Mickelsson, remembering these things, thought Finney’s weary cynicism not just sick but insane. He should be writing the book—for Donnie, for Mark and Leslie, for Ellen in her new life—but then he remembered that he’d killed a man and would eventually go to prison: his advice to the world would be poisoned at the source. Whose wasn’t? He had lost forever his clout.

Thoughts of his father kept coming back to him, memories groping toward revelation. He remembered how, when he, Mickelsson, was a child, his father, his father’s friend Hobart, and his uncle Edgar had torn out the partition between what had once been the pantry and the original diningroom to make one large room, the new diningroom, how they’d put in new lath, plastered, hammered in an oak frame to replace the partition, then put up new wallpaper (light blue) and painted the doors, casements, mop-boards, and mouldings white. They’d worked in frantic haste, all of two days and nights, because his mother had been away somewhere and it was meant as a surprise for her. When Mickelsson had gone to bed—they’d allowed him to stay up late, watching—the room was all dust and strangeness and confusion (he remembered the astonishing slick whiteness of the paint they were just then beginning to brush onto the doors, abnormally white because they worked by the light of bare bulbs); when he went in in the morning, the whole thing was finished and he could hardly believe his eyes—a huge, gleaming room where once there had been two small dingy rooms, the white paint and light blue wallpaper adazzle in the early-morning sunlight. Was it that, then, that had prompted him, these many years later, to transform the old Sprague place? He had his doubts about the power of psychological symbols; nonetheless, his