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

as strikingly pretty as Leslie and wore slightly thick glasses, but she was visibly a nice kid, by no means ugly; one of civilization’s fortunate.

From somewhere surprisingly nearby—at first he thought it was from outside the house, only feet away from him—a voice called, “Sheila?”

Without turning, still playing with the cat, the girl said, “Coming! Just a sec, Ma!” She made another pass over the cat’s head with the shoelace—the cat declined the gambit, then belatedly jumped and caught the lace in both paws and its teeth. The girl dropped her end, bent down with quick grace to give the cat a little pat, then swung around and went lightly from the room.

What had his intention been, Mickelsson asked himself. To beat the man up? Shoot him, perhaps? Was it so surprising, really, that he had a house, a daughter who showed every sign of having been loved, pampered, taught to be cheerfully obedient?

The cat settled on the carpet with the shoelace, its blue eyes by some trick of light going empty. From the way the cat fumbled and mainly used its teeth, one could see that the creature had been declawed.

Jessie’s house was dark. Perhaps she’d gone to bed; he had no idea how late it was. She prided herself on being an early riser, he remembered. The darkness behind her windows seeped into his heart.

As he drove toward the Tillsons’ it suddenly came to him why it was that he kept thinking, lately—thinking somehow guiltily—of Ludwig Wittgenstein: Michael Nugent had mentioned him the last time they’d talked, at Mickelsson’s office. It was Tillson that had put the boy on to Wittgenstein. The Investigations had been somehow a great revelation to Nugent; Mickelsson no longer remembered, if he’d ever known, how or why. He thanked God now that, on a lucky impulse, he’d refrained from coming down too hard on old Ludwig, though he’d mentioned, with some annoyance, the use to which the Wiener Kreis had put Wittgenstein’s mystical empiricism—how Wittgenstein’s divorce of God and the knowable had without warrant become, in their hands, a dismissal of God as not simply one of the unspeakable things but Nothing, not just an empty term but a lie. Nugent, Mickelsson remembered, had simply nodded, smiling as if his mind were elsewhere.

“The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.” Traceable to Nietzsche, like everything else in modern thought. “Problems are not solved but outgrown.”

What in hell, he wondered (as always), was it supposed to mean?

Tillson’s house, like Jessie’s, was dark. Had he too gone to bed? Were they off somewhere together? He thought of swinging past the university and checking Tillson’s office but rejected the idea in disgust. He started up the engine of the Jeep once more, wondering where to go now, what to do. He felt himself absurdly like one of those young colleagues or graduate students who had come to visit him and drink up his liquor when he was living in his apartment. He thought of knocking at Gail Edelman’s door and was for a moment faintly tempted. If he were drunk, he knew, he would certainly do it. He was sorry he wasn’t drunk.

He winced, ambushed by memory. What a fool they must all have thought him, ranting against abortion, bullying them, granting them no space for what they all, this younger generation, must have known to be the truth! Bigot, he thought, then winced in embarrassment at the memory of his confession, a few hours ago, to Randy Wilson. He suffered a brief, quite mad hallucination: he thought his ex-wife was seated with him in the Jeep, crushed far over on the passenger side, to be as far from him as possible. She was crying, carefully not making a sound. Tears streamed down her face, she made no effort to get rid of them. Her hands were knotted together in her lap. Her face was puffy, her dyed hair stiff and coarse. He wanted to shout at her, turn her terrible sorrow to anger—anger he could deal with—but he couldn’t find his voice.

Now the Jeep was rushing down Route 11, the long, eerie supertrucks of 81 on his left, the frozen, snowy Susquehanna on his right. The image of his crying ex-wife was gone. One moment it was there, the next it was not, and he pushed along the well-plowed, partly bare highway at nearly sixty, as if to leave the hallucination behind him forever. He found himself thinking again of Donnie Matthews. He was beginning to believe—had been inclined to believe for some time now, it struck him—that she would never be caught, would never be required to reveal what she knew, his guilt. By now she would long since have gotten her abortion, alone. If only he could meet her one more time, let her know it was all right. But she was gone. He must accept that, and the unatonable guilt that went with it. Dickens’ gentle universe of families reunited in the book’s final pages—the sorrowing, guilt-ridden rich and the sad, disowned poor—was as dead as the universe of Newton. The girl had drifted out of Mickelsson’s life like an accelerating galaxy, rushing toward the red shift, Dante’s mente, Einstein’s void. “Let them find her,” he whispered, almost a prayer. “Let her accuse me, and let us meet one more time.”

He roared down Route 11, fleeing the lights of the city toward increasing darkness. It was a clear, starry night, the snowbanks on each side of the road unnaturally sharp of line, with dark, sudden shadows, like snow in one of his son’s photographs. He imagined what it would be like to see the fat man’s ghost right there in front of him, arms stretched toward him, eyes empty. He imagined it with frightening vividness, but the road remained empty and gray, sharply focussed, mirror-bright ice patches rushing toward him like asteroids, just missing him, harmlessly passing through him.

When he looked at the kitchen clock