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

he saw Mabel Garret lying in the dimly lit hospital room on the night she’d seen the ghosts. God bless the Garrets, he thought. They were good people, though possibly unbalanced, certainly not wise. All those children, each of them doomed to at least some small measure of scorn in this world of blind staggers and self-righteous firing squads. Blacks, Orientals, children with handicaps—the Garrets abandoned all sense and took them in. In a mad world, choose a generous madness.

Reagan was now smiling leader of the Reich—Mickelsson hadn’t seen a paper in weeks or heard news on the radio, but someone had mentioned the Great Man’s plans, had mentioned them blithely, as if nothing could be more natural. More nukes; deployment of the neutron bomb to please the Germans; friendly signals to the butchers of El Salvador. Why not? Alles ist erlaubt.

He slept.

A little before midnight he awakened with a shout. He switched on the light and saw that his breath made steam. The windows were white with frost, glittering feathers. He got up and dressed as quickly as he could manage, as if there were something he must do right away, then went down, scratching his head, getting out his cigarettes, and made a fire in the stove. When it was crackling loudly, the stove doors wide open, sending rolling, yellow-orange light over the room, he sat on the couch—the cat came and settled nearby, close to the stove—lit another cigarette and tried to remember what he’d dreamed. For a long time, no matter how he tried to concentrate, nothing would come to him. Then his eye fell on the shotgun by the door and a piece of the dream snapped back.

It was something about a class: Brenda Winburn was there, holding a birdcage with a songbird in it—plump, black, crow-like—and there were others, people he didn’t recognize, in one corner his mother (but too young to be his mother), writing letters in great haste. The room was narrow and extremely cold, a little like the nave of a cathedral, and they were sitting on crates of bright red apples. Nugent was saying something, urgently trying to get some point across, and the class was disgusted, wanting to get on with the course’s more serious business, which had to do with Christmas trees, or someone in hiding. The matter was urgent. The room seemed to be sinking, ice rising inch by inch past the delicate purple windows. Mickelsson, in the dream, had lecture notes strewn on the rough plank floor all around him, words and numbers scrawled on pinkish checkbook paper. He’d apparently brought the wrong set of notes. He stalled, trying to get things clear, blocking Nugent’s voice, trying to block the bird’s bright chatter, stubbornly refusing to grant the floor to Brenda, who was waving her arm, eager to speak, pointing at Nugent’s wide black shadow on the frosty wall, the whole wall glittering, except where the shadow was, like tiny mirrors or bits of bluish schist under torchlight. Nugent was talking about moving vans and had brought with him several wheels, which he held out in display, as if for sale. His eyes themselves were silver wheels. The black shadow at his back was in fact not Nugent’s shadow but an opening, a door to a place Mickelsson hadn’t known to exist. Mickelsson rushed to it, lest the door fall shut, and suddenly found himself lying face up in a grave. The bird sang; Theodosia Sprague looked down at him. Then everything went dark. His frantic fingertips found the padded satin lid.

That was all he could remember. “Crazy dream,” he said to himself, frightened all over again. Nothing in the dream made sense except the wheels. The hubs, which were of wood, reminded him of nuclear reactors. He straightened up a little, glancing at the kitchen door as if someone might be watching—the face in the hex sign, say. Somehow the dream was about his son, he decided. “Dear God, take care of Mark,” he whispered. “And Leslie, Ellen, Willard, Jessie, Geoffrey Tillson …” He was caught again in his trap of ritual, Mickelsson the Magician, and he dared not pull out. Then suddenly, as if taking a great risk, he stopped himself, broke off in the middle of Mabel Garret’s name. He held his breath, feeling his racing heartbeat. His alarm increased. He rubbed his chest.

He stood up, purposeful, a little flame of anger leaping in him, and walked through the dark house to his study, where he snapped on the lights. He heard a rattle of mice scattering, but his eye wasn’t quick enough to spot one. On his desk his electric typewriter sat half buried in mail. He took his old gray sweater from its hook in the closet—the room was ice-cold—pulled it on, then sat down at the typewriter, pushed the mail out of the way, bunching it up, letting some slide to the floor, found a sheet of paper, and inserted it. He flipped on the switch. Dear Mark:

He stared at the paper. He could cover all the rallies, visit all the sites, maybe that would do it; he seemed to have given up on his teaching anyway—his teaching, friendships, love, even his enmities. Sooner or later, driving around the country from rally to rally and reactor to reactor until the Jeep ran out of gas, then hitch-hiking or simply walking like some wet-brained bum, he would spot his son’s top-hat and blue-eyed, pink face, smiling thoughtfully, taking pictures with the ridiculous Instamatic, or wiring some “device,” as the truth-benders called it, then folding up his dollar-fifty toolkit and running like hell. …

You must be very proud.

I am.

It was that that he would write to his son, if he could write. But no words came, only pictures, visions. “Society,” “the Establishment“—those fat, hollow words became a sea of drab faces, dutiful bent-backed Mormons like stalks of wheat, hurrying obediently, meekly across an endless murky plain toward increasingly thick, dark smoke. There