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

gotten through it. Perhaps he hadn’t. Perhaps that was the reason Lawler had burned the house: if the secret was up there, and Sprague too weak to tear it out, let the fire get rid of it. If Mickelsson’s strength were to give out, then, the same would happen here. Lawler would shoot him, or perhaps somehow manage to cut his throat with the knife he must be carrying, or he’d set fire to the house and burn up whatever the presumed evidence was. As Mickelsson considered his weakness and the pain in his hands, the realization was a frightening one. The only hope he had was somehow to keep working, keep Lawler at bay with the faint possibility that they might find something. Not that they would. Mickelsson felt his consciousness settling, more and more intensely, on the box of old keys sitting on the glass-topped table. He must get near it as soon as possible, bury it under, say, fallen plaster from the ceiling. Sooner or later Lawler would wake up to it, and the game would be finished. Sooner or later the game would be finished in any case. It was true; he had no prayer but prayer, a thing he no more believed in than he believed in Freddy Rogers’ stone falls, or blood falls, or the Binghamton paper’s UFOs. He glanced out at the road and saw Lawler’s antique gray car. “Christ,” he whispered to himself, “someone come help me!” Again he felt an impulse toward angry, maybe hysterical laughter. He was praying.

He thought: Suppose it were true, crazy as it sounded, that one could send out a sort of mental cry for help and someone, somewhere, might receive it? There were those who believed in such things, even certain scientists, or so he’d read. There were alleged cases of mothers who, though half a world away, heard the cry of their endangered or dying children. There was the alleged case of the Russian rabbit whose heart whammed at the precise moment each of her babies was slain, though they were thousands of miles from her and caged in a submarine. Mickelsson paused to wipe sweat and dust out of his eyes and wipe his blood-slippery hands on his trousers. The psychic cry for help was a futile and stupid hope, he knew. And shameful. Better the nihilistic courage of Dr. Destouches—though that too was shameful enough, obscene and, for all the hoopla, just one more cunning disguise for sentimentality. Psychic cry for help … Even if such things occasionally did happen, he had no power to make it happen for him. How many thousands of people died every year who would have lived if any such magic were available? Perhaps if one had studied with Tibetan monks … if one had taken care to build strong, deep friendships … It crossed his mind that his helplessness now was a judgment on him. But that thought too seemed too tiresome to trace to its end.

His strokes came more and more slowly, but the room was already well on the way to total ruin, the Christmas tree deep in dust. Once or twice, watching the pick end sink, he felt a flash of rage; but he was no longer even considering an attack on Lawler. He could hardly control the slam of the pick into the plaster, much less throw it hard enough and fast enough to beat Lawler’s gun; and his legs were so weak he could barely stand, much less charge the black-suited fat man on the couch. The thought that the house must be torn apart, then burned, made him wretched. It was only a house; but his heart swore otherwise. Tears ran down his cheeks, making his eyes still more gritty, and his breathing came harder and harder. “Dear God, please,” he whispered, and then at once, for the cowardice of his sudden turn to Jesus, felt revulsion so strong that he again tasted vomit. The ugliness of it! He, Mickelsson, whining his Now-I-lay-me—Mickelsson who himself had shown no mercy—crying out now to a God he’d refused to believe in when he hadn’t been in need. That was how they got you, he knew. Need. Impotence is dangerous for the human character.

“Sinful pride,” his grandfather would hiss. Lightning flashed in the old man’s dim eyes.

Now a terrifying sound burst out behind Mickelsson and he whirled, then was thrown into confusion: Lawler sat watching him, startled by his sudden turn but obviously deaf—stone deaf—to the scream filling the room. Lawler’s eyes rolled, alarmed and dangerous. Mickelsson realized now that he’d heard that sound before: it was the scream of the poisoned rat the Spragues’ child, thinking it was dead, had thrown into the stove. He saw the child himself coming into the room now, an image as solid as Lawler. The child had his gloved hands over his ears, and his eyes were frantic. He ran toward the kitchen. Then Mickelsson saw, not in the room with him but in painfully vivid imagination, the fat man he’d killed, eyes slightly bulging, mouth open, his pistol pressed hard against his bursting heart, his whole soul sending out its terrible, hopeless wail.

Lawler twisted his lips, threatening, and waved his gun, not playing now, growing angry, impatient, maybe frightened. “Stop fooling around!” he yelled. Quaking, Mickelsson turned back to his work. Now Mickelsson was whispering, weeping as he whispered, abject and shameless, “Please, someone! Please!” Though he knew it was lunacy, an obscene grovelling before Nothing, he concentrated with all his might on the psychic cry. Maybe Goethe’s line, inspiration to Nietzsche, could be twisted to his use: “He who overcomes himself finds freedom. Befreit der Mensch sich …” Lawler was saying something, his voice wonderfully aristocratic, it seemed to Mickelsson—silvery elocution, at once soothing and distantly ironic, scornful—but Mickelsson refused to hear, pouring all he had into his uncouth purpose, getting that silent cry to some friendly ear. The harder he drove out his cry,