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

the more his mind worked against him, undermining his effort with indignant upbraidings and images of rebuke until finally he couldn’t hear Lawler’s voice at all. Once, swinging the pick, he remembered, more with his body than with his mind, how he’d killed the dog on the sidewalk. Lying still, it turned into the fat man. He got a nightmare image of walking with a crowd at the Binghamton July-fest—colored lights, noises—an old bum coming up to him, suggesting with an oddly lascivious look that Mickelsson give him money. He felt in his left hand how he’d pushed the man away. Please, he whispered, straining so hard the muscles of his neck and shoulders throbbed. It seemed his brain was on fire. He saw a black man on a lawn in Golden Gate Park, his temples bulging with anger as he cursed Ellen’s mime troupe: “Troublemakers! Arrogant idiots!” They too had cried out like the dying fat man, snarling at Mickelsson, snarling at Society, “the Establishment,” demanding justice—but, like Mickelsson himself, the audience couldn’t hear, couldn’t cut through intellect and standard usages to feel what the mime troupe, in its lubberly, holy stupidity was saying. … Mickelsson’s philosopher-mind kicked in. … Could not grasp, Wittgenstein would say, the terms of the “language game”—applied, Gilbert Ryle would say, “the wrong category,” as when one tries to understand music as if it were arguing in Finnish. He struggled against his mind’s angry and embittered denial of his reasonable right to cry out, but his mind raged on like an urchin in a violent tantrum, unwilling to be hushed. He tried to focus all his energy on the cry. His will repeatedly flagged, then rose again, shouting itself hoarse. Sublimation indeed! Very well, he was no superman. More easy to believe in God and the grace of the lady than in the self-saved Übermensch. He thought of his son the protester—now terrorist, for all he knew—and mixed in with the thought of his son and the nukes was the thought of his son’s fear of horses, and how he, Mickelsson, had bullied the boy to courage, in the end even to prize-winning horsemanship. The pride he’d always felt when he thought of it before, the sense that the consequences had justified his action, now evaporated: all he could see was his son’s eyes crying for mercy, darkness inside his mouth. “Monstrous,” he whispered, then remembered that, monstrous or not, if he meant to be saved he must concentrate all his being on the psychic cry, not that it would save him. (He saw the lawyer Finney ducking and running, covering his ears.) But his thoughts roared on, his wife’s voice shouting at him, swearing. He had not won, as he’d thought. His son, his child, the pride of his life, had found a larger, even crueller father to resist. He would be crushed again—as sure as day—Mickelsson could not stop it. He thought of Leslie and her cunning use of French, how she’d seized the Babar he and Ellen had given her to cry out angrily, “Love me! Forgive me! Look at me!” To which he’d responded with a sudden hatred of the French. “My God, my God!” he whispered now, tears streaming, washing dirt into his mouth. He quickly forced his mind back to the cry. Help me! he made himself think. Help me! Please! He controlled an urge to howl at the stupidity and shamefulness of it. Help me! he made himself think. More real, more solid and substantial than Lawler, Nietzsche stood cackling in admirable mad scornful glee. Mickelsson was swinging the pick as if he’d just begun, all his tiredness gone, more aching, thudding power in his legs and arms than he could remember ever having felt before. He was briefly aware of Lawler talking. “Rightness is beauty. How else can we judge it?” Then the voice faded out like a distant radio station late at night. Mickelsson’s whole body thought: Help me! Please! He felt such physical strength he could have lifted a truck. But his soul bellowed on. He thought of his mother’s cry for help—he had not heard—then of Jessie’s cry, then Tillson’s. Jessie, he thought, Jessie! Jessie!

The phone rang, then rang again. He glanced at Lawler. The man shook his head. The room was still full of floating dust, but there was no doubt in Mickelsson’s mind that the ghosts had appeared, the middle-aged woman, the man in brown, and the child. They seemed to be watching him, fully aware of him now, and possibly frightened, as if he were the ghost. The phone went on ringing. Was it possible, he wondered, that the cry was getting through—to the ghosts and to whoever was calling? He couldn’t answer the phone without Lawler’s permission. The ringing went on and on, making Lawler jumpy, his eyes moving faster. Mickelsson concentrated on the psychic cry. Suddenly he was conscious of a headache so fierce he was amazed that he didn’t pass out. Almost the same instant he noticed the headache, it was gone—all bodily sensation was gone. He could have been floating a thousand feet above the earth. Help me, please, he thought, far more clearly than before. He remembered, suddenly, the Marxist he’d met in the theater after the movie. He had a sense, right or wrong, that the man was crying out to him, or anyway shouting for rightness in the world, and at the memory of his own angry smart-aleck put-downs he felt such squalor of soul he involuntarily bent double, moving his head close to the wall he’d been about to tear out. The sheen of the wallpaper startled him, and—his thought elsewhere—he bent closer. The wallpaper brightened more. He felt alarm—terror—though for a moment he couldn’t tell why. He drew his head back. The light on the wallpaper dimmed. Before he knew what he was testing, he moved his head forward again, and the wallpaper brightened as if a candle had come near.