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

all his clownish fat, the old man had a sort of monstrous dignity, or so Mickelsson thought. Like an antique voodoo-doll. A kind of dream came into his head—Lawler as one of those mechanical figures one saw in the Heidelberg museum, dancing, playing the piano, conducting an orchestra of fixedly grinning, decaying automata. Mickelsson shook himself free of it.

“You were wrong about Professor Warren,” he said. He put his bandaged hands around two of the bars, feeling unsteady on his feet. “I want you to know that every bit of the shit you did was unnecessary.”

Lawler did not look at him.

“It may be true, as you say, that he was a former Mormon; but he’d given all that up long ago. He was interested in my house only as a chemist. Because it’s poison.”

The old man didn’t move.

The policeman said, at Mickelsson’s back, “Would you care to sit down, Professor?” Mickelsson turned and saw a dark wooden chair with wide, flat arms, its lines too sharp, dizzying, crossing the shadows of the bars slanting across the floor. He realized only now that he’d been clinging to the bars as if for dear life, no doubt visibly swaying. He sat down. The policeman drifted away. For an instant Mickelsson’s mind tricked him: he saw not the policeman but Randy Wilson.

He strained for concentration, struggling against the weirdness in his head and rubbing his chest with one hand. Little by little he told Lawler about the trucks with their headlights off, illegal dumpers from New Jersey or New York; the boy who’d come out dying of radiation sickness from a local cave; the burnt patches on the mountain slope above Mickelsson’s house, deadly seepage, tests would show; the cancerous cat and the real or probable cancer of Dr. Bauer, Pearson’s wife, maybe Pearson himself, maybe others; the strange cuts and festerings on Thomas Sprague’s pigs; the samples someone—probably Tim or one of his friends, the night they’d visited—had taken from the beam in Mickelsson’s cellar, livingroom, and bedroom, maybe other places too. That was why Tim smoked Mickelsson’s brand of tobacco. It was Mickelsson’s, or anyway Mickelsson had introduced him to it. Tim had planned it shrewdly, that midnight raid on the house to find out, without anyone’s knowing, what Warren had discovered, the discovery that might possibly have gotten Warren killed and in any case might prove his sale of the house a bad thing, a thing Tim would be ashamed of. It was a good plan. How could he know that Lawler would blunder in? Tim had worked out how to disguise the raid and at the same time check every part of the house; but he was too much the sensualist, and maybe life-affirmer, to throw away that Dunhill tobacco. It was hard to get, even in Binghamton.

“That’s what Warren was on to,” Mickelsson said. With one clumsy, bandaged hand, he took from his coatpocket the fact-sheet Charley Snyder had given him, a long list of sources, waste analysis, legal and illegal dumping times and places. He held the paper toward Lawler, but the old man ignored it. At last Mickelsson put it back in his pocket.

Lawler said nothing, sliding his eyes toward Mickelsson, then away.

“It was a dream,” Mickelsson said, “your optimistic hope that Mormonism was behind it—the glorious vision of Joseph Smith and all that. The dark green unornamented car we spoke of: it wasn’t Mormons. If we ever find it, we’ll probably find it belonged to company men—maybe the Mafia—checking for midnight landfill sites, and making sure no one like me would raise problems.” He sighed, shook his head, glanced for a moment at the policeman still bent over his nails, then returned his gaze to Lawler. “Even your religion, if one can call it that, was more than reality would support. Nothing out there—Tinklepaugh’s right. Luck. Dead facts. Some of them very strange facts, I grant you—ghosts, prescience, real UFOs for all I know—but still just facts, no different from iron bars, woodchucks, trees. No salvation in them.” He leaned forward. “What baffles me is …” He paused, half closing his eyes and pressing his hand to his chest, waiting for a pain to pass. “What made you do it, all those years, that disguise of gentleness and goodness, generosity? Surely you didn’t imagine—no offense, just curiosity—you didn’t imagine you were a Danite then. Why the cover? What was behind it?”

Lawler sat as still as a sack of old clothes. At last he spoke, softly, moving only his lips. “Wittgenstein,” he said. “You love to speak of Wittgenstein.” He sighed, still motionless except for the deep, slow intake of breath. “Why should anything be behind it? Your friend Wittgenstein has a terrible vision: a man says, ‘No admittance,’ a different language game from a sign that says ‘No admittance,’ though it seems to mean the same thing; which is in turn a different language game from a policeman who holds up his arm to signify ‘No admittance,’ and different again from a barbed-wire fence. And then there’s the case of an intentionally planted row of trees—another language game that only possibly means ‘No admittance.’ And finally there’s the case of the accidentally grown row of trees. We read it as language, as if Someone were speaking it. That’s our great error, your friend points out. Used as we are to language games, we read the world as meaningful. But alas, the world is dead and mute. Final. As is the self.”

“That may be,” Mickelsson said, confused, not yet taking in what he’d heard, waving it away with the side of his hand, “but the change in you. How do you explain that?”

Lawler gazed at him with infinite disgust. “I loved truth,” he said at last. “I do not think my vision of the future will prove mistaken.”

Mickelsson leaned farther forward, straining. His vision blurred, focussed, blurred again. “You killed all those people needlessly,” he said. “You know that. There was never any threat to Mormonism,