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

memory. Gim-me a M! Gim-me a I! … The black smudges on his teammates’ cheekbones were like Indian war-paint playfully smeared on the faces of children at a party.

As he turned the corner, starting down the hallway toward his office door, he glanced up for some reason from his impatient perusal of return addresses and saw that Nugent had gotten there ahead of him. His heart sank, and, without entirely meaning to, he put on an expression of harassed irritability. There was another young man with Nugent, a tall, handsome black boy in a tank-top, his hair in corn-rows. Mickelsson had a feeling they’d been in earnest conversation and had stopped at sight of him. They stood not far apart, their heads inclined toward one another, watching him approach. He nodded, a quick little jerk of the head, and looked back down at his mail, letting them know he was busy. At his door, with his right hand closed around the keys in his pocket, Mickelsson reconsidered and turned toward Nugent. If he and Nugent could have their conversation, whatever it was, here in the hallway, he might get finished with it quickly.

“Hi, there,” Mickelsson said and, in spite of himself, grinned.

Nugent bowed with exaggerated formality and blanched a little, as he always did when directly addressed. “Hi,” he said. He looked confused for an instant, then said, overcoming fear, “Professor Mickelsson, I’d like you to meet my friend Randy Wilson.” He reached out and touched his black friend’s elbow, exactly as one might touch the elbow of a younger sister or, perhaps, a girlfriend.

“How do you do,” he said.

“Hey, man,” Randy said, and shyly reached out his hand.

Mickelsson shifted his Plato’s Republic and the letters he held from his right hand to his left and extended his right hand for an ordinary handshake, then quickly readjusted to a power-to-the-people shake. Though he couldn’t have said why, his heart sank more.

“Randy’s in dance,” Nugent said.

“That’s wonderful,” Mickelsson said—rather stupidly, blinking. He felt caught in one of those contemporary tragedies of the kind his ex-wife especially favored, the kind in which you laugh and laugh until the grossly predictable horror swings in. Who else would the sorrowing, suicidal white boy choose as best friend—no, lover—but a black boy in, of all things, dance? Murderous cliché! How easy it was to find roads to catastrophe!

But it was the real world, not theater; scuffed, fake-marble floors, taped-up New Yorker cartoons on the office doors. All might yet be well. Randy had fine, supple muscles, enormously wide lips, such apparent sweetness and childlike timidity one could not help hoping for the best. He was already fading back, delicately allowing Nugent privacy for his conversation with the professor.

Nugent said, “I just wanted to say, that was terrific, the way you handled that.”

“Oh?” Mickelsson said, and waited.

Randy Wilson stood ten feet away from them now, sidling away still further, reading the notices on Libby Tucker’s long bulletin board, his hands on his buttocks, perfectly pressed to them like limp leaves, the elbows perfectly parallel, oddly widening his shoulders.

Nugent glanced at Mickelsson’s office door, then away, as if aware that Mickelsson had decided not to let him in. “All that crap about Ideal Forms,” Nugent said, “and Nature struggling toward God’s Ideas.”

“Mmm,” Mickelsson said, and waited.

Nugent stood oddly still, his chin thrust forward, the bone-line disturbingly visible, troublesome as the sound of one’s own heartbeat in bed. The tracery of his veins showed under the skin. “Everybody wants to go back to the simplicity of childhood,” he said, and smiled as if in panic. “They’re scared of the modern world, you know? Want to get back to innocent, sweet Nature, William Wordsworth. They don’t understand what we came out of—superstition and craziness.”

Mickelsson’s smile became fixed. He began, almost against his will, to pay attention. He couldn’t spend much time on this; he had yet to finish his preparation for the medical ethics class. But Nugent was a strange young man, no question about it.

“Look at the world—the Church is a would-be mass murderer. I mean the Pope’s medieval craziness on abortions—no place for them, even to save a woman’s life! Higher education in full retreat, or if it tries to stand firm—like Greg—he was my chemistry teacher … someone murdered him. Got into his apartment and—you know the one I mean?” He began to blink rapidly.

Mickelsson nodded. He’d heard something about it; not much, though it had been in the papers.

“I mean,” Nugent said, his voice breaking, and suddenly jerked his forearms out to the sides, the rest of his body motionless, “what we need is devices for present-day survival, you know what I mean?” He stretched his lips in a failed grin, one angry, superior intelligence to another. “I used to be in engineering—”

Mickelsson nodded again.

“We need inventions, that’s what I think. But not space-shuttles, smaller computer chips, artificial blood. All that’s been tried.” With a wave he dismissed Technological Man to outer darkness. “Did you happen to read a book by Dr. James J. Lynch, called The Broken Heart: The Medical Consequences of Loneliness?”

“I’ve heard of it,” Mickelsson said, lying, hoping to avoid a long discussion.

Nugent’s head tucked in abruptly, as if he were suddenly going into a fit, and his arms cringed back from extended position, then closed on the straps of his small, dark green backpack. He pulled it off with clumsy haste, unsnapped the top, dove in with one hand, and after a moment came out with an orange-red paperback book. “I thought you might like to look at it,” he said. “I’m sorry about all the underlinings—” He pressed the book toward Mickelsson’s chest. Automatically, unwillingly, Mickelsson took hold of it. The boy said, his eyes on Mickelsson’s forehead, “What Dr. Lynch argues—well, it’s here on the cover.” He pivoted around to stand beside Mickelsson, almost pushing against his shoulder, pointing with two white fingers at the blurb: “Dr. Lynch brings together striking evidence that companionship is an important life-force.”

“Interesting,” Mickelsson