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

blink. “You’re right, it’s none of my business,” she said. “I’m sure they’re fine people. It’s just that it’s so far from—” She hesitated, trying to find the word.

“The city’s bright lights,” he offered, gesturing with both hands, suggesting a kind of umbrella of light in the air between them. Gin made what he’d meant for irony seem anger, but she seemed not to notice.

“Maybe that’s it. I worry about people getting too far out of touch.”

“Turns ’em into witches,” Mickelsson said, and grinned evilly. Also gives them heart attacks, he remembered, but didn’t say it. He pulled uncomfortably at his pipe. Dead again.

“It does, you know? Not literally, I suppose.” She blushed slightly. “OK, you’ve made your point. I’m not to worry about you.” Her smile made the dimple show. Her eyes, pale as the arctic, met his steadily.

“I’m grateful to you for worrying about me,” he said, and gave her an embarrassed nod. It was the last thing in the world he’d intended to say. He set down the glass, pocketed his matches, and stood up. He felt a moment’s unsteadiness. “Well—” he said.

“You’re right,” she said, leaning forward and rising too. “I have a nine o’clock class in the morning!” She took a step in his direction, then looked startled, maybe dizzy. Without knowing he would do it he held out his hand to her, as if to help her over slippery ground.

“Why, thank you!” she said, and smiled as he’d never seen her smile before, as if, for the first time in years, she’d been taken by surprise.

He could barely stay awake. He caught himself broadly weaving on the Interstate; if the police had been out, he would certainly have been arrested. But it was worse after he turned off, nosing toward the mountains. The road was tunnel-like, the sky overcast, as if a hand had been lowered over the world, blocking out the stars. Again and again he had to slow suddenly for curves he hadn’t remembered, the guardrail to his right stark under the headlights and surprisingly close, beyond that the drop-off to the invisible Susquehanna. He had the sensation, not unusual when he’d been drinking, that nothing was quite real, a feeling borrowed from one he had at movies or at plays Ellen had dragged him along to—a sense that, looking away from the road and the darkness of the mountains, he might see people around him, a rapt audience looking where a moment ago he too had been looking, at the road, the darkness of mountains. It was a feeling he always found freighted with meaning, not that he didn’t understand it well enough, and know what it was worth—the old Christian Platonists’ idea of the theatrum mundi, reality as a shadowing forth, a clothing or fleshing out of something behind it, except that, of course, how could there be anything behind it? All the same, he had the sense that if he drove with all his might into a concrete abutment, he might, like an electron breaking free of an atom, crash through the stones into lightless deep space, clarity, absolute freedom. It was a thought he wouldn’t have bothered with sober, and even now he half scorned it. And yet it was always the case, he found, that when intellect dimmed down and something older took over, the notion seemed faintly worth regard: by trees, stones, sky, he felt distanced, as if by words. He felt removed from the essential in the way a black and white photograph is removed from the barn it represents, perhaps a barn no longer standing, or as a star still visible may be removed from its present actuality: spectacular red flash, white dwarf. In this queer situation, he must survive by close attention to details he had no confidence in, the phantom steeringwheel, the phantom road. And must do it, alas, with his whole body tricking him toward sleep.

Dreams tugged more and more persistently, and, awakening with a start, his eyes snapping open from a protracted blink, he would swerve hard, overcompensating, then swerve again. He drove more and more slowly, bent forward over the wheel. “Have to be careful,” he said aloud, but thanks to the gin he felt no alarm. A peculiar calm came over him, in fact, as he moved into the hug of the mountains rising immediately to his left and, more distantly, across the narrow valley, to his right, comforting shapes as much felt as seen, closing in more and more snugly, like huge friendly milkcows on his father’s farm many years ago, drawing him gently along the fenced, grassy lane toward home. He thought of Jessica, or rather saw her in his mind, tossing her head back, laughing.

Then suddenly, right in front of him, he saw two men in long black coats. They swung around, swift as startled bears—at first, in fact, he registered them as bears. The image of their open-mouthed, button-eyed faces stayed frozen in his mind as he slammed on his brakes, skidded crazily toward them, tires spitting gravel, then shot left toward the ditch beyond the left-side shoulder, trees leaping out at him, white in the headlights, then skidded again and shot right toward the guardrail, then back, with a violent jerk, toward the road. When the motor died, the big Jeep sat beached at an angle to the macadam, half in the ditch, shooting light up into the trees. He sat clenching the steeringwheel, shaking. He looked back at last toward where he’d seen the two men. For all the darkness, he saw everything clearly—the gray of the road, duller gray of the guardrail, heavy blackness of weeds and treetrunks. The two men had vanished. He thought a moment, then rolled down the window and called out, “Hello?” The sound of his voice clanged in the stillness. No one answered. He called, “You all right, back there?” Again no answer. The shaking in his arms and legs had become just a stirring now,