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

people, in Time Marches On. The chatter of guns seemed not real, more like dream-noise; only the drums were real—absolute Being—rank on rank of goose-stepping soldiers, with swastika flags hanging down from the buildings, so many thousand soldiers that there seemed no hope for mankind. He held his older cousin’s hand, white-blond Erik, who was to die in Korea. Later he saw pictures in Life magazine of mound on mound of dead people—Jews, he was told, though the magazine did not make it clear. Still later, in college, he had lain beside a half-Jewish, half-Italian girl, one of the cheerleaders, on a blanket overlooking a quarry. Suddenly, looking into her brown eyes, feeling the softness of her skin, he’d felt horror stir in him, as if a black shadow—Sweden’s evil ghost, or the ghost of Dr. Luther in his final madness—had fallen over them. Whenever he went to movies about World War II—dog-fights, people shouting happily, like Boy Scouts, grenades exploding, bridges falling in—he felt sick at his stomach, as if he were looking at his childhood through thick, wavy glass. People laughed in the ocean-bed darkness of the theater around him, or leaned forward, flickering light on their faces. At times a kind of vertigo would come over him, a weakness of arms and legs, and he would leave. Once, in college, lying on his bunk in the dark with his hands behind his head, he’d asked his roommate, “Does it ever seem to you that everything you look at, it’s in a mirror?” “No,” his roommate had said, after thought. He hadn’t expressed himself clearly, he’d decided. It was impossible that others should not have noticed. (He’d never heard of Plotinus, Porphyry, and the rest—thank God—though he ought to have suspected the whole thing from his grandfather’s talk of Luther.) But then there were times, sometimes weeks on end, when even he himself forgot and swam comfortably, easily, through a world that seemed to him not insubstantial. After he’d married Ellen, that queer sense of things had more or less left him, and after his son had been born, the world had become for him positively secure. (By now he knew Nietzsche on consciousness: “a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable text.”) The feel of grass when he hunkered down, rolling a ball to Mark, had such quiddity, such authority, one might have imagined time had stopped, and the sacramental moment toward which everything tended had arrived. When Mark’s clumsy hands came together around the ball and he laughed in proud amazement—Ellen standing over by the day-lilies, a book closed on her finger, her bespectacled face turning its smile to them—it was as if the whole world cried out, delighted, changed to music, lively as an animal—the dazzling white walls of the neighbors’ houses, the green lace of leaves overhead, blue sky.

At four in the morning, feeling a change in the darkness beyond the windows, Mickelsson decided he’d better quit. There would be another day for painting—and another and another. Days also for writing his blockbuster book. He’d do well to sleep. He put the lid on the paint can, sealed it tight with his heel, then washed out the roller and brush in the upstairs bathroom sink. The bones of the hand that had gripped the paintbrush ached like rotten teeth.

It gave him a queer feeling, moving around alone at this hour in the big, empty house, the house he was painting, preparing for nothing, “just the one of you,” as the doc had said. He remembered distinctly, as if she were in the room with him, her girlish laugh. “Strange,” he said aloud, then said nothing more, made uneasy by the sound of his voice. He turned out the lights, then—unconsciously massaging his right hand as he walked—went back to the bathroom to wash up, prepare for bed. He got a sudden image of the fat man’s tray of money, then of Donnie in the musty-smelling bed, on her knees, her face buried in the pillow, her two hands spreading her buttocks for his entrance from behind. Like a suddenly shrinking aura, his emotion shrank inward and went dark. He stared into the mirror, brushing his teeth. Foam around his mouth, bags under his eyes, the hair on his chest yellow-silver. He was old, debauched, repulsive. No one would ever again see Mickelsson the athlete, big-chested, small-bellied, powerful but not yet fat of shoulder, not yet grossly fat of neck. He looked away. He spat, rinsed his mouth, wiped his face on the towel, then draped it once more over the toilet tank; he’d taken down the towel rack in preparation for painting the walls. He took from the medicine cabinet the sickly violet plastic-and-rubber gum-stimulator, dreariest curse of middle age, leaned toward the mirror again, and dutifully bared his fangs.

He awakened at seven-thirty with a strong sense that something was wrong. At first it seemed to him that the house was on fire, but when he put on his trousers, stiff muscles complaining, and hurried from room to room, he couldn’t get even a whiff of smoke, though something else reached his nostrils, the baffling scent he’d encountered once or twice before, of bread baking, or cookies. It was weird: the smell was strong and all around him, like the smell of baking in his grandmother’s house, in his childhood; much too strong to be explained by the trickery of mountain wind bringing smells in from the kitchens of his neighbors. He’d look into it, see if one of the chemists at school could account for it. At the moment he had other things to think about. His sense of something wrong was more intense than before, and now it seemed to him that the wellspring of trouble was under his feet, in the cellar. Only after he’d turned the wooden latch and cautiously opened the cellar door did he realize what it was that he’d expected, the dim memory of