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

wasn’t why they did it. And the same thing for cowardice, only vice versa. How does Aristotle know it’s not more reasonable than killing people? He doesn’t even question it. All he’s really saying is ‘Our kind of chaps don’t do that kind of thing.’ ” Again the class laughed.

John Kalen raised his eyes from his doodle with a look of surprise. “That’s stupid,” he said. “Running away never solved anything!”

“Maybe not if an atomic bomb’s coming straight at you,” Blassenheim said.

The class laughed more loudly. Even Nugent half smiled, glancing at Mickelsson. Biamonte, in the right rear corner of the room, leaned over his desk, stomping his feet in applause. If he let this progress, Mickelsson saw, things would soon be out of hand. Yet he did nothing, merely turned to look out the window. The tree in the courtyard was a blaze of yellow now. Soon they’d be looking out at snow. The room was already like a classroom in midwinter, stuffy and overheated.

The memory of waking with Donnie came to him, her blue-white body a deadweight on his own, her hair silvery in the early-morning light. After he’d left her he’d covered six pages with single-spaced outlining and notes, then scribbled additions, before driving in to school.

When he turned back to the class, Brenda Winburn, in the chair-desk beside Blassenheim’s, was slipping a note into Blassenheim’s fingers, her face dead-pan, as if Mickelsson were some bullying but not very dangerous cop. Mickelsson thought about it, or rather, paused to register it—in the room’s heavy warmth, no real thought broke through—then cleared his throat and asked amiably, “Are you saying, then, that ‘it’s all relative’?” A crazy thing to say, he knew even as he said it; an expression so cloudy in student minds one hardly knew where to start on it. It was a mark of his weary recklessness that he’d deliberately introduced the befuddling phrase—language that would blow up the arena, to paraphrase Whitehead.

But Blassenheim rushed on, like one of those movie-cartoon characters running on, oblivious, beyond the edge of the cliff. “I’m just saying it’s not right, that’s all. I mean, logic’s got its place, like when you’re a kid playing with an Erector set, but a lot of times it can trick you.” More laughter. Mickelsson quashed it with a look. “What seems reasonable to a tsar,” the boy pressed on urgently, leaning forward, almost whining, “may not necessarily seem reasonable to his peasants, but what can they do? He tells them, ‘Be reasonable,’ with all his cossacks around him with their swords and big black horses, so the peasants have to stand there and look reasonable.”

Mickelsson shook his head. Class discussion was not his favorite mode, especially when the class contained a Blassenheim; yet he couldn’t quite find it in his heart to squelch all this, get down, finally, to business. Perhaps, to take the optimistic view, he was mellowing. Or perhaps what Garret had said at Blickstein’s party had gotten to him. “… they keep comin and comin, like termites. One morning you wake up and look around and—no castle!” Garret was a good deal more confident than Mickelsson that sheer unmethodical will could flatten castle walls. But Blassenheim’s reckless eagerness—even granting its measure of exhibitionism—was its own excuse. He could not bring himself, this early in the game, to call Time, start sorting through Blassenheim’s morass of claims. In the back of his mind floated the thought of his own son, at least as urgent and concerned about Truth as young Blassenheim, though quieter, more restrained in his style; not that it mattered: his professors cut him down, or listened to what he said with their brains turned off, as Mickelsson was tempted to listen to Blassenheim, thinking all the while of how much there was yet to get through before midterm, then finals.

He said reasonably, hearing in his voice the tyrannical patience he’d used all those years on his wife, “So tell me, Alan. Where is it, if not from reason, that we get these value assertions you keep telling me we’re in some sense right to make?”

He sensed the irritable impatience of the class. They were a difficult herd, one moment laughing, as if Time were Eternity, the next insisting that he for Christ’s sakes get on with it.

Again Blassenheim gave that left-right glance like a basketball player’s just before a shot—or no, something less competitive: the look of a waiter carefully threading his way through a crowd with a loaded tray, or a New York Marathon runner making sure he doesn’t trip those around him. “I don’t know,” the boy said, “maybe the wisdom of the whole community, like, tested over time. You know what I mean?” His expression became silly, as if he thought he might have said that before, and he glanced at Brenda Winburn, who’d turned to stare dully out the window again; then he pushed on, seemingly despite his better judgment: “Like when Kierkegaard talks about Abraham and Isaac, I think he got it wrong. I mean like he thinks what’s good about Abraham’s walking to Mount Moriah is that sometimes a person has to listen to God, metaphorically or whatever, and shut his ears to what the ordinary person might think. But what I think—”

“Now hang on,” Mickelsson said, “we’re getting a little far afield here. Let’s go back to—” It was odd—startling—that Blassenheim had read Fear and Trembling. It was that thought that made Mickelsson pause and gave Blassenheim an entrance.

“Just let me finish,” Blassenheim said, “just this one, like, sentence.” He threw a panicky look left and right, checking the class. Nugent covered his eyes with one hand and stretched his mouth back as if he thought his classmate was, incredibly, faking stupidity.

Mickelsson helplessly shrugged, deferring to Blassenheim, or giving in to weariness, surprise at this unexpected turn of things, or to the stuffiness of the room. The boy could see for himself that the class had lost patience. (It was