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

No one objected, though Pinky Stearns glanced at him from time to time with tentatively unfriendly puzzlement. When the bell rang, Mickelsson glanced at his watch, startled. “Thank you for your patience,” he said. “Thank you all for your patience.”

He’d been seated in his office for more than an hour, with the door closed and the light off—seated doing nothing and thinking nothing, staring at the wall—when a timid knock came. He considered not answering, then thought perhaps it might be Jessica, whose conversation might be a comfort just now, and so he called, rather softly, as if he hadn’t quite made up his mind, “Come in.”

As soon as he saw the worried, uncertain way the doorknob moved, he knew it would be Nugent. “Christ,” he whispered, then leaned forward onto his left elbow and swivelled around in his chair so that he partly faced the door. The boy opened it wide, not seeing him at first in the room’s late-afternoon dimness. His black friend—Mickelsson had forgotten the name—was with him again. He looked in over Nugent’s shoulder, and when he was sure that it was really Mickelsson there at the desk, he smiled and bobbed his head, then backed away, giving them privacy.

“Did you want the light out?” Nugent asked, hovering between the hallway and the office.

“It’s fine. My eyes are tired,” Mickelsson said. “Come in if you like. What can I do for you?”

“Thank you.” He advanced a step or two, looking around the room as if to make sure no one waited in ambush. Then, apparently deciding he was safe, he closed the door behind him and came the rest of the way at a more normal pace. “May I sit down?” he asked.

“Be my guest,” Mickelsson said wearily.

“I won’t take long,” the boy said, and seated himself, rigid as usual, folding his hands and locking them between his legs. He looked not at Mickelsson but exactly at the point on the wall Mickelsson had been staring at earlier.

Mickelsson got out his pipe and tobacco.

“I’m sorry about this morning,” Nugent said. “I realize I wasted valuable class time and talked nothing but stupid nonsense.” His lips trembled and it came to Mickelsson that, damn it all, the boy was going to cry again.

In spite of his annoyance—the feeling of claustrophobia that came over him every time the boy came near him—Mickelsson said, almost gently, “That’s not true.” He concentrated on his pipe, lest the boy throw him a look.

“I hadn’t thought it out,” Nugent said. “I lost my temper, sort of—all those things they were saying. … I’m sort of new at all this. I’m not a very well-educated person, as I imagine you’ve noticed. I’ve read a lot of novels and poetry and things—nothing systematic—and I’ve been pretty good at physics—I can tell you why the lifetime of a resonance particle is not necessarily the smallest possible unit of time—” He gave a choked laugh. “There I go again.” Mickelsson could feel the boy looking at him now but kept his eyes on the bowl of his pipe, packing it, preparing to light a match. When he did, the flame was surprisingly bright, glaring on the glossy stipple of the wall. “Anyway of course it’s not true that Plato’s method is different fundamentally from Aristotle’s—I finally read the Parmenides, as you suggested we should do, and I, I saw—” Suddenly he raised his hands to his face, not lowering the face, simply covering it, holding his breath, his red elbows shooting out sharp as knives to either side.

“Take it easy,” Mickelsson said, gently but with distaste.

“I’m sorry,” the boy whispered. His neck and arms were surprisingly small, and white, as if never touched by sunlight.

“Take your time,” Mickelsson said, and sighed. “It’s all right, believe me.” Seeing that the boy was still unable to speak, he said, “Life’s full of troubles, we all find that out eventually, but in due time we live past them.” He got out his pipecleaners, took the pipe from his lips, pulled the stem off and busied himself with cleaning it.

“I know you have plenty of troubles of your own,” the boy said, still pushing apology.

Mickelsson remembered the boy’s saying, earlier, that he knew how Mickelsson lived, knew everything about him. He thought of asking now what Nugent had meant; it was never good to leave fingernail parings in the hands of witches, but instead he laughed and said, “Boy, you said it!” He looked sideways at Nugent, who had taken his hands from his face now and was staring into his lap. Mickelsson dropped the pipecleaner into his wastebasket, shook his head ruefully, and said, “I’ve been trying to deal with the I.R.S. They’re incredible—simply incredible! They spy on me.” He laughed. “No doubt that sounds like the height of paranoia, but it happens to be true. Every now and then they show up in one of those dark, unmarked cars and sit watching me. I suppose it’s some kind of scare tactic.”

“You’re sure it’s them?” Nugent asked, slightly turning, not quite raising his eyes to Mickelsson’s.

“Well, pretty sure,” Mickelsson said with a little laugh and relit his pipe. “I had a visit from them, not too long ago—came to see me at my apartment. The car they were driving then was pretty much like the one that comes by now.”

“What are you going to do?” It did not seem just polite conversation.

Mickelsson saw now that perhaps he’d made a mistake, telling Nugent about that car. It might be construed as an invitation to friendship, an undermining of the teacher-student relationship. In the hope of blocking that development, he told him more. “Well,” he said, falsely chuckling, “I thought it would be best to deal with the thing directly, so I shot off a note to the I.R.S. office most likely to be responsible, the one in Scranton, since now I’m living in Pennsylvania. I simply told them I know what they’re up to and asked them to stop.”

Nugent thought