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

chemists and physicists from Washington University. None of the airlines would admit they’d lost a cargo of unmarked, plastic-bagged cookies—I suppose I wouldn’t either, if I were the guilty airline. But it was pretty clear that it wasn’t a case for ordinary explanation. All the cookies fell on one man’s property, not so much as a cookie-crumb outside the line. Flattened his garage.”

“I must say—” Mickelsson began, then floundered.

“Obviously it doesn’t much matter whether you believe these things or not,” Rogers said. “They don’t seem to have any earthly effect on anything, except possibly on a few people’s mood when the thought dawns on ’em that the universe occasionally kids around.”

“You actually believe, then—”

“As I say,” Rogers said gravely, patting Mickelsson’s arm, excusing himself, “belief’s a luxury. I’m just a historian. I like to know things really happened, if I can, or really didn’t happen, and I analyze what happened or didn’t if I can. If I can’t, I don’t.” He grinned. “Anyway, except to those who think they’ve seen these things, it doesn’t matter much—unless, of course, taking firm stands on doubtful matters gives a particular person pleasure.”

“I suppose that’s true,” Mickelsson said as Fred Rogers moved away.

When he asked Jessica about the UFOs, she shook her head and said in a tone of regret that she’d thrown out yesterday’s paper without reading it. Except for Mickelsson, no one had mentioned it to her. “Wasn’t there something like that a couple of years ago?” she asked. Absently, with a quick, soft gesture, she brushed her hair back. When he told her what the paper had said, she nodded. “Funny.”

“Well, puzzling,” he said.

“Oh, Peter, why worry about it?” she asked, and smiled. She touched his arm.

“I’ll stop,” he said, hunching his shoulders and touching his fists together just under his chin, “as soon as I know it’s safe.”

At the university bookstore, later that day, his eye chanced to fall on a book displayed on the sale table. Phenomena: A Book of Wonders. His very discovery of such a book at just this time—he was sure it hadn’t been there a week ago—seemed to him that moment as strange as the UFO circles or Freddy Rogers’ “falls.” It was a large book, full of etchings and surprising photographs. He bought it, carried it back to his office, closed the door, and guiltily paged through it. Falls, missiles from the upper regions, strange disappearances, mysterious mutilations, spontaneous human combustions, anomalous fossils, shared visions, human beings that glowed, phantom music and voices …

He frowned, surprised at his eagerness to believe. Error is cowardice.—Nietzsche. And: The religious have a thirst for foolishness.

As if it were a Playboy or Hustler, he put it in the back of his desk drawer, where he could look at it more carefully later, taking his time.

The report by the fat woman, Rachel Morris, in his medical ethics class that afternoon, was on abortion. It was reasonable and meticulous. She was a better researcher and a clearer thinker than, just from looking at her, he would have guessed. She efficiently covered the legal and philosophical history of the subject, then began, with a certain amount of fervor and no obvious stupidity, her own ethical analysis. There was nothing anywhere in what she’d said so far that one could nail as wrong. There were a few cheap shots, for instance a mocking quotation of Billy Graham and a blistering aside on the recent papal directive banning abortion for any reason; but on the whole she followed out her central argument, based on the premise that in ethical calculations not all persons are of equal worth, with reasonably good sense.

Yet as Mickelsson listened, making an occasional note to himself, he felt restless, crotchety. It was not just her style of delivery, though he would admit that that gave him problems. When she’d come into the windowless room, ahead of nearly all the others, she’d taken, for the first time this semester, the chair at the center of the table, opposite him, and had laid out her things—ashtray, cigarettes, notecards, tissues—as if in conscious parody of him; and she was dressed more formally than he’d ever seen her before, high-heeled shoes, stockings, a dark blue satiny dress, several strands of beads. It was probably because she was nervous, he thought; yet once the paranoid notion crossed his mind that she was mocking his own formality, he could not entirely shake it. It was likely, he knew, that she meant no insult—indeed, that she was imitating his style because she admired it, thought it worked. But because he did not very much like her, really, it was difficult to believe that she felt anything but dislike for him.

When the whole class was seated, Pinky Stearns at the far end of the table, Wolters next to him, the women clustered, as if accidentally, at the opposite end of the table from the men, Ms. Morris began her report with what seemed to Mickelsson a sort of lidded belligerence, smoking hard as she read, lighting and jabbing out cigarettes almost without looking at them, her fleshy mouth overneatly pronouncing every word—her nervousness again, probably—her eyes oddly narrowed behind the glasses. Though she couldn’t be thirty yet, she had the look of those middle-aged, blond, overdressed and over-made-up Jewish women mocked—always to Mickelsson’s confused distress—in a thousand movies. Her upper arms were fleshy, pale, and soft, her hands small, dimpled, neat. The way she sucked the cigarette smoke far into her lungs and held it there, only gradually letting it out with her words, made him want to break in on her report and talk to her about cancer. Despite his fear that it might worry her, he avoided looking at her, leaning on his elbow, shading his eyes, staring hard at the paper on the table in front of him, with its few neatly pencilled notes. It was a once-a-week three-hour class with a fifteen-minute break in the middle. His misery was so great—his right hand