Mickelsson''s Ghosts by John Gardner
He parked in a space reserved for the handicapped, made sure that the shotgun was completely hidden, then sat pondering.
His intention had been to go to his office and, in the Campus Directory, find the addresses he needed, among others those of Jessie’s enemies. He had a vague intention of seeking out Jessie and Tillson, too—not to speak of what he’d seen. He wasn’t sure he was up to it; in any case he had no real plan. He had simply decided that it was time to act. It was a sign of how open his sea was that he’d brought along the shotgun: no malice was in his mind, no virulence in his heart; the last thing in the world he wanted was more violence. But stepping out through his front door, he had noticed the shotgun and, for no reason, had snatched it up—symbol of his new-found urgency, perhaps. Now everything was changed: the university was ablaze with lights. Mickelsson locked the Jeep doors and got out.
The double door opening onto the hallway leading to his office was open. Like a thief he peeked in. If everything went wrong, he would meet Jessie. But there were only students, none that he knew, one of them bent down, scolding a dog that cowered and wagged its tail. When he glanced at his watch he saw that it was nearly seven. Few professors would be in their offices now, only those who taught nightschool. On impulse he crossed quickly to the stairs and went up, two steps at a time, and in the comparative safety of the upper hallway nonchalantly hurried to the mailroom, getting out his key as he went. The outer door was open, his box more crammed than ever. He sorted through his mail quickly, dropping pieces to the floor and letting them lie there, looking only for one thing—precisely the last thing he’d have read, normally—Philosophy Department and Inter-Office “To/From/Subject” memos. He found one from Blickstein, dated January 30th, and his eyes snatched out of the rest the words “Professor Stark’s Review Committee …” He crumpled the paper and pushed it down into his suitcoat pocket. He found several recent memos from Tillson. These too he stuffed into his pocket. Then he closed the box, hurried to the elevator, stepped in when the door opened, and pressed the button that would take him to four, home of the chairman of sociology.
On the fourth floor there were no classrooms, therefore no students in the halls. In fact there was no one at all in the halls up here. Above the water fountain there was a sign, black and red: DO NOT DRINK! UNSAFE! Through the window in the door he saw that sociology was closed. Though he’d had no plan, he felt frustrated. He went back to the elevator, rode down to the second floor, and walked to Tillson’s office. Here there were students, but only a few, none he recognized. Tillson’s office too was closed and dark. Beside the door there was a poster—not the usual cheap poster from University Services but something more professional, no doubt printed in town: in elegant, girlish script the words Kate Swisson in Concert, and below the words a cartoon of Kate Swisson, maybe mocking, maybe admiring. Her chin was lifted, her eyes made to seem beautiful; her throat was very long. The poster was of the kind one might see for the Guarneri or the Grateful Dead. It came to him all at once why the concert he’d attended with Jessie and the rest had been so well received, and why his student Alan Blassenheim had been so eager, the night of Mickelsson’s party, to do everything in his power to put Kate Swisson at ease. It was the idiocy factor—brainless, all-together-now humanity rising as always to the shapely worm on the invisible promoter’s hook. Sham, falsity, cuteness, crap. Surely there was no hope!
In his office he copied down the addresses he wanted from the directory, read the crumpled-up notes from his mailbox, then—forcing himself against his terrible exhaustion—hurried back to his Jeep. Looking up as he backed out of his parking space, he saw that, directly above him, Lawler’s light was on. The old man would be meticulously laboring, as always; grading papers, reading, maybe asleep over his book. Guilt flooded in. He saw Donnie Matthews screaming, “It’s just a foetus!” The image was so vivid he had to hit the brake and close his eyes.
The painful realization came that he did not feel as guilty even about the murder as he felt about his betrayal of his calling. If he’d been a true philosopher, the murder would never have taken place; but that was not the point. Lawler was not a famous man; better known as a scholar and editor than as an original philosopher, and no doubt best known as a teacher. He’d written only two or three articles, brilliant, constipated works, tortuously worded, difficult to follow, each piece fifteen or twenty pages long but carrying a line of thought that any other philosopher might easily have made into a book. Philosophy was his life: he had no interest in fame—no interest even in converting the world. He simply wrote, quietly hard-headed, what was absolutely true, so far as his reason could determine. Untouchable, at least for the moment. He had no family that anyone knew of, no friends even, but threw his whole soul into what Mickelsson played at. Once, many years ago, Mickelsson had played football against a team of Peruvians. They were not good, really; in fact they’d lost the game. But one felt, playing against them, that the Peruvians simply weren’t playing the game one knew. One felt that, for losing, the Peruvian quarterback might be tortured and sent away to prison for life, or might simply disappear. (It probably wasn’t true.) They played with a terrible seriousness he could not match or understand—he played seriously himself, by normal standards—that was the point. He had felt, playing against them, like—in Nugent’s sense—a clown, a buffoonish imitation. So now, looking up at Lawler’s lighted window, he understood what a fraud he himself was—understood because once, in graduate school and for a while thereafter, he too had been a true philosopher. Once for him, too, nothing could have touched the joy of thought. And so it had been for Nugent, it struck him. Now at last the young man’s death sank into his understanding. He tightened his grip on the steering-wheel and, bending forward as if in cartoon supplication, looked up at the library tower and the starry night beyond. Even with its lights, the building reminded him of an immense tombstone. At last he remembered himself, raised his heavy, numb arm to the gearshift, and nosed the Jeep toward Campus Drive.
At first no one at the address he’d gotten for Randolph Wilson—Randy, the dancer, Michael Nugent’s friend—would admit to any knowledge of where he’d gone when, as they all insisted, he’d moved. Mickelsson stood in the large, grungy entryway; it was one of those tall houses by the railroad, and all the occupants except for one pale, pregnant girl were black, roughly of college age, fake sleepy-eyed and cautious. They stood blocking the stairway in front of him and the doorway, to his left, beyond which lay a large room with pillows on the floor and dark blue walls. Smells of pot and recently cooked food hung in the air. He stood smiling falsely, eager to show them he was friendly, not dangerous, eyebrows lifted, teeth gleaming—his slightly insane look, he knew, but could find no way to fix it.
A strikingly pretty girl with slanting eyes, black slacks, and a ratty red sweater asked, “What do you want with him?”
“It has to do with his friend Michael Nugent—the student who killed himself,” Mickelsson said, his voice as eager to please as his smile.
As if for no reason, bored with the conversation, the tall young man behind the girl who had spoken—he’d been leaning, on the doorframe looking sullen, maybe grieved—rolled his head away, then followed with his body, fading back into the room.
Mickelsson nodded. “Nugent was a student of mine. The suicide was a terrible shock to me. I thought perhaps if I could talk to Randy, get some idea of, you know—”
“Mooved,” the girl said, shaping the word with care, as if for someone slow-witted.
“And you don’t know—”
“Man,” she said, and cocked her hip, half lowering her eyelids, “for all we know that dude’s in Paris, France.”
Mickelsson slightly scowled, to give her a hint that he wasn’t fooled by her funky act. But he was not in a position to pursue the matter. “And the rest of you?” he asked, glancing around. Except for the pregnant girl, who looked down, half turning away, they met his eyes with what might have been hostility and might have been o
Mickelsson saw that he was beaten, not that he believed them for a minute. He sighed, thanked them, and went back out to the street, where his Jeep was parked. He started up, wondering what a detective would do in a case like this, and in his thoughtful daze almost missed the furtive wave as he came up to the corner a block from the house. There stood the tall boy who’d left the conversation, leaning against a lamppost as if he’d been there all day, his arm extended toward Mickelsson is if by accident. Mickelsson pulled over and, at once, without a glance left or right, the boy climbed in.
“Maybe you’d drive on?” the boy suggested, smiling widely, and clamped his locked hands between his knees.
Mickelsson studied him an instant, then understood and drove on.
“D’you say your name was Mickelsson?” the young man asked.
Mickelsson nodded.
“You got a license or checkbook or something that says that?”
Again, this time in alarm, Mickelsson glanced at him.
“I don’t mean to be overly suspicious,” the boy said, and went on waiting, smiling.
Mickelsson drew out his billfold and, after an instant’s hesitation, handed it to the boy. He opened it, looked at the license in its plastic window, then closed the billfold and nodded. He handed back the billfold then just sat. The smile was gone now. He sat with his knees far forward, his weight almost on the small of his back, his chin resting on his collarbone. He looked for all the world like one of those blacks one sees waiting forever in big-city police stations.
“I heard of you,” the boy said, looking out the window. “From Nugent. Well, I guess I get out here—up there by the light. Thanks a lot.”
Now wait a minute, Mickelsson thought; but he said nothing, more baffled than ever. It seemed clear that it would be useless to press. He pulled over to the curb and the boy opened the door and dropped one leg out. He paused and said, more to the floor of the Jeep than to Mickelsson, “Try the hospitals.”
“What?” Mickelsson asked. “Wait a minute!” He reached out to catch the boy’s shoulder, but his hand closed on nothing. The door fell shut.
He found Randy Wilson in the second hospital he visited, Binghamton General. At the third-floor desk Mickelsson asked, “What’s he here for, could you tell me?”
“Bicycle accident,” the nurse said. She was middle-aged, graying. Her hair made him think of Jessica. The nurse had once been pretty—was still pretty, but her flesh had that weakened look of late-middle-age, and one could not guess what her color would be without the make-up. “They should wear helmets, but you know kids. He’s lucky to be alive.”
“I take it it’s all right if I visit?”
She nodded. “He won’t be able to talk. Broken jaw.”
Mickelsson nodded, turning to go down to Wilson’s room, moving slowly, like an old man, then on second thought turned back to ask, “Do you know where the accident happened, by any chance?”
“Vestal Parkway, I think,” she said. “We get a lot of them from there. Hit and run of course. They always are.”
He nodded, slightly narrowing his eyes for an instant, seeing the accident in his mind. The image was vivid, as clear and detailed as a memory—an old car, practically an antique but in excellent condition, gleaming in the light of oncoming cars. He watched it move toward the bicycle, closing in fast, the right wheels almost off the road on the shoulder. It hit as if the driver had never seen the bicyclist at all, and then the car slowed, almost stopped, before abruptly taking off.
“Three-oh-nine, did you say?” Mickelsson asked.
She nodded, glancing at her book.
Randy Wilson’s jaw was wired shut and most of his head was bandaged; only his nose, eyes and forehead looked out, as through a windshield. One leg was in traction, and apparently he couldn’t move his hands either, though what was wrong with them Mickelsson couldn’t tell, since they were buried under the covers. The boy showed recognition, possibly pleasure, when Mickelsson came in, but since his mouth was hidden and he couldn’t move his head, it was clear that the conversation was going to be limited.
“How are you feeling?” Mickelsson asked, standing over him, then quickly raised his hand as if to stop the boy from speaking. “Sorry, I know you can’t answer. Well, you’re a lucky young man, I guess!” Again he cursed himself for a fool. For all he knew, the boy was now finished as a dancer, brooding on Nugent’s example, escape by suicide. Mickelsson lifted his eyebrows and smiled, as falsely as he’d smiled before Randy’s friends at the house. He thought of asking, “Is there anything I can get you?” but stopped himself in time. He raised the back of his fist to his forehead, weakly smiling on. There was a television in the corner of the room, up by the ceiling. That was what he could do—pay for television for the time the boy was here. Another bad check. No matter. With luck—
He said, “I just wanted to tell you, I think I know what you’re going through, Randy. Michael was one of the finest students I’ve ever had, and a fine, sensitive person besides. Perhaps if I’d been a better teacher—if there had been something I’d thought of to say that I didn’t say …” He smiled still more fiercely, though weakly, lowering his hand, his eyes rivetted to the bandage covering Randy Wilson’s jaw. “I guess I’d have to say, in retrospect, my moral guard was down. I hate bigots—I want you to believe that—but God knows I am one. Been one since the day I was born, I suspect. I was put off by the boy, just couldn’t wake up to him. I think you know what I mean.” Mickelsson’s glance fled to the wall and he thought about getting out a cigarette, then for Randy’s sake did not. He said almost sharply, with the look of some Klansman making a wisecrack, he realized an instant later—though that was not what he intended, God knew; he intended to come clean, break the pattern: “I mean his homosexuality, that’s the truth of it; and the fact that you—a person of your race—was, were, his lover.” He heard his voice fairly crackle with anger as he said it. Even if Randy Wilson were much older, much wiser, he could not be expected to understand that the anger was directed inward, toward Mickelsson himself. He stretched his smile wider and bent down closer, desperate, searching for control of his voice and features, some means of making clear what he meant. “I was an ass, that’s what I’m saying. I couldn’t see. That’s been my problem all my life. All I could see was myself, my grandiose, stupidly righteous schemata!” He raised his right arm to suggest the empty grandeur of his thought, not to mention his rhetoric, and realized, in horror, that it must look to Randy Wilson as if Mickelsson were about to hit him, helpless as he lay. “I’m trying to say I’m sssorry,” he said, bending down still nearer, tears springing to his eyes. He was so weak in the knees he was afraid he might fall on the bed. “I don’t say I’m the cause of your friend’s suicide,” he said, “but by God I feel I’m to blame for it. So listen: if there’s anything I can do for you, anything at all—”
When he glanced furtively at the boy’s eyes he saw that he’d triggered extreme agitation. Was he trying to say that Mickelsson was not to blame? Was it fear that the eyes expressed? He realized in surprise and embarrassment that the immense brown eyes were filled with tears. Except for the tears, the expression—the little that was visible—might have meant anything. Guiltily, feebly, Mickelsson patted the covers over the boy’s right arm. “I’m blabbering like a fool,” he said. “I want to help if I can, that’s all. Listen now, I’ll drop by again.” Then, after a moment of frustrating, painful silence, “Bear up, son!”
Perhaps it was his unexpected use of the word son; perhaps it was something more secret. Impulsively, though his hands moved slowly, as if in dismay, he took off the expensive chronometer that had once been Mark’s and laid it on the bedside table, a vague atonement for he hardly knew what—maybe only an absurd, empty gesture by the buried child-angel. “Keep this,” he said, again with the weak, mad smile. Fallen out of Time, he thought of saying, but refrained. “I never use it, myself.” With a f
Back in the Jeep, heading for Helen Street, only a few blocks from where Mickelsson had formerly had his apartment (already he was moving under dark, heavy trees, heavy even in winter, though the leaves were off now and at times, through the still, black limbs, he could see stars), he wondered why the young people at the house where Randy lived—or had once lived, they claimed—had not wanted him to know the boy’s whereabouts. He knew his propensity for finding patterns where there were none; all the same, the pot-smell was sharp in his memory, as were those guarded, sullen looks. Though his suspicion embarrassed him—he could not help noticing its racist tinge—he allowed a kind of daydream to play through his mind, a scenario so vivid in its particulars that he couldn’t be sure whether he was imagining or actually seeing things, as his grandfather had sometimes seen things, and as perhaps he himself, in the case of the ghosts, had seen things. He saw the house full of late-night visitors, an assortment of shabby druggies, and saw Randy Wilson as a timid part of the pretty black girl’s gang. Perhaps, as in that People’s Temple business, she was their spiritual leader and protector, a kind of high priestess, and the men around her, possibly the pregnant white girl as well, were her sexual thralls. As soon as he suggested the idea to himself, he had a strong hunch that it was right. Then Randy had met Nugent, Mickelsson speculated, and, drawn more and more into his healing influence, had tried to back away from what went on at the house. The young man who’d ridden with Mickelsson and dropped the hint as to where Randy might be found was another defector, then, or half-defector: guilty, restless, tentatively exploring the possibility of flight. Suddenly Mickelsson knew, he thought, why the people at the house had been so reticent. The bicycle accident had been no accident at all: one of them had tried to kill the boy. If Mickelsson should find Randy Wilson, and the boy should talk …