Mickelsson''s Ghosts by John Gardner
“Sinful pride,” his grandfather would hiss. Lightning flashed in the old man’s dim eyes.
Now a terrifying sound burst out behind Mickelsson and he whirled, then was thrown into confusion: Lawler sat watching him, startled by his sudden turn but obviously deaf—stone deaf—to the scream filling the room. Lawler’s eyes rolled, alarmed and dangerous. Mickelsson realized now that he’d heard that sound before: it was the scream of the poisoned rat the Spragues’ child, thinking it was dead, had thrown into the stove. He saw the child himself coming into the room now, an image as solid as Lawler. The child had his gloved hands over his ears, and his eyes were frantic. He ran toward the kitchen. Then Mickelsson saw, not in the room with him but in painfully vivid imagination, the fat man he’d killed, eyes slightly bulging, mouth open, his pistol pressed hard against his bursting heart, his whole soul sending out its terrible, hopeless wail.
Lawler twisted his lips, threatening, and waved his gun, not playing now, growing angry, impatient, maybe frightened. “Stop fooling around!” he yelled. Quaking, Mickelsson turned back to his work. Now Mickelsson was whispering, weeping as he whispered, abject and shameless, “Please, someone! Please!” Though he knew it was lunacy, an obscene grovelling before Nothing, he concentrated with all his might on the psychic cry. Maybe Goethe’s line, inspiration to Nietzsche, could be twisted to his use: “He who overcomes himself finds freedom. Befreit der Mensch sich …” Lawler was saying something, his voice wonderfully aristocratic, it seemed to Mickelsson—silvery elocution, at once soothing and distantly ironic, scornful—but Mickelsson refused to hear, pouring all he had into his uncouth purpose, getting that silent cry to some friendly ear. The harder he drove out his cry, the more his mind worked against him, undermining his effort with indignant upbraidings and images of rebuke until finally he couldn’t hear Lawler’s voice at all. Once, swinging the pick, he remembered, more with his body than with his mind, how he’d killed the dog on the sidewalk. Lying still, it turned into the fat man. He got a nightmare image of walking with a crowd at the Binghamton July-fest—colored lights, noises—an old bum coming up to him, suggesting with an oddly lascivious look that Mickelsson give him money. He felt in his left hand how he’d pushed the man away. Please, he whispered, straining so hard the muscles of his neck and shoulders throbbed. It seemed his brain was on fire. He saw a black man on a lawn in Golden Gate Park, his temples bulging with anger as he cursed Ellen’s mime troupe: “Troublemakers! Arrogant idiots!” They too had cried out like the dying fat man, snarling at Mickelsson, snarling at Society, “the Establishment,” demanding justice—but, like Mickelsson himself, the audience couldn’t hear, couldn’t cut through intellect and standard usages to feel what the mime troupe, in its lubberly, holy stupidity was saying. … Mickelsson’s philosopher-mind kicked in. … Could not grasp, Wittgenstein would say, the terms of the “language game”—applied, Gilbert Ryle would say, “the wrong category,” as when one tries to understand music as if it were arguing in Finnish. He struggled against his mind’s angry and embittered denial of his reasonable right to cry out, but his mind raged on like an urchin in a violent tantrum, unwilling to be hushed. He tried to focus all his energy on the cry. His will repeatedly flagged, then rose again, shouting itself hoarse. Sublimation indeed! Very well, he was no superman. More easy to believe in God and the grace of the lady than in the self-saved Übermensch. He thought of his son the protester—now terrorist, for all he knew—and mixed in with the thought of his son and the nukes was the thought of his son’s fear of horses, and how he, Mickelsson, had bullied the boy to courage, in the end even to prize-winning horsemanship. The pride he’d always felt when he thought of it before, the sense that the consequences had justified his action, now evaporated: all he could see was his son’s eyes crying for mercy, darkness inside his mouth. “Monstrous,” he whispered, then remembered that, monstrous or not, if he meant to be saved he must concentrate all his being on the psychic cry, not that it would save him. (He saw the lawyer Finney ducking and running, covering his ears.) But his thoughts roared on, his wife’s voice shouting at him, swearing. He had not won, as he’d thought. His son, his child, the pride of his life, had found a larger, even crueller father to resist. He would be crushed again—as sure as day—Mickelsson could not stop it. He thought of Leslie and her cunning use of French, how she’d seized the Babar he and Ellen had given her to cry out angrily, “Love me! Forgive me! Look at me!” To which he’d responded with a sudden hatred of the French. “My God, my God!” he whispered now, tears streaming, washing dirt into his mouth. He quickly forced his mind back to the cry. Help me! he made himself think. Help me! Please! He controlled an urge to howl at the stupidity and shamefulness of it. Help me! he made himself think. More real, more solid and substantial than Lawler, Nietzsche stood cackling in admirable mad scornful glee. Mickelsson was swinging the pick as if he’d just begun, all his tiredness gone, more aching, thudding power in his legs and arms than he could remember ever having felt before. He was briefly aware of Lawler talking. “Rightness is beauty. How else can we judge it?” Then the voice faded out like a distant radio station late at night. Mickelsson’s whole body thought: Help me! Please! He felt such physical strength he could have lifted a truck. But his soul bellowed on. He thought of his mother’s cry for help—he had not heard—then of Jessie’s cry, then Tillson’s. Jessie, he thought, Jessie! Jessie!
The phone rang, then rang again. He glanced at Lawler. The man shook his head. The room was still full of floating dust, but there was no doubt in Mickelsson’s mind that the ghosts had appeared, the middle-aged woman, the man in brown, and the child. They seemed to be watching him, fully aware of him now, and possibly frightened, as if he were the ghost. The phone went on ringing. Was it possible, he wondered, that the cry was getting through—to the ghosts and to whoever was calling? He couldn’t answer the phone without Lawler’s permission. The ringing went on and on, making Lawler jumpy, his eyes moving faster. Mickelsson concentrated on the psychic cry. Suddenly he was conscious of a headache so fierce he was amazed that he didn’t pass out. Almost the same instant he noticed the headache, it was gone—all bodily sensation was gone. He could have been floating a thousand feet above the earth. Help me, please, he thought, far more clearly than before. He remembered, suddenly, the Marxist he’d met in the theater after the movie. He had a sense, right or wrong, that the man was crying out to him, or anyway shouting for rightness in the world, and at the memory of his own angry smart-aleck put-downs he felt such squalor of soul he involuntarily bent double, moving his head close to the wall he’d been about to tear out. The sheen of the wallpaper startled him, and—his thought elsewhere—he bent closer. The wallpaper brightened more. He felt alarm—terror—though for a moment he couldn’t tell why. He drew his head back. The light on the wallpaper dimmed. Before he knew what he was testing, he moved his head forward again, and the wallpaper brightened as if a candle had come near. He was thinking all this while, Please, please, please!—pouring the thought out as if it were his life. He turned around to look at Lawler. The man’s eyes were wide, astonished, but there was something else on his face, too: terrible despair. Then, as when one’s ears pop on an airplane, Mickelsson heard the real world’s sounds again. Someone was knocking loudly at the door.
Now Lawler was on his feet, fumbling in one of his suitcoat pockets, hurrying to seize the doorknob. He had the dusty handkerchief over his mouth and nose, almost black now, so that he looked like a fat Jesse James. The room was full of hovering dirt, bits of paper; the phone was ringing, and in his left hand, the hand that seized the doorknob, Lawler had a noose of piano wire.
He threw open the door and cried out joyfully, “Come in! Come in!”
The scream was like the scream of the rat in the stove. Lawler froze, the piano wire forgotten in his hand, and the same instant, nothing in his mind, Mickelsson hurled the pick-axe and charged in behind it. Lawler jerked his head around like a man cruelly wronged, and the pick-axe hit him s
8
He lay on his back on the kitchen floor, someone hunkering beside him. The face and shape began to clear, come into focus.
“Hello, Prafessor,” Tim Booker said, beaming. “I see you’ve been fixin things up a bit.” He had on a red wool stocking cap. His ears stuck out.
Now Mickelsson saw Lepatofsky too, standing beyond Tim, and Lepatofsky’s daughter with her hand in her father’s hand. “Lucky thing we dropped by when we did,” Lepatofsky said. “You know Dr. Benton, here?”
Mickelsson rolled his head to the left and saw an old man tall as a crane in a baggy beige suit. The man smiled and nodded.
“What happened?” Mickelsson asked. The weakness of his voice surprised him, and he couldn’t seem fully to open his left eye. He noticed that his shirt had been unbuttoned and his belt unbuckled. His hands were mittened into paws with gauze and tape. Now he became aware of one more person in the room, over leaning on the sink; the policeman Tacky Tinklepaugh.
“Well,” Dr. Benton said, “nothing too serious, I hope. We won’t really know for a day or two. Seems you had a little touch of heart trouble—likely nothing that won’t be fixed with bed-rest and a few small changes of habit. All that drinking and smoking, not eating right … You may be a bit foggy-minded for a while. …”
“It was the strangest thing,” Lepatofsky said, grinning. One eye was opened extra wide. “My little Lily never talked before. We was driving by the howse and all at once she yells out, ‘Stahp! Stahp!’ I ding near drove right off the road, that’s how supprised I was. Lucky thing we did stahp!”
“And you?” Mickelsson asked Tim feebly. He had to concentrate. Odd dreams kept edging in. It seemed to him that the black dog was in the room.
Tim said, grinning, “They gave me a call when you keeled over.”
“Think you can sit up?” Dr. Benton asked, rather loudly, as if he’d asked it twice now.
Mickelsson tried to push up with his arms, but he was as weak as a baby and his bandaged hands throbbed. Tim and Dr. Benton bent down to help.
“By Gahd, it was just like a miracle,” Lepatofsky said. “We must’ve drove by here fifty times before, but this time she yells ‘Stahp!’ ”
“There are no miracles,” Tinklepaugh growled. “Just luck.” Tinklepaugh’s face was dark red, more ravaged than a week ago—or two; whatever it was—as if years had passed. He seemed, as always, angry about something, saving up for his day of vengeance. The sagging flesh hung as motionless as papier-mâché.
With the help of Tim and Dr. Benton, Mickelsson made it to his feet. He let them lead him to the hallway and the stairs. The cat was still there. All three of them looked at it, but Tim’s pressure on Mickelsson’s arm remained firm, and they climbed past it. “Don’t think about it,” Tim said. “Cat had a cancer anyway. That’s what made ’im so mean—good cat, before. The doc had me owt here six months ago trying to shoot him. Tough old bastard!”
Since his own bedroom was ruined, they put him in the makeshift guest bedroom, a boxspring and mattress made up as a bed, no light but a table-lamp set on the floor. Mickelsson lay on his back, fuzzy-headed, waiting for things to clear. The lamp threw the shadows of those around him toward the ceiling. Lepatofsky’s daughter kneeled beside the bed and gazed, faintly smiling, showing her dimple, at a point just to the left of Mickelsson’s left ear. Tim leaned on the doorframe, arms folded, and Lepatofsky looked out the window. It was almost dark. While Dr. Benton took Mickelsson’s pulse, Tinklepaugh checked the closet as if expecting to find more murderers. Downstairs, the phone was ringing. Lepatofsky said, “I’ll get it,” and left the room. Experimentally, Lepatofsky’s daughter put her hand, very lightly, on Mickelsson’s foot. Still she did not look at him. Dr. Benton was talking—“What a thing! Lordy! You’re a lucky man!” Mickelsson did not listen, watching the girl instead. Tears came to his eyes. He remembered the eyelid that wouldn’t quite open and raised one finger to touch it. Neither the eyelid nor the tape-covered finger had any feeling.
“How is he?” he heard Tinklepaugh ask.
“Very well, considering,” Dr. Benton said. “Gahd only knows what Tim did to him.” He chuckled.
“Can he talk?” Tinklepaugh asked.
Dr. Benton glanced at Tim, who smiled, all innocence, and opened his arms in a crucifix shrug.
“You want us out of the room?” Dr. Benton asked.
Tinklepaugh said nothing, merely hunkered down beside Mickelsson and sullenly gazed at him. Mickelsson closed his eyes.
“You able to talk?” Tinklepaugh asked.
Mickelsson waited. The smell of stale whiskey on Tinklepaugh’s breath made Mickelsson breathe through his mouth.
“We’ve arrested your pal Professor Lawler,” Tinklepaugh said. “He’s over in the Montrose jail right now, learning about toilets without seats. We’re holding him for unlawful possession. I assume there’s more—I guess I gaht a pretty good idea what it is, but I’d be glad if you’d tell me what you know.” He waited a moment, breathing heavily. “Take your time. I’ve gaht no place to get to.”
Mickelsson could hear Lepatofsky talking on the phone down in the kitchen.
“Lawler claims—” Mickelsson said, then faltered. He tried to think where to begin, then was filled with confusion, then heard himself talking.
Once in a while as he told his story he opened his right eye; the left still wasn’t working. Tinklepaugh, each time Mickelsson looked at him, seemed bored, but he paid grudging attention, sometimes helping Mickelsson along when he lost his place. Dr. Benton hovered at the door, near Tim, undecided about whether to hear the story to the end or go back to the hospital, where he was supposed to be on duty. At last, sometime while Mickelsson’s eyes were closed, he left. Only Tim seemed really interested in the story. But Tim was interested in everything. Was it possible, Mickelsson wondered—in his befuddlement mixing up the story he was telling and the book he was supposed to be writing—was it possible that the story, for all it had taken out of him and despite the fact, even, that it had almost been the story of his death, was essentially boring? MADMAN BEHAVES BADLY, ACCIDENTALLY THWARTED BY FELLOW MADMAN? He concentrated, trying to find for Tinklepaugh the deeper significance of what had happened. The dog moved back and forth, just beyond the door.
Tinklepaugh’s questions were mechanical; he took no notes. “So you think he murdered this Michael Nugent.”
“I’m certain of it. The boy in the … hospital too.”
“Neither one of them was reported as a possible homicide,” Tinklepaugh said. “It doesn’t seem likely that the one in the hospital had his throat slit.”
“They were homicides,” Mickelsson said weakly. “Check it.”
“Oh, I believe you, all right.” His voice was sullen, full of something like self-pity.
“You think it’s possible he really is a Danite?” Tim asked.
“No chance,” Tinklepaugh said with heavy disgust. He stood up, as if finished and ready to leave, then hooked his thumbs inside his gunbelt and looked at Lily Lepatofsky, who still had her hand resting lightly on Mickelsson’s foot. “You people always want things interesting,” Tinklepaugh growled. “They ne
“Me?” Tim said. He got out his pipe, then changed his mind, maybe thinking about Mickelsson’s heart.
“You and all your nuts,” Tinklepaugh said. “You make me sick.”
Mickelsson found himself sitting up on his elbows, though he wouldn’t have thought he had the strength to manage it. “Wait a minute,” he brought out, “did you say it was Tim that fixed me up, not Dr. Benton?” He sank back again, as if pushed, trying in vain to hook the word witchcraft with apple-faced Tim and his motorcycle friends, or Dr. Bauer, Donnie Matthews. …
“First aid,” Tinklepaugh said, emphatic, turning away. “That’s all, just first aid. For a while they had trouble getting hold of anything but a witch-doctor.” Then, without a word, he left. Mickelsson listened to his boots going down the stairs.