by John Gardner
“I have to go,” he said.
She nodded, still with her eyes closed. “I’m glad you came.”
He eased up onto the side of the bed, reached down for his socks, and put them on, then got into his undershorts and shirt.
She asked, half sitting up, “Peter, could you hand me that plastic pill thing on the dresser?”
He did. It was a pink plastic, numbered birth-control-pill dispenser. She thanked him, got out a pill, then whispered, “Shit.”
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I forgot my damn pill yesterday,” she said. “Don’t worry, I’ll just take two today. It’s all right. Don’t look so panicky!” She laughed, delighted by the no doubt old-maidish look of horror on his face. “It’s all right, believe me. It’s happened before. Don’t worry about ole Donnie, kiddo! She’s strictly professional!”
“Christ, I hope so,” he said. He put on his shoes.
She lay back, moving over into the middle of the bed, now that he was out of it, and spread her legs wide. She smiled, not enough to let the broken tooth show. “Think of me,” she said, then pursed her lips as if to kiss the air.
“Don’t worry,” he said gloomily, cinching his belt. He turned his back to her, his heart growing heavier, darker by the moment, as much with guilt and self-revulsion as with sorrow; he counted out the money and slipped one corner of the stack of bills under the base of the elf lamp on her dresser; then he picked up his hat, cane, and overcoat in the livingroom, fixed the nightlatch so the door would lock behind him, and let himself out.
He hardly noticed when someone on the stairway said, “Morning, Professor.” But then it came through to him, and he stopped, looking down the third-floor hallway in the direction of the two black-coated young men. At the fat man’s door they stopped walking and, looking back, saw him watching them. The dark-haired one smiled and nodded a second greeting while the blond one reached toward the fat man’s door and knocked. Needless to feel alarm at being caught coming out of her apartment, he saw now. They wouldn’t tell. In all probability those poor shabby innocents didn’t even know what kind of business she ran. (Do them good, he thought; one night with Donnie Matthews. Both of them together, so they could spy on each other, keep up the ole support system.)
He heard the fat man’s voice, then the door opening on its chain. Odd that he would open it at all, Mickelsson thought. No doubt after a time one grew lax. He put his left hand on the bannister, his right holding the cane by its silver head, and started down.
Around eleven that morning he was roused from desperately needed sleep by the jangling of the phone. He got up, shaking his head, rubbing his eyes, clearing his throat to get his voice operational, crossed to the phone on the bedroom wall and answered. When he heard the voice at the other end, he at first thought someone must be playing a prank on him. The voice was absurdly nasalized and flattened, almost exactly the voice of Bugs Bunny, but the accent was desperately low-class Italian, too extreme by many degrees to be real, and the words the voice spoke were so comically mad—or such was Mickelsson’s first impression—so unprompted, simultaneously hysterical and bellicose, reminiscent of the long-ago radio-days wackos who lived on Allen’s Alley, that he smiled as he listened, trying to think who would do this to him, until little by little the smile decayed and he understood that the maniac on the line was serious.
“Professor Mickelsson?”
“Yes.”
“My name is Ernest diSapio, that’s right diSapio as in ‘sap,’ but don’t count on it; I’m with the Internal Revenue Service, Scranton office, and I have here on my desk a letter allegedly written by you to this office on October twelfth. You claim in this letter that the I.R.S. has been harassing and bird-dogging you, according to your presumption because you dint pay your taxes in seventy-nine or even file them properly as the law prescribes. I wunt go around making charges of that nature if I was in your position, Professor, but that’s neither here nor there. I’m now calling you to tell you two things, which the first is, we don’t bird-dog, we don’t need to, because the power is with us as you will see if you keep vilating federal law and trying to play cat and mouse with the Service, in fact we dint even know you was in the area and no longer in Binghamton, New York, until your letter let it slip. And which the second is, I have now been personally assigned to your case and I strongly advise you to cooperate in the fullest.”
“Who is this?” Mickelsson asked.
“My name as I said earlier is Ernest diSapio, and I’m an agent with the Internal Revenue Service, Scranton office, P.O. Box 496, Scranton, Pennsylvania.”
“Wait a minute,” Mickelsson said. Tentatively, he smiled.
“I would like you to be here in my office between nine and eleven on Monday morning, November seventeenth, with a fully documented account of—”
“Hey, hold on,” Mickelsson said, his anger rising now. “I don’t know if this call is a joke or not, but I teach on Mondays, and I have no intention—”
“I can show you pretty quickly that this is no joke. I have the power to swear out a warrant for your arrest. If I was you, Professor—”
“Listen, Mr. Sapio or whoever you are, I don’t know why you’re taking this tone with me, but I assure you I don’t like it. It may be that all you ever deal with is criminals, in which case I’m sorry for you, but I am not a criminal, and I must ask you to keep a civil tongue in your head.” He was trembling a little. In a minute he’d be shouting.
“You’re not a criminal, I’m glad to hear it. In that case I’m sure you will have no objection to meeting me in this office between nine and eleven on November seventeenth. The address—”
“Slow down, God damn it!” Mickelsson shouted. “As I’ve told you already, I teach on Mondays. Besides that, I have no information to give you, everything I have is with my lawyer, you’ll have to talk with him.”
“Mr. Mickelsson, I don’t want to play games with you. In my book you’re a skip: you moved from Binghamton, New York, without sending us notification; in 1977 you filed but neglected to pay your taxes, and in both seventy-eight and seventy-nine you filed late and again have not paid. Now you may have explanations for all the above, but since you dint see fit to give them in your letter of complaint to this office, and since your attitude is clearly hostile to the work of this office—”
“However that may be,” Mickelsson said, controlling himself, suddenly aware that the maniac really might have the power he claimed, “I cannot give you the information you want; you’ll have to talk to my lawyer. I’ll give you his name and phone number.”
There was a pause. At last diSapio said, “Very well. Let me have ’em.”
He gave the man Jake Finney’s name and number.
“All right, Professor Mickelsson,” diSapio said, “I’ll be back in touch. If I was you I’d get a lawyer in Pennsylvania. You’re gonna need it.”
“I’ll do that. Thank you.” Just before diSapio hung up, Mickelsson remembered and said: “One more thing. You say the I.R.S. has not been spying on me? I’m sorry to bother you, and I’m certainly sorry to have accused you falsely, if I have—I don’t blame you for being cross, I suppose—but there’s been someone, so to speak, keeping tabs on me, one of those dark green unmarked cars. …”
“Not us, Professor. According to my records you’re separated from your wife. Maybe she’s put a private dick on you.”
“That’s not her style,” Mickelsson said, mostly to himself.
“Sorry I can’t help you,” diSapio said. Suddenly his voice was friendly, amused. With the change in tone he seemed to Mickelsson more than ever the voice of the Reich: savage, primordial, merciless.
“Well, thanks.”
“I’ll be in touch.”
That afternoon when he tried to work on his blockbuster book, he found his mind was cement. Not only could he not write, he could see no value in anything he’d written. He remembered how pleased he’d been by some of the pages stacked
beside the typewriter, but reading them over now, trying to give them every benefit of the doubt, he thought he must simply have been insane. It was, when one thought about it soberly, the stupidest project imaginable—a blockbuster philosophy book! He turned off the electric typewriter—all the time he’d spent looking at his finished pages, he’d allowed it to hum to him—then stood up and raised the sheaf of papers in his hand, about to throw them in the wastebasket. At the last moment he changed his mind: perhaps another day they wouldn’t seem so bad, would at least seem revisable. He put them bade beside the typewriter, face down. He would work a little more on the house.
That night he began on the hardest of the jobs he’d set himself, the transformation of the crooked, unheated workroom into what would be, eventually, his diningroom. It had seemed an almost impossible job all those afternoons and nights when he’d stood looking in at it, sipping a drink, thinking about what had to be done. There was a double sink to be taken out; a workbench; crude, cheaply stained pine cupboards and shelves; wallpaper and one stretch of panelling to be torn away, then linoleum flooring and the waterstained false ceiling. But once he’d put his gloves on and begun to tear into it with the wreckingbar—his pipe and a glass of gin for company, on the portable radio some newscaster talking about Reagan’s vast support in Texas and his “undisclosed plan” for freeing the hostages—the work of demolition went more quickly than he would have thought possible. The shelves and cupboards had been carelessly put up and came out easily. The sink was not much harder, and the panelling came off in three fierce yanks. The fiberboard ceiling panels broke away like cake, and, climbing once more onto his rickety chair, he began on the wallpapered plaster and lath. By four in the morning, when he was on his third glass of gin and the ceiling was half down, his neck and shoulders numb from his exertion, he began to make discoveries. (He’d turned off the staticky radio long since.) At the far end of the room every second beam was missing, and those that remained were support-braced and blackened by fire. Even more interesting was the fact that here, as nowhere else in the house, the nails were square. It was the oldest section, then, as he’d suspected. Probably this room and the attic above it were all there had been of the house for a good many years. No wonder it had gone through so many wallpapers, so many changes of function.
He worked in a kind of dream, almost a trance, the room so full of dust that he could barely see. He wore a mask over his nose and mouth, goggles over his eyes. His pipe and the glass of gin on the floor in the corner of the room he’d covered with his handkerchief. From time to time he stopped to replace the filter in the mask and clean the goggles, but increasingly it became an idle gesture: even with the door open, propped against the woodpile, the turbulent dust and floating wallpaper chips made the room so dark and murky it was like working at the bottom of the sea.
He would not remember later what thoughts came as he worked. After painting, sanding, making various fairly extensive repairs to the other rooms, he was used to the way the mind drifted freely when the body was engaged; but never before tonight had it been quite like this. It was not just the gin, the heavy darkness of dust through which he moved, wandering half lost in a room only fourteen by twenty—though both the gin and the dustcloud no doubt had their part in it. Lath and plaster, breaking away from the beams, opened squares of darkness like revelations. He stared deep into them but could see nothing, neither attic roof nor sky. With each tear-away of plaster and lath, dirt fell down into the room as from a shovel (he thought of Freddy Rogers’ stone falls), struck the floor with a thud, and billowed upward again, pushing up like smoke all around him. In his mind he saw the dog floating through weeds like a black swan on a lake, and saw Pearson marching along the mountain with his dowsing rod, his whole soul and body intent on the discovery theoretically impossible for him to make. Witchcraft drifted into Mickelsson’s mind and seemed to him normal, not surprising: he imagined Pearson bent over a table where there were gloves, perhaps fingernails, speaking the name of the person they belonged to, drawing her toward him through the night. He tried to think where he’d gotten that image—something he’d seen, or possibly something someone had told him. But nothing came. Pearson had been joking, no doubt; so Mickelsson had by now convinced himself. A “waterwitch,” maybe; not really a witch. Yet in the dark, dust-filled room it seemed clear that no joke was ever wholly or solely a joke, not even what Rogers had called the “kidding around” of the universe. Whatever it occurred to one to say—anyone—was at some level true. At any rate, this much seemed sure: that Pearson was at one with the world in a way Peter Mickelsson was not. He knew without looking where the dog had gone off to, knew even what was happening under the ground. He thought of Pearson’s words, “Most likely you see ’em and just don’t notice.” It was a theory that Mickelsson had encountered before, that psychic insights are for the most part trivial: a vague intrusion of someone else’s personality, foreknowledge of a speed-trap, or that a letter of no real importance will be waiting in one’s mailbox. His grandfather, after the arrival of his gift, had for the most part had visions as clear and detailed as applecrates on a hayrack, but there were times all he got was hunches, like the hunches of a blind man.
He found himself imagining—staring into the dust—the outlines of a shabby woodstove at the far end of the room, a gaunt, middle-aged woman in a gray dress bending down beside it, reaching toward a wood-box. In her right hand she had a wadded-up hankie. Had she been crying, perhaps? That was how the fire would have started, yes. A woman full of troubles, no longer alert, an unsafe old stove … He could know a good deal about the house, if he let himself. Long before the doomed brother and sister had lived there, there had to have been other generations, people who’d grown old in the house when it was only a one- or two-room saltbox. He thought about what kind of man would have built the place—cleared the trees, dug the foundation, notched the cornerbeams and nailed up the walls. Perhaps a young settler not even in his twenties, proud of himself, joyful in his freedom from dull New England parents, or parents back in Germany—a young man with a blond young wife as charged with animal vitality as he was, a big-smiled, big-bosomed, strong-legged young woman he fucked every night till the roof shook. He imagined it so vividly his genitals tingled; meanwhile the unhappy woman in gray—some long-forgotten cousin or aunt, perhaps, or some Wisconsin neighbor—stood at a dark, thick table, kneading bread. Her hands moved with an odd ferocity, as if driven by inner violence. He could smell the bread-dough, sweet and yeasty. The woman’s head was bowed, her black hair rolled up and pinned. Between the two narrow cords at the back of her neck lay a dark, deep valley.
Then for a while he seemed to think nothing at all, simply watched the wreckingbar stab deep beneath the plaster and lath and pry them free. Once he barked his knuckles and swore; yet in a way he was pleased, remembering his father’s hands, and his uncle’s. Once, reaching down for what he thought to be a large scrap of wallpaper, he discovered with a start—as if the wallpaper had magically changed in his hand—the picture of Jesus looking sadly toward Heaven, a beautiful young man with no hope for humanity or himself. He thought of his son’s look of sorrowful detachment as he rode in the Marin Riding Show, winning prize after prize, a born athlete—his sister clapping wildly and shouting herself voiceless, Mickelsson beaming, his weight-lifter arms folded on his wide chest. “Son, I can’t tell you how proud we are!” Mickelsson had said as they drove home. His son had said, “Thanks,” and without another word had turned to stare out the window. “Did I say something wrong?” Mickelsson had asked his wife. She’d smiled, her large teeth brilliant, as always, and had said nothing. His only consolation was that Leslie too seemed baffled, her expression as thoughtful as a cat’s. And now, as if there were some connection, Mickelsson’s thought drifted to the un-beautiful, earnest young Mormons pressing through the world with red noses and ears—like ants, like bees, as Pearson had said—urging their gospel of safety in numbers, organized conspiracy against death and the
Devil, Utah’s vast army of locked-together minds. They would prevail, no question about it. They, with their plain, shabby clothes, their dull eyes, were the Future, the terrible survivors. They were good with computers, wonderful at business administration; no unruly habits.
While he was thinking this—concerned, really, about his own situation, and even that not quite consciously, his attention unfocused, only dimly aware of why the Mormons so bothered him in his present mood—a man adrift between yellow-lighted worlds like a dustcloud mindlessly wandering in space, toying with the possibility of collapsing into a planet—Mickelsson thought he heard a woman’s voice say, angrily but desperately hiding her anger, “I’m not well, I guess,” and then another voice answering with a grunt. Surprised, Mickelsson turned his head, straining to pierce the room’s dimness, but there was nothing; a dream-voice, some old memory. He shook his head as if to wake himself, then sucked in breath and stabbed hard into the plaster and lath, prying away a great hunk above the door into the livingroom. “Dad?” someone said, making Mickelsson jump. But no; another dream. As the wall-section fell he heard a clink such as coins might make, or old brass jewelry. He got down off the chair, stepping clumsily because his legs were overtired, and bent down to sort with his gloved hand through the trash on the floor. After a moment, he found something and raised it toward his goggles to study it more closely: an old-fashioned wooden cheesebox with a sliding top. He forced the top open; then, removing the glove from his right hand, still holding the box up close to his goggles, poked inside with two fingers. The box was full of keys.
