by John Gardner
The fact remained: action was a problem. What was one to do if he knew that every movement of the spirit was poisoned at the source, as if by uremia? Luther had an out: he could claim that in whatever good he did he was the instrument of God, and in the rest the tool of devils. And Nietzsche, turning with all the rage of his brilliant, ferocious mind against Luther, had a hiding place: though his works might be filth, all malice and satire, his devil-dance and chittering pointed the way, by ironic contrast, to something nobler: the serene, spiritually mighty Übermensch. But it was a long time now since the announcement of that as yet unfulfilled possibility.
Perhaps not quite unfulfilled. One might point to Mickelsson’s old teacher McPherson, or to the supermen of science, like Einstein, who had claimed that he’d perceived as a young man the vanity of hope and striving. “I also perceived the cruelty of such effort, which hypocrisy and glittering words concealed more carefully in those days than they do now.” And so had turned first to conventional religion, which had failed to withstand his “youthfully critical scrutiny,” then had fled to a surer harmonious sphere, “that beautiful order glimpsed by Kepler, Galileo, Newton. …” The trick had worked better for McPherson than for Einstein, apparently. But say it was true that devotion to some mighty realm of thought meant escape from the vanity of hope and striving. What switch turned on the gift for caring about the possibly beautiful structure of the universe? Or for that matter the left horn of the dung beetle? He, Mickelsson, had been through all that: had written books that were sound and original, books that had been scorned and misunderstood, and had learned that, in a sense, the lack of reward didn’t matter much. It was the practice that mattered. MacIntyre’s word. In the practice of philosophy, as in the practice of law, or novel-writing, or almost anything else, one gained things inexpressible to anyone not in the practice; no harm that what you gained would die with you, to be regained, inexpressibly, by someone else. But when one day all interest in that casual gaining dried up, what then? What switch could turn life back on? And if one knew it was a simple mechanical switch—some pill, or “love,” or “the sense of community”—would one deign to reach up to the switch? That was the world’s inheritance from Nietzsche, though Nietzsche had not faced the matter squarely. If God was dead, human dignity gone, all values emptied, why not just say “Fuck it”—push the button? The existentialists—Zarathustra’s most tedious apes—had an answer; but they hardly counted: war babies. Any fool could get it up in time of war. It was like the glorious secret of present-day East European fiction: 1943. Woman finds piece of bread; sneaks off; joyfully eats it. No one had the right, anymore, to be quite that sentimentally elemental.
Better to act with fully conscious stupidity: for instance, steal the fat man’s stolen money. A tide of darkness washed over him. It was of course no longer a case for Dostoevski. Raskolnikov was a nice boy; his poverty was real and legitimate. No Russian, not even a modern Russian, could get himself into a position like Mickelsson’s. He was still up to his old tricks. Knowing that his bills were more than he could handle, he would refuse to look at them for weeks at a time, even when the bills came by registered mail; meanwhile his salary would go into his account automatically, so that the account would build like a rich man’s—though Mickelsson, that very moment, might be sweating at the risk of a twenty-dollar check. Then, because nothing had gone wrong for a time, he would write checks to everyone—mainly his wife and his wife’s old creditors, putting off his own, which were more recent—and six out of ten of the checks he wrote would bounce, five-dollar service charge each time. Meanwhile the pile of mail remained virtually untouched.
Would he feel guilty, he wondered, if he stole the fat man’s money?
The question was absurd. Of course he would! So he told himself, angrily gesturing—standing back from himself, watching the performance. It would be good, God knew, to have Donnie and the child taken care of, generously taken care of and out of his life.
He saw himself smashing through the fat man’s door, then shook his head, banishing the thought as he would a nightmare. One impression remained: he would not feel especially guilty.
In his mailbox the next morning, he found a card from Ernest diSapio of the I.R.S. “Possible irregularities in all tax-forms filed by you since 1970. Suggest you drop in or phone.” He read the card three times, thought about the fact that it had been sent on a postcard, for all to see, then laughed.
It was perhaps his anger at diSapio that got him moving. He dressed himself up as if for church, went out into the biting, snapping cold, ground futilely for several minutes on the starter of the Jeep, then tried the blue car, which came to life at once. He got out to shovel himself a path to the road, then got in again and backed out of the barn. He did then something the strangeness of which he would recognize only much later. Perhaps, as Jessie would claim, it was a psychic hunch that made him act. Perhaps it was luck shading toward grace, the same mystery that would prompt him to give the thing to Lepatofsky’s daughter a few hours from now. Driving past the Jeep, he saw the troll-doll hanging from the rear-view mirror, and on impulse got out, unsnapped the pull-chain that attached the troll-doll to the Jeep and transferred it to the rear-view mirror of the Chevy. Then he drove down to Susquehanna.
Though he knocked again and again at Donnie Matthews’ door, there was no answer. Very well; he had errands enough to keep him busy. He would come back. Slowly, over roads that were glare ice over hardpacked snow—except on steep hills, where cinders had been put down—he drove to Montrose. There he found the lawyer he’d dealt with before—deaf, blind, coughing Mr. Cook—and gave him the card from diSapio, gave him Finney’s address and phone number, and briefly outlined, shouting and gesturing, his problems with the I.R.S. “There may be ways around that,” Mr. Cook said, tapping his fingertips over his chest. “If you were under psychiatric care, as you say, we might just, ipso facto, have a toe hold.” The fines and penalties might be questioned, inter alia, perhaps negotiated. He smiled. A man who loved his craft. Ipso jure, they had several means of stalling for time. Mr. Cook could of course promise nothing, but looking a long way down the road …
He went back to his car feeling obscenely grateful, blessed. He’d left only one thing undone that he wished he might have done. He’d like to have asked about those ghosts. But the question was too awkward, and then there was the barrier of Cook’s deafness. During the half hour he’d spent in Cook’s office, the sky, he found, had darkened, huge bluish-brown clouds like bruises overhead—more like thunderclouds than like snow-clouds. They made the whole town mysteriously dark, as if some Biblical miracle were about to happen, or the sun were slipping into eclipse. Even this sudden, surprising darkness did not dampen his mood, that is, steal from him his sense of born-again relief, now that his troubles—some of them anyway—were in professional hands; but the darkness did do something queer, for a matter of seconds, to his imagination. When he’d backed into Public Street and was just nosing the Chevy toward the courthouse, he suddenly hit his brakes, believing he saw something that he knew could not be there. In front of the courthouse steps there was a tall, black gallows, and hanging from it, perfectly still except for a slight movement of her dress in what might have been a light summer breeze, he saw a woman. He saw the hanged woman with perfect clarity—bulging eyes, dark tongue—and then the body and gallows were both gone, the sky softening to wintry gray. He understood that it had been some kind of vision or waking nightmare. Already he had trouble believing he’d really seen it, the whole thing scattering from his mind like the atoms of a dream. On the sidewalks no one looked up at the sky, no one had noticed anything.
Back in Susquehanna, he tried Donnie Matthews’ door again and found her still not at home. He stood thinking for a while, leaning on his cane, then went back down the stairs and, for all the cold, crossed the street to sit on the bench near the traffic light—today there was no one else there, thanks to the weather—and, tucking his leather-gloved hands into the
armpits of his overcoat, turtling his mouth and chin inside his scarf, he settled himself to wait. Except for his forehead and ears, the tip of his nose and his feet, he was warm enough. If he got really uncomfortable he could go sit in the Chevy, parked at a meter not thirty feet away, turn on the motor and heater, and wait in comfort at least until the exhaust fumes got him, seeping through the floor. For now, this was his preference. Though Christmas lights—yellow, blue, green, red, white—drooped above Main Street, and there were lights in the stores, a few brave souls shopping, he felt, here on the icy bench, as if the frozen town had been abandoned to him.
He glanced to his left, across the street toward the Acme, at the sound of a child’s crying, and saw the man he’d bought his Jeep from, Charles Lepatofsky, slipping and sliding across the pavement toward him, a large bag of groceries in his arm and mittened right hand, his left hand dragging along his red-faced, bundled-up daughter. Her name was Lily, Mickelsson remembered. It was odd that he should remember it, bad as he was with names. He couldn’t have heard it more than three or four times. If she never spoke—so Lepatofsky had said—it was not because she lacked the throat for it. She was wailing as if her heart would break, large tears coursing down her cheeks. She caught her breath and paused for a moment when she saw Mickelsson, then returned, with renewed conviction, to her sorrow and indignation.
Lepatofsky apologized, nodding to him, “Poor baby hates the cold. But I couldn’t just leave her up at the house.”
“Hard on kids, this weather,” Mickelsson said.
Lily slid her eyes toward him but went on with her heartbroken wailing.
Suddenly he got up from the bench, throwing a little wave to Lepatofsky, and half skated, half ran to the Chevy, where he opened the door, leaned in on one knee, and unfastened the troll-doll from the rear-view mirror. Triumphantly, he carried it back to where Lepatofsky and his daughter were just now climbing into their truck. “This is for you,” he said to Lily, handing her the doll.
She abruptly stopped crying—even Lepatofsky seemed surprised by that—and after an instant’s hesitation took the doll in her two mittened hands.
“Can you say thank you?” Lepatofsky asked, bending toward her, smiling.
She shook her head.
“Lily don’t talk,” he explained, glancing up at Mickelsson.
“I know.” Mickelsson stepped back from the truck, smiling and nodding, exorbitantly pleased with himself, then closed her door.
Lepatofsky waved, bobbing his head and calling “Thank, you!” Then the truck engine roared to life. Mickelsson waved good-bye until the truck was out of sight, then, still smiling, went back to his bench. As he sat down, his heart jumped. Donnie’s light was on.
He had not been prepared for the temper he found her in. She refused absolutely to listen to reason, refused even to let him take her hand to comfort her—much less go to bed with her—and even as he shouted back at her, bellowing like a bull, towering over her, barely in control, he secretly felt the justice of her rage, even the justice of her blaming the whole thing on him. He’d been one of many; her stubborn claim that things stood otherwise was lunacy, an act of mad desperation and reptile cunning; but the fact that there had been others did not mitigate his guilt, any more than did her own claim, earlier, that she was “professional.” Her actions had not been, in the full sense, rational: in her youthful egoism and optimism, she hadn’t really foreseen the consequences. He, an adult, a man of books and relatively wide experience, had no such excuse. If his use of her, his treatment of this living, feeling human being as pure physical object, was representative, not special, he was nonetheless personally to blame for it. Even as he raged at her, his large red fists clenched, pulled tight against his chest lest he hit her with them—telling her, in scorn of her extortionist dreams, that he was poor, maybe the poorest of her clients—his mind wheeled, hunting wildly for a way to pay her off, save both her and the child in her womb. Foetus, he reminded himself; but what he saw in his mind was his even-then-beloved Leslie emerging, all bloody, from Ellen’s womb. “I haven’t even got a fucking salary,” he shouted, “or anyway I won’t have, not long enough to scrape up the two thousand dollars you think you need. Two thousand dollars!” He hit his forehead with the side of his right fist and spun away from her as if knocked almost off his feet by his own blow.
“You do!” she shouted. “What the hell are you saying?”
“I don’t,” he said, and sucked in air, trying to calm himself. “The I.R.S. is garnishing all I earn.”
“Then get it somewhere else,” she said. “What do I care? Fuck it!”
In his mind he saw her standing stiff with rage in the center of the room behind him. She was still in the scratchy-looking pleated bright red wool dress she’d been out shopping in—with her sister, she said. Her coat and scarf were thrown over the back of the overstuffed chair, and on the cushion and on the carpet in front of the chair, cheaply wrapped Christmas presents spilled out of paper shopping bags. On her forehead she’d put some kind of skin-colored putty—except that it wasn’t the color of her skin—trying to hide pimples. If her pregnancy showed, it was not in her belly but in the dullness of her hair, the dark blue shadows under her eyes.
“Somewhere else,” he sneered. He thought of Jessie and angrily batted the thought from his mind. Something down in the street caught his attention, though at the moment he wasn’t quite conscious of what it was that he was seeing. An old gray car, perhaps from the late fifties or early sixties, had pulled up beside the curb in front of Thomas’s Hardware. The car-door opened, and after a minute, slowly, with great difficulty, the fat man from the apartment downstairs squeezed himself out, closed the door behind him, and went around the front of the car to the sidewalk, out of Mickelsson’s view. He did not have on, today, the police hat but instead a gray, long-out-of-fashion fedora. Mickelsson leaned forward and was able to see him again, standing at the parking meter now, putting a coin in. Then the man turned and, moving tentatively—no doubt because of the near-blindness Mickelsson had noticed down in the hallway that day—again passed out of Mickelsson’s view, entering Thomas’s store. The man’s apartment, it occurred to him, would be empty.
Mickelsson closed his eyes, shocked by the thought that had come to him. He heard Donnie’s abuse blazing like fire behind him, but he registered not a word of it, his mind replaying with a feeling of great dread the movements of the man he’d just seen getting out of the car, directly below him, closing the car-door, the top of his hat moving toward the car for a moment as, presumably, he looked in, maybe checking to see that he hadn’t left his keys; then the hat, the wide shoulders of the coat, the long, dark scarf moving around the front of the car toward the curb. …
He turned to her, breaking in on her crackling stream of dragon-fire. “Suppose I could get you money somewhere,” he said, jerking up both hands to silence her. “How much would it take to convince you to have the baby, put it up for adoption?”
“Fuck you,” she snapped. “It’s my goddamn life!” Then she stopped herself, seeing something in his look, and she seemed visibly to shrink, becoming cunning all at once, then relaxing her face, beginning to dissemble. “It would take more than you could ever get, believe me,” she said.
“How much?” he asked, and moved a step toward her.
She looked away from his eyes, afraid of him, saw her cigarettes on the chair beside the bedroom door, and abruptly went for one. Her hands shook as she picked at the pack and at last drew one out. Her eyes fled here and there, looking for matches.
Mickelsson took a pack from his pocket, opened them, and moved closer to her, lighting one and holding it toward her, at arm’s length. She leaned toward the light, afraid to meet his eyes, poked the end of the cigarette into the flame and sucked hard, then sharply drew back.
“You’re crazy,” she said, letting out smoke and holding the cigarette away from her in a gesture queerly elegant, touching.
“There’s a place in Bing
hamton,” he said, dropping the matchbook back into his pocket. “For five thousand dollars they’ll handle everything—all perfectly legal. I checked. How much more would you require, for yourself?” He listened to the odd note of pompousness that had entered his speech, as if it were someone else that was saying these things.
“I’m afraid,” she said. “Can’t you fucking understand that? I’m scared to fucking death.”
He waited until she looked at him, then said, “But for money—for enough money …” The foetus would be better off dead; what chance did it have? Anyway, there was no justice or decency under heaven. They’d all be better off dead—he, Donnie, Jessie. … He pulled back from the thought in revulsion.
