by John Gardner
He drove more slowly, hardly breathing. Should he phone the police? Might the gang not go to the hospital and finish their work? But what could he tell the police, in fact? What did he actually know?
Then something that had been nagging at the back of his mind burst into his mental field of vision: the old, well-kept car that had appeared in his brief daydream of the accident had been parked down the street from his Jeep when he’d come out of the hospital.
He clenched the steeringwheel as tightly as his neurotic weakness would allow, and tried to think.
Was it possible? Maybe he’d imagined it; or maybe he’d seen the car there before he’d gone in and had unconsciously registered it and had supplied it when his fantasy of the accident needed an image.
“Insane,” he whispered, not quite meaning it, simply playing, philosopher-like, with the patent weirdness, increasing degeneration, of his mental processes. Here he was, deducing reality from intermingled dreams and actualities—“more or less fantastic gloss”—incapable of guessing which was which, yet weighing the results as if he’d gotten them in a clean, bright laboratory.
He shuddered and pushed the whole mess to the back of his mind. He’d arrived at his destination, the modest, fake-Tudor home of Samuel Danytz, Department of Sociology. The man with thick fingers. He parked the Jeep and sat for a moment, trying to decide what he intended to do, his right hand resting idly on the bear-rug covering the shotgun. When he remembered that the gun was there he drew his hand back. He got out of the Jeep almost without a sound.
The front lawn had been fixed up as a kind of Japanese garden, no doubt more as an alternative to lawn-mowing than as a tribute to Zen Buddhism. The snow had stopped falling some time ago, and the sky was bright, but the lawn around the Danytz house lay in the heavy shade of blue spruce trees. He had meant to ring the doorbell, but he found himself looking around somewhat furtively, noticing that there were no dogs out tonight, and not a soul on the white, softly carpeted sidewalks. He moved quickly for all his feebleness, crouching down, toward a lighted window, thinking vaguely of some character in a novel he’d read long ago—Russian, perhaps; anyway, something obsessive and morose and no doubt philosophical, or meant to be; otherwise he wouldn’t have read it. He thought of the night he’d spied on the fat man, and his stomach knotted. To distract himself, bring himself back to the business at hand, he glanced down at his wrist to check the time, then remembered that he’d given away his watch. Crazy thing to do! Even crazier, he saw that in his left hand he held a pack of cigarettes, in his right a pack of matches. He’d actually been about to light a cigarette, give himself away, as if on purpose!
He pocketed the cigarettes and matches, then raised up slowly to peek in through the window. A pretty young girl, maybe twelve or thirteen, was standing in front of a brown, textured couch, playing with a cat—dangling a shoelace, getting the cat to bat at it. Papers and books, probably the girl’s homework, lay on the couch, and above the couch hung two paintings, amateur and awful but obviously treasured, expensively framed. One was of a naked woman with a fat blue mouth and one hand over her crotch; the other was of wedge-shaped mountains with palaces or monasteries on their tops. The girl laughed as the cat leaped up, batting with both black paws. The cat was apparently part-Siamese—blue-eyed, lean and elegant, delicately muscled under sleek black, yellow and white fur. The girl jerked her head back, long blond hair swinging, and Mickelsson thought, with sharp pain, of his daughter. This girl was not as strikingly pretty as Leslie and wore slightly thick glasses, but she was visibly a nice kid, by no means ugly; one of civilization’s fortunate.
From somewhere surprisingly nearby—at first he thought it was from outside the house, only feet away from him—a voice called, “Sheila?”
Without turning, still playing with the cat, the girl said, “Coming! Just a sec, Ma!” She made another pass over the cat’s head with the shoelace—the cat declined the gambit, then belatedly jumped and caught the lace in both paws and its teeth. The girl dropped her end, bent down with quick grace to give the cat a little pat, then swung around and went lightly from the room.
What had his intention been, Mickelsson asked himself. To beat the man up? Shoot him, perhaps? Was it so surprising, really, that he had a house, a daughter who showed every sign of having been loved, pampered, taught to be cheerfully obedient?
The cat settled on the carpet with the shoelace, its blue eyes by some trick of light going empty. From the way the cat fumbled and mainly used its teeth, one could see that the creature had been declawed.
Jessie’s house was dark. Perhaps she’d gone to bed; he had no idea how late it was. She prided herself on being an early riser, he remembered. The darkness behind her windows seeped into his heart.
As he drove toward the Tillsons’ it suddenly came to him why it was that he kept thinking, lately—thinking somehow guiltily—of Ludwig Wittgenstein: Michael Nugent had mentioned him the last time they’d talked, at Mickelsson’s office. It was Tillson that had put the boy on to Wittgenstein. The Investigations had been somehow a great revelation to Nugent; Mickelsson no longer remembered, if he’d ever known, how or why. He thanked God now that, on a lucky impulse, he’d refrained from coming down too hard on old Ludwig, though he’d mentioned, with some annoyance, the use to which the Wiener Kreis had put Wittgenstein’s mystical empiricism—how Wittgenstein’s divorce of God and the knowable had without warrant become, in their hands, a dismissal of God as not simply one of the unspeakable things but Nothing, not just an empty term but a lie. Nugent, Mickelsson remembered, had simply nodded, smiling as if his mind were elsewhere.
“The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.” Traceable to Nietzsche, like everything else in modern thought. “Problems are not solved but outgrown.”
What in hell, he wondered (as always), was it supposed to mean?
Tillson’s house, like Jessie’s, was dark. Had he too gone to bed? Were they off somewhere together? He thought of swinging past the university and checking Tillson’s office but rejected the idea in disgust. He started up the engine of the Jeep once more, wondering where to go now, what to do. He felt himself absurdly like one of those young colleagues or graduate students who had come to visit him and drink up his liquor when he was living in his apartment. He thought of knocking at Gail Edelman’s door and was for a moment faintly tempted. If he were drunk, he knew, he would certainly do it. He was sorry he wasn’t drunk.
He winced, ambushed by memory. What a fool they must all have thought him, ranting against abortion, bullying them, granting them no space for what they all, this younger generation, must have known to be the truth! Bigot, he thought, then winced in embarrassment at the memory of his confession, a few hours ago, to Randy Wilson. He suffered a brief, quite mad hallucination: he thought his ex-wife was seated with him in the Jeep, crushed far over on the passenger side, to be as far from him as possible. She was crying, carefully not making a sound. Tears streamed down her face, she made no effort to get rid of them. Her hands were knotted together in her lap. Her face was puffy, her dyed hair stiff and coarse. He wanted to shout at her, turn her terrible sorrow to anger—anger he could deal with—but he couldn’t find his voice.
Now the Jeep was rushing down Route 11, the long, eerie supertrucks of 81 on his left, the frozen, snowy Susquehanna on his right. The image of his crying ex-wife was gone. One moment it was there, the next it was not, and he pushed along the well-plowed, partly bare highway at nearly sixty, as if to leave the hallucination behind him forever. He found himself thinking again of Donnie Matthews. He was beginning to believe—had been inclined to believe for some time now, it struck him—that she would never be caught, would never be required to reveal what she knew, his guilt. By now she would long since have gotten her abortion, alone. If only he could meet her one more time, let her know it was all right. But she was gone. He must accept that, and the unatonable guilt that went with it. Dickens’ gentle universe of families reu
nited in the book’s final pages—the sorrowing, guilt-ridden rich and the sad, disowned poor—was as dead as the universe of Newton. The girl had drifted out of Mickelsson’s life like an accelerating galaxy, rushing toward the red shift, Dante’s mente, Einstein’s void. “Let them find her,” he whispered, almost a prayer. “Let her accuse me, and let us meet one more time.”
He roared down Route 11, fleeing the lights of the city toward increasing darkness. It was a clear, starry night, the snowbanks on each side of the road unnaturally sharp of line, with dark, sudden shadows, like snow in one of his son’s photographs. He imagined what it would be like to see the fat man’s ghost right there in front of him, arms stretched toward him, eyes empty. He imagined it with frightening vividness, but the road remained empty and gray, sharply focussed, mirror-bright ice patches rushing toward him like asteroids, just missing him, harmlessly passing through him.
When he looked at the kitchen clock he saw, to his perplexity, that it was 5 a.m. He put away the shotgun, then opened the refrigerator, hungry for something no refrigerator contained. The house was cold and still around him, comfortingly beautiful despite his soul’s disquiet. Even if he lost it to the I.R.S., he thought, the house might heal him yet—simply the fact that he’d saved it from ruin, the fact that, against all evidence, things could occasionally be saved. He got out milk for the cat. As he bent down to pour the milk into the bowl, the cat warily eyeing him, the phone rang, making Mickelsson jump. He finished pouring the milk, then turned, set down the milk-carton, wiped his hands on his pantlegs, and at last walked over and lifted the telephone receiver to his ear.
“Hello?”
No one spoke. After a moment he said again, “Hello?”
There was still no voice at the other end. After three or four seconds he asked, “Mark? Is that you?”
He waited, thought of asking if it were Jessie, then asked instead, crossly, “Hello?”
Silence. Now for some season he was sure that it was Jessie. In his mind he saw her face with painful clarity, interested, gentle, the very emblem of aristocratic beauty. He remembered how she’d leaned forward, distressed, talking to old man Sprague up at his house higher on the mountain. Mickelsson hadn’t told her yet, he remembered, that the old people’s house had burned. “Jessie?” he almost said. Was it possible that she knew that it had been Mickelsson outside the door, that night at Tillson’s office? He clenched the receiver more tightly, pressing it against his ear.
“Hello?” he asked one more time, reserved, then listened. It was his wife, it came to him—his poor, wrecked Ellen. But then, once again, he was unsure. At last, deliberately, without haste, he hung up.
Should he call Jessie, just in case? But he did not really believe it had been Jessie. He stood frowning, undecided, for a long time, then for some reason, reaching no decision, found himself moving into the livingroom, crossing to the couch, thoughtfully sitting down, moving the palps of his fingers again and again over his bristly chin, listening to the scritch. After a while he eased his shoes off, raised his feet onto the couch, and lay back, closing his eyes.
He slept for hours, then awakened with a start to discover that the world outside his windows was red, as if burning.
“Sunrise!” he told himself—or was it sunset? He made himself calm. What had he thought it was, Christ’s Return in Glory? Some nuclear accident his son had encouraged to have its in-due-course-inevitable day?
He closed his eyes again, thinking, Yes, it must be sunset; he’d slept another whole day away. He found himself praying for Mark’s safety, wherever he might be—perfunctorily reminding himself even as he prayed that he no longer believed in prayer. Then, as if guiltily, as if for fear of sinfully elevating one love over other loves, or fear that some halfwit supernatural power might misunderstand and save his son but kill his daughter—out of superstitious dread, in other words (so he told himself, but could no more prevent the superstitious act, however lightly he might take it with his rational part, than he could command the Red Sea or make the sun stand still)—he prayed for Leslie; then, because he loved her even now, prayed for Ellen and, because he did not, for The Comedian; then for Jessie; then for Tillson and Tillson’s wife. … The list went on and on, endlessly unfolding—as irrevocable, now that he’d said the first word, as the outrush of worlds, the immense holy gasp and wail that formed Time and Space.
Dreaming, he saw himself with a top-hat, his eyes made up to seem slanted like the Buddha’s, in his hand a magic wand with which he tapped a small, glitter-spattered table like The Incredible Dr. Flint’s. Gilt exploded outward with the first light tap, a lovely, bedazzling puff of gold. He laughed, and the audience laughed with him, delighted, a soft murmur swelling through the shadowy auditorium from end to end, rising and falling away like the breathing of the sea. He winked, signalling more fun to come, and tapped twice, more loudly, then found himself violently hitting the table with a stick. More shining dustclouds of gilt flashed outward.
He awakened to a thunderous pounding and sat upright.
He thought instantly of his son, then knew it couldn’t be that: if something had happened to Mark, he would hear by phone. Someone shouted something, out on the front porch, and the pounding began again. Mickelsson threw his heavy legs over the side, rubbed his forehead with the heels of both hands to awaken himself, then got up, loose-kneed, groped his way through the livingroom’s darkness to the kitchen, switched the light on in the hallway, and made his way down the entry-hall. “I’m coming,” he called when the pounding came again, “hold your horses!” When he opened the front door, two young Mormons stood there, black-coated, their faces white skulls. Behind them, stars and snowlight made the night like a weird dream of day.
“What the Devil—?” Mickelsson said. He closed the door part way.
They were the same two Mormons who had visited him before, but he saw at once that they weren’t here this time on missionary work.
“Professor, we’d like to use your telephone if we could,” the dark-haired one said very softly, obsequious, bending toward him, almost bowing.
Mickelsson stood holding the door against them, looking them up and down. Their faces were as blank as the faces of lizards. “Has something happened? What time is it?”
The blond one poked his head toward him, nose bulbous, eyes slightly widened, “We found a body,” he said. “Up there on the mountain.” He pointed, first toward the road, then, correcting himself, straight up through Mickelsson’s rafters into the woods beyond. “Your place was the quickest to get to, so we came down crosslots.” Mickelsson noticed only now that both of them were snowy to the waist.
Needlessly, Mickelsson said, “He’s dead?”
The blond one nodded, and the dark-haired one took a step toward the door, reminding Mickelsson that they needed to use the phone. Mickelsson stepped back “Right through there,” he said, pointing. “It’s on the wall in the kitchen.”
The dark-haired one nodded, grim, unctuous, rubbing his hands, and moved past, bent forward, the collar of his black coat up over his bright red earlobes. As usual neither of the Mormons wore hats or gloves, but tonight they had galoshes. The blond one came in too, and Mickelsson pulled the door shut behind him.
“Where’d you find him?” he asked. “What happened?”
“It’s the old man called Sprague,” the blond one said. “The crazy one, you know what I mean? One that’s house burned down?” He leaned a little closer to Mickelsson, as if to tell him a secret. “We found him in the snowbank—part of his arm was sticking out. I guess the snowplow must’ve moved him. He’s real banged up.”
Mickelsson stared.
The young man nodded. “I guess the old woman must’ve been up there alone the night the house burned.”
Mickelsson, still staring, brought out, “That must be right.”
In the kitchen the dark-haired one was talking on the phone now, standing in only the dim gray light from the range. A board creaked at the top of the stairs,
and Mickelsson looked up. The two old ghosts were standing there, looking down, hooked forward. Mickelsson shuddered and glanced at the blond young man beside him. He was taller and heavier than Mickelsson had realized. His round, steel-rimmed glasses were steamy. “Evening,” the young man said, nodding in the direction of the ghosts. They ignored him.
The dark-haired Mormon was saying into the phone, “We’re up at Professor Mickelsson’s. … Yes, certainly … We’ll wait right here.”
Mickelsson asked the blond one, “What were you doing out on the road so late?”
“We always put in good long days,” the boy said. He spoke earnestly, his hands in his coatpockets. His face floated closer, not more than ten inches from Mickelsson’s, turned up because of Mickelsson’s height. He could feel the ghosts bending nearer to listen. Urgently, as if it were extremely important that Mickelsson understand, as if he were justifying all his kind, the boy said, “Sometimes we put in fifteen, sixteen hours.” He searched Mickelsson’s eyes.
“That’s a lot,” Mickelsson said. “Listen, if you’re not careful—”
Now the dark-haired one was hanging up the phone and turning to them. “The police are on their way,” he said.
