Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

have any real control of.” He blew out smoke, angrily drumming his short, hard fingers on the tabletop, his head down, like a bull’s. It had seemed the kind of reason Dr. Rifkin would accept. Dr. Rifkin was a fool, an absurdly sloppy thinker if indeed it could be said that he ever thought at all; but Mickelsson was in the habit of consulting him now and then, touching bases in the fashion of a sandlot ballplayer on a diamond whose bases are yards out of position but familiar.

“Come on now,” Rifkin said, his voice adenoidal, as ironic and peevish as a meow. He was always saying “Come on now.” A tiresome—tirelessly tiresome—little man, slightly crabby, though good-hearted to a fault, fresh from his internship somewhere in Texas, still stained by the tan, when Mickelsson had first met him. He was painstaking; would’ve made an excellent dentist. Perhaps, like Martin Luther, he was dizzied by the stink of human breath. It was Mickelsson’s ex-wife that had chosen him, or confirmed the choice of the hospital where Mickelsson had been placed.

Rifkin, at the other end of the line, would be sitting with his knees together, protecting his cock—long, if one could judge by his ears, nose, and thumbs—hair parted in the middle, two fingercurls in front, delicately pushing his glasses up his nose with a carefully manicured, spatulate middle finger, his thick lips puckered (moustache poised, uplifted) as if ready to give the receiver a quick little love-peck. His eyebrows would be arched in faintly ironic astonishment—possibly amusement, possibly reprobation; he purposely kept it ambiguous, playing it safe. He played everything safe. He never spoke of “Freud,” like a normal human being, always of “Doctor Freud.” On the mahogany-panelled wall behind him hung a framed pen-and-ink sketch, probably something his wife had picked out. Again the scratchy, ironic cat’s voice: “Come on now, Professor. What’s the real reason?”

Mickelsson imagined himself saying, “All right; I murdered a dog.”

Even before he’d decided whether or not it was funny, or whether or not it could be construed as relevant, he’d decided on discretion. He said, tapping the tabletop again, “I suppose the truth is I’d like to spite my wife, maybe go to jail and shame her.”

“That’s not impossible,” Rifkin said. “Very interesting.” He’d be sitting with his eyes closed to chinks, grinning like a fox with indigestion.

“Maybe spite my children too,” Mickelsson said, “lose my earning capacity and deprive them of college educations.”

“Mmm,” Rifkin said, suspicious now, from the sound of it. “It’s something you might think about, anyway.”

“I will, believe me.”

“Is that irony I detect?”

“If you detect it, then it is.”

“Come on now, Professor,” Rifkin said crossly, whiningly, “let’s not logic-chop.”

“All right. Sorry,” Mickelsson said. He glanced at his watch. “OK, so I’m jealous of my children.”

“As I say, you might think about it,” Rifkin said.

Mickelsson shook his head. What a profession! After he’d gotten rid of Rifkin he’d gone back to looking through the paper for a house, writing himself notes, occasionally giving a little whistle or muttering to himself. “ ‘Priced to sell.’ I’ll bet! Right before it vanishes in the quicksand!” It was a habit of long standing, this talking to himself, just above a whisper, often in high-flown orotund phrases, often with close-to-the-chest little gestures. One of the things he liked best about his business was the grand tradition of ornate formulations, the effloriate rhetoric of a Goethe, Santayana, Collingwood, or Russell, not to mention Nietzsche—dimly recalled in the prose of living philosophers like Blanchard or, among the younger crowd, Richard Taylor, Peter Singer. In this as in everything, needless to say, he was hopelessly out of fashion, following the no-longer-believed (dis-cred-ited, from creed, Heideggerians would bray); nor did it help when he quoted the ghost of Adam Smith on ethics books that are “dry and disagreeable, abounding in abstruse and metaphysical distinctions, but incapable of exciting in the heart any of those emotions which it is the principal use of books of morality to excite.” Rhetoric was of die Welt, not die Erde, and therefore, in the new, upside-down universe, sin and error. Brahma was out; the jigglings and gyrations of Shiva were in.

And so the hunt continued. His books and papers lay strewn on the table as they’d been when he’d given up trying to work on them. The sink was filled with dishes, and rather than wash them he bought paper cups and plates. He no longer went out for walks on hot nights but climbed into his rattletrap car, an old Chevy he’d bought for seventy dollars from a student, and drove out to look at houses he couldn’t go through until tomorrow. If the house was empty or there was no one about, he would park in the weeds across the road and sit looking for half an hour, going over in his mind what one might do to save it and dimly imagining what his life might be like if he were to take the place. Mornings, he would dress in the slightly dandified fashion he favored—dark shirt, ascot tie, a light summer suit only slightly frayed, dark blue hankie in the pocket, and on his head—pressing down his erumpent red hair—the vaguely Westernish broad-brimmed hat that signalled his difference from other philosophers (as if any such signal were needed), aligning him more nearly with the Southern or Western poets who came, every week or so, to read their flashy junk to the Department of Anguish.

He pursued the hunt as if doomed to it, locked on his senseless course like a planet. Not quite senseless, perhaps. One might speak of the quiet without which creativity cannot hear itself think; one might mention the example of Wittgenstein, who had come to a whole new vision while designing and building his sister’s house. But those were not really Peter Mickelsson’s reasons—unless in this too as in so many things, he was deluded. Never mind, for the moment. (That was the slogan of his crisis: