All the world had been thrown out of Eden at about that time, he knew now, by hindsight. World War II was on. Many of the older farmboys he knew, and even some grown men, his uncle among them for a brief period, had gone away to be part of it, and some were reported to be missing in action or dead. Sweden was said to be conspiring with the enemy. Collaborating. There had been movies to that effect. He would sit cringing, hot with guilt and shame, and at night, each time with astonishment, he would wet his bed. For years, even after he knew they were unjust, he’d been unable to get those movies out of his mind. At times—sometimes publicly, when he was drunk—he had blamed them for his choice of profession.
He and his family, cousins, and friends would sit hunched around the radio, dark and glassy-eyed, listening to Lowell Thomas or Gabriel Heatter report the news: bombings, planes missing, London on fire. No one had known that it was necessary to explain to him that Sweden was not at the heart of it. He’d explained, ragingly, on the asphalt school playground (he had often, in those days, argued with his fists), that his uncle had joined up with the United States Navy; but when Donald Warner—a face and name he would never forget—had said, “Sure! As a spy!” Mickelsson—that is, Mickelsson the child—had felt his heart sink.
Every time an airplane went over at night, he was sure that in a moment he’d hear the piercing, downward-slanting whistle of a bomb, and when the plane droned on, its dark sound innocently diminishing to silence, he was astounded by God’s mercy. It was otherwise with trains, moaning through the woods at the far end of the farm, carrying weary-faced young soldiers. Sometimes in town, standing on the platform of the gray brick depot—torn down thirty years ago now—he had looked in at them with something like that wonder with which he’d looked up at the picture of Eden in the church. They sat crowded like animals in a stockcar on its way to Chicago, but they smoked and grinned, sometimes waved through the gray, greasy window at him, peculiarly indifferent to the fact that when they got where they were going they would have to shoot people, or possibly die. Every Saturday afternoon he saw people die in movies—sometimes actual people, in Time Marches On. The chatter of guns seemed not real, more like dream-noise; only the drums were real—absolute Being—rank on rank of goose-stepping soldiers, with swastika flags hanging down from the buildings, so many thousand soldiers that there seemed no hope for mankind. He held his older cousin’s hand, white-blond Erik, who was to die in Korea. Later he saw pictures in Life magazine of mound on mound of dead people—Jews, he was told, though the magazine did not make it clear. Still later, in college, he had lain beside a half-Jewish, half-Italian girl, one of the cheerleaders, on a blanket overlooking a quarry. Suddenly, looking into her brown eyes, feeling the softness of her skin, he’d felt horror stir in him, as if a black shadow—Sweden’s evil ghost, or the ghost of Dr. Luther in his final madness—had fallen over them. Whenever he went to movies about World War II—dog-fights, people shouting happily, like Boy Scouts, grenades exploding, bridges falling in—he felt sick at his stomach, as if he were looking at his childhood through thick, wavy glass. People laughed in the ocean-bed darkness of the theater around him, or leaned forward, flickering light on their faces. At times a kind of vertigo would come over him, a weakness of arms and legs, and he would leave. Once, in college, lying on his bunk in the dark with his hands behind his head, he’d asked his roommate, “Does it ever seem to you that everything you look at, it’s in a mirror?” “No,” his roommate had said, after thought. He hadn’t expressed himself clearly, he’d decided. It was impossible that others should not have noticed. (He’d never heard of Plotinus, Porphyry, and the rest—thank God—though he ought to have suspected the whole thing from his grandfather’s talk of Luther.) But then there were times, sometimes weeks on end, when even he himself forgot and swam comfortably, easily, through a world that seemed to him not insubstantial. After he’d married Ellen, that queer sense of things had more or less left him, and after his son had been born, the world had become for him positively secure. (By now he knew Nietzsche on consciousness: “a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable text.”) The feel of grass when he hunkered down, rolling a ball to Mark, had such quiddity, such authority, one might have imagined time had stopped, and the sacramental moment toward which everything tended had arrived. When Mark’s clumsy hands came together around the ball and he laughed in proud amazement—Ellen standing over by the day-lilies, a book closed on her finger, her bespectacled face turning its smile to them—it was as if the whole world cried out, delighted, changed to music, lively as an animal—the dazzling white walls of the neighbors’ houses, the green lace of leaves overhead, blue sky.
At four in the morning, feeling a change in the darkness beyond the windows, Mickelsson decided he’d better quit. There would be another day for painting—and another and another. Days also for writing his blockbuster book. He’d do well to sleep. He put the lid on the paint can, sealed it tight with his heel, then washed out the roller and brush in the upstairs bathroom sink. The bones of the hand that had gripped the paintbrush ached like rotten teeth.
It gave him a queer feeling, moving around alone at this hour in the big, empty house, the house he was painting, preparing for nothing, “just the one of you,” as the doc had said. He remembered distinctly, as if she were in the room with him, her girlish laugh. “Strange,” he said aloud, then said nothing more, made uneasy by the sound of his voice. He turned out the lights, then—unconsciously massaging his right hand as he walked—went back to the bathroom to wash up, prepare for bed. He got a sudden image of the fat man’s tray of money, then of Donnie in the musty-smelling bed, on her knees, her face buried in the pillow, her two hands spreading her buttocks for his entrance from behind. Like a suddenly shrinking aura, his emotion shrank inward and went dark. He stared into the mirror, brushing his teeth. Foam around his mouth, bags under his eyes, the hair on his chest yellow-silver. He was old, debauched, repulsive. No one would ever again see Mickelsson the athlete, big-chested, small-bellied, powerful but not yet fat of shoulder, not yet grossly fat of neck. He looked away. He spat, rinsed his mouth, wiped his face on the towel, then draped it once more over the toilet tank; he’d taken down the towel rack in preparation for painting the walls. He took from the medicine cabinet the sickly violet plastic-and-rubber gum-stimulator, dreariest curse of middle age, leaned toward the mirror again, and dutifully bared his fangs.
He awakened at seven-thirty with a strong sense that something was wrong. At first it seemed to him that the house was on fire, but when he put on his trousers, stiff muscles complaining, and hurried from room to room, he couldn’t get even a whiff of smoke, though something else reached his nostrils, the baffling scent he’d encountered once or twice before, of bread baking, or cookies. It was weird: the smell was strong and all around him, like the smell of baking in his grandmother’s house, in his childhood; much too strong to be explained by the trickery of mountain wind bringing smells in from the kitchens of his neighbors. He’d look into it, see if one of the chemists at school could account for it. At the moment he had other things to think about. His sense of something wrong was more intense than before, and now it seemed to him that the wellspring of trouble was under his feet, in the cellar. Only after he’d turned the wooden latch and cautiously opened the cellar door did he realize what it was that he’d expected, the dim memory of a nightmare perhaps: he’d thought the cellar would be hip-deep in rattlesnakes. As he moved tread by tread down the cellar stairs, the center of evil seemed to shift to another part of the house. He stood for several minutes, with the fingertips of his right hand spread on the damp stone wall as if waiting for an earth tremor, then moved to the doorway opening to the cellar chute. The padlock was broken. It was here, then, that his visitors had come in; that was why the kitchen door, which had been open when he’d come in that night, had not been broken. All this time, ever since the break-in, the house had, unbeknownst to him, stood open. He would nail the thing shut, but no
t till he was rid of this sixth-sense certainty that something was amiss. He went back upstairs.
In the middle of the livingroom he stopped walking and looked around in alarm. If it was not fire or snakes in the cellar, it was a violent outpouring of electricity, some fallen power line, something wrong in the TV. … He closed his eyes.
No …
He had thought all this time that it was a force outside himself, invisible, crackling, so powerful it bent him almost double and made all his joints cry out with pain. If he’d believed in spirits he’d have said it was the angry native spirit of this place—the earth god, still smarting over the digging of the cellar or the reservoir higher on the mountain; or the waterfall god, across the road, annoyed by the frequent intrusion of tourists (through the livingroom window Mickelsson could see that there was a car out there now, its smooth dark top gleaming in the sunlight, the driver and his family no doubt out there littering, breaking branches from saplings, lining each other up for pictures against the falls)—but he did not, of course, believe in spirits. The malevolent Shockwaves he felt all around him in the house must come from within.
No wonder. He, Mickelsson, had fled from the world’s complexity to what he’d hoped might be Eden, and he’d found the place polluted, decaying—filled to the tongue-roots with low, slimy secrets: gossips, pompous asses, crudely cunning whores, con-men, idiots, mysterious intruders. He’d taken risks, like the merchant in the parable, who sold all his goods, or like the man who found the treasure on another man’s land, and what he’d gotten for his trouble was neither paradise here nor freedom from his troubles in …
“Shit!” he whispered, and bolted to the window. The car he’d thought belonged to tourists was gone. Dark green, utterly without ornament. No doubt the Pennsylvania contingent of the I.R.S. “Shit!” he whispered more bitterly than before, and hit the wall with the side of his fist, so hard that his hand went numb.
As if it might help, he showered, shaved, trimmed the hair in his nostrils, cleaned his nails, then dressed as if for an English picnic, white sportcoat, blue slacks, blue ascot, white shoes, took the silver-headed cane and went out to the Jeep, ground the starter till it caught, then drove down, square in the middle of the road, to the Susquehanna bank. He hadn’t hit them yet with one of his Binghamton checks. With luck … At the drive-in window he wrote a check for seventy-five dollars, drawn to “cash,” and handed it to the woman. She gave him the money without a moment’s hesitation, and wished him good-day. He drove back onto Main Street and parked in front of Reddon’s Drugs, for all to see.
He knocked and knocked. Finally she called out, “Who is it?”
“Pete Mickelsson,” he said. “I brought your money.”
There was a pause, then she called, “What time is it?”
“Eight-thirty, maybe nine. Donnie, could I come in?”
“Eight-thirty in the morning?”
“I brought your money,” Mickelsson said, leaning closer to the door. “I brought cash—the full amount. Donnie, I’ve really got to talk to you.”
Silence.
He tapped at the door with one knuckle. “Donnie? Can I come in?” When she said nothing, he called, “Are you alone in there?”
Now she did answer, and to his surprise she was only a few feet from the door. Desire leaped in him, stirring in his chest and groin. “I can’t let you in,” she said. “Can you slide the money under the door?”
“Let me talk to you for just one minute. That’s all I want—just to talk to you. No funny business.”
“There’s somebody here,” she said, barely audible.
He thought about it, not quite believing her but trapped. “Can I talk to you later, then? When will you be free?”
“First slide the money under the door.”
He smiled, then got out the bank envelope, removed twenty dollars from it, and slid the rest under the door.
Almost at once she said, “It’s not all here.”
“When can I see you?”
“Jesus,” she whispered. From the way she said it he thought perhaps there was someone in there with her after all.
“Tell me and I’ll slide in the rest,” he said.
“All right, all right,” she said. “How about midnight?”
“You’re kidding.” It struck him immediately that if she was serious he could stay with her till morning.
“No, I mean it.”
He pulled at the twenty-dollar bill, then after an instant bent down and slid it under the door. “OK,” he said, his voice thinned by emotion, “midnight.”
As he turned from the door, still smiling, she called, “Hay, Prafessor, I just remembered something. I have to go visit my sister tonight. She’s in the hospital.”
His mouth opened of its own volition and he turned. At last he said, “Bullshit.”
“It’s the truth,” she said. “Listen, tomorrow night, OK? Midnight tomorrow night. I’ll make it worth your time.”
There was no real doubt that she was laughing at him, both she and whoever it was she had with her, maybe fucking him upright even as they talked; yet, crazily, he wasn’t quite sure. He thought of kicking the door in: it wasn’t pleasant to think that some son of a bitch—he might never know which one—had listened to his miserable whimperings and pleadings and would go out and tell all Susquehanna. Better to kick the door in than be a farmboys’ joke and never even know whom to thank. She might admire him for it. He was not quite the crawling slave he seemed!
But it wasn’t quite positive that someone was with her, and not positive that Donnie, if he kicked her door in, would ever let him visit her again. He turned, blushing, his right hand clenched tight on the handle of his cane, and, when he was sure he had his voice in control, said, “OK, then, tomorrow night. Good.”
“Bring cash,” she said, but the teasing voice was sweet.
“Don’t worry,” Mickelsson said.
At the third-floor landing he stopped without knowing why. Though it was bright daylight outside, one could hardly tell here whether it was day or night. He glanced down the hall into increasing dimness, then realized with a start what it was that had made him pause. The fat man, still in his police hat, was bending over at his door, trying to reach something on the carpet, apparently a pamphlet. There was no one in sight, and the fat man, caught up in the labor of bending, appeared unaware of Mickelsson’s existence. In the dingy corridor the man seemed even more immense than he’d seemed in his room, but also more vulnerable. His face shone with sweat, and as he bent his knees a little, snatching at the pamphlet, breathing in gasps, he seemed about as dangerous as a beached whale. Upright, he’d be six feet tall, maybe more.
“Let me help you with that,” Mickelsson said, taking a step in the fat man’s direction.
The fat man jerked his head up, cheeks gray as ashes, flapped both arms wildly, and almost fell. Mickelsson froze, the fat man’s steel-rimmed glasses aiming at him. By the time his heart had ka-thumped three times, Mickelsson understood that the man could not see him at all.
For two or three hours he tried to work on his book, but nothing came. He kept looking at his watch, as if tonight were the night he would be seeing Donnie; then he would remember that it was not, and would remember that somewhere—in some bar, in some store, in some sooty, run-down factory—some countrified oaf knew fat, middle-aged Professor Mickelsson’s doting shamelessness. Some goaty-smelling cow-herd or plumber or electrician, young or old, fat or thin, bare-chinned or whiskery—some preacher, garbage-man, schoolteacher, lawyer—maybe the very man who’d murdered Professor What’s-his-name, or the man who had torn apart Mickelsson’s house—somebody, somewhere, had the word on him. For a minute the thought enraged him; then suddenly, as if some blockage in his brain had broken open, he was serene. Her naked image rose before his eyes, and he no more cared about the impression he made on the people of Susquehanna—or Binghamton itself—than Boethius cared for his prison bars, or some silver-eyed saint of the thirteenth centur
y for his grotto’s stench of piss.
Again—thesis-antithesis—in came the thought of his grandfather, his own tight-sphinctered, abandoned self (thus Rifkin, once), dryly correct and reasonable as clockparts. Abruptly, Mickelsson got up from his desk, got out his dropcloths, roller, and paint, and, every aching muscle crying protest, set to work. When he was able to write he would write.
His lunacy would wane, this preposterous, self-destructive business with Donnie Matthews. When he imagined himself married to her he almost might have laughed—would have, except for the sudden, sharp chest-pain he felt at the thought of losing her. Biological programming, he knew; nothing more. The older male turning to the potential child-bearer. God did not demand that one approve of being born a primate; He demanded only—and exacted—obedience. Ah, for a little common dignity, Mickelsson thought. He shook his head, ironic, lest some well-intentioned angel mistake his meaning.