He’d been seated in his office for more than an hour, with the door closed and the light off—seated doing nothing and thinking nothing, staring at the wall—when a timid knock came. He considered not answering, then thought perhaps it might be Jessica, whose conversation might be a comfort just now, and so he called, rather softly, as if he hadn’t quite made up his mind, “Come in.”
As soon as he saw the worried, uncertain way the doorknob moved, he knew it would be Nugent. “Christ,” he whispered, then leaned forward onto his left elbow and swivelled around in his chair so that he partly faced the door. The boy opened it wide, not seeing him at first in the room’s late-afternoon dimness. His black friend—Mickelsson had forgotten the name—was with him again. He looked in over Nugent’s shoulder, and when he was sure that it was really Mickelsson there at the desk, he smiled and bobbed his head, then backed away, giving them privacy.
“Did you want the light out?” Nugent asked, hovering between the hallway and the office.
“It’s fine. My eyes are tired,” Mickelsson said. “Come in if you like. What can I do for you?”
“Thank you.” He advanced a step or two, looking around the room as if to make sure no one waited in ambush. Then, apparently deciding he was safe, he closed the door behind him and came the rest of the way at a more normal pace. “May I sit down?” he asked.
“Be my guest,” Mickelsson said wearily.
“I won’t take long,” the boy said, and seated himself, rigid as usual, folding his hands and locking them between his legs. He looked not at Mickelsson but exactly at the point on the wall Mickelsson had been staring at earlier.
Mickelsson got out his pipe and tobacco.
“I’m sorry about this morning,” Nugent said. “I realize I wasted valuable class time and talked nothing but stupid nonsense.” His lips trembled and it came to Mickelsson that, damn it all, the boy was going to cry again.
In spite of his annoyance—the feeling of claustrophobia that came over him every time the boy came near him—Mickelsson said, almost gently, “That’s not true.” He concentrated on his pipe, lest the boy throw him a look.
“I hadn’t thought it out,” Nugent said. “I lost my temper, sort of—all those things they were saying. … I’m sort of new at all this. I’m not a very well-educated person, as I imagine you’ve noticed. I’ve read a lot of novels and poetry and things—nothing systematic—and I’ve been pretty good at physics—I can tell you why the lifetime of a resonance particle is not necessarily the smallest possible unit of time—” He gave a choked laugh. “There I go again.” Mickelsson could feel the boy looking at him now but kept his eyes on the bowl of his pipe, packing it, preparing to light a match. When he did, the flame was surprisingly bright, glaring on the glossy stipple of the wall. “Anyway of course it’s not true that Plato’s method is different fundamentally from Aristotle’s—I finally read the Parmenides, as you suggested we should do, and I, I saw—” Suddenly he raised his hands to his face, not lowering the face, simply covering it, holding his breath, his red elbows shooting out sharp as knives to either side.
“Take it easy,” Mickelsson said, gently but with distaste.
“I’m sorry,” the boy whispered. His neck and arms were surprisingly small, and white, as if never touched by sunlight.
“Take your time,” Mickelsson said, and sighed. “It’s all right, believe me.” Seeing that the boy was still unable to speak, he said, “Life’s full of troubles, we all find that out eventually, but in due time we live past them.” He got out his pipecleaners, took the pipe from his lips, pulled the stem off and busied himself with cleaning it.
“I know you have plenty of troubles of your own,” the boy said, still pushing apology.
Mickelsson remembered the boy’s saying, earlier, that he knew how Mickelsson lived, knew everything about him. He thought of asking now what Nugent had meant; it was never good to leave fingernail parings in the hands of witches, but instead he laughed and said, “Boy, you said it!” He looked sideways at Nugent, who had taken his hands from his face now and was staring into his lap. Mickelsson dropped the pipecleaner into his wastebasket, shook his head ruefully, and said, “I’ve been trying to deal with the I.R.S. They’re incredible—simply incredible! They spy on me.” He laughed. “No doubt that sounds like the height of paranoia, but it happens to be true. Every now and then they show up in one of those dark, unmarked cars and sit watching me. I suppose it’s some kind of scare tactic.”
“You’re sure it’s them?” Nugent asked, slightly turning, not quite raising his eyes to Mickelsson’s.
“Well, pretty sure,” Mickelsson said with a little laugh and relit his pipe. “I had a visit from them, not too long ago—came to see me at my apartment. The car they were driving then was pretty much like the one that comes by now.”
“What are you going to do?” It did not seem just polite conversation.
Mickelsson saw now that perhaps he’d made a mistake, telling Nugent about that car. It might be construed as an invitation to friendship, an undermining of the teacher-student relationship. In the hope of blocking that development, he told him more. “Well,” he said, falsely chuckling, “I thought it would be best to deal with the thing directly, so I shot off a note to the I.R.S. office most likely to be responsible, the one in Scranton, since now I’m living in Pennsylvania. I simply told them I know what they’re up to and asked them to stop.”
Nugent thought about it, no doubt privately analyzing, as Mickelsson had done over and over, whether it was a good idea or likely to make things worse. At last he said, just above a whisper, “Creeps.”
“They are creeps,” Mickelsson said, pleased to have been given the word for them.
Now a silence fell between Mickelsson and the boy. It was Nugent who finally broke it. “Well,” he said, “I just wanted to say I’m sorry—and I’m sorry about making a scene here now, too. It’s been a—” He stiffened slightly, making sure he had control. “It’s been a bad year.”
Mickelsson studied him. Nietzsche would say—or Freud, or any other man of sense—that the statement was an emotional con. He drew the pipe from his mouth and, against his better judgment, said, “I heard about your father. I’m sorry, Nugent.”
The boy nodded. After a moment he said, “I also had a friend die, my chemistry teacher—he was murdered; you probably heard about it, maybe I told you. Professor Warren? He’d just gotten married a week before—”
A chill ran up Mickelsson’s spine. Warren. That was it, of course: the strange, bedevilled woman he’d met at the Blicksteins’ party. Evenly, he asked, “Wasn’t he investigating something down near where I live, in Susquehanna?”
“I don’t know about that,” Nugent said. He closed one hand over his nose, breathing shallowly again, fighting emotion. “He was always looking into something or other. He had more energy than—” He fell silent and tightly closed his eyes. In a minute he would whisper again, “I’m sorry,” and would cry.
To prevent it, Mickelsson said sternly, “It’s been a bad year for you, Nugent. I’m very sorry.”
“Well,” Nugent said, and sniffled. Abruptly he stood up. “Thank you,” he said, for an instant meeting Mickelsson’s gaze.
“No problem,” Mickelsson said, and waved his pipe. “Any time I can be of help …”
Nugent nodded stiffly, then turned, off balance, and hurried to the door. He fumbled for the doorknob as if unable to see it, then opened the door, half turned back, nodded stiffly again, then quickly stepped out into the hallway and closed the door behind him.
Mickelsson sat for a few minutes longer in the now quite dark office, thinking, or trying to think. A chemist. Then at last he heaved his bulk out of the chair, dropped the tobacco-pouch and pipe into his pocket, and settled his spirit on the long, lonely drive home.
2
Now that the leaves had turned, exploding in a variety of yellows and reds here and there broken by the dark green pines, the Susquehanna Valley and t
he mountains rising on each side of it were more beautiful than ever. In farmers’ yards lay piles of bright orange pumpkins, and on every roadside stand, from Binghamton to Susquehanna, Mickelsson saw more of them—also apples, bright yellow pears, plastic jugs of cider. Here and there, seated on a porch or up on the gable of an old, gray barn, sometimes on a porch roof or sleeping against a tree, he saw pumpkin people—brightly dressed, straw-filled characters with jack-o’-lantern heads. Cars with New Jersey license plates cruised slowly up and down the mountain roads, pausing now and then to spill out tourists with cameras. Often they stopped outside Mickelsson’s house, to take pictures of the pond and waterfall, the viaduct and river in the distance. Mickelsson kept clear of them, more reserved than any native. (He’d seen no sign, lately, of the dark green, unornamented car that had earlier come to spy on him.) Every night, deer came to look down at his house. Mornings, the grass would be white with frost.
Halloween came and went. He might easily have forgotten about Halloween—he’d lost all track of time, floating in it as in Nietzsche’s sea of recurrence. If there were masks in store windows, Mickelsson didn’t notice them. But two nights before the real one—if he wasn’t mistaken about the date of Halloween (it had always been Ellen who tended to such things)—Mickelsson, driving through Susquehanna after dark, came suddenly on a troop of four- or five-foot-high witches and goblins, monster creatures, white-sheeted ghosts. They scattered away in all directions from the glow of the headlights. Hastily, Mickelsson laid in candy and apples, preparing for the blackmail of trick-or-treat, and just to be on the safe side padlocked the barn in which the old blue Chevy sat—in his country childhood, Halloween had been a favorite time for vandalism, especially the destruction of seemingly useless machinery. Then he waited, busying himself around the house and listening for a knock. His head was crowded with painful, happy memories—scenes, images, fragments.
Their first year at Brown, he and his family had been invited to a Halloween party given by some friends, the Vicos—the adults to drink, eat, and talk, the children to go out trick-or-treating together, maybe ten, fifteen kids. Maria Vico, famous for her sewing (she’d later turned professional, opening a store), had “created” something for his daughter Leslie; none of them except Leslie had seen it. Leslie, nine or ten, never wore anything at that time of her life but overalls, some old workshirt, and a baseball cap, her long blond hair stringy, always slightly tangled, usually (like her face and hands) not quite clean. Her greatest happiness was to visit her grandparents’ farm in Wisconsin, often with a girlfriend, sometimes with her brother, who liked it less, and devote herself to fishing, pigs, and horses. He and Ellen had not strongly disapproved of her ways; even if they had, nothing much could have been done about her. She’d been as stubborn and independent as she was winsome.
So they’d arrived that night at the Vicos’ steep-roofed, ultra-modern house with its lush plants, mysterious lighting, and invisible stereo, Leslie in her usual country-hippy garb, and after a few minutes Maria had gone off with the girls of the children’s party to the master bedroom. Joe, Maria’s husband, took the boys. When the girls emerged, with much fanfare, all the children transformed, Mickelsson’s eye had fallen instantly on Leslie, knowing her at once and, in a way, not knowing her at all. The room had been filled to the brim with noise—ooh’s and ah’s, exclamations and cries of laughter—but he had felt as if he and Leslie were standing in a great silence. Maria had dressed her as a fairy princess: silver crown, light blue dress nearly floor-length, large transparent wings that seemed lighter than air. Her hair, around the eye-mask, was brushed and shimmering, lighter than the wings, and her face had been subtly colored, so that she looked a little like a doll, or a Sumerian goddess. He stood motionless, baffled as by a psychic vision, and he was not himself until his daughter came to him, obscurely smiling, and, raising her star-tipped silver wand, lightly—impishly—touched him with it on the nose. He stood grinning, dazed. Then the boys came tumbling out from the second bedroom, Joe Vico behind them, Mickelsson’s colleague in philosophy; pirates, cowboys, a portly banker with a Godzilla mask, then Mark, his son, dressed as some formal, scientific-looking man, bald, with a long white beard and a kind of scarf draped flat over his shoulders. Though there couldn’t have been more than six boys in all, they roared like school letting out. Mickelsson, abruptly coming to himself, had joined in with the laughter and extravagant but not inaccurate praise. Then, before his heart was ready, the children were off trick-or-treating.
Everything he’d seen, smelled, touched that night was alive, unforgettable, transmuted by his vision of Leslie. Maria had made some kind of fish in aspic; other women, including Ellen, had brought other things. There was a black chocolate cake with whipped cream and cherries; a large fruit salad that made a picture of a witch. He looked at everything with reawakened vision, the innocent eyes of a child. For all his love of talk—especially his own talk—Mickelsson, that evening, had been unable to follow the conversation and had taken no real part in it. In his mind he saw his daughter approaching strange doors: such beauty as the man in the doorway’s glow had never seen before, beauty that might reasonably turn him at once from a furniture salesman or professor of economics into a kidnapper or rapist. Little comfort that the party was led by Olympia Vico, sixteen, and guarded on all sides by sixteen-, fifteen-, and fourteen-year-olds. Everyone in the room where Mickelsson sat was talking of Maria’s genius with needle and thread. Mickelsson kept stroking the fern beside him as if he thought it were a dog, often nervously glancing at his watch, and at last he’d said casually, “I think I’ll just drive around and see how the kids are doing.” No one seemed to notice the oddity of the remark. No one seemed worried in the least about the children.
He drove up and down street after street and saw no trace of them. His heart began to pound. He seriously examined how a murderer might capture fifteen children all at once and leave no sign outside his door. Then at last he spotted them and at once pulled the car over to the curb and extinguished the lights. His son was bowing grandly, swinging down his top-hat to reveal the pink cloth bald dome, and the man and woman at the door were laughing. His son was obviously the star, the leader. His daughter was nearly at the back of the flock, just another child in dress-up. She was smiling and slapping the hand of the girl beside her as Mickelsson had seen black people do on TV.
When he returned to the party, one of the men from the Art Department was doing a sword-dance, and Maria Vico was flamboyantly playing the piano. Mickelsson thought her beautiful. Then he noticed that all the women in the room were beautiful. Let the demon of eternal recurrence come speak to him now!
He remembered other Halloweens, at Hiram, in California, the sad one in Heidelberg where they couldn’t find masks, no matter where they looked (only the children had taken it in stride). He remembered the Halloweens in graduate school, when they were poor; how they’d watched the glass dish of M&M’s beside the door, praying they wouldn’t give out. …
Suddenly he remembered, only for a moment, a rather different occasion.
He wasn’t certain how old he’d been. Nine, maybe. And he was no longer clear on exactly what had led up to it. He was in fourth grade. His teacher was Miss Minton. He hated her as he’d never hated anyone before or since. For some reason she’d sent him to the coatroom, or rather, led him there by the ear—a particularly grisly punishment because no one after second grade was ever sent to the coatroom. (He understood it now. Proper form would have been to send him to the principal, but Miss Minton was notoriously cruel, maybe crazy; the principal would not have supported her, or anyway not to her satisfaction.) He could remember vividly only one thing from his year with her: “Sssmart, aren’t you! Oh yess, you’re sssmart!” Her lips shook, a hairy, warty lump on the upper one. She was a stupid woman (so Mickelsson had believed), and no doubt, overgrown and stubborn as he was, and a smart-aleck besides, he had challenged her more than he knew. He remembered, though he couldn’t recall detail
s, that he’d mocked her, made fun of her, mimicked her; and he knew that the wilder she became the more stubborn and despairingly reckless he grew. No one quite believed him about her or, so far as he knew, took his side. It was no trifling business. Once when he had had his desktop open and was munging around inside for a book, she, passing down the aisle, had slammed the desktop down on his forearms with all her angry might. When the school nurse came—Miss Minton couldn’t prevent it—the nurse found his left arm was broken. Mickelsson had believed absolutely at the time—and tended to believe now—that he’d given his teacher no provocation. In any case she’d lied, or tried to, saying he’d fallen while running—wicked child—in the classroom. Much as all the children feared her, someone had told on her, and at last, bitterly weeping, blaming Mickelsson, Miss Minton had admitted what she’d done. When he’d complained, theatrically crying, to his parents, faking more pain inside the cast than he felt, they’d insisted that he must have done something very wrong—“There’s two sides to every story,” his father said, not ungently but with finality—and the principal had pretended to hold the same opinion. (She’d been as kind as she was able to be. The principal had suggested, in subtle ways, that if he endured through this year he would next year have Mrs. Wheat, who would make up for it all—which in fact had proved true.)
Miss Minton would slap your hand with the ruler—so hard that the fingers would sting for minutes—if you said “Hell-o-copter” instead of “helio-co-peter.” She would also hit you with the ruler if you said “stuff,” as in “books ’n’ stuff”—“except when you’re talking about Thanksgiving,” she said. (“That’s not ‘stuff,’ that’s stuffing,” Mickelsson had said scornfully. She’d hit him with the ruler.) She also hit you for reading “David Cooperfield,” as she called it. Why it was wrong to read David Copperfield she did not explain; perhaps because he read it through arithmetic class—but he loved arithmetic and had finished and handed in all the book’s exercises weeks ago. Pretty clearly her madness had in it, among other things, something twistedly sexual. When she’d finally admitted slamming the desktop on his forearms, she explained to the principal that she’d done it because he was “playing with himself.” No one questioned this, though the physical contortions the claim suggested were extreme—as extreme as his small-boy prudery and shyness.