At last, thoughtfully, he would fold the letter and put it back on its place on his study table, then move as if aimlessly, to the kitchen, to put on another pot of coffee. While the percolator snorted and rumbled, he would stand at the back door, his hands in his pockets, looking up at the colorful, thinning leaves, thinking calmly—coldly and indifferently, as if it had nothing to do with himself or his son—how queer it was that the soul in isolation, no matter what the stimulation of the world around, should shrivel up, like a plant perfectly healthy except for its signal leaf, and die. It was no queerer, of course, than the familiar fact that to a person in love the world, however drab, comes alive, full of music and soft voices.
It was by no means just poetry. As the book Nugent had pressed upon him made abundantly clear, with pages and pages of statistics and charts, one’s very life depended on the sometimes sped-up heartbeat one experienced when close to loved-ones (also, to some extent, one’s sped-up heartbeat in the presence of those who offend). If it was true that people occasionally died while making love, it was far more true that people died for lack of it. Reading through Nugent’s book, case after dreary case of cardiac fatality in the single, the unhappily married, and the divorced, Mickelsson had begun to feel like a man encountering his own obituary. At first it had seemed that Donnie Matthews, costly or not, would prove his salvation, but no such luck: the quite violent heartbeat rise during young people’s sexual coupling, and the moderate heartbeat rise during older people’s coupling, were both found to be beneficial. The sexual coupling of an older man and a younger woman, especially one not his marriage partner, was apparently only a little less deadly than cyanide. In the end, of course, the heart’s real, physical demand for love was not just a matter of sex: the heart—whatever the mind’s objections—demanded company, security, trust. By the time Mickelsson was two-thirds of the way through The Broken Heart, he found the chest-pains caused by his anxiety so great that he dared not read further. All he could do was glance hastily at the last few pages to make sure that at the last minute the author didn’t take it all back. Alas, he did not. Mickelsson resolved to eat less, drink less, smoke less. Even so, if Dr. James Lynch was right, Mickelsson was a walking dead man.
He was over that original anxiety now, for himself at least. He was resigned to the likelihood that he would die soon—even morbidly interested. It would solve a good deal. But with every passing day he grew increasingly uneasy about his missing son. It was not, of course, that he thought the boy might be lying hurt somewhere, or dead. His mind refused to entertain such thoughts (though one of Dr. Lynch’s statistics unnerved him: four out of five of those who die between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five die by accidents, suicide, or homicide). Yet he couldn’t help but worry—indeed, Peter Mickelsson was worried sick—about the long-range effects of the boy’s decision to go underground. Not the danger that he might be caught for something, and imprisoned, or shot; these things, though he thought of them, had not yet impressed themselves on Mickelsson as real possibilities. He worried that Mark’s heart, like his own—but far nobler than his own—might be broken.
He shook his head, raising his hand to his chin, touching the stubble of whiskers. Perhaps things were not as dark as he imagined. What if it was the influence of some young woman that had made Mark disappear? Some beautiful, flashing-eyed, nutty radical. Let it be that, he thought. He almost came to believe it; it made the rest—the extremity of disappearing—make sense. Yet his gloom remained, deep and sodden. A flock of birds floated high over the trees on the mountain above him, drifting like specks of ash.
There was, sometime during this period, a queer piece of news in the Binghamton paper. Early in the morning someone had discovered, less than thirty miles from where Mickelsson lived, three perfect circles, each a hundred yards wide exactly, cut into the forest just off Route 17. Within the circles, trees, wildlife—whatever had been there, apparently—had been ground to bits. Federal investigators called in to study the strange phenomenon, the article said, had ruled out wind damage, flood, and human vandalism. Asked if they thought the circles had been made by UFOs, the investigators said, according to the paper, that that seemed at present the only available explanation. Mickelsson reread the sentence. That was, sure enough, what it said. The article mentioned that similar circles had been found in the same area two years earlier. Mickelsson pulled at his mouth with two fingers and read the whole thing again, expecting that this time he would surely find it was a joke of some kind; but it was apparently not a joke, at least in the mind of the newspaper people. Strange business!
The following day when he went in to teach, Mickelsson waited for someone to mention the peculiar article—more and more peculiar, as he thought about it: though they’d treated the story as front-page news, the news people hadn’t even bothered to print a picture. Surely in a case as bizarre as this, a couple of aerial photographs … To his surprise, no one said a word about the article until Mickelsson himself brought it up; and even then, as it seemed to him, they showed only the feeblest interest. Fred Rogers, the historian, when Mickelsson met him just outside the mailroom, smiled as if bravely withstanding life’s woe, sadly amused by Mickelsson’s concern. “We get a lot of that,” he said. “Binghamton’s one of the hot spots, apparently. I guess you’re familiar with the Port Crane Center for the Study of UFOs?” He flipped tragically through his envelopes, sorting as he spoke.
“You’re kidding,” Mickelsson said.
Rogers glanced at him for an instant, then back at his mail. “No,” he said, as if seeing no reason anyone should think he might ever be anything but serious. “You haven’t seen the trucks? I imagine you’ll see one, sooner or later, tooling down the highway. Port Crane’s not far from here, up on Route 88. They’re beautiful things, those trucks—enough to make you want to study UFOs yourself. Big vans, very official-looking. Sign on the door, siren, red flashers, radar dish on top, computers inside …” Suddenly, woefully, Rogers laughed. “Peter, you should see your face,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” Mickelsson said, and made an effort to look sober and sensible. “I guess it never—”
“Yes,” Rogers said, glancing down the hallway, preparing to move on, “it’s curious, all this. Well, there are lots of strange things in this old world. ‘Falls,’ for instance. That’s the one I like—frogs falling out of the sky, or blood, or fish … stones. … Most people say it’s hogwash, but nobody says that after they’ve seen one.”
Mickelsson lifted an eyebrow, not quite willing to ask the question.
“Oh, sure,” Rogers said, shaking his head and patting his pile of mail as if the proof were right there. “I saw the fall of little stones out in Chico, California—maybe you read about it; it made a lot of the papers. I was there the second day. ‘Right out of a clear blue sky,’ as the saying goes. It was most peculiar, believe me. Made you blink your eyes a bit. There were scientists there, state police, newspaper reporters. We just stood there with our hands folded and looked. Even in Chico nobody believed it except the people who were right there and saw it. Poured down out of the sky as if there were somebody up there with a dump-truck, except not that fast and not that steady, sometimes nothing for a while, then one or two stones, then bucketfuls. The way they hit the ground they seemed electrically charged or something—blurry, as if with heatwaves. Very odd, but then when they’d settled they just lay there, commonest stones in the world. People make up theories, but they never explain anything. Waterspouts, for instance. But nobody tells you how the stones pulled out of the ocean by waterspouts get carried along in the sky to a place as far inland as Chico, or how come the stones are invariably the local kind, different from even the stones you’d find forty miles away.” Rogers smiled and shook his head, raising one hand to discourage protest. “I know. I know. You’d be surprised, though, how many thoroughly studied cases there are of these mysterious falls—though I must say, in these matters ‘study’ seems a little irrelevant. I’ll tell you my favo
rite one: a fall in St. Louis—1967, I think. Five and a half tons of cookies in unmarked plastic bags.” He laughed, and Mickelsson risked laughing with him. “Thorough investigation,” Rogers said, “local police, U.S. government, chemists and physicists from Washington University. None of the airlines would admit they’d lost a cargo of unmarked, plastic-bagged cookies—I suppose I wouldn’t either, if I were the guilty airline. But it was pretty clear that it wasn’t a case for ordinary explanation. All the cookies fell on one man’s property, not so much as a cookie-crumb outside the line. Flattened his garage.”
“I must say—” Mickelsson began, then floundered.
“Obviously it doesn’t much matter whether you believe these things or not,” Rogers said. “They don’t seem to have any earthly effect on anything, except possibly on a few people’s mood when the thought dawns on ’em that the universe occasionally kids around.”
“You actually believe, then—”
“As I say,” Rogers said gravely, patting Mickelsson’s arm, excusing himself, “belief’s a luxury. I’m just a historian. I like to know things really happened, if I can, or really didn’t happen, and I analyze what happened or didn’t if I can. If I can’t, I don’t.” He grinned. “Anyway, except to those who think they’ve seen these things, it doesn’t matter much—unless, of course, taking firm stands on doubtful matters gives a particular person pleasure.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Mickelsson said as Fred Rogers moved away.
When he asked Jessica about the UFOs, she shook her head and said in a tone of regret that she’d thrown out yesterday’s paper without reading it. Except for Mickelsson, no one had mentioned it to her. “Wasn’t there something like that a couple of years ago?” she asked. Absently, with a quick, soft gesture, she brushed her hair back. When he told her what the paper had said, she nodded. “Funny.”
“Well, puzzling,” he said.
“Oh, Peter, why worry about it?” she asked, and smiled. She touched his arm.
“I’ll stop,” he said, hunching his shoulders and touching his fists together just under his chin, “as soon as I know it’s safe.”
At the university bookstore, later that day, his eye chanced to fall on a book displayed on the sale table. Phenomena: A Book of Wonders. His very discovery of such a book at just this time—he was sure it hadn’t been there a week ago—seemed to him that moment as strange as the UFO circles or Freddy Rogers’ “falls.” It was a large book, full of etchings and surprising photographs. He bought it, carried it back to his office, closed the door, and guiltily paged through it. Falls, missiles from the upper regions, strange disappearances, mysterious mutilations, spontaneous human combustions, anomalous fossils, shared visions, human beings that glowed, phantom music and voices …
He frowned, surprised at his eagerness to believe. Error is cowardice.—Nietzsche. And: The religious have a thirst for foolishness.
As if it were a Playboy or Hustler, he put it in the back of his desk drawer, where he could look at it more carefully later, taking his time.
The report by the fat woman, Rachel Morris, in his medical ethics class that afternoon, was on abortion. It was reasonable and meticulous. She was a better researcher and a clearer thinker than, just from looking at her, he would have guessed. She efficiently covered the legal and philosophical history of the subject, then began, with a certain amount of fervor and no obvious stupidity, her own ethical analysis. There was nothing anywhere in what she’d said so far that one could nail as wrong. There were a few cheap shots, for instance a mocking quotation of Billy Graham and a blistering aside on the recent papal directive banning abortion for any reason; but on the whole she followed out her central argument, based on the premise that in ethical calculations not all persons are of equal worth, with reasonably good sense.
Yet as Mickelsson listened, making an occasional note to himself, he felt restless, crotchety. It was not just her style of delivery, though he would admit that that gave him problems. When she’d come into the windowless room, ahead of nearly all the others, she’d taken, for the first time this semester, the chair at the center of the table, opposite him, and had laid out her things—ashtray, cigarettes, notecards, tissues—as if in conscious parody of him; and she was dressed more formally than he’d ever seen her before, high-heeled shoes, stockings, a dark blue satiny dress, several strands of beads. It was probably because she was nervous, he thought; yet once the paranoid notion crossed his mind that she was mocking his own formality, he could not entirely shake it. It was likely, he knew, that she meant no insult—indeed, that she was imitating his style because she admired it, thought it worked. But because he did not very much like her, really, it was difficult to believe that she felt anything but dislike for him.
When the whole class was seated, Pinky Stearns at the far end of the table, Wolters next to him, the women clustered, as if accidentally, at the opposite end of the table from the men, Ms. Morris began her report with what seemed to Mickelsson a sort of lidded belligerence, smoking hard as she read, lighting and jabbing out cigarettes almost without looking at them, her fleshy mouth overneatly pronouncing every word—her nervousness again, probably—her eyes oddly narrowed behind the glasses. Though she couldn’t be thirty yet, she had the look of those middle-aged, blond, overdressed and over-made-up Jewish women mocked—always to Mickelsson’s confused distress—in a thousand movies. Her upper arms were fleshy, pale, and soft, her hands small, dimpled, neat. The way she sucked the cigarette smoke far into her lungs and held it there, only gradually letting it out with her words, made him want to break in on her report and talk to her about cancer. Despite his fear that it might worry her, he avoided looking at her, leaning on his elbow, shading his eyes, staring hard at the paper on the table in front of him, with its few neatly pencilled notes. It was a once-a-week three-hour class with a fifteen-minute break in the middle. His misery was so great—his right hand furtively rubbing his chest—he wondered if the class might be the last he ever met.
Part of what made him restless was his sense that she was working toward an argument for abortion on demand, an argument that, for all its popularity, even present legal dominance, filled him with fury. She began with the claim, legitimate enough, that a mother with four children dependent upon her is of more worth to society, including her husband, than is an unborn foetus; and she moved, not unreasonably, to a claim that any mature human being, given society’s various kinds of investment, should take priority over a foetus. (He wondered if she would find it equally easy to argue if she used the words unborn child.) In general, she seemed fair, even-handed. She was properly annoyed by extreme “feminist” arguments that describe the foetus as a “cannibal”; she rightly noted the possible implications of a widespread practice of aborting when the foetus is not of the parentally desired sex, among other things the possible consequences of population imbalance (but she treated the matter too flippantly, he thought: “If present correlations remained constant, a United States with many more males would have a lower life expectancy, fewer church-goers, higher crime rates, and more Democratic voters”); and she neatly side-stepped the trap involved in turning all anti-abortionist feeling into cheap religiosity or male-chauvinist-piggism—though she couldn’t resist those little raps at silly Billy and the Pope.
Nevertheless, Mickelsson had to concentrate on not wringing his hands, and, furtively glancing around the room, he saw that he was not alone. At first the battle-lines seemed male vs. female, a condition that would not have surprised him. But on closer inspection he saw that at least two women were similarly uncomfortable with Ms. Morris’s position—which finally did indeed turn out to be a defense of abortion on demand, “for the avoidance of the needless humiliation of women, too frequently socially disadvantaged young women; and for the sake of social justice, since only the female must suffer the pain of childbirth and, in our society, the shame of unwed-motherhood.” One of the women who seemed displeased was the short girl, Janet, daughter, Mickels
son suddenly remembered from his first conference with her, of Orthodox Jews; the other was the tall Polish woman, who stared at the table in what seemed acute distress. He wrote himself a note to bring up, when time for discussion came, Dr. Bernard N. Nathanson.
After the break, which was unusually quiet—not surprisingly; abortion was always a touchy subject, even for those who thought they knew what they thought—Pinky Stearns asked, frontally, the first question. “I notice you don’t say anything of murder.”
Mickelsson sighed.
Ms. Morris was ready for it, of course. She sucked deep on her cigarette, lowering her eyelids (evilly, one might have said, but it was obviously nothing but the gesture of one threatened, attacked), and said, “To many people capital punishment is murder, or war is murder, just as, to other people, abortion is murder. But we traditionally make a distinction between killing by the society and killing by the individual.” A stupid distinction, Mickelsson thought. He thought of Heidegger, cloistered in his university, encircled by disciples, sending out his praise, however qualified, of the Third Reich. Why not prefer murder by a Raskolnikov? Not that anarchy was an answer either. Stop everything! No more painters, no more writers, no more musicians … Ms. Morris was saying: “In the case of abortion, of course, it can be argued that the thing killed is not even fully human.” She threw a look at Mickelsson that, in spite of himself, he found touching—the uncertain young girl looking out through the eyes of Portnoy’s mother. Hesitantly, like an umpire under duress, he nodded, the curl of his lip no doubt showing his distaste. Stearns fumed but was too stupid, or maybe too angry, to spot the weaknesses in her response. He shook his puffy, filthy-bearded head, an impressive display of disgust and perhaps right feeling, but not an argument. In this much, anyway, Heidegger was right: judging philosophy by the standards of science is like judging the capacity for survival of a fish out of water.