The pock-marked Marxist materialized at Mickelsson’s bedside, a little like a grudging relative at a death-bed, a large, darker hulk in the darkness of the room. With the lightest flick of the will Mickelsson could have banished him, but it was of course his own wish that had brought him. He allowed him to remain.
He waited for what the man would say, or rather for what he might imagine the man would say. The man said nothing, looking down, morose, at his thick, folded hands.
“It’s true, of course,” Mickelsson thought, “that you give students a position, maybe not objective, but a solid foundation they can move away from on their own when they see their way past it, assuming they’re not fools.”
The man said nothing.
“And it’s true that, however ridiculous your opinions, the motivation’s real enough—admirable enough—the rage against injustice, the conviction that there must be something better. Though of course self-righteousness and prejudice are somewhat mixed in.”
Still the man said nothing.
“I understand your background,” Mickelsson said. “Poverty, victimization, superstitious love of ideas, hatred of ‘the stupid middle class’ and all it stands for—your class, if you’d admit it, though you call yourself ‘blue collar,’ stealing your father’s innocence, perhaps afraid he’d hate you—”
Below him in the night, there was a loud banging at Mickelsson’s front door. Mickelsson’s heart quaked and, forgetting the Marxist seated at his bedside, he quickly got out of bed, crossed to the window, and peeked out. He could see nothing—no car, only the snow in the yard and on the porch roof. He heard the knocking again, louder, more violent or desperate than before. Then the person who’d been knocking moved down the porch steps and out onto the snowy yard where Mickelsson could see him. It was the fat man—crooked-mouthed, gross, greenish, gouty—peering up near-sightedly through his steel-rimmed glasses at Mickelsson’s window, reaching toward him with both arms, pitifully, his fingers extended, fat as the teats of a cow. Mickelsson squeezed his eyes shut, then open again, all strength gone from his legs, and strained with all his might to awaken himself. He was as wide awake, it seemed, as he would ever be.
When he put his hand over his eyes, admitting to himself that his mind was playing tricks, he thought of the photograph of Jessie as a girl of twenty-five, and the cave of his heart went darker.
2
There was still more than a week left of winter break—school was to start up again on January 30th. Mickelsson, holed up (the other Mickelsson, he kept insisting), often not remembering to eat all day long, seeing no one except on his rare trips to town—or seeing no one he could safely believe to be really there—became increasingly restless, increasingly full of dread and what he could describe to himself only as a kind of limitless petulance, a free-floating anger like that of a child who has been falsely accused, though nothing in the accusations Mickelsson could level against himself—“himself”—was false. He was haunted all the time now, which in theory should have convinced him that he was mad, but he could not be sure, turn it over as he might. Again and again he found himself listening, a prickling sensation coming over him, then turning to see if the ghosts were there. As often as not they were, just standing, incommunicative, all but unaware of his existence, the old woman full of anger—he continued to feel it building toward something—the old man increasingly confused, more and more senile, always looking for something or staring, puzzled, at his pocket watch. Their presence became routine—disturbing, even frightening, yet paradoxically—frustratingly—humdrum, perhaps because for all the emotion he felt flowing out of them, the old woman in particular, nothing came of it. He saw the fat man too, but never in the house, always in the yard with his arms stretched pitifully toward Mickelsson, fingers extended, blackness in his mouth and eyes. They seemed to exist—the fat man on one hand, the old people on the other—in separate unrealities, as if time had melted. At any rate the old people seemed as unaware of the fat man as they seemed, for the most part, of Mickelsson. Mickelsson worked out theories, not that they gave him any comfort: disparate functions of his mind, he theorized, had fallen together in a jumble, as if succumbing to entropy. The softening of the brain Nietzsche’s father had come to. Perhaps the old people were really there, or rather had been once, and he saw them because, like his grandfather, he’d developed second sight; and perhaps the fat man was a creature of Mickelsson’s guilty imagination, not there at all except in the living allegory of the soul. Once, in late afternoon, he saw the ghost of Michael Nugent. He was walking, with a look of grim determination, up the slope of the mountain behind Mickelsson’s house, moving toward the woods and perhaps the road beyond, toward Pearson’s place, or the Spragues’. The vision was so clear, so convincing in each detail, that Mickelsson went out into the freezing weather wearing only his usual indoor clothes, no boots on his feet, to see if the figure had left tracks in the snow. There were none, or rather, there were only fresh deer-tracks crossing diagonally the line where the boy’s tracks should have been. He blew on his cold hands and looked again, but he’d been right the first time; the boy had left no trace. There was nothing to see but an occasional swirling of snow over drift-caps, nothing to hear but the steady, loveless wind like the whisper of a seashell.
Sometimes for several hours the house would seem emptied of its ghosts, as if a curse had been lifted, and then, just as he began to breathe easy, there the old woman would be, looking out a window as if patiently waiting for the mailman—looking out one window, then out another, like a philosopher without a system. Sometimes, usually when he wasn’t in the room, the old people would talk, for the most part too quietly for him to hear what they were saying. They said nothing important, nothing that took more than a few words. Increasingly their presence was a cause of foreboding but not fear or alarm: dread that became a steady deadweight on him, or a gnawing, like hunger. He doubted that he could have explained it even to Jessie, not that he tried; but something about them made his muscles and bones heavy, his mind’s movement slow. He thought sometimes of what old Sprague had said, up in his house above Mickelsson’s, how Caleb and Theodosia had come to want nothing to do with relatives, how eventually “it” had gotten them, the something that inhabited the woods.
He resisted driving into Binghamton to see friends, resisted even thinking of friends and their need of him, Jessie especially. He depended more and more on his woodworking projects to keep him sane, if sane he was, mostly making picture frames, one after another, each more elaborate and ornate than the last, for his son’s photographs, using scrap-wood—apple, pear, butternut and maple—from the Susquehanna Home Center, where when no one was around he sorted it from the piled-up kindling-stack beside the saws. He routed and bevelled, sanded, stained, resanded, sometimes gilded, then boxed them by the dozen and shipped them, with carefully lettered labels and exactly the right postage, to his son’s old address at U.V.M. Once when he was smoking his pipe and reading, his eye chanced to fall on the box of keys he’d found when he was fixing up the diningroom, and it occurred to him that perhaps he might clean them up, or anyway clean up a few of the more impressive, and somehow make use of them in his projects. They were for the most part large blunt things of brass or iron, quite beautiful once they were shined up. He discovered that one could make locks for them out of wood and the metal from coffee-can lids—quite wonderful locks, in Mickelsson’s opinion, though one could open them as easily with a bent paper clip as with the key. He found himself making small chests and boxes with drawers and secret compartments, felt linings, mirror tops—all pointless foolishness, things he had no use for, but his hands worked on, warding off evil, and when his basement shop was cluttered with these objects, he packed them one inside another, as well as he could, crated them up for delivery by Greyhound, and shipped them away with a birthday card (though her birthday was in August) to his daughter. In this way he used up nearly half the keys. He made a lockable winerack, crudely routed with a grape an
d satyr design, for Ellen and The Comedian, then a crazily elegant rosewood Kleenex-box holder, also lockable. These too he shipped. He made a pecky-cedar, silver-hasped box to hold Jessie’s gloves, on the top of which, in a circle around the lock, he routed, in careful Gothic lettering, as on a hymnbook, Jessie’s Gloves.
One night he had another of his terrible dreams about the people who had lived here before him, the Spragues. When he awakened, bolt-upright in the darkness, the memory of it shot away from him, so that he was able to catch before they vanished only a few images. He saw them young, playing with a child—their child, though they were brother and sister. “No wonder!” he said aloud, as if the dream were the truth. He had a sense, somehow, though he could call back no images, that they’d kept the child hidden, for all practical purposes a prisoner in the house. He saw the child lying in a bed, very white, his hair standing out, waxy, from his waxy skull. Then the dream went vague; he could remember nothing, though he had a feeling that what he’d lost was long and elaborate. Sudden distress came over him and he got up and turned on the light, remembering something more. He stood before the dresser and looked into the mirror as if to steady himself with the image of his own face, but what he saw was, as in a witch’s mirror, the dream: the old man up on the roof, standing, bent over so that he looked almost hunchbacked, lowering something by a rope down into the chimney—cleaning out the flue, no doubt. The old woman came out into the yard below. It was a warm summer day. She seemed to have something hidden behind her back. When she drew it from behind her, Mickelsson saw that it was a gun of some kind, a rifle or single-barrelled shotgun. She raised it to her shoulder without a sound, aiming upward, and he saw the old man give a sudden jerk of fear, violently wobbling, about to fall, shouting. He reached out his arms, changing into the fat man, and the inside of his mouth was dark. There was an explosion. It missed him, and she reloaded. Though he had all the time in the world, he did nothing to escape. She fired at him again, and then he was falling, all bloody, sliding—not very fast—toward the eaves, then over, mumbling something, and he fell toward the ground, inert. As he hit, Mickelsson woke up.
He went down and locked the doors, checked the windows; then, after a while, went back to bed.
The weather grew still colder, so that the packed snow on his front walk and on the road was squeaky underfoot when he went out to the mailbox, or out to his car to drive furtively to Susquehanna for groceries (the Jeep was still not fixed) and to see if Donnie Matthews had returned. He did not mean to keep watching for her, and though it took every ounce of will he possessed, he did not go up to make sure she didn’t answer her door. The FOR RENT sign in her window, black and red, told him the apartment was still empty. There was never any light on, no apparent change. He stood thoughtfully sucking at his teeth. He’d lost weight. Would that please her? He’d lost so much weight, mainly from forgetting to eat, that the crotch of his pants hung low.
Each time he went down he saw—to his dismay—people he knew. Tim, Charley Snyder, the friendly, gray-suited banker, and once Lepatofsky and his daughter. (She smiled and waved at him, making some sort of sign in the air, a letter in an unknown alphabet.) For all his misery, guilt, and dread, he was beginning to feel like a native of sorts. A household familiar in the sense that a rat is. He might eventually get his life in order, it seemed to him, if he never again had to drive to the university. The very thought of facing Jessie, for whom he’d hardly raised a finger, or facing Tillson, who must know that Mickelsson was professionally washed up—the very thought of pretending to care about ideas before his freshmen and, worse yet, graduate students—gave him fevers and chills.
Sometimes now he went out with the new gun, looking for something to take a shot at, a squirrel or rabbit or just some posted sign two or three years old. Occasionally he would leave the road and wander in the woods awhile, trying to lose himself as he’d always been lost when he’d hunted with his father in his childhood. It was difficult here. Every few rods he would come to a break from which he could look down at the familiar valley, the viaduct, the frozen river and still, dark pines. (Higher on the mountain, up beyond the Spragues’ house, there would be no such breaks; but he disliked it up there. The ground rose too steeply, the brush was too thickly tangled; the mist and darkness made him uncomfortable.) For the most part as he moved through snow and trees, the shotgun broken over his arm, on safety, he hardly remembered that he’d come here to hunt; he simply walked, watching the ground for whatever he might see there, admiring ice-beaded weeds and branches, observing how the sun struck on patches of snow that had melted and refrozen to a glaze. He was not himself.
Once, half a mile above his house, he came upon John Pearson, also out walking with his gun. Snow was lightly falling, flake by flake. Mickelsson spotted him while still a long way off, up in a blue-shadowed grove, the black dog circling him, nose to the ground. After debating with himself, Mickelsson moved in Pearson’s general direction. When he’d drawn near enough for the old man to see him, Mickelsson stopped, thought some more, then shouted hello. Pearson stopped moving and raised one hand to shade his eyes. “That you, Prafessor?” he called at last. The dog sat down not far from Pearson and scratched itself.
“Hello!” Mickelsson shouted again, stretching out the “o,” and waved. He continued climbing, keeping his eyes on the slippery, snowy rocks, holding the shotgun out far to one side and helping himself along by pulling with his left hand at saplings. They met on a flat open shelf overlooking the valley, a long-fallen maple tree rotting away in the middle of it, mounded in snow.
When they’d come together, Pearson said, “Seen them ghosts yet?”
“They’re down there,” Mickelsson said.
Pearson raised his eyebrows. “You’ve heard ’em, then?”
“More than that,” Mickelsson said.
“No foolin.” Pearson stretched back one side of his mouth. “Wal, I’ll be damned.”
The man had dead squirrels tied to his belt. Mickelsson pointed at them with his gloved left hand. “You’ve had some luck, I see.”
“Nothing fancy,” the old man said, then leaned over and spit. He looked around past his shoulder at the fallen tree, then moved toward it and half sat, half leaned against it. Mickelsson joined him. Pearson said, “So you’ve seen ’em, hay?” He straightened his neck, working a crick out. In his eyebrows there were droplets of water, melted snow. The dog remembered something and ran off into the brush.
“You thought it was just stories?” Mickelsson asked.
“I might’ve,” the old man admitted, and nodded, one quick jerk. “I can’t say’s I more’n half believed it, all in all.”
Mickelsson looked over where the dog had disappeared. “I wouldn’t lie to you,” he said.
Pearson almost grinned, just a momentary tuck at the corners of his mouth. “I don’t s’pose it matters much, one way t’other.”
“No, that’s true. Be a funny thing to lie about, though.” He met Pearson’s eyes.
“Oh, I don’t know. Naht really. World can be a mighty dull place, time to time. I guess that’s why people go around whistling, or writing verses on bathroom walls.” He continued to meet Mickelsson’s eyes. “I’m not a whistler, myself, or a wall-writer. Other hand, I’ve seen that the world’s gaht a certain amount of strangeness to it. Ball lightning, now. People can swear till they’re blue in the face that it don’t exist, but I’ve seen what I’ve seen.”
“I guess ball lightning’s accepted now. By scientists, that is.”
“That may be, I wouldn’t know. Used to be people’d just wave their hand at you. You know you can see ball lightning right through the floorboards? I don’t mean the cracks, I mean right through the floor. I’ll tell you something stranger. When my dad was a boy, there was a woman was dying—old woman named Radwell, she’d been normal all her life—she’d point at the wall and yell owt, ‘Look!’—scared to death—and right where she’d been lookin the wallpaper’d catch fire. My dad saw it himse
lf. Swore to’t.”
Uncomfortably, Mickelsson nodded.
“Wal,” the old man said, looking off into the air, “I’m not surprised abowt the ghosts. There’s times when I believe I’ve seen ghosts myself, just as plain as day—and then again there’s times when I’m not sure I wa’n’t fooled. I guess that sounds peculiar, don’t it.” He watched Mickelsson with level eyes. “Ye’d think at least a man would know what he seen from what he ain’t seen.”
“You’re sure you saw the ball lightning, though.”
“Whole bunch of us that time. Cyrus Tyler, Arthur Cole, Omar Bannatyne, Hobby Jayne—he used to be the local auctioneer, mainly cattle. … Everybody saw it. I’ll tell you a fact. It’s more common for a whole group to see things than for one man alone. Like the night of the Baker murders, in 1918. My whole family felt it happenin, just as clear as anything, though the Baker place was two miles away. We was sitting on the porch, all nine of us, and the strangest feeling you can imagine come over us. We all remarked on it. One man by himself—except for certain sort of strange men—it don’t come through near as well. That’s my opinion.”
Mickelsson looked down, remembering his student Alan Blassenheim’s tentative gropings for some connection between intersubjectivity and truth. Pearson was arguing something more than that. Mickelsson slowly turned his bull-neck to gaze across the valley. “I know what happened down there,” he said. Though he spoke with assurance, he was seeing if he believed it. He was thinking of that trick of his grandfather’s, asking a question and proposing an answer, seeing if the hunch came that told him it was true.