Tinklepaugh sucked at his teeth, considering, then went over to the file-cabinet, opened it, and got out a bottle, cheap bourbon, and a dime-store glass. He poured the glass half full, put the bottle away, then went to the window again, to stand with his back to Mickelsson. He sipped the drink. “Beautiful town once,” he said. “Some people say it will come back. I doubt it. You’d be surprised how delicate the balance is, place like this. Man runs up a pile of debts, then skips out, or something happens to him—somebody’s business could go under. That’s how fragile it can get. Everybody knows that, these dying small towns. Different places you live got different ways of being, of course. But that’s how it is here. People take care of each other, when they’re all living right on the edge—they better, anyway. The worse it gets, the more careful they all got to be. Somebody stops pulling his weight—somebody breaks the agreement, you might say—that’s trouble. Anything can happen.” He shook his head, as if imagining atrocities. “Well, people say the trains are coming back—coal to take care of the energy crisis. Maybe it’ll happen. That might change things. But I wouldn’t bet on it. I see it getting worse and worse—more houses falling down or catching fire some night, more people out of work, sitting out there on the bench by the traffic light, more poisons coming in, more ruined farmland, more sickness. …” He half turned and for a moment met Mickelsson’s eyes. “We just all gotta be careful, I guess, keep things in perspective, watch out for each other … and watch each other. …” He turned back to the window and tipped his head back, draining the glass.
“So that’s why I go ‘free,’ ” Mickelsson said.
“You go free,” Tinklepaugh said evenly, “because it has not yet come to my attention that you’ve committed any crime.” Now at last, his left hand on the windowsill to steady him, he turned all the way around to face Mickelsson. “And if I were you,” he said, “I would see that no crime does come to my attention. I get crazy sometimes when I think about having to do paperwork.”
“I’ll think about that,” Mickelsson said.
“Yes, do.”
Mickelsson rose from his chair, each movement careful. “Does this mean,” he asked, “I’m supposed to stay up there in that house?”
Tinklepaugh raised both hands and his eyebrows. “Live anywhere you like,” he said. “I wouldn’t be too quick to get rid of the place, though. Poisoned springs can be sealed off—I imagine your neighbors would be glad to pitch in. And they’d probably help lay in pipe from somewhere else. It’s not quite the case that the whole county’s done for. You mention industrial waste, radiation; people lose all perspective. It’s the media. With a little work, little cooperation …” He glanced at the file-cabinet. “Care for that drink now?”
Mickelsson weighed the matter carefully. “No,” he said at last. “But thanks.”
He slept for hours. For the most part it must have been a sleep like death, but he remembered it as one filled with nightmare shapes moving slowly in and out of his consciousness like fish. An effect, perhaps, of the pills Dr. Benton had left with him. He dreamed repeatedly of the huge black dog—possibly it figured in every one of the dreams, moving about at the periphery. Once he dreamed that, lying wide awake, he heard the dog coming up the stairs, grunting with age or discomfort, heard it come toward the door and then through it, perhaps invisible, perhaps exactly the color of the darkness, then felt the bed move as the dog got up into it, for a long time standing over Mickelsson, then settling heavily beside him, lowering its head onto his back. As Mickelsson slept it occurred to him that perhaps this was a dream, and he struggled to awaken but could not. The dog was immense, the size of a small horse. As he lay beside it, partly under it, Mickelsson reasoned by a chain of argument, which in the dream seemed brilliantly illuminating, that the world seemed to mean things, seemed a “language game,” because dreams meant things by making use of the world. Thinking back to it later, he saw that the idea was old and familiar, and understood that the euphoria he’d felt in the dream must have come from elsewhere, perhaps the revelation that one could live with guilt, that the existentialists were to this extent right: one was free to move on.
In another dream he thought it was morning, and he got up and went downstairs and into the livingroom, and there on the couch he saw his son Mark sleeping, dressed in black, with his face to the back cushions, the room around him in ruins. Mickelsson tiptoed past him—the room was icy cold—and made a fire in the woodstove, then went to find a blanket, which he carried to Mark and gently tucked around him. At the last moment his son turned his head, opening his eyes, and said, “Hi, Dad.” “You’re home!” Mickelsson said, and burst into tears. His son smiled, slightly nodded, then closed his eyes and went back to sleep. Mickelsson was suddenly aware of people in the kitchen, fluttering around softly, like bats. The black dog came through the kitchen door, for some reason crawling on its belly like a trained war-dog. It was definitely the dog, but it was confused in Mickelsson’s mind with Edward Lawler. It stopped, not far from Mickelsson, close enough to reach him at one bound, and drew trembling black lips back from its fangs. Mickelsson stretched his arms wide to protect his son, whose black-clothed body became smaller as he watched, smaller and smaller until it was the size of a baby, the neck and the side of the face red and wrinkled. It was not at all strange. If all time was taking place at once—eternal recurrence, the reason psychics could see the future or the past—then the adult Mark was also the infant Mark and Mark long dead. He was looking down at stiff, gray hair. …
He awakened to a smell of food and lay uneasy in his bed—it was mid-morning, judging by the light—then gradually understood that the food smell was real, there was someone down in his kitchen. His heart ticked lightly, sending out tiny shocks of pain, and when he touched his chest with his hand—the bandage loose now, ready to fall off—he found feeling in his fingers again, the hand so sore he could not fully open it.
Tim’s voice called up the stairs, “You awake, Prafessor?”
He did not answer—simply neglected to, his mind gone elsewhere—and after a moment Tim appeared on the stairs outside the room, coming up with a tray. He seemed to float above the floor. “What are you doing here?” Mickelsson asked.
“Ah, feelin crabby!” Tim said. “That’s a good sign.” He helped Mickelsson sit up with the pillows propped behind him, then sat cross-legged on the floor, chattering while Mickelsson ate. Oatmeal, weak tea, toast. Afterward, he helped Mickelsson to the bathroom, waited outside the door, then helped him back into bed.
“Why do you do this?” Mickelsson asked.
“Boy, that really is a mess down there,” Tim said. “I’ll send a couple of kids, see if they can clean things up a little.”
Mickelsson said: “I don’t trust good works. What are you doing?”
Tim raised one finger to his lips. “Sh!” he said. “Go to sleep.”
He came again that night, and again the following morning. Now Mickelsson was much stronger, impatient of the bed. He still slept for hours on end, but more often now he lay with his eyes open—one wider than the other—thinking, irritably listening to the noise downstairs, Tim’s people flapping on black webbed wings from room to room, shovelling things into bags or crates, cleaning out the mess. Once one of them, a scraggly young woman, brought Mickelsson a piece of toast and a glass of grapejuice. Otherwise he did not see them. When he finally went down they were gone; the wrecked livingroom was clean, neatly swept, ready for stud-repairs and sheetrock. He waited for Tim to come and fix him supper, then at last understood that no one was coming, he was on his own. Irritably, he built a fire in the woodstove, then made himself a soft-boiled egg. He thought of calling Jessie, then sat still, the fork halfway to his mouth, understanding that he could not do it. Reality was back, bleak as a stone. For all his nightmares, he hadn’t seen the ghosts in days. That was Lawler’s gift to him, or Wittgenstein’s, perhaps. Reality in winter.
He’d been in bed for hours when the phone rang, waking him. He
ignored it at first, but it continued to ring, and he at last reached over to the lamp on the floor and turned it on, then looked at his watch: 3 a.m. The guest bedroom was freezing cold. He blinked, trying to drive the loginess from his eyelids; the left one still drooped, giving him, he knew, a slightly stupid look. He drew the covers around him and went down to the kitchen to get the phone. He must start up another fire in the woodstove or the pipes would freeze—maybe they were frozen already. Somehow he must get oil for the furnace. Sell something, perhaps—the blue car, the Jeep. He thought of the five hundred dollars he owed Stearns’ Texaco. Hopelessness washed over him.
“Hello?” he said.
“Professor Mickelsson?” It was a woman’s voice, one he could not recognize, though he felt he should.
“Yes,” he said cautiously.
The woman began to sob. “Christ,” he whispered. Surely not even Job was so tried and tormented! The feeling of hopelessness increased. He thought he would drown in it.
“Hello?” he said, his voice sharp. He imagined himself roaring like a crazed gorilla. No more! No fucking more! He controlled himself.
She went on sobbing, breaking sometimes, trying to speak.
The ghosts he’d thought banished forever suddenly appeared, frowning by the sink, bending forward, watching. I’ve gone mad again, he thought. He felt a flutter of fear and utter weariness, then nothing. The old woman dabbed at her mouth with quick, angry jabs, catlike. Spittle glistened on her chin. Thinking perhaps he was still asleep, it was all just a nightmare, he held out the receiver and looked at it. What caught his eye was his own stiff, bloody-scabbed hand. He raised the receiver to his ear again, checking as he did so to see if the ghosts were still there. They were, solid as furniture, the old woman watching him with narrowed eyes.
“Who is this?” he demanded. “Take your time. I’m listening.” After a while he said, “Brenda?”
The sobbing changed, grew more frantic, but still she couldn’t speak. Drunk, he thought. He asked, “Where are you?” When she sobbed on, he asked still more sharply—indifferent and objective, surgical, his voice as much like a slap as he could make it—”Brenda, where are you?”
“Colonial Inn,” she said. “In Hallstead. Alan was—”
“You’re not hurt?”
“No, I just—”
“Stay there, I’ll be right over,” he said, and angrily hung up the phone. “Well?” he shouted at the ghosts.
They touched each other, not afraid of him; hostile, plotting, as if he were the evil invader.
She sat in the bed in just her blouse, the covers at her waist, her face streaked and puffy, blond hair stringy, her body drawn inward around its center. When he paced past the mirror he saw that his own face was red with anger, wrinkled and long-nosed from his weight loss, his uncombed hair flying wildly, like a mathematician’s.
“So what did you expect?” he said, jabbing his hand out, walking back and forth. He felt and ignored a touch of dizziness.
“I’m going to kill her,” she said.
“You’re going to kill her,” he mocked. He picked up the drink on the dresser, sniffed it, then put it down again. “You’re behaving very foolishly, you know that, young lady? You follow your boyfriend around like he’s property, and you find out that he’s doing what you knew he was doing, and then you get yourself drunk and call me up—me!—get me out of bed in the middle of the night, a sick man, because you want me to give you advice but you’re too drunk to hear it.”
“I’m not drunk!”
“My mistake.” He touched his forehead. Another little tingle of dizziness.
The way she pursed her lips, her mouth was like a beak, a small pigeon’s, one of Darwin’s beloved tumblers. He wondered if he was making her angry on purpose, not entirely out of malice, at least partly from a half-conscious theory that it might help.
“And I don’t want advice,” Brenda said, belatedly bridling. She took a swipe at her eyes with the back of one hand.
“Good.” He put his fists on his hips. “So why call me?” At once he was annoyed: resounding righteousness, hollowly echoing. Luther’s hammer putting nail-holes in the church door.
“You should be flattered,” she said. “A lot of people would be.”
His heart skipped, and he half turned away. Jessie had said the girl had a crush on him—because Brenda was “proud.” Abruptly, he sat down on the side of the bed and put his hand on her shin. “Listen, Brenda, what’s all this about? Do you know?”
She shook her head and burst into tears again. She covered her nose and mouth with her two cupped hands.
He became overconscious of his own hand on her shin and looked at the floor, trying to think clearly, waiting for her crying to stop. It flitted through his mind that maybe she wanted him to make love to her. It was a startling idea, especially when he remembered that image in the mirror, but he’d lived long enough to know, he thought, that mostly things are simple, that women almost never turn to men except for love, and that love is, more often than not, physical. He drew his hand back and laid it on the muscle above his knee. It made sense, he thought, suddenly as crafty as she was, for all his weariness; sly as any lawyer: revenge on Blassenheim, and the age-old comfort of skin on skin—and she’d be needing comfort; these things were shattering to the ego. Who knew, maybe there might be a touch of revenge in it too. He’d gotten them together, so Garret claimed. He frowned, balking. Not revenge, no. Maybe not love of the healthiest kind … It was no news that students occasionally developed attachments to teachers. He wondered whether he, for his part, wanted to make love to Brenda, then quickly shied from the thought, despising himself and Brenda too, remembering Donnie Matthews. Yet the question remained. In his mind, though he carefully didn’t look at her, he saw how Brenda’s small breasts outlined themselves against her blouse. He thought of the occasional affairs he’d had, bodies and faces floating up out of the dark—what harm?—and he began to feel, in spite of himself, aroused. Brenda’s skirt and pantyhose were neatly laid out on the chair beside her bed. It was as if she’d placed them there on purpose, so that he’d see them. Preliminary statement of her case. Again his mind shied back. He remembered the idiot look lent by the drooping eyelid, and something about a dim, half-mile-long corridor in a Texas Holiday Inn.
“In a thousand years,” he said, grandly melancholy and sarcastic at once, old Fritz on his mountain, “all of this—”
She looked at him with exaggerated interest, and Mickelsson realized in dismay what a bore he had become.
He stood up and put his hands in his pockets. He’d left his pipe at home. “Have you got cigarettes?” he asked, a little testy. He kept himself partly turned away from her.
She shook her head. “I’m sorry.”
He waved, perfunctory. What was the world coming to? Nobody smoked anymore, college kids, anyway. It was selfish and hedonistic, a decay of faith in goodness even beyond the grave, a shameful usurpation of space that rightfully belonged to the next generation. What times! Social responsibility was dead, a trampled corpse. Let the tobacco farmers fend for themselves, also the chemists who put in the sugar and formaldehyde. Every poor devil for himself!
For a time neither of them said anything, at least aloud, each of them looking, like tired visitors to a modern-art museum, at the mound of covers over Brenda’s feet.
Then she said, “I know it was wrong of me to call you.” When he bent his head, weary of fraudulence, both the fraudulence of phoney expressions and the fraudulence of “true” ones, she looked at him reprovingly. “I was distraught,” she said. He thought about her choosing the word distraught. “When I found out he was really doing it—I mean with her, a married woman, and so ugly—”
“She is a bit ugly,” Mickelsson said, and sighed.
She took a deep breath. “I guess I was a little drunk. But it was so bush!”
“Don’t be silly.”
“It was. Is. It sucks! I mean you just begin to think … that the wo
rld … Do you know what that class of yours is like, Professor?”
He suppressed a nasty smile. It had led, he might have mentioned, to this.
“My parents are divorced,” she said. “They never really liked each other anyway. They used to whack each other all over the place. Even at parties, once out in the yard behind these people’s house; they had to call in the police. I grew up with this feeling that … We’d go to the houses of these various different people, and we’d play with the kids, the other people’s, and then we’d all go to bed and the parents would switch. Once I got sick and I went to find my mother and she was in bed with this other man—he was—” She stopped herself. “Anyway, in your class … your class was like church or something.”
As if by way of apology, Mickelsson put his hand back on her shin.
She leaned forward a little, rounding her back. She said, “Every time I went into your class I’d feel better. I felt all at once like possibly there might be things to do in the world. I’d go back to the dorm and I’d feel like singing. Really! Only then there was nothing at all to do. I’d read Aristotle, and I mean, it sucked. And then this one time you told Alan I was smart. I’d hardly noticed him. I mean he’s so, well—” Her eyes narrowed. “I mean I know he’s an asshole. Anyway, he asked me to go to this meeting with him, and he told me what you said. … He hadn’t noticed if I was smart or not, himself—nobody does—but because you told him I was, he believed it. …”
Mickelsson asked, blushing, “What made you a swimmer?”
She flicked a look at him. “My parents had a pool.” Her lips stretched diagonally, making a face. “They had me swimming before I could walk. They put me in when I was one year old. They’d read this book. I took off like a fish, swimming underwater—at least that’s what they say. All over my room they had pictures of Mark Spitz and Johnny Weismuller, Esther Williams. … There was a class at the Y. For babies. I was ‘fabulous.’ My mom’s word.”