Jessica Stark’s late husband, in the photograph she’d one night shown him at her house, was young, almost comically clean-jawed, like Dudley Do-Right. He had smiling, slightly impish eyes, crooked teeth. Though he was a treeman—“forestry,” she’d said with a tone of respect that struck Mickelsson as odd—he had a classy look suited to her own. He looked English, though he wasn’t. An American from Michigan. But one could imagine him speaking with an Oxford accent, talking about cricket or Rugby with the Queen. Not that that was fair. He had one of those boyish, forestry-people names: “Buzzy.” He did not look like a young man who’d played football, though perhaps, somewhere like Yale, he’d been on the rowing team. Shadowy and unreal as he seemed, now that he was dead, he had left, scattered here and there throughout the house, bold signs of his existence: African drums, long spears, painted masks. Much of his work, Jessica had told him, he’d done in Africa. “He wasn’t exactly political,” she said, “but of course because of the nature of his work he knew everyone.”
One of her colleagues in sociology had been listening—it was a large party; otherwise, Mickelsson knew now, the man wouldn’t have been there. “How could a man work in Africa and not be political?” he asked. He had a blunt, gar-nosed, tough New York face, a curiously arrogant way of lifting his pock-marked chin.
“I don’t know,” Jessica said. “Somehow he managed.”
The man leered, smug, and in what appeared to be a rare burst of politeness decided to drop it. He let his hooded eyes drift over paintings, furniture, the drapes on the windows; then he floated away to find more lively conversation.
“Who the hell was that?” Mickelsson had asked. He felt again now the protectiveness—the witless leap of anguish like a dog’s—that had stirred in him then.
Jessica said, watching her departing colleague, “Him? I’m not quite sure what his name is. Danytz, I think. One of the Marx brothers.” She smiled, momentarily wicked, her dimple flashing, then put back her studiously fair look. Except for Jessica, the whole Sociology Department was Marxist. It was not a subject she cared to dwell on. “They’re decent enough people,” she said, and shrugged.
“I’m sure,” Mickelsson said. The man who’d just left them stood grinning, jabbing his long, thick finger into a black man’s chest. Apparently he and the black man were friends.
Jessica said, “Come, meet the Bryants. You’ll like them.”
Mickelsson had liked them a good deal, perhaps simply because Jessica liked them, or perhaps because that night Phil Bryant, in his melodious, down-cellar voice, had chosen to argue with Geoffrey Tillson about whales; and for all his scorn of Tillson, Mickelsson had liked Jessica Stark even more than before for the way she’d tried to help poor Tillson save face.
“But heck,” Tillson said, his smile wildly twitching, “how can anyone come out against women’s perfume? Never mind protein for the Japanese people—” He twisted his silver-bearded head toward Mickelsson and winked, then quickly, when Mickelsson gave him no response, poked his face back into Bryant’s. When Tillson shook his finger, the cloth of his suitcoat pulled against the hump on his back as if the hump were stone. “Sentimentality will be the ruin of our civilization,” he said, grinning crazily, as if afraid to let anyone know he really meant it, though his voice insisted. “You weep over the whales—big, intelligent mammals. Who weeps for the thousands and thousands of cows out there dying in Wyoming and Oklahoma to make Burger King Whoppers? Granted, steers may be comparatively stupid—but down with intellectual snobbery! They’re feeling creatures! Did you ever watch a cow with her calf?”
“It’s true, Peter,” Jessica said, seeing Mickelsson’s look.
Ruth, Tillson’s wife, cried out sharply, “We’re vegetarians, you know.” Only when she spoke did Mickelsson notice that she was present—round-backed, big-bosomed, arrow-faced. Her shiny eyes seemed all anguish.
“Then you shouldn’t approve of eating whales,” Phil Bryant said reasonably. He stood comfortably erect, like the former army captain he was, and he smiled as if he took them all for fellow officers.
“We don’t! Do we, Geoffrey?”
“But perfume! That’s the issue!” Tillson raved.
“Oh, come on, Geoffrey,” Jessica said, and laughed. Light seemed to gather around her.
Mickelsson backed off, briefly catching Phil Bryant’s eye, then winking at Jessica as he turned to find other conversation.
“He’s not a bit crazy,” she’d said later. “He’s self-conscious, so he puts on a show. I imagine we all sound fiercer than we are, at times.” She gave him a sidelong glance.
Poor woman, Mickelsson thought now, almost prayerful. Fall coolness had come to the mountain, and he was down on one knee, putting a log in the livingroom stove. He would sleep on the livingroom couch again tonight, the bedrooms upstairs newly painted or in disorder, stripped down and waiting for his brush.
God grant her someone worthy of her beauty, he thought. Someone full of energy in bed, someone like his own …
Everybody’s own, he corrected himself, and reached into his right-side pocket for a Di-Gel.
He put away the poker, closed the door of the stove, crossed to switch off the livingroom light, the last still burning, then stood a moment thinking, unconsciously rubbing his sore shoulders and arms. Now the sky was beginning to gray. If it weren’t for the mountains, he might already be looking at sunrise. How peaceful it was, he thought, then realized he was mistaken. The house was full of noises and unnamable trouble. A wind had come up, a wash of sound just wintry enough to make things whisper and creak, much like voices. Something alive and almost certainly large ran startled through the cellar, knocking something from its place, a dull clunk, then fleeing. Then, somewhere across the valley or maybe up on the mountain behind the house, he heard gunshots, two in quick succession, then a third. He had a feeling there had been other gunshots earlier. He listened hard, almost not breathing, but except for the sounds of the house stirring, he heard nothing more.
He got a crystal-clear mental image of the fire escape leading to the girl’s window.
He went over to the couch, lay down and pulled the afghan over him. When he was almost asleep, free-falling through space, hearing faraway angry shouts, he was jerked back to wakefulness by a roar of motorcycles on the road out front, or maybe in the rough field beyond—four or five of them, from the sound of it, crackling and whining like chain-saws digging in. Kids, he thought, annoyed as an old man. Of their own accord, his fists clenched and his back bent painfully. Rattlesnakes, housebreakers, animals in the cellar, big-chested big-cocked devils on dirt bikes …
He closed his eyes, praying that he be spared bad dreams.
PART TWO
1
“But isn’t it true,” Blassenheim said, his hand still in the air, lest anyone get the idea of interrupting him, “that Aristotle’s just as much a fascist as Plato was, it’s just their manners are different?” Michael Nugent slid his eyes toward the ceiling in despair. Blassenheim continued, registering Nugent’s comment but not persuaded that he’d made any mistake, “Like in Nicomachean Ethics, where he tells us that ‘courage’ is the mean between ‘foolhardiness’ and ‘cowardice,’ what’s his authority but his own aristocratic style—I mean, button-down collars, like ‘Let’s not make a scene, my dear fellow’—shit like that. I mean, what he’s always saying is ‘Be reasonable.’ Just like my mother.” The class laughed, all but Nugent, who dramatically clenched his fists and squeezed his eyes shut. Blassenheim looked around, pleased (on the whole), moving just his eyes, and remembered to lower his hand, then hurried on. “How do we know it’s correct to be reasonable except that Aristotle says so? Look at the berserkers—you know, those Viking guys. They took this drug or something and when they went into battle they were crazy people, and maybe they’d get killed—lot of times they didn’t, people were too scared—but either way the Vikings trashed all Europe. Or look at those guys in Vietnam that would throw themselves on a grenade to sa
ve their buddies—that wasn’t reasonable, or even if it was, it wasn’t why they did it. And the same thing for cowardice, only vice versa. How does Aristotle know it’s not more reasonable than killing people? He doesn’t even question it. All he’s really saying is ‘Our kind of chaps don’t do that kind of thing.’ ” Again the class laughed.
John Kalen raised his eyes from his doodle with a look of surprise. “That’s stupid,” he said. “Running away never solved anything!”
“Maybe not if an atomic bomb’s coming straight at you,” Blassenheim said.
The class laughed more loudly. Even Nugent half smiled, glancing at Mickelsson. Biamonte, in the right rear corner of the room, leaned over his desk, stomping his feet in applause. If he let this progress, Mickelsson saw, things would soon be out of hand. Yet he did nothing, merely turned to look out the window. The tree in the courtyard was a blaze of yellow now. Soon they’d be looking out at snow. The room was already like a classroom in midwinter, stuffy and overheated.
The memory of waking with Donnie came to him, her blue-white body a deadweight on his own, her hair silvery in the early-morning light. After he’d left her he’d covered six pages with single-spaced outlining and notes, then scribbled additions, before driving in to school.
When he turned back to the class, Brenda Winburn, in the chair-desk beside Blassenheim’s, was slipping a note into Blassenheim’s fingers, her face dead-pan, as if Mickelsson were some bullying but not very dangerous cop. Mickelsson thought about it, or rather, paused to register it—in the room’s heavy warmth, no real thought broke through—then cleared his throat and asked amiably, “Are you saying, then, that ‘it’s all relative’?” A crazy thing to say, he knew even as he said it; an expression so cloudy in student minds one hardly knew where to start on it. It was a mark of his weary recklessness that he’d deliberately introduced the befuddling phrase—language that would blow up the arena, to paraphrase Whitehead.
But Blassenheim rushed on, like one of those movie-cartoon characters running on, oblivious, beyond the edge of the cliff. “I’m just saying it’s not right, that’s all. I mean, logic’s got its place, like when you’re a kid playing with an Erector set, but a lot of times it can trick you.” More laughter. Mickelsson quashed it with a look. “What seems reasonable to a tsar,” the boy pressed on urgently, leaning forward, almost whining, “may not necessarily seem reasonable to his peasants, but what can they do? He tells them, ‘Be reasonable,’ with all his cossacks around him with their swords and big black horses, so the peasants have to stand there and look reasonable.”
Mickelsson shook his head. Class discussion was not his favorite mode, especially when the class contained a Blassenheim; yet he couldn’t quite find it in his heart to squelch all this, get down, finally, to business. Perhaps, to take the optimistic view, he was mellowing. Or perhaps what Garret had said at Blickstein’s party had gotten to him. “… they keep comin and comin, like termites. One morning you wake up and look around and—no castle!” Garret was a good deal more confident than Mickelsson that sheer unmethodical will could flatten castle walls. But Blassenheim’s reckless eagerness—even granting its measure of exhibitionism—was its own excuse. He could not bring himself, this early in the game, to call Time, start sorting through Blassenheim’s morass of claims. In the back of his mind floated the thought of his own son, at least as urgent and concerned about Truth as young Blassenheim, though quieter, more restrained in his style; not that it mattered: his professors cut him down, or listened to what he said with their brains turned off, as Mickelsson was tempted to listen to Blassenheim, thinking all the while of how much there was yet to get through before midterm, then finals.
He said reasonably, hearing in his voice the tyrannical patience he’d used all those years on his wife, “So tell me, Alan. Where is it, if not from reason, that we get these value assertions you keep telling me we’re in some sense right to make?”
He sensed the irritable impatience of the class. They were a difficult herd, one moment laughing, as if Time were Eternity, the next insisting that he for Christ’s sakes get on with it.
Again Blassenheim gave that left-right glance like a basketball player’s just before a shot—or no, something less competitive: the look of a waiter carefully threading his way through a crowd with a loaded tray, or a New York Marathon runner making sure he doesn’t trip those around him. “I don’t know,” the boy said, “maybe the wisdom of the whole community, like, tested over time. You know what I mean?” His expression became silly, as if he thought he might have said that before, and he glanced at Brenda Winburn, who’d turned to stare dully out the window again; then he pushed on, seemingly despite his better judgment: “Like when Kierkegaard talks about Abraham and Isaac, I think he got it wrong. I mean like he thinks what’s good about Abraham’s walking to Mount Moriah is that sometimes a person has to listen to God, metaphorically or whatever, and shut his ears to what the ordinary person might think. But what I think—”
“Now hang on,” Mickelsson said, “we’re getting a little far afield here. Let’s go back to—” It was odd—startling—that Blassenheim had read Fear and Trembling. It was that thought that made Mickelsson pause and gave Blassenheim an entrance.
“Just let me finish,” Blassenheim said, “just this one, like, sentence.” He threw a panicky look left and right, checking the class. Nugent covered his eyes with one hand and stretched his mouth back as if he thought his classmate was, incredibly, faking stupidity.
Mickelsson helplessly shrugged, deferring to Blassenheim, or giving in to weariness, surprise at this unexpected turn of things, or to the stuffiness of the room. The boy could see for himself that the class had lost patience. (It was really with Mickelsson himself, he knew, that the class had lost patience. It was he that allowed the class to flounder, yet on quizzes gave low grades. In his mailbox this morning he’d found two more drop cards.)
Blassenheim said, “What I think is, all that’s important about the story is it’s a parable against human sacrifice, and what makes it right isn’t that Abraham listened to the whisper in his ear, which was really pretty crazy, but that all these generations of scribes and revisers kept agreeing with the parable, looking at, like, their personal experience, and listening to the whisper of God in their own ears—and they left it in, so the parable got, like, truer.”
Mickelsson felt gooseflesh rising. (He was admittedly an easy lay for notions of that kind. It was the point at which he and Nietzsche parted company. Say the words common sense or community and his eyes would grow moist, not that, in real life, he knew any community he did not hate.) “That’s not bad,” he said. He glanced around the room. Apparently nobody else had gotten gooseflesh. Blassenheim was looking at him intently, as if hoping for an A—not the common kind of A; an A straight from God. Michael Nugent, behind him, sat leaning on his fist, morosely waiting for graduation, success, old age. Susan Kunstler, behind Nugent, was asleep.
“Alan’s got the start of an interesting idea here,” Mickelsson told the class, feeling only a flicker of irritation at their sluggishness. (An idea that left much to be desired, of course; not exactly up on the metaethical, methodological, and epistemological issues central in philosophical ethics since 1903—but never mind.) He rose from the desk and moved toward the blackboard, looking around for chalk as he went. The light outside the window seemed to have brightened. “Let me try to rephrase it and develop it a little, in case any of you didn’t quite catch it.” He found a tiny pebble of chalk in the tray and wrote on the blackboard, Intersubjectivity, underlined it, then drew a line and, at the end of it, wrote and underlined Verification. “Now watch closely,” he said. “Nothing in my hat, nothing up my sleeve …” Dutifully, without pleasure, they laughed.
As he spoke it came to him that Brenda Winburn, who’d seemed to be staring at him with fierce hostility—eyelids half lowered, long dark lashes veiling the eyes—was not seeing him, in fact, but gazing inward. Relief leaped up in him, and he be
gan to speak more quickly and heartily.
Considering the heat, Mickelsson spoke with remarkable animation and focus, making circles in the air with the end of his pipe, putting Blassenheim’s cloudy notion into language one could build on, make use of. Yet a part of his mind drifted free of all he said, half dreaming. Suppose it were true that God was really up there, a “lure for our feeling,” as Whitehead, not to mention Aristotle, had fondly maintained—bespectacled old Jahweh, scratching his chin through his mountains of beard, watching Blassenheim climb carefully, shakily toward him, feeling his way around boulders, scooting downward now and then on loose scree. Mickelsson’s voice resounded as in a cavern. He listened as if to a stranger, aware that he was in a sense talking in his sleep. At the edge of his consciousness, as on old, blurry film, he saw Brenda Winburn pulling herself deeper and deeper, with powerful strokes, like a pearl diver, down past the kingdoms of mammals and fish, down past the strangest of antique, blind serpents, toward God only knew what primordial, half-animate beast. He saw her reach out and seize something, and the next moment it seemed that what she held in her fist, swimming up, was the bright yellow courtyard, the tree.
He acknowledged Nugent’s hand. He felt, though he did not hear, the collective groan.
“It’s interesting, all that about shared community values tested over time,” Nugent said. He sat rigid, slightly tilted to one side, stiff with concentration, his arms—poking out of the short-sleeved blue shirt—very white, his face and elbows pink. “But what I wanted to say is … it doesn’t seem to me you can call either Plato or Aristotle a fascist.” He was indignant that anyone should think otherwise. His pale, lashless eyes grew round. “The point is … the point is, Plato and Aristotle have a test you can try out on your own, like a repeatable experiment in chemistry. They start with the same assumption everybody makes, even dogs and cats, that some things may be true and some things may not be; only Plato and Aristotle are better than dogs and cats at thinking logically.”