Mickelsson's Ghosts (88 page)

If he went mad, would the murder of the fat man be excused? That was not at all what he wanted.

After Mickelsson had left his wife, his daughter had cried for three days and nights, almost ceaselessly. So Mark had told him. Whether or not Mark himself had cried he did not say. Nor did anyone mention whether Ellen had cried. She had loved him once, as he had loved her; surely she had cried. It was the nature of the poor human animal. (He saw in his mind the black Geoffrey Stewart, smiling at the piano, beloved on every hand, but a truth-teller, enemy of evil—“God's dog,” as Kierkegaard had put it once—the most solitary man in the world. Bad for the heart.) He thought of Michael Nugent, then shrank away. He returned to that other (along with Kierkegaard) of Zarathustra's apes.

It is not
how
things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.

(Is this not the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?)

Toward morning, when the sky outside his window, above the mountains, was beginning to bloom like a dark corpse gloomily stirring toward life, his eyes snapped open and he was suddenly wide awake, starving hungry but indifferent to food, thinking with fierce concentration of the place above Blue Mountain Lake, up in the Adirondacks, where he'd gone, all those summers, to be alone and try to write. It was an old, decaying “camp,” a building of heavy logs hanging precariously now on its broad stone chimneys. It was three stories high, wide porches on each story looking out through trees at the valley and fog-shrouded water. It had leaded, diamond-paned windows no longer proof against flies and moths, a large, old-fashioned kitchen with an antique gas range, a sink with a pump on it, and built-in cupboards of a kind seldom seen since the early 1900s. High on the livingroom wall there was a rustic interior balcony and beyond it bedrooms, enough room for four or five families, though he stayed there alone. Ellen had hated wilderness all her life, except in Shakespeare's plays. She was afraid of bears and susceptible to pollens, insects, the effects of damp weather. She wouldn't hear of his taking the children there with him, and though he'd argued, sometimes hotly, and had sometimes gotten them to visit for a day or two, he'd been secretly pleased.

Sometimes he would type all day and far into the night, or read the books he'd brought with him, whole trunkloads, puffing solemnly and tranquilly on his pipe, sometimes sipping gin or, more often, in those days, white wine. At other times Mickelsson would drop all his pretenses and set off with a walking-stick through the thick, rustling leaves, on his back a knapsack and Army & Navy Store sleeping-bag, and would roam until night fell, then hang his knapsack too high and on too narrow a branch for the bears to get, and would sleep under the trees and stars. He would find things, exploring the world with the excitement of a child: cave-mouths, which he'd enter, crawling along carefully until the darkness was too much for him. In one of them he could hear a distant waterfall. Sometimes he came upon long-abandoned roads, faint traces of foundations—houses, large old hotels, not a timber still standing. He would sit sometimes, still as a stump, watching bears, sometimes deep in the woods, more often at the garbage dump behind the Adirondack Museum, owner of the camp where, courtesy of the curator, he stayed. Sometimes he would borrow from the curator one of the museum's canoes or, if he was lucky, an old-time Adirondack guideboat, and would set off across the water with two or three days' worth of provisions—he could have packed into the guideboat a month's worth, if he'd wished—and would paddle his way north toward Canada, lake by lake, avoiding villages and camps, though he liked seeing their lights. He'd pass deer with huge racks, sometimes a family of bears that had waded into the dark, glass-smooth water to fish. They would watch him with lifted heads as he passed. It seemed that if he waved, they would wave back. High above his head, toward dusk, he would sometimes spot an eagle.

It had never seemed to him there that the world was a cypher, the “Great Cryptogram” Rifkin ironically spoke of. There the world was itself, as immediate as his thought, his huge, nameless desires. Back in the camp he would write essays, chapters, explanations and speculations with the carefree delight of a child lost in fantasy, perhaps because there in the Adirondack Mountains no explanation seemed necessary, the art of philosophy was exactly as Tom Garret had described it that night to Blassenheim, a joy to work at, for the kind of people who naturally took to it, a joy just as pottery might be, or leathercraft. There in the Adirondacks the world was visibly what it had seemed to Bergson (gentlest of Nietzsche's children), all unity and flow, not divisible into instants, intellectual apprehensions: to write of the world, chop it up into its logic, was so patently a game that the writing was a harmless delight, like the activity of children inventing words, or Jesus the Joker, as his grandfather used to say (utterly humorless), making up his punning, logic-boggling parables to make fools of human reason and the devil. (Like the father of his reflections, he was forever reasoning on the worthlessness of reason. “As much as a cow understands about her own life, that's how much we know.”—Luther.) There in the Adirondacks, where there were no people, the philosopher's arrogant confusion was impossible—though he suffered one other great confusion, which made clarity not worth the candle. A tangible longing came over him, at times, to talk to people. Sometimes, late at night, the longing would be too much for him, and he'd walk down to the village, a mile below, to the payphone outside the canoe-rental place, and would call Ellen. “Peter!” she would say, half annoyed, half pleased to hear from him. “Are you drunk? Do you know what
time
it is?” Time. There was no time!

In one of his essays, which he'd thrown out later as overwrought nonsense—or thrown out, really, because he no longer cared about the argument—he'd made the universe something more than Bergsonian. The primal nut from which the Big Bang had come—so Mickelsson had argued—was in some sense Mind: Mind in Whitehead's sense, say. But it was Mind incapable of knowing itself, having nothing to judge or measure by, Time, Space, Matter. The whole history of evolution, then, from hydrogen to the ape that can sing its own song, the explosion up and out, with its innumerable mistakes and misjudgments and false starts and, down at the heart of things, its fierce determination, creating against all probability, in defiance of the limits of natural selection—homing in, through the millennia, with maniacal single-mindedness, on its dream of the unthinkable (the human eye, the juxtaposed thumb, the brain)—was the history of that primal blind Mind in pursuit of self-knowledge, that is, God's rise into self-awareness. Mickelsson had not yet heard, at that time, of Lloyd Motz, and hadn't had available the physics, chemistry, or biology to reach Motz' conclusion, that among all living organisms there will always be one, the main track in the maze, in which the probability for evolution to higher and higher forms must always be maximum, in man an effect of the symmetry and three-dimensional structure of DNA molecules; but he'd anticipated Motz' idea that cosmic self-knowledge—the development of the body and brain of God, as Mickelsson had put it—took the whole eighty-seven-billion-year evolutionary ride, at the zenith of which, overwhelmed by its own weight, it must collapse with an agonized cry to the darkness of its beginning.

It had been, in a way, the mountains, not Mickelsson, that had created the theory. He had long before given up theism, and finding himself writing like some latter-day Christian apologist, making casual, fashionable use of the scientific myth of the moment (the Big Bang, anyway, and evolution-theory), he'd been surprised and amused, though not put off. He'd understood well enough that the God he was talking about could not really be made to jibe with the Christian Jehovah; but it had pleased him, there in the mountains, with the trees full of birds, bears and wolves in their shadow, to talk with childhood's confidence of God—any God. Later, back in Providence (ironic name!), he could not recapture that feeling and had occasionally ranted about the cowardice of Tillich.

All the same, it was a theory he should have mentioned to Alan Blassenheim, he thought now. It would have been a comfort to the boy's religiously grounded idealism, nonsense or not. It might have guy-wired the touch of prudery, old-fashioned faithfulness, he was seeing his way past. And anyway, he was not certain that the theory was nonsense, though heaven knew there were arguments against its meaningfulness. It would have satisfied Blassenheim's wish, even need—like Mickelsson's and, worst of all, poor Nugent's—that the universe make sense. It allowed for randomness, the seemingly undeniable fact of our physical experience—the Heisenberg principle, the implications of plasma compression, electrons spinning out in unpredictable directions, so that even if some all-embracing intelligence existed and could know the solutions of all the equations that govern events, no completely accurate prediction of the future would be possible (random electrons, random universe)—yet at the same time it offered not only hope but certainty: the very randomness that made prediction impossible was Nature's tool for insuring the emergence of life in each expansion cycle, Nature's guarantee of the approach to perfection and harmony as increasingly complex forms evolved: out of atoms, layering upward, God's grandeur, answer to the flounder-heart's need, soft cry to the lutists: “That was nice!”

He imagined Blassenheim asking him, glancing up at him, not quite meeting his eyes—petulant as a child, Adam in the garden, who's been offered some gift and then seen it, apparently for no reason, withdrawn—“So what's wrong with the theory?”

“Ah,” Mickelsson said, and feebly moved his arm on the covers, in his mind waving Blassenheim away, “the trouble is the psychics. Time theory.”

“Go on,” Blassenheim said.

“Nobody worries about it, here on the East Coast, but in California they've been studying it for years; also other places—England, Russia. … Psychics, the authentic ones, can tell you the future, often the past, sometimes even the distant past. Sharks have some prescience, apparently—in fact there's some evidence that lower forms have an advantage in these matters. You'll find proofs of psychic phenomena mountains high, if you care to look. Ask the police who use psychics to find missing children or solve crimes. Never mind that often they can't do it; notice that occasionally—with great accuracy of detail—they
do.
A number of scientists are looking into such things these days; mostly physicists. The Stanford out-of-the-body experiments, dream labs, studies of dream predictions like the famous one last year, before the DC-
10
crash. If it's true that psychics can occasionally tell you in advance, in precise detail, what's going to happen, and if it's true that once the psychic has seen it there's no preventing it, no more than one can prevent today the accident one witnessed yesterday, then in a random universe (unpredictable electrons, unpredictable universe) it would seem—tentatively, anyway—there's only one clear avenue of explanation: the future has already taken place. Maybe part of it, maybe all of it; in any case, the moving bubble of ‘now' is in some sense—no one knows quite in what sense—an allusion. It's true, you can make up theories to explain it—hundreds of theories, whatever you've got the math for.” He waved again, dismissive. “But a hundred untestable theories are as good as no theory.”

“But that's what science is for, isn't it?” Blassenheim asked—or rather, Mickelsson (Mickelsson's self-fiction) made him ask, forcing himself through a fool's Socratic dialogue, stacking the deck, the shadowy teacher oonching cards into the shadowy student's hand: “Make up hypotheses and test them, one after another, the way Edison tested materials for the lightbulb?”

Mickelsson closed his eyes, dropping the game, losing interest. The image he'd been fleeing rose up again, long-legged, beautiful Jessica Stark giving tit on the couch in Tillson's office, Tillson snuffling like a humping wet rat. Venus and the deformed Vulcan. He clenched his teeth, but lightly, turning his thought away, mine-sweeping waters he knew to be more safe, trying to remember what he'd been thinking just a minute before. It came to him at last: typing, late at night, in his Adirondack camp. Silky-winged moths fluttered drunkenly around him, crawled like soul-weary “new philosophers” on the tabletop, nibbling at his papers and books. Sometimes he'd get up and go out on the porch to listen to the sounds of the night—animals brustling about in the fallen leaves not far away, wind moving softly through diseased beechtrees and pines. Far, far in the distance, on an island in the acidy lake below, he could sometimes make out warm yellow lights.
Ah, community,
he would sometimes muse. He'd written about that too. Why do we think what we think and not all the other things equally possible, once prejudice is defused?
(Why,
he thought now,
do we choose not to believe in frog falls, blood falls, falls of bricks, cookies in plastic bags?)

He opened his eyes again. The sky outside his window was distinctly lighter. Why was it, he thought—putting the question in a way he had never thought to put it before—that people were increasingly interested, of late, in alternative (so to speak) reality options? Castaneda—Carlos, not Hector—UFO books, quack speculations like
The Secret of the Pyramids
or
The Cosmic Egg.
The Western way of thinking had held its own since the pre-Socratics. Could it be because lately the community had expanded—it was possible now to read good, thoughtful books about the Tibetan way of thinking, or the ideas of Peruvian Indians? Perhaps, to take the optimistic view, human beings instinctively widened their horizons, at least in certain situations, to take in views held by strangers. Perhaps, in accord with a principle he'd explored in the one book he was at all well-known for, on medical ethics—the ultimately Platonic idea that justice and reason give advantage in the battle for survival—people were programmed by Nature to make an effort, if they were given sufficient time to rise above their fears, to find merit in the opinions of people not like them superficially, that is, culturally. Or was it, to take the darker view, that people of the Western tradition were turning from their tradition in disgust, jettisoning the community and the “reality” it cherished, because the tradition had led to the kinds of things his son was concerned about, greed, bestiality, fascistic rectitude—the same kinds of things he himself was concerned about now, not just in his mind but in his misanthropic heart: above all, the murderously logical righteousness with which he himself cringed from the image of Jessie in Tillson's office—cowardly bitch, afraid to let his car be seen parked near her house. (His original sympathy was, he saw, long gone.) Jessie of all people! He saw her as in the picture when she was twenty-five—radiant, innocent. And Tillson, that miserable, crooked-backed, chittering … He shuddered, seeing the fat man's dead eyes. The weight of his guilt, rage, and helplessness rolled over him again, and again he slept.