“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 save 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 began 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.”
The pressure of his nervousness made Nugent’s face redder and redder, and he began, just perceptibly, to sway, eyes rapidly blinking. Mickelsson lowered his gaze, lest his looking at the boy increase his discomfort. “It’s bad to dismiss them out of hand,” Nugent said, “dismiss the whole idea of discernible truth just because one doesn’t want to go through the trouble of thinking.” Blassenheim turned, injured, to look at Nugent. Hadn’t Blassenheim stood up for Truth just last week, and Nugent, in his arrogance, made fun of the ‘eternal verities’? Nugent hurried on, “It’s the assumption that some things are true—discernibly true—that keeps us going, makes life even possible.” He flashed a panicky grin, catching Mickelsson’s brief glance. “I mean, that’s where we get our sense of dignity, from the feeling that we’re good, the feeling that our team’s better than the other team. Angels of Life versus Angels of Death, things like that. But the thing is—this is what I wanted to say—even though Plato and Aristotle mean to be logical and reasonable, so you can repeat their processes, when you really look at it nothing ever works. It’s as if between their time and ours all the names of the chemicals got shifted around, so that what we call oxygen is really lithium hydride, and … For instance, take the word moral. What’s the connection between the way Plato uses it in the Symposium or Aristotle uses it in the Ethics or Poetics and how we use it now, when we say ‘She hasn’t got any morals’? Or take ‘virtue.’ ”
Mickelsson raised his head, about to break in, but Nugent pressed forward, raising his voice a little. “They may work differently—Plato’s like a poet, or the person who writes a national anthem, and Aristotle’s more like a novelist, or a symphony composer—or anyhow that’s how it seems to me. …” He looked proud of himself. No harm. For him it was an original insight. “But all the same when they say ‘virtue,’ they seem to mean more or less the same thing. If Kierkegaard uses it at all it’s like somebody handed him the wrong test tube.” Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard, Mickelsson thought. Is that shit still “in”? “Or what does a person mean by ‘virtue’ when he’s talking about the greatest good for the greatest number? I guess Aristotle wouldn’t say, any more than Jean-Paul Sartre, that people are necessarily born with virtues—if they were, Aristotle wouldn’t have had to write that instruction book for his son—but in Sartre, from what I can tell, it’s like virtue is something that just vanished out of the universe.” Sartre! Christ save us! Sartre! “That’s the reason Kierkegaard’s so strange: he tells you right out that he doesn’t know what virtue is, maybe it’s God’s whisper in Abraham’s ear, maybe it’s just insanity. I think he”—Nugent nodded toward Blassenheim—“might be right: maybe Aristotle really didn’t know what he was talking about, he was just saying how we do things in Athens or wherever. He even uses that word—‘we,’ like ‘the reason we believe’—as if he were speaking for all grown-ups. But if he did really know what he was talking about, it seems like it must be lost knowledge, like how to fuse brick. It’s like what Kafka says, there’s this machine that really used to work, but it doesn’t anymore—something fell off and nobody noticed, or the parts are worn out and nobody knows how to make new ones. It’s like words, language, ideas that used to make perfectly good sense—” He raised both hands, as if to guard himself from something invisible. “I realize it’s confusing, the way I’m saying it, but—” He abruptly looked down, then with a jerk, his face whitening, sat back in his chair. “That’s all.”
There was an embarrassed silence. For a moment Mickelsson couldn’t think how to break it. His stomach was in a knot. Some of the students were looking at him, waiting; some looked at the floor. He pushed from his mind the observation that too many chairs were empty. At last he nodded and said seriously, “Very good, Mr. Nugent.” He couldn’t seem to remember the boy’s first name. After another moment he nodded again and said, “Very interesting!” He glanced around the room. “Anyone like to comment?”
Miss Mariani raised her hand, looking troubled.
“Yes?”
“Are we supposed to have read the Poetics? According to the assignment sheet you passed out—”
“Mr. Nugent’s been reading ahead,” Mickelsson answered. “Reading and thinking. A practice I commend to you.”
Miss Winburn was again passing a note to Alan Blassenheim. Mickelsson gave her a look. To his surprise, she smiled brightly, her teeth large and perfect, startling against her tan.
Like someone who has just confessed some terrible crime, or avenged a murder, Nugent sat gravely still, with his eyes closed.
Mickelsson looked at the clock. “Well—” he said.
Sudden, loud rustling of papers and books, a raucous scraping of chairs. The students got to their feet—all but Nugent—and shuffled, beginning to talk now, toward the door. Then a strange thing happened. As the students filed out, Alan Blassenheim, passing behind Nugent, paused, looking down at him, then draped his hand for a moment over Nugent’s upper arm. Nugent opened his pale eyes, throwing a look of alarm up to Mickelsson, who merely gazed back at him, hardly knowing how to respond. Blassenheim, unaware of the effect he’d set off, moved on, loose-limbed, graceful as a dancer, toward the door, turning once, smiling at something another student said, saying something in return. His shoulders, in the dark athletic jacket, were immense.
Now Brenda Winburn, moving in a kind of side-step between the rows of desk-chairs, glided behind and past Nugent, her tanned, amazingly smooth face turned toward Mickelsson. For the second time today, as if she and Mickelsson had some secret, she smiled. She turned from him, swinging her smooth hair, and, just behind Blassenheim, disappeared into the noisy current of the hallway. At last, abruptly, as if someone had told him to, Nugent stood up, wiped his forehead, then his eyes, looking at the floor like someone stunned, mechanically gathered his papers and books, and left. Only now did Mickelsson come to himself and rise to leave.
“What was that curious phrase?” he asked himself, then remembered. Angels of Life; Angels of Death.
He’d meant to spend no more than a few minutes in his office, just drop off his mail as he always did, ritually transport it from his box to his desk, glancing at return addresses as he walked, on the slim chance that there might be something he’d take pleasure in opening—a letter from his daughter or son, perhaps—then get out of there quickly, before some student could catch him and pin him to his chair with questions, requests for favors, reasonable demands he couldn’t decently refuse. But almost as soon as he was inside the door, looking down miserably at his ex-wife’s handwriting (a demand that he send money, he knew without opening it), there stood Tillson, poking his silver-bearded head in, smiling his murderous, fake smile like the Keebler Cookie Elf gone insane.
“May I speak to you, Pete?” he asked, and grinned harder, his eyebrows jumping up and down as if he were clowning, which he was not. He wore an expensive but rumpled black suit, white shirt, a tie with narrow stripes; a kind of hunchbacked dandy. No doubt part of what was wrong with him, Mickelsson had decided some time ago, was that it took so much energy to keep up the opinion that it was the world out there that was misshapen. Not a generous thought, Mickelsson would admit. But Blassenheim was right, why be reasonable?
“Come in,” Mickelsson said, and, when Tillson had slipped through the door, not opening it farther, “sit down.”
“Thank you!” Tillson said. “I’ll only take a minute of your valuable time.” He bent his knees to sit, but then, with his rear end hovering over the chair, two fingers of each hand raising the material of his coal-black suitpants to protect what little remained of the crease, he caught sight of the huge pile of mail on Mickelsson’s desk and, eyes widening, cried, “Wow!” He was pointing now, looking at Mickelsson in disbelief.
“Saving it for a rainy day,” Mickelsson said.
“Gosh, Pete,” Tillson said, “don’t you feel that’s a little … unethical?” He flashed the grin again, slanty eyes glittering, like a fierce debater pretending he never shot to kill.
“No doubt,” Mickelsson said casually. “Was that what you wanted to talk about?”
After an instant Tillson seated himself, once again flashed his exaggerated smile, and said, “Not directly.” His tongue flicked out, wetting his lower lip. “I thought maybe we should have a chat about … Senior Personnel?” He tipped his head, letting his smile come in at an angle.
Mickelsson waited.
“You’ve been getting our notices?” He tapped the tips of his fingers together, eyebrows jerking, smile painfully stretched.
Mickelsson glanced at the pile on his desk. “I’m sure they’re here someplace.”
Tillson laughed thinly, as if gleefully, and nodded. “Yes, I know meetings are a nuisance. Personally, I hate them! But if we don’t all of us pull together on this—” He leaned far to one side, smiling hard, never blinking, his whole body wearing an expression so oddly devious that Mickelsson was abruptly reminded of what Edie Bryant had told him, that Tillson had a wife and a mistress who knew each other, were in fact good friends. It was all very open and twentieth-century except that, she said, Tillson and the mistress were forever sneaking in extra assignations, not telling the wife. “That’s ridiculous,” Mickelsson had said at once, sorry to have lent his ear to such talk. “Isn’t it?” Edie had laughed, innocently delighted.
The memory and Mickelsson’s sense of guilt made him suddenly blunt. “You keep scheduling the meetings on Fridays,” he said. “I don’t come in on Fridays.”
Tillson’s laugh might lead one to wonder if he were actually making an effort to appear insane, but he splashed his hands open and stretched them, palms up, toward Mickelsson, begging him to show a little sense. “It’s the only time the whole committee has free!” he said. “Gosh, I know it’s not ideal—”
“I’m not free on Fridays,” Mickelsson broke in. “Thursdays and Fridays are my days for research.”
“Research is important, I grant you,” Tillson said, “and believe me, we’d be nowhere if it weren’t for the reputation we get from people like yourself! On the other hand, these matters of hiring and firing, tenure and promotion—we need your in-put, Pete. Golly, leave such matters in the hands of the department’s weaker sisters, people like myself, ha ha—”
“I see your point, but I don’t come in on Fridays,” Mickelsson said. He put his arms on the chair-arms, as if to rise.
“Pete, you’re being rigid,” Tillson said sharply. He raised an index finger and shook it, fakely grinning. “You’re new to the department, and of course you’re a ‘famous man’ and all that, so we all like to give you the benefit of the doubt. But we have to work together—that’s civilization. I know you’re a man of principle, an idealist—” Accidentally but quite horribly, as if his face had gone completely out of control, he sneered.
Mickelsson looked hard at the man, confounded by the sudden conviction that Tillson hated him. It was no cause for alarm; Mickelsson had tenure and probably more clout, if it should come to that, than the chairman himself. Probably the discovery shouldn’t even have come as a surprise to him: professionally, Tillson was of the enemy camp, a “linguistic atomist“—so he pretentiously styled himself. No wonder if he minded Mickelsson’s success, such as it was, a success which must in any case seem to Tillson fraudulent, “a shrill pitch to the philosophical right,” as some metaphor-scrambling fool had once written of Mickelsson’s ethics book. And of course it was true too that Mickelsson had never pretended to feel friendly toward Tillson—had perhaps been, at times, barely civil. Nevertheless he was sickened for an instant by the realization that Tillson hated him. Not sickened for good reason; simply a cry of his genetic programming. Thanatos, vulnerability … a dreary business.
Now it came to Mickelsson that he was looking at the chairman—the black suit and too fashionable beard, the monstrous fake smile and piously tapping fingertips—with an expression of undisguised contempt. He had a choice to make: he could negotiate, take back that look of disgust, pour oil on troubled waters; or he could confirm the charge or, at any rate, innuendo—could admit to Tillson and himself at once that he did not care in the least what Geoffrey Tillson and all his kind, spawn of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, might think.
Though Mickelsson had by now made his face expressionless—might even have seemed to a casual observer to be studying Tillson with a friendly half-smile—the truth was that a peculiar coldness, clammy as cave-walls, had come over him, an indifference that finally had nothing much to do with the nervously leering little scholar. Along with the indifference came a feeling of power, invulnerability like a dead man’s. “Surely your feeling of righteousness is a little misplaced,” he said. He watched Tillson’s pink tongue dart across his lips again, silver eyebrows shooting up, then continued, “You know it takes me an hour to get in from Susquehanna, and an hour to get home again, and at least an hour for those meetings where nothing ever happens.” Though Tillson was showing alarm, he pressed on coolly, “You know I’ve set aside Thursdays and Fridays for my own research and writing. You set up those meetings knowing I can’t come to them—not even wanting me to come to them, I suspect, since my opinions would surely be opposed to your own—” He checked Tillson’s eyes and took pleasure in the look of amazement there. “And then you come in and use my ‘valuable time,’ as you call it, complaining about my failure to attend.”
Tillson’s smile became crazier than ever. “What?” he said, straightening a little. His eyebrows stopped jittering, frozen in circumflex.
“I’m not interested in offending you,” Mickelsson said. He felt his indifference increasing by leaps and bounds. “All I’m saying is”—he pointed at the calendar on the office wall—“you’ve scheduled the meetings for a time when I can’t come. That’s your mistake, not mine. And now, if that’s all the business we have between us …”
Tillson raised his finger again, then changed his mind, leaned his head to one side, and slowly lowered his hand. “Mickelsson,” he said, as if threatening, “you’re a strange man. Stranger than you think!” He suddenly stopped smiling. “All right,” he said, and abruptly stood up, fists clenched. His eyes glittered brighter than ever. “I appreciate your frankness.”
Mickelsson rose.
At the door, Tillson said, “We shouldn’t be”—he paused, hunting for the word, looking wildly dishonest as he did so—“enemies. I’ll admit, now that we’ve talked about it, I may have been a little in the wrong.”
Mickelsson nodded curtly, feeling redness in his face.
“We all have to try to get along, you know,” Tillson said. “None of us is perfect.”
“No doubt that’s true.”
Tillson thought about it, decided against comment—one hand went up furtively to the corner of one eye—and after a moment’s further hesitation, he nodded sharply and left. Mickelsson’s arms and legs began to shake. He bent over the vast mess of mail.
Only the back of his mind was aware that someone stood just outside his door looking in. “What was all that about?” Jessica Stark’s voice asked.
“Oh, hello,” he said. Guilt crawled over him. How fitting that she of all people should catch him at such a moment—Mickelsson the Viking, the Prussian Junker, reducing poor humpbacked Geoffrey Tillson to tears. Well, better Jessica than Edie Bryant.
Jessica was looking down the corridor after Tillson. Now she turned to look in at Mickelsson again. “Mind if I come in?”
“Do,” he said, a little querulous. He picked up the first piece of paper that came to hand and, scowling hard, pretended to read. Proudly, the Department of Music Presents … He put it down again.
She closed the door behind her and stood half leaning against it, her left hand on the doorknob. “Is something wrong?” she asked. She wore, today, a beige turtleneck, dark brown skirt, skin-tight soft leather boots.
“No,” he said, “nothing wrong,” and reached for his pipe. It occurred to him that if he were dying of lung or throat cancer none of this would matter. His father had died of cancer. Pancreas. People had come in great crowds to the hospital; the windows and tables, even the floor at one end of the room, were jammed with flowerpots.
Mickelsson said, “I had a fight with Tillson, as I imagine you saw.” He smiled sourly, then put a match to the tobacco in his pipe. “Poor bastard, he doesn’t deserve me.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. He registered an interesting complexity in her tone. By an act of will she supported him as if instinctively, but clearly she had private reservations. He wondered if perhaps it was a trick she’d learned with her late husband.
“Well, anyway …” he began, then shifted: “So how have you been?”
She said, “You’re trembling.”
“You think. I’m trembling, you should see Tillson!” He laughed, faking pleasure, and lowered the pipe.
Her eyes narrowed and one side of her mouth went up, not quite in a smile. “You like fighting with him, don’t you.” She came a step nearer.
“It’s always good to keep in shape,” he said.
“I think it’s a little like a fifth-grader picking on a third-grader.”
He stood stupidly gazing at her forehead. Her dark hair glowed; her scent brought a wave of unhappiness. He could think of no witty response.
She turned from him, irritably glancing at the papers on his desk. Something caught her attention. “Look,” she said, “the Swissons are giving a concert.” Then, after a pause: “You want to go?”
He looked down at the paper. Proudly, the Department of Music Presents … “I could,” he said, suddenly thinking of Donnie Matthews. “Do you?”
“Sure,” she said with a shrug, “why not?” She seemed to be working something out in her mind.
“I’ll pick you up, then,” he said, lifting his chin and sweeping one arm out like a Congressman performing.
At once he got an image of Jessica seated in her mink coat in his old, beat-up Jeep, but before he could take back his offer, she said, looking in horror at his desk-clock, checking it against her wristwatch, “Jesusl Gotta run!”
After she was gone, Mickelsson stared for a time at the mail on his desk, his mind a blank. When he came to again, he thought: She’s right; I should apologize to Tillson. He took out his checkbook and hastily wrote a check to his ex-wife, addressed and stamped the envelope, and sealed the check inside. Dear God, let it clear, he thought. The letter from Ellen he dropped in the wastebasket unopened.
Then he saw the letter from Finney. He reached for it at once.
The photograph was startling. Young people of college age, some perhaps only highschool students, lay everywhere in attitudes of passive resistance; a few sat foetus-like, hands over their heads. In the foreground two angry-looking members of a SWAT squad were lifting a young woman by the hands and feet. They were helmeted, white billy clubs hanging from their belts. At the center of it all, the only protester standing upright, was Mickelsson’s son. Though the picture was black and white, Mickelsson saw the boy’s hair as flame red, flying out wildly in all directions under the top-hat. In one hand stretched out toward the photographer’s camera, the boy held the remains of his Rolleiflex. His expression was solemn, the eyes just dark shadows, the mouth a straight line of resignation, as if the violence done to his camera had nothing to do with the police or, indeed, with anything terrestrial. The standing figure seemed ritually still and formal, clothed in the apparel of a by-gone age. It was as if he were not really there, a trick, of light.
When he phoned the university, Mickelsson could learn nothing. Mark hadn’t visited the dorm in a week; no one could say whether or not he’d been going to his classes. Somehow Mickelsson had known Mark would have vanished. He phoned Ellen. She wept. “You must be very proud,” she said. “Ellen,” he said, “try to be reasonable!” “For God’s sake,” she said, “why don’t you die or something?” After that she cried for a long time and couldn’t answer when he spoke. Then The Comedian came on.
“Is that you, Professor?”
“Hello, Willard.”
He remembered the first time he’d seen the boy, out in the hallway of some grubby theater during the first intermission, lighting the cigarette in Ellen’s cigarette holder, Ellen puffing furiously, sucking her cheeks in, bending her head to him—he was a good nine inches shorter than she was and as skinny as she was fat. Both of them were dressed in black and white and both of them wore dyed black hair. Neither of them had noticed Mickelsson standing by the ticket-table, drinking coffee from a paper cup, getting ready to say hello. He hadn’t been expected, had intended to surprise and please her. It was an evening of plays—Three Radical Plays for Women—that Ellen had produced, and apparently Ellen and her friend agreed with Mickelsson that the evening was going badly. When Ellen, looking up past her smoke, had seen Mickelsson, she’d frozen, eyes caught in an evil wince. Slowly—ratlike, as it seemed to Mickelsson—the boy had turned to see what was wrong. That instant told everything. There was some fish he’d read about in his childhood: the male impregnated the female then docilely let her eat him. The boy touched Ellen’s waist as he looked at Mickelsson. She apparently hadn’t yet told him that she hated to be touched. All women, according to Ellen, hated to be touched, and all men were touchers. Women, she said, were lunar.
Willard said now, his voice crackling with emotion-held-in-check, “I should think you’d know by now that El doesn’t appreciate these phone-calls.”
“Good dog,” Mickelsson said. He was thinking of German shepherd watchdogs, but the joke was admittedly obscure.
There was a pause; then the boy said, “If you have things to say to El, I’d be grateful if you’d relay them through me.”
“I’ll bet you would,” Mickelsson said.
“In future, if you don’t mind—”
“I do mind, actually.”
“I’m not too interested, actually, in what you do and do not mind.”
One could imagine him thrusting his beard forward, eyes hooded. He would be standing bent-backed with the intensity of his emotion, maybe rising in slow, precarious rhythm onto the balls of his feet, then down again onto his heels. He wore pointy black, shoes, black suspenders.
“Occasionally it’s necessary for a man and his ex-wife to discuss the welfare of their children,” Mickelsson said. “You wouldn’t understand that, given your proclivity to fucking barren mares. Don’t be needlessly offended! I’m impressed by your Jesuitical devotion to your, so to speak, sex object—”
The phone went dead.
Mickelsson hung up, then looked at the newspaper photo of his son again, then folded it carefully and put it away in his billfold.
His graduate class in medical ethics had eight students. It met in a windowless room on the library’s fourth floor, around a dark, polished table. If he was lucky he did not have to sit next to or across from Gail Edelman, a bright young woman with whom, unfortunately, he had once spent the night. Generally, though the class was supposed to be a seminar, Mickelsson lectured, or rather, read from old notes. He would arrange the ashtray, pipe tobacco, pipe knife, matches, and notecards in front of him, hardly looking up as late-comers entered, and would skim through his notes, organizing his thoughts—he was never completely unprepared, in fact, but no one could doubt that for the most part he was winging it, not so easy with graduate students as with freshmen but possible as long as he alone held the floor—and when everyone was settled and the talk had died down, he would look up and say, formally—the formal tone indispensable to his ruse—”Good afternoon.” “Good afternoon,” they would respond, not quite words, more like a collective Mmmm’n. In just two weeks now their reports would begin, and he’d be off the hook, temporarily at least. If he had fifteen students, the maximum for the course, he’d be off the hook for good; but God sends only what He sends. In the brief moment when he looked up at them he got their placement, Gail Edelman in the far corner, where she often sat, these days, C. J. Wolters, his forty-year-old ex-highschool teacher across from him, fat Pinky Stearns profusely sweating to his immediate left, Janet Something to his right (it was hard to learn names when one never took attendance, never called on a student, never gave spot quizzes). … Of his eight students, only two, Stearns and Wolters, were male. In the old days, when Mickelsson had first begun teaching, nearly all graduate students in philosophy were men.
He lit his pipe, cool and reserved as an officer of the Gestapo, carefully squared his deck of notecards, and began.
“We observed last week that before we can talk seriously about ethics as they relate to any given field—law, education, medicine, whatever—we need some fundamental principles we feel we can trust. We’ve reviewed the common available options—Kant’s imperative, Utilitarianism, R. M. Hare’s philosophy of (as we called it) ‘style,’ and so on—and we noted the limitations of each position. The fact, for instance, that Kant, if you were his dearest friend and you went to him asking him to hide you from the police—Kant, if he acted by his principles, would turn you in. What I’d like to do today is set out—or anyway begin to set out—a system that may prove less vulnerable to reasonable attack, anything short of, as we mentioned, an absolute attack, such as Nietzsche’s, though my approach, as you might expect, is Nietzchean”—he laughed formally—“a looking out from one window, then another.” He laughed again. “The position involves four basic areas of inquiry: One: What? Two: Why? How? Who? When? Where? Three: Foreseeable effects? and Four: Viable alternatives?” He glanced at Pinky Stearns, to his left—yellow-bearded, puffy-faced, leaning on his hand, lost in thought or private sorrow. Wolters, across from Mickelsson, was writing furiously in his notebook, his left hand half raised, palm out, begging Mickelsson not to go too fast. Janet Something sat sideways, leaning on her elbow, facing Mickelsson. She had no notebook. She smiled and waited. The bitch had read his book.
“Let’s begin with the ‘what,’ ” Mickelsson said. He glanced at the card. “The is is father to the ought; or, to put it another way, the moral judgment is about what befits or does not befit the personal situation as it really is. Let me give a rather quick and—admittedly—cheap example. A good deal of discussion of capitalism and socialism is lamed from the start by a failure to identify ‘what’ it is that is meant by capitalism and socialism. Professor Robert L. Heilbroner points out that in much that is said about capitalism, the explicit assumption is that the United States is the most typical capitalist nation. Thus, Paul Sweezy, the American Marxian critic, says that the United States is a capitalist society, the purest capitalist society that ever existed. …” He took off his glasses, more impediment than help, and held the card up closer. “But as Heilbroner says, it might well be argued that the United States is not a pure realization of capitalism but rather ‘a deformed variant, the product of special influences of continental isolation, vast wealth, an eighteenth-century structure of government, and the terrible presence of its inheritance of slavery—the last certainly not a “capitalist institution.” For ‘pure’ capitalism, we should perhaps look to Denmark, Norway, or New Zealand. Obviously, making those countries our model will affect all subsequent analysis of the political, economic, or moral dimensions of capitalism. We start with a different ‘what.’ ”
He set aside the notecard and glanced up at his students—all dutiful, most of them scribbling away like doomed prisoners writing for pardons they were sure they wouldn’t get. Janet Something hadn’t moved a muscle in all this time, staring at him with a slight, inscrutable smile. She was short and, more than that, built low. She was said to be a brownbelt in karate. Under her Oxford-cloth shirt she had, he imagined, voluminous steel tits. It crossed his mind (weirdly, for a quarter of a second) that he would like to be hit by her, even killed. They would be screwing. She would kill him the instant he came. The tall young woman with the Polish name and the hair drawn tight to her head, then frizzing out—she sat beside Janet—moved her left hand slowly back and forth, fanning away smoke from Mickelsson’s pipe and her classmates’ cigarettes. She seemed unhappy, dark circles under her eyes.
Guiltily, he turned to the next card.
“And obviously Russia is an equally dubious model of socialism,” he said. “I assume you’ve all read Marx—if you haven’t, please do! Anyway, you get the point. As the scholiasts liked to say, Ex falso sequitur quid-libet—that is, for those of you whose Latin is rusty”—mechanically, he smiled—” ‘From false premises anything can follow.’ As E. H. Hare points out—not to be confused with R. M.—a hundred years ago it was the established belief of the medical profession that masturbation was a frequent cause of mental disorder.” He glanced up, smiled again, then again looked down. “Explaining ‘what’ masturbation was, medical experts in those days claimed it was an activity that caused an increased flow of blood to the brain and thus was enervating in its effects. It was supposed to produce”—he drew the card closer—“ ‘seminal weakness, impotence, dysuria, tabes dorsalis, pulmonary consumption, not to mention senility, stupidity, melancholy, homosexuality, hysteria. …’ ” He let his voice trail off, deciding against reading the whole long list. He said, “This is obviously a dim view of ‘what’ masturbation is, not that any of us here would practice it.” No one laughed. “With such chaotic notions of the ‘what’ of masturbation—and thus as to what effects it could have—rational moral discourse on the subject was impossible.”
He turned to the next card. Wolters again held up his hand, his cigarette between two fingers, to slow him down. Obligingly, Mickelsson paused for a moment. The fat woman, Rachel Something, at the end of the table, next to Gail Edelman, jerked her ballpoint pen from the paper she’d been writing on, looked at it, then angrily shook it. She whispered something to Gail, who, with a glance at Mickelsson, bent down for her purse. Ah, poor miserable humanity, he thought, all this punishment—smoky rooms, broken pens, boring professors. … What crime could possibly warrant all this? He thought again, just for an instant, of the night when, on one of his walks, he’d stopped at Gail’s. He’d been somewhat drunk; she, surprised and nervous. Frightened, possibly? Had she thought he might, despite appearances, prove a rapist and murderer? In the apartment she lived in the ceilings were weirdly high, the wallpaper dark. The memory was too painful, too shameful, to allow further play. What sufferings and humiliations people live through! he thought. Poor girl! Poor good, kind kid!
He said, glancing down at the card, “On the subject of death there are similar definitional problems. Medically, death is not a moment but a process. Some organs may die while others live. At what point in this process do we declare that death has come? When, if ever, are we justified in preserving the living dead for the recycling of their functioning organs? Or take the area of sexual intercourse …” He caught himself just in time to prevent, or at least divert, an instinctual glance at Gail. He almost evaded the glance at Gail by a glance at Janet, but caught that too. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that, studiously, mournfully, Gail was writing something, clearly not class notes—he suspected it was a letter—in her notebook. He read: “It will obviously be telling if one immediately defines sexual intercourse as ‘the marital act.’ The widely respected moralist Richard McCormick”—he gave the words an ironic twist—“has written: ‘Since sexual intercourse and its proximate antecedents represent total personal exchange, they can be separated from total personal relationship (marriage) only by undermining their truly human, their expressive character.’ ” He looked up. “Obviously, McCormick is answering, by his lights, the ‘what’ question regarding sexual intercourse. Either it is marital or it is objectively wrong.” Now for just an instant he did look balefully at Gail. She was buried in her writing. “Do you think this is a good idea?” she had asked, distressed. He thought of Donnie Matthews.
His pipe had gone out. He held a match to it, his hand slightly trembling, then said: “Well, so much for the ‘what’ component in every moral decision.” He looked up from his cards. The soft, pale white Jewish woman whose name he did not know was also accessible. His penis was as hard as a petrified tree. “It comes down to simply this: if we don’t get reality right, if we misunderstand the case we’re examining, all we say will be poppycock.” He looked at his watch. Thirty minutes to go, then a fifteen-minute break. Could the watch be broken?
“Let’s turn to the ‘why’ and ‘how,’ that is, ends and means.” He was skipping cards now. He had several more on the ‘what’ component. He chattered as he hunted. “Take government, for instance. Every government is basically intended … Every government is basically intended to promote the common good, but the preservation of the government—as you all know, as loyal Americans”—he looked up for a second and smiled—“giving your money to support the I.R.S., the F.B.I., the C.I.A.—as you all know, the preservation of the government can easily come to seem more important than the common good it was designed to insure. If you look at history, you’ll find this is a pattern, not an exception.” Now he’d found his card. “Or take jobs. A job is a means to survival and, hopefully, personal fulfillment. But we all know how a job can become a man’s life. Think of the popular term ‘workaholic’ ” He turned the card. “Or take wealth. Wealth is obviously nothing but a means to happiness and well-being. But when wealth becomes an end, as it often does, people under its sway will sacrifice both happiness and well-being—even life itself—for money.” Impatiently, looking at his watch again, he turned to another card.
“Or take armaments. The avowed purpose of armaments is always to bring security and power.” He almost flipped this card too, then changed his mind. “Tsar Nicholas the Second of Russia in his proposal for the first Hague Conference in 1899 spotted the fatal flaw in equating arms and safety: ‘In proportion as the armaments of each power increase, so do they less and less fulfill the objects which the Governments have set before themselves. … It appears evident that if this state of things were prolonged, it would inevitably lead to the very cataclysm which it is designed to avert, and the horrors of which make every thinking man shudder in advance.’ Think about that,” Mickelsson said, looking up, “in relation to our present situation—sixteen tons of T.N.T.—atomic equivalent—for every man, woman, and child in the world!” For reasons not instantly clear to him, tears sprang to his eyes. “Think about it,” he said, catching himself, forcing himself to smile. “If we were true philosophers we might well be terrorists, trying to bring down the nukes.”
His son, in the photograph, stood eerily alone, framed by the two SWAT men bending to lift the girl. His hair, flying wildly in all directions under the top-hat, and his eyes, aloof and shadowy—his chin slightly raised, like that of a nineteenth-century prince posing for a painting—gave him a mad look, or rather, to be precise, the look of some good man profoundly wronged by people who could not know better, forgiving his persecutors and waiting, with a still and terrible rage, for his meeting with God.
“The question ‘who,’ ” Mickelsson said, “enters into the calculus of ethics to make us address the following realities: What is right for one person may be wrong for another. What is right for a person now may be wrong for the same person at another time. Some persons are, in ethical calculations, worth more than others. …”
He remembered his ex-wife’s sobbing on the telephone, his own senseless cruelty to The Comedian.
Then suddenly he felt nothing. As if from a distance, he heard his voice droning, changing now and then to a different drone, for emphasis, or irony, or to present a seemingly spontaneous example. He listened to himself like a man judging the performance of a colleague, then let his mind wander. He saw again the wary look on Mark’s face, the look one might give to an injured boa-constrictor. The other Mickelsson talked on, paused for questions, told a joke. He forgot to give the mid-period break. No one objected, though Pinky Stearns glanced at him from time to time with tentatively unfriendly puzzlement. When the bell rang, Mickelsson glanced at his watch, startled. “Thank you for your patience,” he said. “Thank you all for your patience.”
He’d been seated in his office for more than an hour, with the door closed and the light off—seated doing nothing and thinking nothing, staring at the wall—when a timid knock came. He considered not answering, then thought perhaps it might be Jessica, whose conversation might be a comfort just now, and so he called, rather softly, as if he hadn’t quite made up his mind, “Come in.”
As soon as he saw the worried, uncertain way the doorknob moved, he knew it would be Nugent. “Christ,” he whispered, then leaned forward onto his left elbow and swivelled around in his chair so that he partly faced the door. The boy opened it wide, not seeing him at first in the room’s late-afternoon dimness. His black friend—Mickelsson had forgotten the name—was with him again. He looked in over Nugent’s shoulder, and when he was sure that it was really Mickelsson there at the desk, he smiled and bobbed his head, then backed away, giving them privacy.
“Did you want the light out?” Nugent asked, hovering between the hallway and the office.
“It’s fine. My eyes are tired,” Mickelsson said. “Come in if you like. What can I do for you?”
“Thank you.” He advanced a step or two, looking around the room as if to make sure no one waited in ambush. Then, apparently deciding he was safe, he closed the door behind him and came the rest of the way at a more normal pace. “May I sit down?” he asked.
“Be my guest,” Mickelsson said wearily.
“I won’t take long,” the boy said, and seated himself, rigid as usual, folding his hands and locking them between his legs. He looked not at Mickelsson but exactly at the point on the wall Mickelsson had been staring at earlier.
Mickelsson got out his pipe and tobacco.
“I’m sorry about this morning,” Nugent said. “I realize I wasted valuable class time and talked nothing but stupid nonsense.” His lips trembled and it came to Mickelsson that, damn it all, the boy was going to cry again.
In spite of his annoyance—the feeling of claustrophobia that came over him every time the boy came near him—Mickelsson said, almost gently, “That’s not true.” He concentrated on his pipe, lest the boy throw him a look.
“I hadn’t thought it out,” Nugent said. “I lost my temper, sort of—all those things they were saying. … I’m sort of new at all this. I’m not a very well-educated person, as I imagine you’ve noticed. I’ve read a lot of novels and poetry and things—nothing systematic—and I’ve been pretty good at physics—I can tell you why the lifetime of a resonance particle is not necessarily the smallest possible unit of time—” He gave a choked laugh. “There I go again.” Mickelsson could feel the boy looking at him now but kept his eyes on the bowl of his pipe, packing it, preparing to light a match. When he did, the flame was surprisingly bright, glaring on the glossy stipple of the wall. “Anyway of course it’s not true that Plato’s method is different fundamentally from Aristotle’s—I finally read the Parmenides, as you suggested we should do, and I, I saw—” Suddenly he raised his hands to his face, not lowering the face, simply covering it, holding his breath, his red elbows shooting out sharp as knives to either side.
“Take it easy,” Mickelsson said, gently but with distaste.
“I’m sorry,” the boy whispered. His neck and arms were surprisingly small, and white, as if never touched by sunlight.
“Take your time,” Mickelsson said, and sighed. “It’s all right, believe me.” Seeing that the boy was still unable to speak, he said, “Life’s full of troubles, we all find that out eventually, but in due time we live past them.” He got out his pipecleaners, took the pipe from his lips, pulled the stem off and busied himself with cleaning it.
“I know you have plenty of troubles of your own,” the boy said, still pushing apology.
Mickelsson remembered the boy’s saying, earlier, that he knew how Mickelsson lived, knew everything about him. He thought of asking now what Nugent had meant; it was never good to leave fingernail parings in the hands of witches, but instead he laughed and said, “Boy, you said it!” He looked sideways at Nugent, who had taken his hands from his face now and was staring into his lap. Mickelsson dropped the pipecleaner into his wastebasket, shook his head ruefully, and said, “I’ve been trying to deal with the I.R.S. They’re incredible—simply incredible! They spy on me.” He laughed. “No doubt that sounds like the height of paranoia, but it happens to be true. Every now and then they show up in one of those dark, unmarked cars and sit watching me. I suppose it’s some kind of scare tactic.”
“You’re sure it’s them?” Nugent asked, slightly turning, not quite raising his eyes to Mickelsson’s.
“Well, pretty sure,” Mickelsson said with a little laugh and relit his pipe. “I had a visit from them, not too long ago—came to see me at my apartment. The car they were driving then was pretty much like the one that comes by now.”
“What are you going to do?” It did not seem just polite conversation.
Mickelsson saw now that perhaps he’d made a mistake, telling Nugent about that car. It might be construed as an invitation to friendship, an undermining of the teacher-student relationship. In the hope of blocking that development, he told him more. “Well,” he said, falsely chuckling, “I thought it would be best to deal with the thing directly, so I shot off a note to the I.R.S. office most likely to be responsible, the one in Scranton, since now I’m living in Pennsylvania. I simply told them I know what they’re up to and asked them to stop.”
Nugent thought about it, no doubt privately analyzing, as Mickelsson had done over and over, whether it was a good idea or likely to make things worse. At last he said, just above a whisper, “Creeps.”
“They are creeps,” Mickelsson said, pleased to have been given the word for them.
Now a silence fell between Mickelsson and the boy. It was Nugent who finally broke it. “Well,” he said, “I just wanted to say I’m sorry—and I’m sorry about making a scene here now, too. It’s been a—” He stiffened slightly, making sure he had control. “It’s been a bad year.”
Mickelsson studied him. Nietzsche would say—or Freud, or any other man of sense—that the statement was an emotional con. He drew the pipe from his mouth and, against his better judgment, said, “I heard about your father. I’m sorry, Nugent.”
The boy nodded. After a moment he said, “I also had a friend die, my chemistry teacher—he was murdered; you probably heard about it, maybe I told you. Professor Warren? He’d just gotten married a week before—”
A chill ran up Mickelsson’s spine. Warren. That was it, of course: the strange, bedevilled woman he’d met at the Blicksteins’ party. Evenly, he asked, “Wasn’t he investigating something down near where I live, in Susquehanna?”
“I don’t know about that,” Nugent said. He closed one hand over his nose, breathing shallowly again, fighting emotion. “He was always looking into something or other. He had more energy than—” He fell silent and tightly closed his eyes. In a minute he would whisper again, “I’m sorry,” and would cry.
To prevent it, Mickelsson said sternly, “It’s been a bad year for you, Nugent. I’m very sorry.”
“Well,” Nugent said, and sniffled. Abruptly he stood up. “Thank you,” he said, for an instant meeting Mickelsson’s gaze.
“No problem,” Mickelsson said, and waved his pipe. “Any time I can be of help …”
Nugent nodded stiffly, then turned, off balance, and hurried to the door. He fumbled for the doorknob as if unable to see it, then opened the door, half turned back, nodded stiffly again, then quickly stepped out into the hallway and closed the door behind him.
Mickelsson sat for a few minutes longer in the now quite dark office, thinking, or trying to think. A chemist. Then at last he heaved his bulk out of the chair, dropped the tobacco-pouch and pipe into his pocket, and settled his spirit on the long, lonely drive home.