“Anyway,” Mickelsson said, “it wasn’t my father—or my mother either—that made me feel odd. I had an uncle Edgar who went berserk during the war. He’d been peculiar all his life, in various ways—very secretive, also fussy, punctilious. Wouldn’t speak English: beneath his dignity. But when the war came, and people began to talk about the Swedes as collaborators—not too openly, but somehow you knew they were talking … Certain movies, maybe. Uncle Edgar joined up, to everyone’s surprise, and set off, mad as a hornet, to vindicate the race, or at any rate that was the family interpretation. He was a Seabee, one of the ‘old men,’ as they were called. They’d go in before everybody and build the landing strips. On some island in the Pacific something went wrong: he started machine-gunning his own people. My theory is it came to him that everyone was evil, the Americans as much as the Japanese—but I don’t know, of course. Projection, my psychiatrist claims. Maybe so. They sent him home, and he spent fifteen years in a V.A. mental ward. When they finally released him he was crazier than ever, but he was no longer violent—probably hadn’t been in years. After he was back, he almost never said a word to anyone, and if he did speak, it was almost never English. He visited us in California, a time or two. He’d sit up with Ellen half the night—I’d go to bed: every time he came he’d get me drunk—not on purpose; I couldn’t keep up. I’d hear them out in the kitchen, Uncle Edgar gibbering away in Swedish, Ellen saying, ‘Ya, ya, ya!’—she didn’t speak a word of Swedish, but maybe with Uncle Edgar she thought she did. He gestured a lot. I’d stare at the furniture, trying to keep it from swimming around, and I’d hear them going on and on, the crazy old Seabee taking nectar from her hand. … Of course that was long afterward. I meant to explain why I felt the way I did in highschool.”
“So explain,” she said and smiled. She squeezed his hand.
It was almost dark now. He thought of putting on another chunk of wood but did nothing.
“I guess the horror of it was, he got off, more or less. He knew what he’d done, killing those people. It has something to do with Nietzsche’s idea of pity—I’m sorry I keep prattling about Nietzsche.”
“You don’t,” she said. “Or if you do, I haven’t really noticed.”
He said, “Nietzsche thought the pitier becomes infected by his pity—becomes weak, like the person he’s sorry for. What he forgot to mention is that the pitied person becomes weaker than before, from his shame at degrading the one who pities him. It’s true.”
“Which is why you won’t take a loan,” she said, looking smug.
“Once the offer’s made it’s already too late.”
She shook her head and rolled her eyes toward God. “You see,” she said to God, “he’s hopeless.”
“And then there’s my grandfather,” he said.
She stifled a yawn, turning her eyes to him.
“For years and years he was a stern, boring Christian minister. I suppose I might not think him so boring if I knew him now. He was a good Luther man; had the whole hundred volumes in German. Anyway, in his seventieth year he got the gift. Did I tell you all this?”
“What gift?”
“According to the story, he was standing beside the marsh on my father’s place, watching my father and uncle fish, when suddenly, there in the water, exactly like a reflection, or so he claimed—or is said to have claimed—he saw my great-aunt Alma clutch her throat and suck for air and die. He said to my father, ‘Alma’s dead. Heart attack, looks like.’ My father and Uncle Edgar hardly knew what to say, they argued back and forth, but the old man made his claim with such conviction that eventually they pulled their lines and went home. Aunt Alma was dead, exactly as he’d said she’d be.
“After that he had these visions all the time. He knew trivial things—that a tire would go flat, or a dog would get mange—but also important things: he saw the hurricane Agnes weeks before it came. Various things like that. Believe me, we could’ve made money off him.”
Jessica extracted her hands from his and got up to put a log on. Sparks flew, making her jerk back. When the fire settled, she put the screen in again. She came back and sat once more beside him, not so close now, cautiously erect. “Did you ever see any of this?”
“Everybody did. It was common as ducks. It was so common the family didn’t even talk about it except if some stranger came, and then they’d get interested again.”
Now the wall was bright once more, flames leaping in the stove.
“Strange,” she said. They sat for several minutes without speaking, Mickelsson painfully conscious that all the talk was about himself. Then she leaned back onto his arm. “He just saw things, clear as day, and they were always true?”
“It was more complicated than that.” He hesitated, then gave in. “Sometimes he saw things clear as day; sometimes he saw things but not the things you wanted him to see. Once a cousin of ours called. Her father was very sick, down in Florida. She wanted my grandfather to tell her what to do, that is, whether or not her father was really dying. My grandfather said, ‘I don’t know. I can’t see it. If I were you I’d just go back to the kitchen and finish supper.’ There was no way he could know she’d just left the kitchen, where she was making supper, to use the bedroom phone.” Mickelsson smiled to himself, flooded now with memories, more than he could tell her. He said, “Sometimes he’d get things in dreams, all muddled and distorted. And sometimes all he’d get was hunches. He’d ask himself a question—‘Is so-and-so going to happen?’—and he’d give himself an answer—‘Yes it will’—and if it really was going to happen he’d have a powerful hunch that Yes was right. He almost never made mistakes, like those psychic guessers in the National Enquirer. There was one broad area of exception—the usual one, I guess. If he wanted very badly for something to happen, he would sometimes have a false hunch; so he was unreliable on important matters involving himself or his family. And sometimes he couldn’t tell ordinary dreams from psychic dreams. It was a tricky gift—just like ordinary sight—in the sense that it could shade off from certain to doubtful. Some things he saw the way you see things on a bright, clear day; other things he saw as if in fog, or at night during a thunderstorm. He moved back and forth through time like a prophet, as if one really could slip out of time into eternity. He did see things, there was no doubt of that. If he saw a thing happening—plainly saw it—then if it was something in the past you could be sure it had happened exactly as he said, and if it was something in the future, then all the armies in the world couldn’t prevent it. Pretty often the vision was trivial, as I said. He’d know what his birthday presents were before he opened them. He’d mention things he’d read in the paper before the paper came.”
This time when Mickelsson stopped speaking, Jessica said nothing, and she was silent for so long he turned his head to look at her, to see if he’d put her to sleep. She opened her eyes as he did so, looking straight into Mickelsson’s, and said, “You want to know something? I think you’re psychic, Pete. I’ve had a feeling all along that you might be, but what you tell me about your grandfather makes me sure of it. I think that whoever it was that came to your bedroom was actually somebody.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Listen, let’s try something.” She was suddenly wide awake. “Tell me something you can’t possibly know. Tell me something about my mother!”
He laughed. “I can’t do that. She walks with a limp, she has trouble sleeping, her hair’s very white—”
“That’s right, Peter! That’s good!”
Again he laughed. “All I did was guess her age.”
“Oh, Pete,” she said, petulant, still determined. “Well, let’s think of something else.” She was silent for a moment. Then: “Tell me what will happen to the Spragues.”
Reluctantly, he closed his eyes. All he could see was an image of flickering light from the woodstove, which his mind somehow imposed upon the doors and windows of the old, gray Sprague house up the mountain. As the image began to feel nightmarish h
e opened his eyes and said, “I forgot to tell you one thing about my grandfather’s second sight. Anything he saw, if it wasn’t absolutely trivial, was horrible. He never saw somebody winning his race, or a woman being handed her healthy new baby. He saw railroad bridges buckling and the train spilling over. He’d get an image of a wrecked car sitting beside a highway, and a young girl’s head in the grass. He’d get an image of somebody’s child screaming, running out of the house with her nightdress on fire. That’s how it is with psychics, or so I’ve read. It’s somehow pain and death that cry out to be noticed; the rest floats by and gets forgotten—maybe sufficient to itself.”
“How awful!” Jessica said. Then immediately, so that once again he was almost alarmed by the quickness of her mind, “What made you think of that? Did you see something frightening when I asked you to tell me about the Spragues?”
“Definitely not!” he said. “Look, no more of this game, OK? It’s creepy.”
Jessica pushed her head against his shoulder. “You’re right. I hereby renounce all creepy games.” She sidled her eyes toward him. “You want to go to bed?”
“Let’s!”
But the game was not quite over. In the upstairs bathroom, brushing his teeth, the cold water plunging noisily into the sink, Mickelsson had a thought that was almost a voice. It was a line from Nietzsche. “This life is your eternal life.” It was a line he’d never understood, nor did he understand it now. Nietzsche’s whole doctrine of eternal recurrence was a bafflement to him and, so far as he could see, to everybody else, even Kaufmann and Danto. But tonight, the line had the odd effect of sending a chill up his spine and drawing him to the window that looked out onto the field at the back of the house, between the house and the rise of the mountain. It was a soft, warm night stirred by gentle breezes and lighted by a full moon. Fifty feet from the house, directly in line with the window where Mickelsson stood looking out—bending closer to the glass now, startled—someone, a farmer, from the looks of it, was digging a hole. Mickelsson’s thoughts flew into confusion and it took him a moment to realize that the man had no right to be digging there, on Mickelsson’s own property—and another moment to realize that the hole was a grave. In the swaying weeds five feet from the head of the hole lay a small coffin, presumably a child’s—too small, anyway, to be even a small woman’s, too large to be the coffin of an infant. Without letting himself think further, Mickelsson spat out the toothpaste into the sink, grabbed his shirt and, without a word to Jessica—he’d forgotten she was there, in fact—ran through the bedroom, out into the hall and down the stairs, his feet hitting like thunder. He was halfway out the back door of the kitchen when he realized that the world had magically snapped into winter. There was no full moon, no gentle summer breeze. Overhead he could see only blurry stars, and in the field where the gravedigger ought to be there was nothing at all—short gray weeds, scraps of snow. Now at last he came awake to Jessica’s cries of alarm from the house: “Pete! What’s the matter?”
She was in the middle of the kitchen, the quilt from the bed clutched awkwardly around her. When he’d closed and locked the door, then turned back to her, she said, “What happened? You look awful!”
He put his hands on her arms. The kitchen they were standing in was not the kitchen he’d run through on his way outside.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “I thought I heard a bear, or a skunk or something. Let’s go up.”
When he at last lay down beside her, his skin against hers, the warmth and sweetness of it, and his residual fear, made him dizzy.
8
He’d been going through his fifteen-year-old Martin Luther notes and reading through his grandfather’s yellow tablets on the subject, an activity which took him days and profoundly depressed him. How soon the best opinions of a normally intelligent, well-read man turned commonplace! Archaic, studiously eloquent—hiked up with ’tis’s and lo’s and yea’s—the old man’s broodings recalled the most vacuous poetry of his age: earnest, noble-hearted flounderings in the common bog. This morning he’d gone back to work on his own book, no longer a blockbuster—duller, he suspected, than the telephone book of an unfamiliar city, certainly duller than anything anywhere by Dr. Martinus. It was cruel that a rotten human being like Martin Luther should rivet one’s attention, even now, after all these centuries, and the thoughts of a good man like Mickelsson’s grandfather, hardly in his grave yet, as angels count time, should stupefy the soul.
Around noon Tom Garret had called him to remind him to vote, which Mickelsson promised to do, though in fact he’d forgotten to register. It gave him no grief. Carter had his faults, but it was unthinkable that the American people would be so stupid and self-destructive as to vote in Reagan. After lunch Mickelsson had worked on the house, still brooding more on Luther than on his own book, increasingly shocked by how powerfully the man’s spirit worked on him, both the gentle side—copier of folk tales, translator of the Bible into beautiful, moving German, advocate of infinite gentleness in the teaching of children, doting parent himself—and the dark, terrible side, manic-depressive plunging toward psychosis, fighter, hard drinker, well of hatreds—the Italians, French, English, above all the Jews. Thinking about Luther—and himself, of course—he ate Di-Gels one after another. He was drinking while he worked, as his habit was. He’d drunk only beer, then at suppertime switched to gin and tonic. He turned on the portable radio to listen to the returns. By nine that night he was drinking martinis, as Luther would have done with great lust, if God had allowed their invention in time. He sat at the kitchen table listening in mounting astonishment to the evidence that the American people had gone mad. “Idiots!” he shouted, and slammed the table with both fists at once. He drank on, sometimes pacing, clutching at his hair with his right hand, swearing at the walls and windows. Carter conceded. Mickelsson hardly noticed that he was drunk—he could still see, still stand upright, still howl his anger, though his eyes were full of tears—but drunk he was: his heart bellowed for something, he didn’t know what at first, and then he realized: the base, uncomplicated love of Donnie Matthews. His mind, inhibitionless, could see no objection. And so he found himself tapping importunately with his cane’s silver lioness-head at her door.
Oh, he knew, he was cognizant, that it was debauchery. (He tapped louder, sweating gin.) He had become once more the suicidal Dadaist, representative hero and symbol of his nation—perhaps the secret center of all men and nations—fallen out of orbit, drifting like his civilization toward absolute catastrophe (all the professional predictors agreed, the U.N., the Carter Report on the Future, alas: by the year 2000 wide-spread starvation, plague, universal war, for all practical purposes the end of the world), all of which, however, he accepted tonight with mournfully comfortable fatalism. Let it come! Let the final explosions be colorful! (“And Lord, may my death be not painful!”—Luther.) It was the nature of life and always had been, insofar as life in the world was worldly: the beginning of things in the blood-washed breaking of membranes, the precarious middle span with its tortuous, ultimately futile imposition of order, the protracted close of life—entropy, chaos, the final loosening of the sphincter. Alles ist erlaubt.
He was banging hard now at Donnie Matthews’ door.
“Who is it?” she called from somewhere not far away. Perhaps she was sitting in her chair in the livingroom, reading.
“It’s me,” he called back. “Are you free?”
“Just a minute.”
He was leaning far forward, his left hand on his hatbrim, his right ear close to the door. He was unaware that he was leaning farther than balance would permit until he found himself falling, drunkenly tumbling, lashing out with the tip of his cane to protect himself, shifting his left foot at the same time, but somehow getting it wrong, so that the next thing he knew he was on the carpet, the thud of his fall still echoing like thunder, the door suddenly opening and Donnie Matthews looking down at him, surprised.
“Jesus!” she said, bending down toward him. ?
??What happened?”
“Floor tipped,” he said. “Or maybe it was solar wind.”
“You’re drunk!” she said.
“That’s also a possible explanation.” He was up on his knees now. She studied him with narrowed eyes, then suddenly decided to reach down for his right arm and help him.
“Come on in,” she said, “before the neighbors see you.”
He laughed and turned to look in the direction of the door at the opposite side of the landing. It was safely closed. Then, letting her help him a little, he entered her livingroom and stood waiting while she closed and locked the door.
“You really are something,” she said, and smiled now. “Let me help you with your coat.” He stood locked into balance, like an old horse asleep, while she drew the overcoat down from his shoulders, shook the sleeves from his arms, then folded the coat and laid it on the straight-backed chair beside the door. Then she came to him and put her arms around him. Her cheap, young-woman smell was foreign, as intensely “other” as the room. “Where were you all this time?” she asked. “I kept expecting you to phone or something.” She was wearing striped pajamas and a gray bathrobe, attire that gave her a childish, innocent look that, when he thought of what she looked like naked, stirred him suddenly toward lust. Her hair smelled of shampoo.