Mickelsson's Ghosts Read Free Page A

been no car. Yet somehow he couldn’t convince himself. He remembered distinctly how, then or at some other time, headlights had shown him the rough bark on the tree just ahead of him, right beside the tilting, crumbling sidewalk, then the bark on the next tree and the next. He looked again at the silver cane-handle, dented now, the left eye of the lioness blanked out, as if blinded.
    â€œJesus,” he whispered, almost prayerful, covering his eyes, reliving the moment of the dog’s silent fall. Something nagged for his attention, then at last broke through: a siren, not far off. He listened as if his heart had stopped, then at last realized that it was moving away, not coming nearer—and not a police siren anyway; the ascending and sinking wail that meant somebody’s house was on fire.
    He got up, weak and heavy-limbed, his gorge full of acid, carried the walking-stick to the closet of the bedroom, and hid it in the darkest corner, behind an outgrown suit, the long brown bathrobe he never wore, and a box of old windowshades that had stood there, abandoned, when he’d moved in.
    It was nonsense, of course, all this anguish of fear and guilt. No one had seen. And it had been, strictly speaking, an accident—at worst, an act of legitimate self-defense. The city had a leash law. Even if someone had seen him do it, no one could say he’d done anything wrong; the law was on his side. He compressed his lips. He was beginning to sound like Heidegger in the days of the Führer.
    The kitchen smelled of old coffee grounds, stale tobacco, must and mould. Again vague alarm rose up in him, the peripheral sense of dread that comes when a dream begins to decay toward nightmare. At last the cause of his unease reached his consciousness: a mouse was stirring in the garbage bag or in one of the junk-filled drawers under the sink.
    He looked up in alarm, freezing for an instant, then drawing back his head from the innards of the once-again jammed-up Xerox copying machine, hearing his name called—Geoffrey Tillson, his department chairman, bleating in a voice as thin as a bassoon’s: “Professor Mickelsson, could I ask you to step in here a minute when you’re free?”
    His heart raced, but at once he steadied himself. By the chimpanzee grin old Tillson wore on his gray-bearded face (thrust forward and slung low, level with the rock-solid hump on his back), Mickelsson made out that, almost certainly, it was nothing, just some ordinary nuisance. The chairman, it must be, had a student in there with him, or a disgruntled parent, or someone from the State Education Office, in any case someone to be dealt with gently, petted and stroked, the kind of thing Mickelsson, mainly by virtue of his standing in the department, was thought to be good at. (It was summer vacation. The bastard had no right.) He stole a last look at the snarled-up paper trapped among plastic cams and mysterious metal pins. All day long things had been going wrong for him, as if even inanimate objects were hostile, wary of him. Then he straightened up, took his glasses from the top of the machine, and put them on—bifocal lenses for which everything in the world was slightly too near at hand or far away.
    â€œI guess I’m more or less free now,” he said, still blushing, and faked a laugh—two sharp hacks. He saw that the secretary’s eye was on him, over behind the desk to the left of Tillson’s open door. She seemed to be watching him suspiciously, and he blushed more deeply. He asked, as if to account for the blush, “Charlotte, do you think you could clear this thing for me?”
    â€œSurely,” she said, and at once stood up, automatically smoothing her skirt with one hand, giving him one of those pitying, superior smiles. No doubt she was a man-hater, her nice, secretarial smile masking private scorn. All pretty, well-built young women were despisers of men, these days, or all except the