Mickelsson's Ghosts John Gardner (read 50 shades of grey .TXT) 📖

He suspected that only one of them understood for sure what he was saying. Perhaps “one” not including himself. All truths are for me soaked in blood.

In the parking lot he found he had congratulated himself too early on escaping the campus without having to deal with Michael Nugent. As he was getting out his keys, preparing to heave himself up into the Jeep, a voice called out, “He was investigating some kind of fraud.”

Mickelsson turned to see who it was that had spoken, not imagining it was himself who’d been addressed. Thirty feet away, in the middle of the asphalt between rows of cars, looking at him or maybe past him, he saw a gangly, rather tall, very white-skinned young man wearing white slacks, blue jacket, a broad-brimmed hat canted over one eye. Perched on the top of a dark van nearby, maybe twenty feet beyond the young man in the hat, he saw a graceful, broadly smiling Negro boy. It was only because he recognized the Negro that he recognized Nugent, then an instant later recognized that the words were meant for himself.

“What?” he called.

“I don’t know if it had to do with chemistry or not,” the young man called, “but I know he was investigating some kind of fraud.”

Mickelsson looked down, gathering his wits, wondering why it was here, on the high parking lot overlooking the campus, dark blue waves of mountains in the distance, that Nugent and his friend had chosen to waylay him. It seemed strange, to say the least, that Nugent should wait for him here, in this isolated place, and then shout his information from thirty feet away. After he’d mused a moment, Mickelsson put the keys back in his pocket and walked over to Nugent—since apparently Nugent did not wish to come to him. The black boy went on smiling, his elbows on his knees, then tipped his head up to look at the sky. Towering black clouds were moving in, drawing together, tumbling. Occasionally one of them would brighten with buried lightning, then go dark again. There was as yet no sound of thunder. The trees above the parking lot were perfectly still. In a moment the smallest branches would begin to move, and after another moment it would begin to rain. Mickelsson’s shadow fell over Nugent.

“You mean Professor Warren?” Mickelsson asked.

Nugent blinked rapidly, then nodded.

“How do you know?” Mickelsson asked.

“I talked to some people,” Nugent said. It was clear that no amount of prodding would make him more specific.

After a while Mickelsson asked, “Something to do with the university, you think? What was his interest in this fraud?”

Nugent shrugged as if it hardly mattered to him, but his eyes showed interest. They stared straight into Mickelsson’s. Disconcerting.

“That’s all you know? He was investigating some fraud?”

“I guess that’s right.”

Now he did hear thunder, a low, long-drawn-out roll that made him think of his grandfather, in those final years, listening as if God’s voice were in the sound.

“You think it was just intellectual curiosity?” he asked.

Nugent seemed to ponder the question, then finally said, “He was a clown, in a way. The sort of person who liked to go on—you know—intellectual benders. I remember he told me he was a member of an ashram in Boston for a while, after he’d abandoned conventional religion—he was at Harvard then. Later, when he was teaching at Riverside, in California, he got into Rolfing and the Alexander method—I forgot what all. I don’t mean he was stupid, or just a joker, or anything like that. When I say he was a ‘clown’ all I mean is—” He stopped smiling and rolled his eyes heavenward, grotesquely, as if saying what he wanted to say, getting it just right, took total concentration and God’s help. “You know how it is in the circus. The acrobat does something, and the clown tries to imitate it, but the clown’s not human, like the acrobat, he’s just this creature with straw in his head. That’s why clowns are at the same time funny and sad: they imitate exactly what human beings do, and if the Nicomachean Ethics were right, they really would become human. But no matter what they do they remain just clowns.”

Mickelsson smiled crossly and, still with his head down, looked at the boy up-from-under, reserved. The black boy on the van was still looking up into the darkness of the clouds, watching them with fascination, as if their movement were writing. “I guess I don’t really follow,” Mickelsson said.

Nugent gave a quick, eager nod, as if that were completely understandable, exactly as it should be. “I just mean that you have to believe things, to be human—you know? You have to feel that things are true. A clown is someone who’d give his soul to believe, if he had one, but he never can, he just goes through the motions, harder and harder, to no avail. We laugh at him because we recognize that, in a limited way, that’s how we are too. That’s what I was trying to say in class, about Kafka and the lost language and everything.”

Mickelsson thought about it—thought, tentatively, hastily, about many things. “And Warren was a clown,” he said at last—vapidly, waiting for something more.

Nugent nodded; two quick jerks. “I didn’t understand it at the time—and I don’t mean I was wrong to admire him. Gosh no! When he got married … I guess you’ve probably heard he was homosexual?”

“I hadn’t, but—” He dismissed it with a wave.

“But that was typical, you see! The Truth of Science, Liberal Causes, Marriage and the Family …”

“Mr. Nugent,” he said—again the young man’s first name had escaped him—“you seem to be telling me that you have no beliefs, you feel like a clown. It seems to me that with a mind like yours—an extraordinary mind, if you’ll forgive my saying so—”

“Mind! Oh yes, certainly!” He was smiling, ready to burst out any moment into raucous laughter.