Mickelsson's Ghosts, John Gardner [well read books .TXT] 📗

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 he 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