Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner

“Uranium, was it?” “Refuse is what it was,” the lawyer yelled, “refuse brought down here from Canada or New Jersey!” Then he doubled over, covering his mouth with his already clenched fist, for a coughing fit. As soon as it was over he pulled again at his cigarette, hollowing his cheeks.
    The conversation of the lawyer and Charley Snyder rippled into the conversation of the secretary and the doctor. As if unaware what it was that had altered the tone of their talk, the two women wondered what the world was coming to, briefly troubled about the future of the secretary’s children. “So many strangers coming in with their different ideas,” the secretary said as if Mickelsson weren’t there. “Lot more Mormons these days, not that I gaht anything against the Mormons.”
    â€œCourse not,” Dr. Bauer said.
    â€œAnd all those people from New York City and so on, buying up the land so’s an ordinary person can’t afford it anymore—buying it and not even moving to it.”
    â€œBuying it for retirement, they say,” Dr. Bauer said, and briefly closed her eyes.
    For all his deafness, the lawyer somehow caught the secretary’s last remark and said to Snyder, as if it were he who’d made it, “Buying it to make the whole state of Pennsylvania their God damn garbage dump.”
    Mickelsson, listening with only half his mind, remembered “Punk” Atcheson, the grinning, freckle-faced, red-headed boy who’d first made friends with him when—timid, knowing no one—he’d transferred to the big highschool in Wausau. One day Mickelsson had been the weird outsider, the next it was as if he’d lived in Wausau all his life. Punk had been on the football team and a star in the highschool chorus, which Mickelsson had quickly joined. They’d become, as they say, inseparable. Again and again they’d gone into laughing fits—Mickelsson could no longer remember the reason—and had been thrown out of classes. That was what he wanted now, of course: a Punk Atcheson to let him through the door.
    Almost the instant he figured out his feelings, Mickelsson began to feel nothing at all, or nothing but the boredom and weariness he felt at faculty meetings. It was of course not that anyone had done anything wrong. His gloom had nothing to do with them—had more to do with his dream of the child in the spillway.
    And so, for these reasons and various others, when he looked back later almost the only image he retained was of the blurred silhouette of the lawyer’s torso and head against the window and, below, the doctor awkwardly twisted above her stack of gray papers, even her mouth twisted hard to one side (he could not see her eyes), signing her name, wherever there was an x, with her curled, long-fingered left hand.
    He also remembered, sometime much later, one joke they’d neglected to let him in on. When Mickelsson was introduced to the secretary, when he’d first arrived, the woman smiled warmly and exclaimed, “So you’re buying the Sprague place! You must have steady nerves!”
    â€œNo,” he’d said, then realized that that must be their name for it (his mind went briefly to Sprague the philosopher), then realized there must be something more he was missing. “Steady nerves?” he echoed.
    They were all laughing, Charley Snyder calling out, “Shame on you, Martha! You trying to make him change his mind?”
    Mickelsson had meant to press her for what she’d meant, though he’d assumed he more or less knew. It was an odd-looking house, “Pennsylvania Gothic,” as Tim had said, laughing. Mickelsson laughed now with the others, trying to concentrate on the continuing introductions—the lawyer and Charley Snyder; Dr. Bauer he’d met before—and when the introductions were over, something else coming up immediately, the joke he wasn’t sure