Part 9 (1/2)

”No,” Josie said. ”Why would I be? I'm not even s.e.xually active right now.”

At this, Craig had snorted, and said, ”I'd say right now you're pretty s.e.xually active.” He hadn't intended to sound so sarcastic, but the whole thing was just so f.u.c.king stupid. He'd been minding his own business when she'd come into his room and taken off her clothes and pulled him down onto her in his bed.

But at that point, she was already out of his bed, pulling her little silky panties up over her wildly lush and dark-haired p.u.s.s.y, and then she was looking around for her top, and Craig sighed, too loudly, and flopped down on his back and said, ”I'll go see if somebody on the floor will give me a condom,” before he realized she was crying.

”I can't believe this,” Josie said, pulling her lacy tank top down over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

Craig sat up at the edge of the bed then. Luckily, he'd completely deflated, but he pulled his towel up off the floor and put it over his d.i.c.k anyway. ”Can't believe what?” he asked, but by then she was dressed, and she'd unlocked his door, slipped out of it, and slammed it behind her. For just a second, in the s.p.a.ce she opened as she left, Craig could hear the party going on in the hallway-all the hardworking students celebrating the harvest. Somehow he pictured them in plaid s.h.i.+rts and gingham dresses-ruddy with good health, living their productive lives, while he searched the dresser for clean boxers, put them on, got back in his messed-up bed, and shoved the buds of his iPod as deeply into his ears as he could.

But now, as he rounded the corner, jacketless, to G.o.dwin Honors Hall-which looked stately and decrepit at the same time under a low, bright moon-he was really hoping that maybe Josie wasn't so mad at him anymore, or at least had never told Nicole what had happened. Truly, he never really thought he stood a chance with Nicole anyway (because, for one thing, he knew he'd never have enough courage or imagination to figure out how to get together with a girl like that: every girl he'd ever hooked up with had made the moves on him first, and it seemed unlikely that Nicole would be that kind of girl), but it had surprised him how sad he was, after the s.h.i.+t with Josie, to think he'd blown that chance with Nicole without ever even actually having it.

When he came up the walk to the dorm, Lucas was smoking a cigarette under an elm tree in the courtyard.

”So!” Lucas called out. ”Did you strike out again, young man?”

Craig held out his hand for a cigarette, but Lucas patted his pocket and said, ”I'm out,” and then, ”She's not for you anyway, Craig. She's one of those girls who's waiting for marriage, and then she wants two kids and an SUV, and wants to stay home and bake cookies all day while you slave away at some s.h.i.+tty job. On the other hand, you've got 'f.u.c.k-'em-and-dump-'em' written all over you.”

”What?” Craig asked, sincerely astonished by this a.s.sessment. ”Go to h.e.l.l, Lucas. I do not have 'f.u.c.k-'em-and-dump-'em' written all over me.”

”Yeah, you do, Craig. You look at girls like you hate 'em.”

”What? I do not.”

Lucas shrugged, and tossed his cigarette over the wrought-iron fence and onto the sidewalk.

”Okay,” he said. ”Sorry. Whatever. But I just don't see you taking Little Miss Suns.h.i.+ne there on a walk through the park before you propose to her.”

To this, Craig said nothing. He could think of nothing to say. He watched the shadows of other students pa.s.s on the other side of the tiny glittering windows of G.o.dwin Honors Hall. They knew what the h.e.l.l they were doing there. For one thing, they hadn't gotten into the Honors College just because their father was buddies with the dean.

”Besides,” Lucas asked, ”wouldn't you rather have a really great b.l.o.w. .j.o.b than a really nice date? I mean, I just don't picture that little virgin on her knees with her sweet red lips wrapped around your ma.s.sive man tool.”

”Shut the f.u.c.k up,” Craig said.

But there was no animation in it.

No energy.

Lucas was probably right, he knew.

Lucas was often right.

Craig had never, he realized, been on an actual date. And the idea of one-asking for one, going on one-seemed like another one of those ten million things that all the normal guys, wearing khaki pants and carrying bouquets of daisies, would know exactly how to do, but which would be about as easy for Craig as building a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p and then going for a zip around the earth in it.

”Hey, sorry,” Lucas said to Craig's silence. ”I didn't mean to-”

”Forget it,” Craig said, more to himself than to Lucas. ”Let's just go smoke a bowl.”

”Splendid idea, dude,” Lucas said. ”Let us indeed go smoke a bowl.”

17.

Perry Edwards was waiting outside her office when Mira got there. She wasn't surprised. There'd been a look on his face when she dismissed the cla.s.s at the end of the first session, and a hesitancy, as if he wanted to stay behind, had more to say. But Mira was already late for a committee meeting and had made a conscious effort to avoid eye contact, to gather her books and papers up in a way that would convey how rushed she was. She told herself that it was because she was rushed, but she knew there was something else, too-Perry Edwards's intensity during cla.s.s combined with what he'd said that day in the hallway when he was imploring her to let him audit: ”I have some fundamental questions about death, questions I'm trying to find answers to,” he'd said. ”Because of Nicole. And not just philosophical questions. I have metaphysical questions. Physical questions.”

There was such an urgency in the way he'd said it that Mira had signed his override without asking for any further explanation.

At best, she thought, this was a true philosopher-a metaphysician in the making, one of the rare twenty-year-olds she occasionally encountered who actually had a mission, and the mind with which to accomplish it.

At worst, he was just another morbid college kid, and Mira knew all about those. Who knew better than she the fascination people had with death? Every year she took her cla.s.s on a field trip to the local funeral parlor and the university hospital morgue, where she had plenty of opportunity to observe their rapt attention to the embalming table, their hushed awe upon being led through the bas.e.m.e.nt to the room with the refrigerators. When there happened to be no dead bodies at the moment, someone-often the most squeamish-seeming of the girls-would express bitter disappointment. And when they were ushered into the autopsy room to find a body still on the coroner's cabinet, there would be a rush of excited breathing, stillness, awe. Occasionally someone fainted, but no one ever left because they didn't want to look.

Still, Perry Edwards's interest seemed bigger than morbid fascination. During that first cla.s.s he had an answer to every question. This material wasn't new to him. He'd been doing his own research, for his own reasons. That's what had made her think she might not want to talk to him after cla.s.s-that she was not, perhaps, ready to hear about those reasons.

”See you next time,” she'd said that day at the end of cla.s.s, without looking up.

”Thank you, Professor Polson,” he'd said as he stepped past her, out the door, and into the hallway.

Now he was standing outside her office door, and Mira cleared her throat so she wouldn't startle him when she came up behind him. There was no one else in the corridor this early on a Thursday morning. He was looking at something she'd tacked up two semesters earlier, a photograph she'd taken in the Balkans during her Fulbright year: a color image of a charnel house in a small village in the mountains.

It had been, in the nineteenth century, the custom in the village to exhume corpses from the local cemetery a few months after their burial, and to display the skulls and long bones, brightly painted with the names and dates of their former owners. Mira had taken the photograph from a distance, but with a zoom lens on a sunny day, and the effect, when the photograph was printed up, startled even her: A dizzying mult.i.tude of skulls stared from their dry sockets at a little gathering of tourists, staring back.

Below the photo, Mira had taped an explanation of how the villagers believed that the dead could escape from their graves, and that the only way to avoid this was to dig up the bodies, to make sure they were in their graves, and that the flesh had fully decomposed. That way, if they came upon a corpse on which the flesh hadn't rotted away (a potential ”walker”), the villagers could go through the stake-through-the-heart ritual.

Once or twice, according to village folklore, they came upon an empty grave, and panic broke out. It was said that the village lost three quarters of its nonelderly population during one such panic. They packed up their wagons and moved, leaving behind any grandparents too enfeebled to come along. The year Mira visited the village it was little more than a field of a daisies with a stone church at the center of it, and its only attraction was the charnel house.

”Oh,” Perry said, turning. ”Professor Polson. I don't want to bother you. I just wonder if I could-”

Mira handed him the book she held in her hands, Nils Stora's Burial Customs of the Skolt Lapps, as she felt around in the darkness of her leather bag for her keys, coming up, first, with the purple nipple of one of the boys' bottles: Despite everything she'd read or been told about what she should do, Mira still let the twins carry their bottles around with them when she took them to the store, or to the park. Sometimes the nipples were dislodged, or dirtied, or they wound up on the floor of the car. Who knew how long ago she might have stuffed this one into her bag? Perry Edwards looked at it, and then looked away, as if Mira had shown him something intimate-which, she supposed, it was.

She reached in again, and this time snagged the key ring, which was attached to a rubber heart that Clark had given to her years ago. (”Squeeze me,” it read, and when you did, a little mechanical voice said, ”I WUV you.”) She unlocked the door and ushered Perry in, and he sat in the chair across from her desk, looked around, and then handed Mira's book back to her.

”Are you . . . ? Is this . . . time? An okay . . . ?” he stammered politely.

”It's fine,” Mira said. She cleared the books she had piled on her own chair, stacking them on the floor at her feet, and then sat down at her desk, folded her hands in her lap, and said, ”How can I help you?”

”I've been reading,” Perry said, unzipping his backpack on the floor and leaning over it. He took out a book with the Roper Library's generic brown cover, and held it up as if it would explain something on its own.

She took the book from him. It was G. Melvin's Handbook of Unusual Phenomena-book twenty-four on the suggested reading list. It was a text Mira had put on loan in the G.o.dwin Hall dormitory library several years before, but that, to her knowledge, no one had ever checked out. She kept it there for students who might want to explore Ukrainian death and burial superst.i.tion further-in particular an account (late for such an account) of a teenage girl killed in a farm accident circa 1952 in a primitive village in the foothills. The girl was said to have managed an escape from her tomb, and the proof of this was that, although she was not seen in the flesh, whenever a photograph was taken in the village in the year following her death, the girl's shadowy image could be seen in the upper left- or right-hand corner.

In the Handbook were several grainy photos of stiff and formally dressed peasants staring expressionlessly into the camera. In the corner of each photograph a dark-haired girl, blurred, seemed to be moving as quickly as possible out of the photographer's range. And as if that weren't enough, the girl had appeared to every man in the village, in the night, unclothed, demanding s.e.x. Apparently, the men obliged her, however reluctantly, and during the act she bit them-a few on the neck, a few on the arm, and one, mercilessly, on the nipple, which she bit clean off his torso before disappearing. Each man died in a farming accident within a few weeks of the event.

But what Mira wanted the students to read was the part that followed this: How the body was dug up, and how the body was found in her coffin, a year after the girl's death, good as new. Her flesh was pink. Her hair had grown luxuriously around her shoulders. Her mouth was red, filled with blood. Her teeth had grown, and they glistened. Only her clothes had rotted away, revealing, of course, her beautifully gleaming b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

The village then managed to engage, at great expense, a cement truck to back up to the grave and fill it in, and the girl, whose name was Etta, never walked through the village again, and the farm accidents mysteriously drew to a halt-a fact the villagers attributed to the cementing-in of this tomb, not to the fact that their agricultural lifestyle was, within a few years, completely eradicated when a cardboard box factory moved into the village.

Melvin, the author, had been an ancient professor at Mira's undergraduate inst.i.tution and had given her the only B she'd ever received in college, but she still thought his was a brilliant a.n.a.lysis of the superst.i.tions of the period and the move from an agrarian to an urban culture that fueled them. This story of Etta, he said in the Handbook, was the last real ”vampire” story the world would ever know. In only another year or two, all the young adults who might have died tilling the land or harvesting the grain were working in that box factory or in shops in some Soviet metropolis, and the funerary traditions were forever changed. Instead of simple burials in wooden coffins in the churchyard, the whole commercial funeral business moved in, complete with embalming and sealed tombs and caskets that cost more than most families in the area made in a year.

”It's a good book,” Mira said to Perry, handing it back to him. ”I'm glad you thought to check it out.”