“It may not surprise you to learn that the number one cause of ‘shell shock’ as we used to call it, among war veterans, or posttraumatic stress disorder as we call it now, is not actually due to the experience of shelling, or the fear of their own deaths, but by encounters had with corpses.
“It’s why the old man in ‘The Monkey’s Paw,’ who perhaps lived in a time before the funeral parlor business got so big, and who might have been a war veteran himself, would not have wanted to open the door to find his three-days-dead son on the other side, and why the old woman in Bosnia swept the doorway to make sure her beloved daughter wouldn’t come home. It’s why the fear of the dead, and the conviction that they are evil—our utter aversion to them—has persisted and influenced so many of our rituals and beliefs. And, as with anything so feared, there are corresponding obsessions and fascinations. That will be the focus of our next class.”
There were no questions. The students seemed vaguely disoriented, as they often did on Putrefaction Day, and Mira let them go ten minutes early. They gathered their things in silence. As they filed out past her desk, Perry unplugged the slide projector and wound the cord carefully. As she packed up her things, he asked, “Are we meeting this afternoon, Professor?”
Mira looked at her watch. It was Tuesday, and Clark would be eager to be relieved of the twins, who had been especially cranky that morning—tossing their Cheerios around the kitchen, hollering at Mira in their musical, unintelligible chatter. Clark had said, “Don’t be late,” as Mira hurried out the door.
“Clark,” she’d said, stopping, turning, “I’ll try not to be, but I have a job. I have students, and colleagues, and emails, and phone calls—”
Clark held up a hand, shaking his head. “No need to list all the things you have, Mira. I get it. See you when you can manage it.”
“Clark,” she’d said, holding out her hands—not as if she were reaching for him, she realized, but more as if she were offering him her wrists to slash. She’d said his name again, but he’d gone into the bathroom and shut the door.
She looked now at Perry.
All weekend she’d thought about their project. She had a hundred questions for him, and a strange bright spot of hope about the future. Despite herself (how well she knew the foolishness of putting the cart before the horse), she’d thought of a title: The American Campus: Sex, Superstition, and Death.
It was, she had to admit to herself, the first sense she’d had since the twins were born that she might have another book in her, and a continuing academic career.
“Well,” she said to Perry. “Yes, we should meet. But I’ll need to leave within the hour. Childcare.”
She shrugged, but felt a soggy lump in her throat that she thought must have to do with the twins, and the way, that morning, the boys had looked up from their high chairs as she bent over to kiss them, their faces wet with milk and a few stuck-on Cheerios, and how she’d been too worried about what their reaction would be to her leaving (and what Clark’s reaction to their reaction would be) to actually say good-bye. They were babbling in their sad foreign language, and she had to push down, as she always did, her fear that there was something wrong, that this was not just your routine “delayed language acquisition,” and as perfectly normal as the pediatrician had insisted, but something much larger, much more predictive of future horrors. Clark refused to talk about it except to say, “You blame me, I suppose?”
“Why would I blame you?”
“Because I’m the one raising your kids, I suppose.”
Everything, even the sounds that came out of their toddlers’ mouths, was a minefield between them now.
She couldn’t say good-bye. Instead, she’d waited until they were busy with their plastic airplane spoons again to sneak out the front door, pulling it closed behind her without making a sound.
20
“I’m in love, man.”
Craig was sitting at the edge of his bed. It was a Saturday night, mid-November, and Perry had just finished writing a paper on Socrates’ belief that rational self-criticism could free the human mind from the bondage of illusion. He didn’t want to talk to his roommate about Nicole Werner.
“Great, man,” he said.
“I’m serious,” Craig said. “I know you think I’m an asshole, but—”
“Well, who’s to say an asshole can’t fall in love?”
Perry deliberately kept his back turned to Craig’s side of the room, hoping he’d take the hint.
“You’re not fooling me,” Craig said.
Perry couldn’t help it. He turned around. “Okay,” he said. “So, what is it I’m not fooling you about, Craig?”
“You’re in love with her, too. You’ve probably been in love with her since kindergarten or something. It galls you that I’m dating her. You’re going nuts.”
“Jesus Christ,” Perry said, leaning back, looking at the ceiling. “You’re so full of shit, Craig. You’d be saying that about anyone you were dating. You think the whole world’s just watching you, burning with envy. But you know what? News flash: We’re not.”
Craig snorted, as if Perry had confirmed his suspicions by denying them. It was one of the many, many infuriating things about his roommate. You could not win with Craig Clements-Rabbitt. You either confessed or you were lying.
“Look,” Perry said, and inhaled. “Even if I’d been madly in love with Nicole Werner since kindergarten, I’d have fallen out of love with her by the time I realized she was stupid enough to date someone like you—not to mention this sorority bullshit, which seems about as stupid as it’s humanly possible to get.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Craig asked.
Perry shook his head.
“Huh?” Craig prodded.
“Forget it,” Perry said.
“So she likes her sorority, Perry. I think it’s cute. You have to admit, she looks incredible in a string of pearls. And that was one helluva float they decorated for Homecoming.”
“If you say so.”
“I say so. And you know so.”
“What happened to all your cynicism, man?”
“Well, then I fell in love with Nicole Werner. Just like you did, back in Bad Ass.”
“Jesus Christ,” Perry said. “Why do we have to talk about this? Why do we have to talk at all.”
“Because you won’t admit it to me, or to yourself. You’re in love with Nicole.”
Perry tossed up his hands. “Okay, Craig. Okay. If I ‘admit’ I’m in love with your girlfriend, will you shut the fuck up? Will that make you feel like a Big Man? Like the Big Campus Stud with the girl we’d all die to get our hands on?”
“How about you admit it first, and I’ll decide after that?”
“Okay,” Perry said, and cleared his throat, rolled his eyes heavenward. “Let me see. The first time I saw Nicole Werner in Mrs. Bell’s kindergarten classroom, clutching a crayon in one hand and a piece of construction paper in the other, I thought to myself, There’s the only girl I’ll ever love. I sure as hell hope she doesn’t end up dating my roommate in college, because then I’ll have to kill myself.”
Craig nodded. “I knew it,” he said.
“So, you’re going to shut up now?”
“No,” Craig said, and he went on to tell Perry about their date that night. Pizza at Knockout’s. Hours afterward at Starbucks, holding hands. A long walk across the Commons in a bright, sparkling snow. He’d walked her back to her room, and kissed her outside her door.
“Did I tell you yet that I’m in love?” he asked Perry.
“I think you might have mentioned that,” Perry said.
21
Craig knew it was a bad idea to walk by the sorority. He’d promised Perry he wouldn’t, and his father, and he’d managed to get through the entire month of September without doing so, without visiting any of the old haunts, except that one day he’d stood outside Godwin Honors Hall in September. Now, it was October.
Where had September go
ne?
Craig had simply sleepwalked through it, it seemed. He woke up in the mornings and realized that, somehow, he’d done his homework. He’d have only the vaguest recollection of doing it, but there it would be on his laptop: an essay on the Ptolemaic strategy waiting to be taken to the lab to be printed up. The notes he took in his classes were in his own handwriting, so he had to have taken them himself, but it was like that story “The Elves and the Shoemaker.” Craig just woke up and found all the work had been done, as if by elves, or some other self.
That morning he woke to hear Perry running water in the kitchen, nuking something. Through the other wall he could hear a thudding bass from the neighbor’s stereo. Outside, the masses of blackbirds that had taken to roosting in the trees outside their apartment windows were already cawing and squawking. The black arrow of one’s shadow passed over his window shade. He was going to have to get out of bed, he knew, and he knew that once he did that, he was going to walk by the Omega Theta Tau house.
“Pal,” his father had said on Saturday when he’d called. “You don’t sound right. Are you depressed? Are they harassing you there? Any problems? Memory? Et cetera?”
“No, Dad. No one’s harassing me. And, yeah, I guess I’m a little depressed. I wouldn’t be any less depressed anywhere else, though. And I think I’m okay in the head. As good as I’m going to be again, I guess.”
“You’re sure no one’s giving you a hard time?”
“No one,” Craig said, realizing, not for the first time, that maybe he’d hoped they would. Maybe he’d come back here hoping to be hounded off campus, ridiculed, killed. Where were the outraged sorority sisters? Why hadn’t they chased him down on the Commons and ripped him limb from limb? Had they forgotten about Nicole? Shouldn’t there be daily protests outside the administration building?
How could they have let Nicole Werner’s killer back in?
But Nicole’s death, it seemed, was last year’s news. He hadn’t overheard a word about it anywhere. If people recognized him, they didn’t show it. If his professors made the connection between Nicole’s death and his name, they kept it to themselves. Maybe back at Godwin Honors Hall there were still some flyers posted to the bulletin boards, or a memorial in the lobby or something, but there wasn’t anything else anywhere else on campus.
He dragged himself out of bed. He was packing up his laptop, pulling a sweatshirt over his grungy T-shirt, saying, “See ya later,” to Perry, and trying to get out of the apartment quickly enough that Perry couldn’t ask him where he was headed.
He was headed there. He hadn’t even glimpsed it, he realized, since that last night in March. Back then.
Back then, Craig had hated the Omega Theta Tau house and the way, each time he walked across campus to it, the front door would open for Nicole and swallow her whole. There was always some blonde standing in the shadows beyond the threshold, and the door would swing closed, and Craig knew he wouldn’t get her back until whatever party, or pledging, or tea, or secret meeting, or special election of floral arrangement committee members, or selection of the menu for the next Founders Formal that night was over.
How many times had he walked by the Omega Theta Tau house (its brooding brown and blond bricks, the wraparound porch, the long windows, the eaves crawling with ivy) after he’d started dating Nicole, just to see if the candles were still flickering in the rooms beyond the windows?
And the guys hanging around.
Those frat guys with their handshakes and their collars turned up. Tossing a football, hard. The smack of it hitting their hands.
“Maybe you could think about a house, you know, for next year? It’s not too late. Plenty of guys rush their sophomore years,” Nicole said one night as he was walking her from Godwin Honors Hall to the Omega Theta Tau house.
“Why?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, sweet and pouty. “It would just, maybe, make things easier, you know.”
“What’s hard now?”
“I don’t know. I mean, there’s a lot of social stuff. The sorority likes it, you know, if your dates are Greek. When I’m living in the house next year, there might be a bit more, I don’t know, pressure or something to be dating a frat guy.”
“Nicole,” Craig said, speaking slowly, as if to a child, humoring her, but, he hoped, radiating affection at the same time. “I’m not going to be one of those assholes. I mean, I think your whole sorority sister stuff is cute. But you’re a girl. It’s all about hair and makeup for you, and shaving chocolate onto gelato, and decorating floats. But if I joined one of those things I’d have to, I don’t know, wear a beanie propeller or shave my pubic hair or something.”
“What? Is that what you think?”
“Okay, not that maybe. But something equally dumb, and obnoxious. Those guys are all about dumb and obnoxious. I’d rather die than live in a houseful of those kinds of guys.”
Nicole hadn’t said anything. She’d grown quiet.
Sometimes, when she sulked, Craig glimpsed a single dimple at the right corner of her mouth, and he could imagine her as a toddler then, mad about something: A teddy bear. A lollipop. It made him want to give her anything she wanted.
“But I’ll think about it,” he said. “I understand why you think that would make things easier.”
“Really?” she asked, turning to him, taking both his hands in hers, kissing them.
He’d hated having to let go of those hands—soft and white as little cashmere mittens—and watch her walk away from him, sway up the paving stones to the front door of that house in her silver sandals, some meaty frat guy watching her ass from the porch of the frat house next door.
Now he walked across campus as quickly as he could, long strides, without looking up. He had a reason for going to the Omega Theta Tau house today, although the reason was only a half-formed idea in his head, a kind of dreamy inclination that had begun at the Roper Library a few days earlier. He’d gone there to check out a book his Western Mind professor had put on reserve, but the book had already been checked out, so Craig had found himself at a computer instead, plugging Nicole’s name into the friendly Google rectangle and coming up with about four hundred and twenty hits—mostly local newspaper accounts of the accident, which he’d read a hundred times already, and a few reports from the Bad Axe Times, including an obituary, and a couple of articles from the school newspaper calling for his blood, and then lamenting his readmittance to the university, all of which he’d also seen and gotten used to.
But then he came upon one with a photograph of the Omega Theta Tau house: an entire orchard of cherry trees being planted in the two acres that stretched between the south end of their property and the Presbyterian church next door.
The Nicole Werner Memorial Cherry Orchard.
How, on his many Google visits, had he missed this?
Fifteen, twenty trees, and a line of sorority sisters in black dresses and black sunglasses holding hands before those trees as if they were worshipping them, their gleaming sorority hair lit up by the sun, their heads bowed.
In the branches of the trees were bright blossoms. In the background, some shining cars.
Craig had zoomed in on the photograph, leaned forward until his face was only a few inches from the screen. With the photo enlarged, he was able to recognize some of the sorority sisters who were holding one another’s hands. Nicole had introduced him to some of them while crossing campus, or standing in line at the Bijou, or looking up from their milkshakes at Pizza Bob’s.
(“Craig, this is my sister Allison. This is Joanne. This is Skye. This is Marrielle.”)
Back then, they’d all looked the same to him. Whether blond (mostly) or dark-haired, they each appeared to Craig like cheap knockoffs of Nicole—girls who were trying hard but could only dream of being as bright-eyed, as pink-cheeked, as purely beautiful as she was.
Nicole had accused him of being unfriendly. It was December by then, and they’d been together for two months (which to him see
med like a lifetime, by far the longest he’d ever dated a girl), and she’d said, “You don’t make eye contact with my sisters. They think you’re unfriendly.” He agreed to try harder, albeit reluctantly. But the only time he met any of her sorority sisters again after that was when he’d already pissed them off by pushing his way into a Greek-only party:
Two a.m., and Nicole had said she’d meet him outside the Omega Theta Tau house at midnight. Craig had stood around for what seemed like long enough, and then he’d sat on the front stoop, calling her dorm room over and over. (Like Perry, Nicole didn’t own a cell phone. Verizon, it seemed, had not yet made its sales pitch to Bad Axe.) He was thinking that eventually she’d pick up, and explain that she’d waited outside the OTT house but hadn’t seen him, and so had walked herself back to Godwin. He was thinking she’d say how sorry she was, and ask if he would come by to give her a good-night kiss. The worst-case scenario would be that Josie would answer and sound pissed off to hear his voice, but at least she’d offer some explanation for what had happened to Nicole.
But there was no answer at all in Nicole’s dorm room, and not a single girl came out the front door of the sorority house. Craig could hear the music thumping away inside, along with the occasional burst of wild laughter, the occasional girlish scream, sounding as if someone was being tickled with something surprisingly sharp. He’d already tried to look in the windows a few times, but they were high, tall windows, and the party seemed to be taking place in the basement, out of sight. The only partiers he’d managed to glimpse were some guy passed out on a couch and two girls appearing to be trying to read each other’s palms.
There was a hired thug at the door: some hulking guy in a black shirt and black pants, holding a walkie-talkie in his hand, who did not look as if he were now or had ever been a college student. The thug would stand up and shrug his shoulders menacingly each time Craig came around the front door, and then shake his head, looking at Craig. When Craig went to the back door, there was always a sorority sister there—a different one each time—who would cross her arms over her breasts as if Craig were about to grab them, and, in this pretzel shape, manage to say something into a walkie-talkie while watching Craig warily until he went away.