But now, as he rounded the corner, jacketless, to Godwin 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 shit 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 shitty job. On the other hand, you’ve got ‘fuck-’em-and-dump-’em’ written all over you.”
“What?” Craig asked, sincerely astonished by this assessment. “Go to hell, Lucas. I do not have ‘fuck-’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 Sunshine 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 pass on the other side of the tiny glittering windows of Godwin Honors Hall. They knew what the hell 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 blow job 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 massive man tool.”
“Shut the fuck 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 spaceship 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 class 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 class 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 class 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 basement 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 class 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 class—that she was not, perhaps, ready to hear about those reasons.
“See you next time,” she’d said that day at the end of class, 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 multitude 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—”