There was a snort here and there, and a baffled huff. It was the same every year.
“Because,” Mira said, without missing a beat, “you, of all people, can’t tell me there’s no such thing as an attraction to this subject matter, since you have, yourselves, enrolled in a class about death and the dead. You had twenty other classes to choose from. Although I’d like to flatter myself that it’s my reputation as a stellar educator that makes this the most popular class at Godwin Honors College every year, I rather doubt it. There are other reasons, perhaps related to the fascination that, for instance, young women with almost no interest in poetry beyond Hallmark cards have for Sylvia Plath, and why Kurt Cobain, who barely lived long enough to write and sing more than a handful of decent songs, commands so many fans among teenage boys.
“These are the subjects,” Mira continued, looking around, catching the eyes of the students who looked the least impressed, “that I want you to explore, in as much depth, with as much critical analysis and personal reflection as you’re capable of, in this essay.”
She turned and sat back down behind her desk, and said, in a less impassioned tone, “On the class website you’ll find papers from previous years. Questions?”
The students were either looking at Mira or staring at their assignment sheets, some with their mouths hanging open. There were questions regarding font, and quotes, and the width of margins. Mira made it clear that ten pages meant ten pages. The frantic questions subsided when it became obvious that there would be no way around this, whether or not their high school teachers had counted the title page as a page, or allowed them to use two-inch margins and eighteen-point font.
“Okay,” Mira said, exhaling. “Finally. Putrefaction.”
There were titters, and a groan.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I’m afraid we can’t begin to understand the folklore and superstitions surrounding the dead until we understand the reality of death and decay. In our particular time and place, it’s the rare person who encounters putrefied human remains, but it has been less than a century that the technology and professional services allowing us to avoid this nasty reality have been around, and in most places on earth, they still don’t exist. So, the decay of the dead body remains a powerful psychic and cultural memory.
“I’m assuming you’ve all read the selection in your course packs from W.E.B. Evans’s The Chemistry of Death?”
A few heads nodded. Mira flipped the lights and pulled the screen down over the blackboard. “Okay. Perry, can you turn on the slide projector? First slide.”
The first image was a still from Dawn of the Dead. A “corpse” in ragged clothing was chasing a beautiful young girl across an emerald green lawn.
“You’re probably familiar with this movie. I imagine most of you also know the story ‘The Monkey’s Paw,’ in which a husband comes home to his wife with a monkey’s paw he’s been told will grant him three wishes. The first wish, which is for a sum of cash, results in their son’s death in a mining accident, and a life insurance payoff of that exact sum.
“The wife, several days after the son’s burial, in a state of unbearable grief, makes the second wish: for his return.
“She’s about given up hope when, late at night, the couple hears something slow and heavy and scraping coming up the walk. The wife rushes for the door, but the husband stops her. He seems to understand, in a way his wife doesn’t, what their son, returning after a few days spent in the grave, will be—so he uses the last wish to make his son go away.
“Now, let me ask you—this is your beloved only son, and you are responsible for his death. Would you open the door?”
There was a collective “No!” Karess Flanagan actually put her hands to her rosy cheeks, shaking her head.
“Well, why not?” Mira asked, pretending to be shocked by their callousness. “He’s your son. Your loving child. What are you afraid of?”
“He’s dead!”
“So? He’s back!” Mira imitated their tones, and they laughed.
“He won’t be the same,” Miriam Mason said. “He’s been buried.”
“He’ll be pissed as hell,” Tony Barnstone said.
“Maybe not.” Mira shrugged. “He’d probably understand that you just screwed up with that first wish, and then, after all, you used the next one to get him out of the grave.”
“Dead people are always pissed,” Tony said.
“Well, here’s a question then—why?” Mira asked. “What would turn someone who has been, say, kind and shy before death into this kind of monster after?” She used her pencil to point to the raging zombie in the movie still.
There was no answer.
“Perry? Next slide?”
The next slide was a photograph Mira had taken herself in Bosnia during her Fulbright year. In it, an old woman in a black dress was walking backward out of the doorway of her little cottage on a hillside. She was sweeping the threshold.
“This is a Bosnian woman whose only daughter had died of pneumonia a few days before I took this photo. I’d been in the village and was invited to the funeral, where I saw this woman throw herself onto the casket of her daughter, clawing at it. She eventually had to be pulled away by her sons. During the funeral procession and service, the woman collapsed to her knees in grief five or six times. But what she’s doing here”—Mira pointed with her pencil to the broom—“is sweeping the doorway while walking backward, exactly forty-eight hours after her daughter’s death, to ensure that the girl won’t come back.”
Some of the students were chewing on their pencils.
“Perry?”
He flipped to the next slide, which was as provocative as Mira allowed herself to get this early in the semester—a black-and-white morgue photo of Marilyn Monroe, laid out on a gurney, covered to the neck with a sheet. Her face was completely slack, her cheeks sunken and discolored, mottled along the cheekbones and forehead and nose, her hair combed back straight behind her head, her lips a thin grimace.
“This is Marilyn Monroe’s last photo,” Mira said.
There were the expected oh my gods and muffled cries of horror as the students started to recognize in the corpse’s distorted features the icon of sex and beauty with which they were familiar. Several students sat up and leaned over their desks to get a closer look. No one turned away.
“Perry?”
The next image was the famous shot of Marilyn Monroe standing over the subway grate, pretending to try to hold down the pleated skirt of her white dress.
“Thanks, Perry. You can turn the projector off,” Mira said. “So, as you now know from your reading, within twelve to fifteen hours of death, if the corpse is left untreated and unrefrigerated, the following changes take place:
“The corpse changes in color, usually to a kind of pinkish-purple. This is called hypostasis.”
Mira wrote the word on the board.
“Even earlier than twelve hours, depending on the weather, there will be massive swelling due to the build-up of gases in the body, which renders the facial features unrecognizable. Blisters rise on the surface of the skin, and burst, due to the shedding of the epidermis. This is called skin slippage.”
She wrote the word sacromenos on the board.
“This,” she told them, pointing, “is the Greek word for ‘vampire.’ Literally, it means ‘flesh made by the moon.’ You can imagine such flesh on the dead, can’t you, after skin slippage?”