They kept walking, past their Starbucks, back to the dorm so she could start on the roses. They’d changed the topic to how crazy it was that someone had spray-painted a different word under every Stop sign in town, so the signs read, STOP WAR, STOP SHRUBBERY, STOP STOPPING, STOP UP, STOP OVER, STOP DIAPER RASH, etc. They speculated about which campus group would have done it, or if it was just one weird guy, or maybe high school students—who knew? Craig had his arms wrapped around her, and his mouth and nose were full of the smell and taste of her red wool scarf. His hands were so numb he had to look at them every few feet to make sure the trig book was still in them.
Then Craig saw him again: up ahead, that same guy who’d come out of the Omega Theta Tau house just before Nicole. He was walking out of the bank in his blue jacket, stuffing his wallet into the back pocket of his khaki pants.
“There he is again,” Craig said, pointing.
“Who?” Nicole asked absently. She wasn’t even looking in the direction he was pointing.
“That guy who was in your house. That man.”
Nicole looked around this time, seeming to scan the horizon, not finding anything of interest. “So?”
“I just want to know who he is,” Craig said. “Who is he, Nicole?”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said. “I can’t even see who you’re pointing at.” She was looking in the exact opposite direction. The guy turned around then, and Craig was sure he looked right at them, as if he’d known they were there, as if he were looking for them.
There was a patch on the guy’s jacket pocket. Craig could see it clearly now: “EMT.”
“He’s an ambulance driver or something,” Craig said, more to himself than Nicole.
“So?” she said.
“Why does he hang out at your sorority? Why is he always there?”
Nicole held a hand up to her forehead and looked in the wrong direction again, and then said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about Craig. There’s no EMT hanging out at the sorority.”
Craig looked at her and said, “How did you know he was an EMT?”
“You just said it,” she said, and seemed to stomp her foot a little in frustration. “Sheesh!”
“No, I didn’t,” Craig said. “I said ‘ambulance driver,’ after I saw there was an EMT patch on his pocket.”
“Same thing,” she said.
“It’s not,” he said.
She continued looking around, exactly where the guy was not standing, and then the guy turned his back and stepped into the street, and a white truck pulled into the intersection, blocking Craig’s view, and by the time it had passed, the man was gone and Craig was staring at nothing but a brick wall.
Nicole got on her tiptoes and kissed his cheeks. “Okay, I guess this is where we say good-bye,” she said. “You’re going back to Starbucks?”
“Without you?”
“Why not?” she asked. “You’ll study better without me there anyway. I’ll see you at dinner, okay?”
“Okay,” Craig said, feeling a little bit like he’d been duped in some kind of card trick—not an unpleasant one, just confusing—and then she was half-walking, half-skipping away from him in the direction of Godwin Hall.
28
Professor Polson’s lecture that day concerned the soul.
“In some cultures, you can never speak the name of the deceased person again because the soul might hear its name and come looking for its body. Or, worse, the body might come looking for its soul.
“In fact, the tradition of cremation, which seems to us one of the most modern means for dealing with human remains, has its origins in this impulse. If the body is burned to ashes, there can be no reinhabiting, no return.
“Some anthropologists believe that many mourning customs originally served the purpose of keeping the dead at bay. Schneerweiss—you read the translation of the article, right?—hypothesized that the reason widows were instructed to wear black for at least a year and to change their hairstyle was so as to be unrecognizable when their dead husbands came looking for them.
“Why,” Professor Polson asked, “might this be? Why would any self-respecting widow not be thrilled to have her dead husband return to her?”
Most of the class responded in unison, “Putrefaction!”
“Exactly. The fear, the aversion, that we think of as superstitious or religious is, in fact, based on physical reality. It’s based on experience. Difficult experience. So, primitive people, we see, cannot be so easily dismissed as the sort of fools we tend to think of them as. In actuality, they had a much closer, much more intimate experience with the dead than most of us will ever have—unless we go to war or into the mortuary arts. They knew what they were trying to avoid.”
She turned to the chalkboard, on which she’d written a quote from Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain:
What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so.
Perry tapped his pencil over a sentence from that day’s reading:
H. Guntert: Larve (Ger. Mask) is etymologically connected with the hidden spirits of the Kingdom of the Dead, the Lares (Lat.), and their name is cognate with latere (to be hidden or to keep oneself hidden) and Latona, the goddess of death (Leto in Greek), and gives expression to human’s immediate feeling about the corpse—the visible presence of the body, and the deepest concealment of the person.
He wanted to ask Professor Polson there in class, instead of in her office (where she often seemed too preoccupied about childcare to talk about the subject at any length), if she had any thoughts on this, if she thought that this idea of seeing the dead one’s body, and recognizing that his or her soul was no longer animating it, was the basis of even more superstition and folklore. He had, himself, some ideas about this.
But she was answering some bland question presented to her by Elwood Campbell about why, given the horrors of putrefaction, so many people were not repulsed by the dead, but fascinated by them, wanted to see pictures of them. “What about people who love to look at gore?” he asked, and snickered. Perry suspected Elwood was speaking for himself. He’d been one of the students who hadn’t lunged forward to get a closer look at Marilyn Monroe’s morgue photograph, and Perry had the impression it was because Elwood was already familiar with it, that he was probably one of those guys trolling the gore.com-type websites, or posting things on them.
“How about necrophilia types? Right?” Elwood prompted. “You know, people who want to have sex with corpses?”
A few of the girls shook their heads and glanced at one another uncomfortably, but Professor Polson didn’t bat an eye.
“‘And so all the night-tide I lie down by the side / Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride / In the sepulchre there by the sea…’ Poe,” she said, “was only one of many poets and philosophers who has described the death of a young woman as one of the most beautiful sights one could behold.”
“Yeah,” Elwood said, seeming to take this as affirmation of his opinion.
“Kind of puts the ‘fun’ back into funeral,” Brett Barber said, and almost everyone burst out laughing, but none laughed as hard as Elwood.
“On that note,” Professor Polson said, shaking her head, “we’re done for today. See you Tuesday.”