And, indeed, there he was—poor, sad, scroungy, familiar Lucas laid out under a sheet up to his shoulders, with what might have been a rope burn around his neck, his eyes closed.
“You knew of him,” Kurt repeated, and Mira, fighting the urge to bolt from the room, could not even manage to nod. She put a hand to her mouth, and stifled what might have turned into an actual scream if she hadn’t. Except for Perry, the other students had already left the room, thank God, but they were still out there stripping off scrubs, putting scrubs on, some still waiting to get their chance to see the autopsy room.
“Jesus Christ,” Jeff said. “Lucas?”
They talked for a while about Lucas and how, if there had been a most-likely-to-hang-himself award on campus, Lucas might have won it. The drugs. The posture. The delusions. The nihilistic books and music. All that world weariness carried around in his hemp backpack. Still, Mira couldn’t help but ask, “Do you think it had to do with Nicole Werner, with—”
“Shit yes,” Jeff said. “A kid thinks he’s had sex with a dead girl? Either he was mentally ill beforehand or he would have been after.”
Mira told him then about the cryptic, urgent call from the dean.
“I haven’t called him back yet,” she said. “It’s something urgent. What do you think he wants?”
“Nothing,” Jeff said. “Staples—you’re missing a couple. Or he wants to know if you need more. I know you don’t have tenure yet, Mira, and I’m familiar with all the fantasies a person without tenure has, but, believe me, Dean Fleming is just calling to ask you if you like his new tie or something. Go in and see him. The sooner you get it over with the better.”
Mira felt such a rush of warmth again she was afraid she’d melt into tears. She’d desperately missed—without even knowing it—having an adult male tell her that everything would be okay. How direly she’d needed a man who, despite the obvious flaws in his personality, seemed competent, and sane, and full of goodwill toward her. All Mira could manage was to stare at him in wonder, and gratitude, and then Jeff was standing up, handing Mira the purse she’d dropped on the table.
“Go,” he said. “Get thee to the dean. I have two hours before your little urchins destroy me with the secret linguistic and mathematical knowledge I was so foolish as to impart to them.”
“Oh, Jeff.”
“‘Oh, Jeff’ nothing. Go.”
He pulled her up from her chair by the arm and pointed her toward the door.
74
“Well, go ahead and fucking tell me, man. You think I can’t handle it? What? Are you having regular wet dreams about my girlfriend? You think I don’t know you have a hard-on five miles long for Nicole?”
“Fuck you, Craig.”
“No, fuck you, Perry. Just tell me. You know you’ve been just shitting your pants and swimming in your own piss since I started dating Nicole, so why don’t you just get it over with, you jealous fuck? Spew your guts. You and your fucking Boy Scouts back in Bad Ass—did you used to sit around in your tents and jerk off to her yearbook picture or something? Nicole told me all about how some other dude knocked up your hometown girlfriend, so maybe you couldn’t get it up, or—”
Perry shoved the table into Craig, and the salad he’d been eating and the manicotti that had been congealing on Craig’s plate splashed over the edge of the table, splattering onto the linoleum with a sick wet-crap sound, and then Perry was over the table, not knowing how he’d gotten there, and his left hand was full of Craig’s T-shirt and the other one was a fist making contact with Craig’s nose, and then they were down on the ground, Craig’s back slapping onto the manicotti and salad, and then Perry was staring into his roommate’s bloody nose and hearing himself shout, “I’ve fucked Nicole, you fucking fool. Half of fucking Godwin Hall has fucked your virgin girlfriend, you stupid, stupid, deaf, blind, fucking idiot.”
With each of the last six words, Perry lifted Craig off the floor by his T-shirt and pushed him back down, and then they were panting and bleeding and staring into one another’s eyes, and something so horrible and honest and intimate passed between them at that moment (even worse than Perry’s sudden realization that they had become, somehow, at some point, friends) that, for a horrible moment Perry felt that he was Craig, looking up, seeing his own face looking down—that they had switched places, switched faces, and bodies, and selves, and become each other.
Then some beefy guy in a steamy white apron hauled Perry up by the back of his shirt and shoved him toward the cafeteria exit.
75
“I think,” Dean Fleming said, making a motion in the air in front of his face as if trying to coax the words out of his own mouth, “some of this is, at best, questionable. Or, I should say”—more coaxing—“it raises questions. Or, at least, one could see how questions might be raised.”
Mira nodded. She had no idea what he was trying to say.
She was having a hard time concentrating on his face, which seemed oddly distorted by the pale sun shining through his window, directly onto him, as if he were standing in headlights. She tried to appear as if she were carefully considering his words as she glanced around his office. For some reason, which she felt sure was not intended to be ironic and also had nothing to do with the Edgar Allan Poe poem, Dean Fleming kept a taxidermied raven on his bookshelf, just over his left shoulder. It had the beady eye of Poe’s bird, and Mira could easily have imagined it squawking, “Nevermore!” except that part of its beak had crumbled away and one of its wings was mostly sawdust. Mira couldn’t keep herself from staring at it. Dean Fleming had pulled a copy of her first-year seminar syllabus out of a file drawer and placed it on his desk between them. Now he was directing his comments to the syllabus, as if those six stapled pages could hear him.
“I’ve received a number of such questions from parents, which is, of course, of less concern to me than the concerns raised by the students themselves—”
Mira recognized instantly the reference, the deference, the dean was making to a recent Honors College meeting, during which numerous professors had excitedly, resentfully called for a moratorium on what was called “parental meddling.” Implications had been made that the dean was passively encouraging this meddling by not actively putting a stop to it. It had been generally agreed upon by Honors College faculty that this generation of college students had parents who were over-involved. That the students were “adults,” and that when it came to issues of curriculum, grading, et cetera, the faculty should not have to answer to parents, was the subject of several long monologues during that meeting, during which Mira had watched the clock with a rising sense of despair and panic because she had told Clark she’d be home a half hour ago.
Now she nodded to the raven, and Dean Fleming continued to speak to her syllabus on his desk.
“I think we need to reconsider,” he said, “not only the direction your teaching is taking, but also your research.”
This time Mira was surprised enough that she looked straight at him, hard enough that he had to look up and meet her eyes. The light was pouring down baptismally on his head, and she noticed that either he had a bald spot that was just sprouting new growth or the cold November light was somehow singeing away a round place in his full head of hair. She tried to think about how to say what she was about to say before she said it, but her heart had started to race, and she simply blurted out, trying to keep her voice from shaking, “I felt that you seemed quite supportive of my new project when we last—”