Dean Fleming waved his hand. Mira noticed, for the first time, a small dark ruby on his pinky. He seemed to notice her noticing it, and he tucked the hand away beneath his desk.
“I was laboring,” the dean said, “under a false impression.”
Mira leaned forward. “Which was…?”
“I didn’t realize it was so, so, so—death-laden, so popularist. Of course this sort of thing can work in some cases, but those cases are rare. We’re a research institution, Professor Polson, one of the most formidable in the country” (how many times had Mira heard this since her first on-campus interview here?) “and the field of anthropology is not, it seems to me, particularly well suited to the, the, the…”
Mira wiped her sweating palms on her knees, feeling the heat through the black tights she was wearing, as if her hands could burn straight through her clothes, melt her flesh into her flesh.
“Anyway,” he said, “it’s beside the point. The point is we can’t have you teaching Death Studies in our college, or doing ‘exposés’ concerning university tragedies of the magnitude of the Nicole Werner incident. I’m sure you see, yourself, how unseemly it is. How, how, how…”
“Dangerous?” Mira sputtered, unable to help herself.
“Yes,” Dean Fleming said defensively. “Yes, well, dangerous. But also unseemly. As I said. It isn’t done. For one thing, this fascination of yours is not material for a serious academic project. The sort of research you’re doing, and the teaching is, is—”
“—is what I was hired to teach, and to research. You were on my hiring committee, sir. Except for some improvements, the class I’m teaching follows the exact syllabus I presented at my interview, the one I recall you praising for its rigor. You said, and I believe it’s in my evaluation from last semester, that I brought something both to the college and to my research that was ‘dynamically different.’”
“That was prior to the Nicole Werner work.”
“The Nicole Werner work? What do you mean?”
“I’m talking about the suicide of one of our students, Professor Polson. You must certainly understand the seriousness of this, that—”
Suddenly, she understood:
Lucas.
He was already getting heat for Lucas. After every suicide, there was a witch hunt. Mira had been on college campuses long enough to understand that.
She swallowed. At least now she knew what she was dealing with. At least now she could address it head on. Blame had to be laid.
She looked from the bright spot on the dean’s head to the raven, and then down to the syllabus on his desk, and then back into Dean Fleming’s small, piercing eyes. She took a deep breath and said, “I certainly understand the seriousness of suicide, sir. It’s one of the things I try to bring to full light for my students. My major purpose in teaching the courses I teach is to deromanticize death, and to effectively convince a disbelieving segment of the population, youth, as to its permanence. Believe me, there were no students at the morgue today who don’t understand that now.”
“I’ve been informed that he was working with you. Lucas. That he’d—”
“He wasn’t working with me. I interviewed him about Nicole Werner, yes, and—”
“And he says as much in his goddamned suicide note, Professor Polson. Do you have any idea what this means?”
Mira shook her head. She could feel her blood beating at her temples and behind her knees. His suicide note. She said, nearly spluttering the words, “He didn’t commit suicide because of me.” Then she took a moment to think about it, and actually laughed out loud. “There were reasons that boy killed himself, and there was plenty the college could have done, but none of that had anything to do with me.”
“Well, maybe that’s true, but you were a faculty member aware of his problems, and—”
“And I informed Mental Health Services after the interview. I spoke with three therapists. I spoke with Lucas himself. I made an appointment for him. I did everything except walk him over there myself.”
“Well, you didn’t inform his parents, who, as you can imagine, are—”
Mira laughed again, involuntarily, in amazement. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Dean Fleming, I have a statement in my contract specifying that, under the Confidentiality of Academic Information Act, I can under no circumstances contact my students’ parents. The university is a closed system. Remember? I’m not to contact police, medical professionals, and surely not parents. Those were your exact words when I was hired. A closed system.”
He cleared his throat. He licked his lips. He paused for what seemed like a long time, and then he said, “You misunderstood. And this course of yours, it’s encouraging a death cult in our college.”
This time it was so funny Mira couldn’t even laugh. “I’m encouraging a death cult?” she asked.
“Yes. There are girls directly influenced by your class who have started a club devoted to trying to contact Nicole Werner and some other dead girl. They claim to be seeing ghosts. They’ve done some serious injury to themselves, and to the facility. Cutting. That sort of thing. Their candles caused a fire.”
Mira felt all the breath inside her leave. She waited for the dean to go on, but neither of them spoke, and finally she shook her head and said to the silence between them, “There are always crazy college girls. Those aren’t my students. You can’t blame me for what crazy coeds do in a dorm.”
Dean Fleming looked around him then, as if he’d lost his raven and was trying to locate it, and then he put his hands on his desk, folded, looked back at Mira, and said, “Believe it or not, there’s more.” He leaned a little closer, as if there were someone else in the room who might overhear. He said, “There’s the question of your relationships, Mira, which have been called to my attention. Your husband has informed me that you’re involved in a… situation. With a student. An extracurricular situation.”
Mira had then the sensation of having been hit by a blunt object, a blow to the head, and she remembered, suddenly, once, in the dark, getting out of bed and stumbling into a bookshelf, jarring a solid brass bookend off of it, and the blank, dull feeling when it smacked her just above her left temple.
Such surprise, it wasn’t even painful. The pain was somewhere so deep inside her it did not register on any physical scale. It took her several seconds to open her eyes again, blinking, and recover enough to say, “What? My husband? You heard from my husband?”
“Yes. But that’s only part of this. A part of it. I have my own concerns, my own reservations, about your relationship with Professor Blackhawk.”
“Jeff?”
“Yes.”
Yes.
The drive out of town to get her twins, passing, on the way, Dean Fleming, who was standing at a crosswalk.
Now, Mira understood that the blank expression on the dean’s face as they drove by had been his way of registering the two of them together, maybe adding it up with other things he’d suspected. Idle gossip in the faculty lounge. Hunches, glimpses. “Jeff?” she asked again. It was the only thing she could think to ask.
“In truth, it’s none of my business,” the dean said, “although it’s another delicate matter, and relationships between colleagues in a program as intimate as ours have to be discouraged. But I’m less concerned about Jeff Blackhawk than I am about Perry Edwards, who is a student. I know you know how seriously this university takes the crossing of the line between a student and a teacher, and I have to warn you, Mira, these are puritanical times we’re living in. You can’t expect to remain employed here and behave in a manner that is, that is, that is…”