"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 p.i.s.sed as h.e.l.l," 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 p.i.s.sed," 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 G.o.ds and m.u.f.fled cries of horror as the students started to recognize in the corpse's distorted features the icon of s.e.x 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 ma.s.sive 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?"

There were dazed-looking nods all around.

"So," Mira went on, "a few hours after skin slippage, there begins the escape of bloodstained fluids from the orifices and the liquefaction of the eyeb.a.l.l.s. Within twenty-four hours-again, depending on the weather-there will be the presence of maggots, and in another twenty-four hours, the shedding of nails and hair, and then the conversion of tissue into a semi-fluid ma.s.s, which, along with the buildup of ga.s.ses, will cause the abdomen to burst, often in a noisy explosion.

"It may not surprise you to learn that the number one cause of 'sh.e.l.l shock' as we used to call it, among war veterans, or posttraumatic stress disorder as we call it now, is not actually due to the experience of sh.e.l.ling, or the fear of their own deaths, but by encounters had with corpses.

"It's why the old man in 'The Monkey's Paw,' who perhaps lived in a time before the funeral parlor business got so big, and who might have been a war veteran himself, would not have wanted to open the door to find his three-days-dead son on the other side, and why the old woman in Bosnia swept the doorway to make sure her beloved daughter wouldn't come home. It's why the fear of the dead, and the conviction that they are evil-our utter aversion to them-has persisted and influenced so many of our rituals and beliefs. And, as with anything so feared, there are corresponding obsessions and fascinations. That will be the focus of our next cla.s.s."

There were no questions. The students seemed vaguely disoriented, as they often did on Putrefaction Day, and Mira let them go ten minutes early. They gathered their things in silence. As they filed out past her desk, Perry unplugged the slide projector and wound the cord carefully. As she packed up her things, he asked, "Are we meeting this afternoon, Professor?"

Mira looked at her watch. It was Tuesday, and Clark would be eager to be relieved of the twins, who had been especially cranky that morning-tossing their Cheerios around the kitchen, hollering at Mira in their musical, unintelligible chatter. Clark had said, "Don't be late," as Mira hurried out the door.

"Clark," she'd said, stopping, turning, "I'll try not to be, but I have a job. I have students, and colleagues, and emails, and phone calls-"

Clark held up a hand, shaking his head. "No need to list all the things you have, Mira. I get it. See you when you can manage it."

"Clark," she'd said, holding out her hands-not as if she were reaching for him, she realized, but more as if she were offering him her wrists to slash. She'd said his name again, but he'd gone into the bathroom and shut the door.

She looked now at Perry.

All weekend she'd thought about their project. She had a hundred questions for him, and a strange bright spot of hope about the future. Despite herself (how well she knew the foolishness of putting the cart before the horse), she'd thought of a t.i.tle: The American Campus: s.e.x, Superst.i.tion, and Death.

It was, she had to admit to herself, the first sense she'd had since the twins were born that she might have another book in her, and a continuing academic career.

"Well," she said to Perry. "Yes, we should meet. But I'll need to leave within the hour. Childcare."

She shrugged, but felt a soggy lump in her throat that she thought must have to do with the twins, and the way, that morning, the boys had looked up from their high chairs as she bent over to kiss them, their faces wet with milk and a few stuck-on Cheerios, and how she'd been too worried about what their reaction would be to her leaving (and what Clark's reaction to their reaction would be) to actually say good-bye. They were babbling in their sad foreign language, and she had to push down, as she always did, her fear that there was something wrong, that this was not just your routine "delayed language acquisition," and as perfectly normal as the pediatrician had insisted, but something much larger, much more predictive of future horrors. Clark refused to talk about it except to say, "You blame me, I suppose?"

"Why would I blame you?"

"Because I'm the one raising your kids, I suppose."

Everything, even the sounds that came out of their toddlers' mouths, was a minefield between them now.

She couldn't say good-bye. Instead, she'd waited until they were busy with their plastic airplane spoons again to sneak out the front door, pulling it closed behind her without making a sound.

20.

"I'm in love, man."

Craig was sitting at the edge of his bed. It was a Sat.u.r.day night, mid-November, and Perry had just finished writing a paper on Socrates' belief that rational self-criticism could free the human mind from the bondage of illusion. He didn't want to talk to his roommate about Nicole Werner.

"Great, man," he said.

"I'm serious," Craig said. "I know you think I'm an a.s.shole, but-"

"Well, who's to say an a.s.shole can't fall in love?"

Perry deliberately kept his back turned to Craig's side of the room, hoping he'd take the hint.

"You're not fooling me," Craig said.

Perry couldn't help it. He turned around. "Okay," he said. "So, what is it I'm not fooling you about, Craig?"

"You're in love with her, too. You've probably been in love with her since kindergarten or something. It galls you that I'm dating her. You're going nuts."

"Jesus Christ," Perry said, leaning back, looking at the ceiling. "You're so full of s.h.i.t, Craig. You'd be saying that about anyone you were dating. You think the whole world's just watching you, burning with envy. But you know what? News flash: We're not."

Craig snorted, as if Perry had confirmed his suspicions by denying them. It was one of the many, many infuriating things about his roommate. You could not win with Craig Clements-Rabbitt. You either confessed or you were lying.

"Look," Perry said, and inhaled. "Even if I'd been madly in love with Nicole Werner since kindergarten, I'd have fallen out of love with her by the time I realized she was stupid enough to date someone like you-not to mention this sorority bulls.h.i.t, which seems about as stupid as it's humanly possible to get."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Craig asked.

Perry shook his head.

"Huh?" Craig prodded.

"Forget it," Perry said.

"So she likes her sorority, Perry. I think it's cute. You have to admit, she looks incredible in a string of pearls. And that was one h.e.l.luva float they decorated for Homecoming."

"If you say so."

"I say so. And you know so."

"What happened to all your cynicism, man?"

"Well, then I fell in love with Nicole Werner. Just like you did, back in Bad a.s.s."

"Jesus Christ," Perry said. "Why do we have to talk about this? Why do we have to talk at all."

"Because you won't admit it to me, or to yourself. You're in love with Nicole."

Perry tossed up his hands. "Okay, Craig. Okay. If I 'admit' I'm in love with your girlfriend, will you shut the f.u.c.k up? Will that make you feel like a Big Man? Like the Big Campus Stud with the girl we'd all die to get our hands on?"

"How about you admit it first, and I'll decide after that?"

"Okay," Perry said, and cleared his throat, rolled his eyes heavenward. "Let me see. The first time I saw Nicole Werner in Mrs. Bell's kindergarten cla.s.sroom, clutching a crayon in one hand and a piece of construction paper in the other, I thought to myself, There's the only girl I'll ever love. I sure as h.e.l.l hope she doesn't end up dating my roommate in college, because then I'll have to kill myself."

Craig nodded. "I knew it," he said.

"So, you're going to shut up now?"

"No," Craig said, and he went on to tell Perry about their date that night. Pizza at Knockout's. Hours afterward at Starbucks, holding hands. A long walk across the Commons in a bright, sparkling snow. He'd walked her back to her room, and kissed her outside her door.

"Did I tell you yet that I'm in love?" he asked Perry.

"I think you might have mentioned that," Perry said.

21.

Craig knew it was a bad idea to walk by the sorority. He'd promised Perry he wouldn't, and his father, and he'd managed to get through the entire month of September without doing so, without visiting any of the old haunts, except that one day he'd stood outside G.o.dwin Honors Hall in September. Now, it was October.

Where had September gone?

Craig had simply sleepwalked through it, it seemed. He woke up in the mornings and realized that, somehow, he'd done his homework. He'd have only the vaguest recollection of doing it, but there it would be on his laptop: an essay on the Ptolemaic strategy waiting to be taken to the lab to be printed up. The notes he took in his cla.s.ses were in his own handwriting, so he had to have taken them himself, but it was like that story "The Elves and the Shoemaker." Craig just woke up and found all the work had been done, as if by elves, or some other self.

That morning he woke to hear Perry running water in the kitchen, nuking something. Through the other wall he could hear a thudding ba.s.s from the neighbor's stereo. Outside, the ma.s.ses of blackbirds that had taken to roosting in the trees outside their apartment windows were already cawing and squawking. The black arrow of one's shadow pa.s.sed over his window shade. He was going to have to get out of bed, he knew, and he knew that once he did that, he was going to walk by the Omega Theta Tau house.

"Pal," his father had said on Sat.u.r.day when he'd called. "You don't sound right. Are you depressed? Are they hara.s.sing you there? Any problems? Memory? Et cetera?"

"No, Dad. No one's hara.s.sing me. And, yeah, I guess I'm a little depressed. I wouldn't be any less depressed anywhere else, though. And I think I'm okay in the head. As good as I'm going to be again, I guess."

"You're sure no one's giving you a hard time?"

"No one," Craig said, realizing, not for the first time, that maybe he'd hoped they would. Maybe he'd come back here hoping to be hounded off campus, ridiculed, killed. Where were the outraged sorority sisters? Why hadn't they chased him down on the Commons and ripped him limb from limb? Had they forgotten about Nicole? Shouldn't there be daily protests outside the administration building?

How could they have let Nicole Werner's killer back in?

But Nicole's death, it seemed, was last year's news. He hadn't overheard a word about it anywhere. If people recognized him, they didn't show it. If his professors made the connection between Nicole's death and his name, they kept it to themselves. Maybe back at G.o.dwin Honors Hall there were still some flyers posted to the bulletin boards, or a memorial in the lobby or something, but there wasn't anything else anywhere else on campus.

He dragged himself out of bed. He was packing up his laptop, pulling a sweatshirt over his grungy T-shirt, saying, "See ya later," to Perry, and trying to get out of the apartment quickly enough that Perry couldn't ask him where he was headed.

He was headed there. He hadn't even glimpsed it, he realized, since that last night in March. Back then.

Back then, Craig had hated the Omega Theta Tau house and the way, each time he walked across campus to it, the front door would open for Nicole and swallow her whole. There was always some blonde standing in the shadows beyond the threshold, and the door would swing closed, and Craig knew he wouldn't get her back until whatever party, or pledging, or tea, or secret meeting, or special election of floral arrangement committee members, or selection of the menu for the next Founders Formal that night was over.

How many times had he walked by the Omega Theta Tau house (its brooding brown and blond bricks, the wraparound porch, the long windows, the eaves crawling with ivy) after he'd started dating Nicole, just to see if the candles were still flickering in the rooms beyond the windows?

And the guys hanging around.

Those frat guys with their handshakes and their collars turned up. Tossing a football, hard. The smack of it hitting their hands.

"Maybe you could think about a house, you know, for next year? It's not too late. Plenty of guys rush their soph.o.m.ore years," Nicole said one night as he was walking her from G.o.dwin Honors Hall to the Omega Theta Tau house.

"Why?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said, sweet and pouty. "It would just, maybe, make things easier, you know."