The Raising (13 page)

19

I
t was Putrefaction Day. As they filed into the room, Mira wrote on the board:

He looks like he’s asleep.

It’s a shame that he won’t keep,

But it’s summer and we’re runnin’ out of ice . . .

—“Pore Jud Is Daid,”
Oklahoma!

Perry Edwards was the first one in, already with his notebook open, jotting down the quote from the board (which was really intended more as a joke than something to include in one’s notes).

He was wearing a somber-looking pair of black trousers and a white button-down shirt, as if he’d just come from a Glee Club concert, or a funeral.

“Perry,” Mira said before the others were in their places, “would you mind working the slide projector?”

“No, Professor Polson.” He rose from his seat and moved to the chair next to the projector.

“Okay,” Mira said. “Today’s the big day. I’m assigning you your first essay, which will be due next week. I didn’t assign it earlier because I don’t believe in giving students, as some professors do, a
month
to write a paper. The longer you have, in my experience, the longer you’ll put it off. But, at the same time, as I state in the syllabus, I accept no late papers, so my suggestion is that you start working on this assignment
today.
It can be as long as you need it to be to make your points, but it will be no shorter than ten pages.”

“Ten pages!” Karess Flanagan blurted, and then blushed and looked around as if trying to pretend someone else had said it.

Under what circumstances, Mira wondered, would a parent consider naming a child Karess? Of course, they’d had no way of knowing that their infant daughter would turn into a stunningly sexy dark-haired beauty with C cups and glossy pink lips, did they? Mira could only
begin
to imagine the jokes and riffs the name and the girl had inspired in boys’ locker rooms over the years.

Karess continued to look shocked, whether by the number of pages of the assignment or by her own outburst, or both.

“Didn’t you read the syllabus?” Mira asked. “Under ‘Requirements’ ”—she whipped a syllabus out of the folder on her desk—“it says pretty clearly, ‘five papers, ten pages double-spaced or longer, must receive a grade of C or higher to pass the course.’ ”

Karess managed to nod and shake her head at the same time.

“So, here’s your paper topic,” Mira said.

Out of the same folder, she took her stack of Xeroxed assignments and handed them to Karess to pass out to the class. As the girl stood up with them, every guy in the class except Perry (who was studying the slide projector) looked from her ankles to her breasts, and lingered there until she sat back down.

“I’ll let you read this on your own,” Mira said, “but let me go over the basics. In this essay, which is a Personal Reflection piece, you are to examine your own superstitions—personal and cultural—related to death. You might start with why it is you signed up for this class, but you might also examine your preconceptions regarding burial, cremation, funeral rites, and the other rituals practiced by your family and community. What is your experience with the dead? Have you been in the presence of a dead body, and if so, what was your reaction? What are your fears related to the dead? What are your
attractions
?”

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?”

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 eyeballs. 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 mass, which, along with the buildup of gasses, will cause the abdomen to burst, often in a noisy explosion.

“It may not surprise you to learn that the number one cause of ‘shell 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 shelling, 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 class.”

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 title:
The American Campus: Sex, Superstition, 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.”