Laura Kasischke - The Raising

“Perry told you we wanted to talk to you about—?”

“Yeah,” Lucas said again, and looked up. “He told me.”

“That’s okay with you?”

“Sure,” Lucas said.

For the first time Perry noticed that there was what looked like a perfectly round quarter-size circle of hair missing just over Lucas’s temple. It looked like someone (Lucas himself?) had grabbed a handful of the hair there and yanked.

“Lucas?” Professor Polson said, leaning forward so that, from the angle at which he observed her, Perry could see a silver charm dangling in the neckline of her blouse, there in the dark shadows between her breasts. He looked away, looked over at Lucas, who was now staring at one of the worn-away patches on the Oriental rug.

“Is everything okay?” Professor Polson asked. She was studying him. “You look tired. Are you sleeping? Are you smoking dope, or taking something harder?”

Lucas shook his head, and told her the same thing he’d told Perry, that he’d quit smoking dope “and everything else,” hoping it would help with the sleep. “But I don’t sleep. Not since this thing with—”

There was a long pause as Professor Polson waited for him to finish the sentence, before she finally finished it for him.

“Nicole?”

Lucas brought his hands to his temples and began to rub with his index and forefingers, and Perry saw that he was rubbing in a circular motion at the exact spot where the quarter-size circle of hair was missing.

“Are you really ready to talk about this?” Professor Polson asked. “You know, you don’t have to. I’m not acting with the university in any way. I’m only inquiring into this as a scholar, and my interest in these kinds of things relates to the tradition of these kinds of things. I don’t want to mislead you into thinking I’m a supernaturalist—you understand that? I’m a folklorist.

“I mean, I’ll listen to what you have to say,” she went on. “And I’ll believe you, that you’re telling the truth as you’ve experienced it. But I have some ideas of my own about how these things happen—and eventually, maybe, those ideas might help you, but I don’t know.” She hesitated for a moment, shrugging her shoulders, which Perry thought looked fragile, thin, like the shoulders of a little girl.

When he didn’t say anything, she said, “They might help you feel better, make sense of things, but you might also want to get some professional help, and I’ll give you some references for that. For the sleep problems, if nothing else?”

Lucas took his hands away from his temples, put them in his lap, and looked up at Professor Polson. He nodded.

“So, then, do you mind, Lucas, if I tape-record our conversation? Do you trust me when I say I’ll share this with no one without your written permission? And, in fact, I’d like to give you this, to ask you to read and sign.” She stood and went over to the bookshelf, where a piece of paper lay on top of a row of hardback books. “It states for the record that I won’t share what you’ve shared here with anyone without first obtaining your written permission.”

Lucas took the piece of paper, which fluttered loosely in his hand, and looked at it for a few seconds, nodding again, and when Professor Polson handed him a pen, he signed what seemed to be his name across the bottom of it.

“Okay,” she said, taking the paper from him and putting it back on the shelf. “I’ll make a copy of this and give you the original. So, is it all right if I record what you have to say?”

Lucas said, “Sure, whatever,” and inhaled.

He did not, to Perry, look or sound like someone who would have the ability to speak loud or long enough to tell any kind of story, lucid or otherwise, truth or fiction, but when Professor Polson took out her little recorder—a shining, silver thing, sleek and glinting like the charm between her breasts—pressed a button, and set it on the table, Lucas began, as if he’d been waiting a long time, holding his breath, to speak:

So, okay. Like. Jesus. (long sigh) You know, I didn’t even know her very well. I was friends with Craig, and I didn’t think she liked me. Right from the beginning he told me she told him she didn’t approve of the smoking, that it was, you know, against her religion, and also that she thought it turned Craig into an asshole. Which, I guess, you know, it did. Craig got really weirded out sometimes on weed. He’d start talking to himself, sort of muttering. He’d want to pick a fight, or he’d start crying about his parents getting a divorce or something. Or he wanted to steal things. I don’t know. She had a point. And she thought I was his supplier, even though Craig was getting dope from other dealers. It wasn’t just me. But she didn’t like me, I guess, I thought. Or, he said she didn’t like me. We hardly spoke two words. Except one time. Well, the one time before the other time. I was in my room, and I was smoking, and listening to music, and she knocked on my door, and as soon as I saw her I was like, Sorry, he’s not here. I don’t know where he is. And she was like, I didn’t come to find Craig. So I just held the door open, and I was like, Okay, so, how can I help you? (Except I was stoned, so maybe I didn’t say it like that, maybe I said, okay so what the fuck or something, because I remember she made a little disapproving thing out of the corners of her mouth.) And she just walked on past me into my room, which was a single, you know, because I was the resident advisor, and she walked over to my bed and sat at the edge of it. She was wearing a short skirt, and flip-flops, even though it was, like, the beginning of February, and she leaned forward and put her hands on her knees and just sort of looked at me, and I was standing there, and maybe because I was stoned and also her hair being so blond, so she was sort of covered with this light, like smoke light, and the light was sort of pulsing, like—I don’t know. So, anyway, I’m not sure, but I think she unbuttoned the top two buttons of her blouse, and then she kind of pressed her boobs together, and she said something like, Don’t you like me? Which I did, I guess, but I was friends with Craig, you know, and they’d been going out already for like four months and he was totally in love with her, so I said something like, Sure. Did you and Craig break up? And she just burst out laughing, and she said, Haven’t you ever fucked your friend’s girlfriend before? And then I guess I was so stoned I didn’t know what to say, because I swear she had these little flames, like flickers, like horns, coming out of the sides of her head. I mean, sometimes when I’m really stoned, I see this stuff. It’s a hallucination or whatever. I saw a halo once over my grandmother’s head. And I thought my ex-girlfriend had a tail one night, when she got up to go to the bathroom, and it was swishing around (laughs, coughs). But Nicole’s little horns freaked me out, and I was like, Okay, Nicole, time for you to go, and I went over to the door and opened it, and stood there, and she got up really slow and walked past me with her blouse still undone, and then she put her arms around my neck and pushed up against me, and kissed me, and it was just a reflex, I mean, she was a very hot girl, maybe the hottest girl I’d ever even seen, really, so I was kissing her, and it went on a long time, and she sort of tried to pull me back into the room, but I said, No, you better go, and she started laughing, and buttoned back up, and then she said, I’ll be back, Lucas. You’re going to sleep with me, and you know it, because I know you want to, and I want to. After that, I just tried to avoid her when she was with Craig because I felt guilty, and because she made me really nervous. She only came to my room one more time without Craig, but Murph was with me, and we were cutting up this bag of (clears throat)—and she came in and lay down on my bed, and she was sort of reaching over and playing with my hair, and Murph was looking at me like what the fuck, so I told her she better leave, that if the cops or the administrators came by she’d be an accessory or something, and she was such a goody-goody on the surface that I knew she’d leave when I said that, and she did; she left. And then I was gone for a week, in Mexico at the break, and I barely saw her and Craig before that night, when he—I-I know it wasn’t my fault, you know, but the whole thing. Her. Me. All the drugs I was selling, and doing, and it was my fucking car. She died in my fucking car. Because of my car.