Laura Kasischke - The Raising

“We’ll be entering the ‘Waiting Mortuary’ in a moment,” Mira said, and gestured for the class to follow her through the sliding glass doors. “This is the part of the morgue that was specifically designed for the purpose of confirming that a dead body was actually deceased. Until very recently, as we’ve already discussed, there were no trusted methods for verifying death, and people had sincere fears of being buried alive. The Waiting Mortuary was designed to house the dead for a period of time during which attendants would be on alert for any sign of life. Right, Kurt?”

Kurt nodded sincerely. He was nothing if not sincere. When Mira had first met him, they had been leaning over a grave full of Serbian dead together, peering down.

Skeletal remains. Some scraps of clothing. A couple of wristwatches. A ring.

Kurt had turned to her, looked at her for what seemed like a long time, and then he’d reached over and put his hand over her eyes.

Since his move to the States, Mira had seen Kurt only during these visits with her classes to the morgue. She’d asked him to have coffee with her once, but he’d said he was busy. She invited him over to dinner once, but he’d declined.

“Your husband wouldn’t like it.”

“No, he would like it,” Mira insisted. “Clark would like to meet you. He’s heard so much about you.”

“No,” Kurt said again. “I am a single man. He looks at me one time. He knows I feel for you. I am a shy man, Mira. Large, yes, but timid. I do not want to fight your husband.”

“Fight?” Mira had exclaimed, and laughed out loud, but Kurt was serious, and she realized that because of this seriousness, there could be no dissuading him without insulting him, without implying that her husband would never have considered him a rival, that there would be no fight. So she hadn’t argued—although, when Clark had laughed and laughed after she told him about Kurt’s fears, so adamantly amused, she’d briefly considered telling him, that, actually, Kurt had been a figure for quite a while in her sexual imagination.

His large Eastern European presence with his scent of cologne and his experience of the world, and war, and hardship, and death.

Kurt bowed a little to Mira’s students then and said, “You must be very quiet, although of course the dead cannot hear.” (Again, excited and uneasy laughter.) “But because, you know, the word morgue , it is a French word. It means, at one and same, ‘to look at solemnly,’ and ‘to defy.’” Kurt waited for this to sink in, and then said, “You see, the sameness? And the strangeness?”

They were all nodding by this time. Perhaps they did understand, or maybe they were starting to feel as if their lives depended upon the goodwill of this man, their diener.

They stopped at the sliding glass doors. Mira turned and said, “Here we are in what the Victorians quaintly referred to as the Rose Cottage. At children’s morgues, they called it the Rainbow Room. And though these euphemisms might be charming, and funny, we have to remember that eventually most of us will find ourselves in a morgue, not viewing , but viewed .”

“ Too -day,” Kurt said, “we have a man who has had a brain aneurysm. We have a woman of old age. We have a suicide. But I must warn you, because it is disturbing, there are a family, two children, father, grandmother, they were hit by a head-on. It is a busy day at the morgue.”

One or two of the students took a step backward, and began to look around as if in a panic to find the exit.

“As I’ve said,” Mira said (pointlessly, because no one ever left), “this is optional. You can wait for us here, or leave altogether if you need to. No penalties.”

The shock turned to resignation then. In some, it looked like excited anticipation. They might insist that they did not want to see dead bodies, but they did. And each semester this viewing was a turning point in her class. For a while afterward, anyway, they would feel in a way they hadn’t felt before that the living body was a temporary condition. Funereal black would no longer be a fashion statement. They would communicate with one another and with her more carefully.

The glass doors slid open, and Kurt stepped through them, and Mira and all of her students followed.

“Ilove you,” Nicole said again, and squeezed her eyes and kissed him. “I love you, and I love you, and I love you. But now I have to go.”

He watched Nicole’s small, tight, perfectly smooth body as she got out of his bed to slip into the black dress she’d bought to wear that night to her sorority’s ridiculous ritual. Except for the girls who were being raised, who wore white dresses, the others were to wear funeral black. The ones who’d already been raised, and the ones who were yet to be raised, were “mourners.”

It was ridiculous, he thought, even as he admired the dress as Nicole unfurled it from the hanger she’d so carefully put it on when she brought it to his room—and even more ridiculous that the sorority hadn’t been imaginative enough to come up with a name for it that didn’t rhyme with hazing.

Still, he vowed, he would say no more about it. It was the kind of absurdity you had to be outside of to see. Nicole, he knew, would have found absurd the painfully hard slaps on the ass his track teammates gave each other after a meet, and the writers’ conferences he went to with his father (languid poets and novelists wandering around with glasses of wine and little leather-bound diaries), not to mention the tradition among teenage males in Fredonia every winter, just before the ski resort opened, of getting naked in the middle of the night on the slopes, dropping acid, and beating the living shit out of each other.

Briefly it crossed Craig’s mind to call Lucas and ask him to crash the party with him, but he dismissed it instantly. He couldn’t risk the wrath of Nicole’s sisters again. He wasn’t even allowed to step onto the porch to pick her up anymore. And Nicole would hate him for it.

Her black dress was made of something that seemed silkier than silk. Craig sat up with his feet on the floor, and had to will himself not to crawl to her on hands and knees and kiss the hem of it. She’d gotten her hair cut a few weeks before, and although it was still long, there were blunt little ends now that curled up a little around her shoulders. She’d started wearing it loose more often. Sometimes, when she was studying or thinking or standing in front of the mirror, she’d run her fingers through it and it would appear to pour through them like molten gold.

Now she pulled out Perry’s desk chair and started rolling a sheer black stocking up her leg, and Craig stared at her ankle until she started to laugh.

“You’re drooling, Craig,” she said, and he snapped his mouth closed.

Her other foot was still bare.

The toenails were painted pale pink. In the light that shone through the crack in the curtains, those toenails seemed to glow—and then he was on his knees, crawling across the floor, taking the foot in his hands, cradling it, bringing it to his lips, kissing first the top of it, up near the ankle, and then moving down toward the toes, until she was squealing, “Stop! Stop! It tickles!” And then he heard a key flip the lock on the door, and Perry was standing there, looking down at Craig, in his underwear, on his knees in front of Nicole, holding her bare foot to his lips.

“Excuse me,” Perry said, looking up to the ceiling. “But if you could open the door when you’re done. I’ve got to get my food plan ID out of the desk to get some dinner.” The door slammed shut behind him, but not before Craig and Nicole had burst out laughing. How could they not? What must the scene have looked like to Perry? Craig released the foot and took her face in his hands, and pulled her gently toward him for a kiss, and then sat back on his heels to look at her. All that gold hair. Her cheeks flushed.