Laura Kasischke - The Raising

He tried not to imagine her then, in a basement, in a black dress, a bunch of drunk and stoned sorority girls holding hands and chanting.

“We’d better hurry,” Nicole said. “Perry will be mad.”

“Screw Perry,” Craig said, loudly, toward the dorm room door, as if for Perry’s benefit, although he doubted Perry could hear him through the solid wood of the door, and he really had no great desire to hurt Perry’s feelings or piss him off. Perry had been particularly nice lately, letting Craig go on and on about his parents’ divorce, offering commiserating head shakes. He was gratifyingly appalled by the behavior of Craig’s mother, leaving his father. Once, he’d been in the room when Craig had called home and his mother had said to him, wearily, “Craig, this has nothing to do with you. This is between me, and Dad, and Scar.”

“Between you and Dad and Scar ?” Craig had shouted, and then, without waiting for her answer, he’d slapped his phone shut and thrown it against the wall.

Perry had jumped up from his computer and taken Craig by the shoulders and said, in the voice of a really mature guy, “It’s okay, man. It’s okay. You gotta calm down, okay?”

He’d helped Craig duct-tape his cell phone together again. (Perry was great at fixing broken mechanical things, as Craig had learned when Perry’d accidentally stepped on his own calculator.) Afterward, he’d gone to Z’s with Craig, and they’d gotten pretty shitfaced—Craig, albeit, much more shitfaced than Perry.

And Craig found that he had grown oddly fond of the way Perry bleached his socks and rolled them into obsessive little balls lined up in the top drawer of his dresser. When Nicole was off at some sorority function, they’d eat in the cafeteria together, and now and then they’d go down to Winger Lounge and sprawl all over the couch to watch some basketball game neither of them cared about.

“Don’t be mean to Perry,” Nicole said. “He’s like family.”

Craig turned back to Nicole. She wasn’t joking. She was so sweet.

“You’re right,” Craig said. “I lucked out in the roommate department.”

“Yeah, Perry’s true blue.” She was looking at the ceiling as she said this, and her eyes looked oddly blank to him. He stood up so he could see her better, and even from overhead, the expression on her face seemed strange to him. She looked pale, he thought. Even her irises.

“What?” she asked, without looking at him, as if she were blind.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I… don’t know.”

“Then don’t be silly.” There was so little intonation in her voice, and her face still looked weird. Could he be having one of those dreaded acid trip flashbacks, even though he hadn’t dropped acid for years?

“Nicole?”

She snapped out of it then, and looked at him. Pure Nicole. Little dimple near the right corner of her lip. He was so relieved, he put a hand on his chest and sighed.

“What’s the matter, sweetheart?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said, but suddenly he had a very bad feeling about the Spring Event.

“Nicole,” he said, kneeling down again at her feet, looking up at her. “Can’t you blow this off? This is so fucking stupid, and—”

“Are you crazy, Craig?” She was serious. She looked sincerely shocked, as if he’d suggested they jump off the roof together. He shook his head, to let her know he wasn’t going to push it. Instead, he straightened up, and she slid the stockings all the way on, and slipped her feet into lacy black heels, blew him a kiss, opened the door, and Craig heard her call bye-bye to Perry, musically, as she stepped out of the room, and he stepped in.

“Want to go to dinner?” Perry asked, grabbing his meal card off his desk, as if he hadn’t just walked in while Craig was half-naked kissing Nicole’s little foot, as if it were just any of the other hundreds of times they’d headed down to the cafeteria together.

From the Waiting Mortuary, Professor Polson’s friend Kurt took them into a hallway lined with doors.

There were numbers nailed to the doors, but the numbers seemed random. Room 3 was adjacent to 11. Room 1 seemed to be missing altogether. Tacked to the door of Room 4 was a photograph of a white cat standing beside a blue mailbox. Perry wondered about that photo, in a place where there were no others, what the significance of that could be, when someone in a pale green shower cap and matching scrubs opened the door and looked out, white light pouring on him (or her), before shutting it again.

Everything in the hallway was bright, and cold. It wasn’t the outdoor, winter kind of cold, but a dry, artificial cold, as if freeze-dried air were being poured down from the ceiling by the fluorescent lights.

When they reached the end of the hallway, Kurt stopped, turned, and held up a hand.

“Thank you for being so quiet,” he said. “We do not have them today, but this is where sometimes a parent or a wife or husband must come to identify a deceased person. It is not like in the TV show, exactly, because we do not bring them into a room and take off a sheet and show them their loved one’s face. Instead they are shown the effects. Wallet, jewelry, et cetera, and then a Polaroid photograph of the deceased’s face. They know, or do not know, and if they are not sure, they must see. If they are sure, but still wish to see the body, they may request. It is easier, the Polaroid. Luckily for us, today, any families have already been and gone.”

Nicole. Nicole had been here, of course, and it had been Josie Reilly who’d come to identify her—and although it was utterly impossible to imagine Josie Reilly clipping down this hallway in some pair of cute little shoes, it was even harder to imagine Nicole in this cold brilliance, laid out in whatever manner they laid out the dead, which he was about to see, and suddenly did not want to.

But wasn’t this one of the reasons he’d taken this class? To see for himself?

He felt exhausted, dizzy, as if a grave mistake had been made by someone he used to be and no longer was. He put a hand to his head.

Professor Polson, standing off to the side of the hallway, looked over and raised her eyebrows as if to ask him, you okay? But she seemed preoccupied, too, looking at Perry as she also held her cell phone to her ear. After a few seconds, she looked at it in the palm of her hand, and then she seemed to be scrolling through her messages, or her address book. The fluorescent light turned her hair to a reddish gleaming that Perry had never quite noticed before. He watched her until he noticed out of the corner of his eye that Karess was staring at him, again, staring at Professor Polson.

“Today,” Kurt said, “is an autopsy, but it is not yet to begin. I am taking you to autopsy room, where there is one body, which you will see it. This is not someone who has been disfigured, but will look typical of a corpse who has died by strangulation, because it is believed he has hanged himself. If you will faint, or be disturbed, you might wish to not.”

Kurt nodded solemnly then, as if they’d all understood what he meant, and then, whether they did or not, they followed him into Room 42—all except Professor Polson, who was again holding her cell phone to her ear, seeming to be trying to get a connection, which Perry thought pretty unlikely, deep in this basement, a place out of which he imagined very few cell phone calls were intended to be made or received.

“We shall proceed,” Kurt said, “four people at a time. You will wear booties, cap, and gown.” He pointed to a doorless locker where the mint green garb was hanging on hooks, and he shrugged. “We have only so many clothes.” He made clothes a two-syllable word, and tapped four students—one of them Karess—on the shoulder, pointing toward the locker. “You must wear such cloth-es when there is a body.”