Dullards and Deathcraft
Someone had drawn a penis in the margin of my library copy of Wuthering Heights. Not even a good one—just a sad, droopy thing scrawled in pencil beside Catherine’s deathbed scene.
College truly was the pinnacle of intellectual achievement.
I tried my eraser on it. A bit of gray paper came off on my finger, which was probably my cue to stop. Whoever’d drawn it had really committed; you could feel the dent on the next page. Catherine was stuck dying beside that thing until the library finally retired the book.
Professor Whitman was still talking about landscape and the tormented self. I’d written that down twenty minutes ago. Underneath it, in smaller letters: Heathcliff was also an asshole.
The moth on the windowsill had been dead for hours.
It lay beneath the catch with one brown wing stuck in a cobweb. Poor little bastard. It had made it all the way to a window, and somebody from Facilities had painted the thing shut. You could still see the brush hairs.
I checked the row. The girl two seats over was texting under her desk, and the rowing guy in front of me had nodded off onto his fist. Plenty of important learning going on. When Whitman turned to the board, I laid a finger against the moth’s exposed wing.
A few scales stuck to my skin. I barely moved my lips as I breathed the working into the space beside the glass. My fingertip went cold. Then came the wait, which I used to be terrible at. Push too soon and the trace scattered. I’d wrecked enough specimens to get that into my head.
Its wing shivered, then fluttered with remembered life.
The torn edge caught against the sill. I eased the cobweb loose with my pencil, and the moth turned a little toward the light.
There. The fine veins through the brown, the darker patch near the tip. I could spend an hour drawing a wing and still miss what I got from watching it move. The moth couldn’t feel me freeing it, though. Its body would finish that one remembered turn and go still again.
“Miss Crowe?”
Twenty people turned to watch me touching a windowsill. I took my hand away and sat up. “Sorry.”
“I asked whether you agreed with Mr. Chen.”
Mr. Chen perked up. Whatever he’d said, I was about to get graded on it too. Great.
“About the spiritual and the physical,” Whitman added.
Helpful. I glanced down at Catherine and her unfortunate companion.
“I think the separation is less useful than the characters want it to be,” I said. “Death doesn’t make anyone stop wanting things from each other. They carry on behaving as though the other person can hear them. Sometimes as though the other person owes them an answer.”
Whitman leaned back against her desk. “And is that love?”
“I wouldn’t enjoy being loved by Heathcliff.”
A few people laughed. Mr. Chen lowered his eyes to his notes, smiling.
“That wasn’t quite my question.”
“No.” The moth’s wing slowed beside me. “But I don’t think wanting someone badly enough gives you much authority on the subject. He wants her there. What she’d want becomes fairly secondary.”
Whitman gave me another second, then uncapped her pen. “There we are. Possession. Let’s put that beside haunting. Mr. Chen, does that change your reading?”
I added possession under landscape, with a decent gap between them. Beside me, the moth settled. That was all I was getting for now. If I preserved the trace soon, I could draw the movement out again. Leave it in this overheated room all afternoon, and I’d just have a dead moth. Less useful, and a bit depressing.
When Whitman turned back to the board, I slipped it into the little tin that usually held my spare erasers.
I paid attention after that. Whitman could be good when she got off the goddamn moors.
Outside, wet leaves stuck to the soles of my boots. November had stripped most of the quad bare, except for the red maple by humanities, which was still showing off. Somebody had tied a scarf around the bronze bust. I liked him better that way. The scarf covered most of the inscription about his service to an institution he had helped keep women out of.
Bethany caught up with me by the steps. I was trying to free a wet gig flyer from beneath somebody’s tutoring ad without tearing off the date.
“Are you coming tomorrow?” she asked.
“To what?”
“Psych. The study group. I sent you the room number.”
Right. That tomorrow. The flyer came loose in two pieces. I kept the one with the venue and tried to remember whether I’d actually promised somebody something.
“I’ve got a thing.”
“Okay. We’re doing the case questions. I can send you what we get through.”
I looked up. She had green ink along her thumb and the same exhausted half-bun she’d had at nine. I’d been prepared for a speech about participating. Instead, she shifted her books and waited for me to answer. She’d offered me the notes last time too, after I’d spent most of the session disagreeing with the worksheet. Apparently that hadn’t put her off. I could probably stop acting as though a study group was something people were trying to do to me.
“Thanks. What time again?”
“Four.”
“I might make it.”
“Very binding. I’ll save you a chair.”
She glanced at my open bag. The book had fallen open at the page I’d been attacking with my eraser.
“You got the library copy with the artwork. Page eighty-two is worse.”
“I’ve been trying to erase it.”
“Don’t. You’ll go through the paper. See you tomorrow, maybe.”
She went down the steps. I stood there holding half a flyer for a show that had happened last Friday. For fuck’s sake. I’d meant to go, too. My roommate Mira and I had listened to the opener while she was editing photos, both of us saying we ought to see them live. Then we’d stayed in the apartment doing things that could’ve waited until Saturday. I smoothed the date with my thumb before stuffing the paper in my pocket.
Bethany’s message had been sitting unread since Sunday. I opened it and put four o’clock in my calendar. She’d added a little drawing of a dog beneath the room number, no obvious connection to psychology. I nearly asked about it. Maybe tomorrow.
I could’ve cut across the grass behind the science building. I stayed on the path. Near the big oak, something pulled at the air, a pressure that made my back teeth ache. Two students were sharing a cigarette under it. One had his shoulder against the trunk, right where a scar in the bark kept catching my eye.
Dullards. Imagine standing in that and only worrying about your next class.
Sleepers, if you wanted to be polite. Most people went their whole lives without noticing any of this. The Veil helped. A shadow moved wrong, and somebody blamed the clouds; a face appeared in a window, and it was obviously a reflection. I sometimes envied the amount of stuff they could walk past.
I’d found that thin spot freshman year by going straight under the branches. Spent an hour afterward feeling like I’d left something precious on a bus, though I had everything in my bag. I went back the next day to see what I’d missed. Nothing. Ever since, I’d taken the long way, including when I was late.
Today there was a little glint among the roots. A bottle cap, probably. I slowed until one of the smokers looked at me, then kept going. I had a moth warming up in a tin. The last thing I needed was to spend another afternoon getting weird about a tree.
My phone buzzed at the corner. An email from my mother: December arrangements. It was the third of November, for fuck’s sake. I left that treat unopened and went home.
Renee, our other roommate, had left a note on the kitchen table.
EVIE. FOOD SURFACE.
There was an arrow, in case I needed help identifying the part we ate off. My drying rack sat above it, holding six clean specimen vials. I carried the rack into my bedroom before she could come home and watch me concede.
She caught me coming back. A grocery bag was sliding down her hip while she tried to shut the refrigerator with her foot.
“Your note was very informative,” I said, taking the bag.
“Good. There’s a quiz later.”
I moved half a lime off a plate to make room for the eggs. Underneath it was another half-lime, much older, with a fork stuck through it.
“Whose are these?”
“Mira’s. Something with copper.”
“In the fridge?”
Renee held out her hand for the eggs. “Do you see how a dedicated work area could help all of us?”
“The vials were empty.”
“Last week one wasn’t.”
“It had a leaf in it.”
“Then write leaf on the label. I don’t want to guess while I’m eating cereal.”
I folded the note and put it in my pocket. She’d drawn the arrow with the nice pen, too. Serious business. I helped her unpack and asked about her lab. Somebody had switched two samples, and she’d spent the afternoon repeating work she’d already stayed late to finish yesterday. While she talked, she checked all three open cartons of milk.
I’d been about to explain exactly how clean the vials were. I put the milk away instead. Renee listened when I needed to complain about a moth for twenty minutes; I could manage a kitchen conversation in which the moth wasn’t the main event.
By the time we’d found room for everything, she’d started telling me what the person responsible had said in his own defense. I pulled out a chair. It was a substantial defense, apparently. The moth could wait until she’d finished. After that, I wanted to see what else it could show me.
