32

Professor Polson’s apartment house looked like a place a student would live, Perry thought, not a professor with a family. In fact, last winter he’d met a guy from his International Human Rights seminar who’d lived in this same building. Around midterms the guy had asked Perry to come over to study with him, but when Perry had shown up the guy had been drunk and didn’t seem to remember that he’d wanted to study, or even who Perry was.

Then, and now, the building’s stairwell smelled like old beer soaked into carpet. Lucas climbed the stairs ahead of him, taking each step as if it were much higher than it was. Perry had to slow down so he wouldn’t charge over him. Lucas looked like an old man, holding tightly to the railing, shoulders hunched and bony in his threadbare T-shirt. There was stenciling on the back of the shirt, but it was so faded Perry couldn’t tell if it read, THE FINAL TOUR or SHE FINDS OUT.

“What’s the number?” Lucas asked for the second or third time when they stepped out into the hallway.

“Two thirty-three,” Perry said, and gave Lucas a gentle push in the direction of the door with 233 on it.

Professor Polson opened it before they knocked (she’d had to buzz them in, so she knew they were in the building, coming up the stairs, and then she must have heard them in the hallway) wearing a ruffly purple blouse, long-sleeved and flowered, and faded jeans with a patch on one knee. This outfit was, Perry realized, exactly what he’d imagined she might wear when she wasn’t wearing professor clothes. To class, Professor Polson always wore black—black dresses, black skirts, black jackets—but it looked to him as if she were playing a role that required these costumes, and that in fact she’d be a lot more comfortable in some kind of hippie dress or skirt, some T-shirt with a Monet painting on it. He could easily picture her in a floppy hat and strappy sandals, some kind of bright silk skirt.

She opened the door wide and motioned for them to come in, and then said, “Sit down, boys. I’ll get some tea.”

Perry wandered in behind Lucas, not sure where to go. Lucas was moving toward a chair in one room, and Professor Polson had disappeared into what must have been a kitchen. He could smell that the tea was already brewing—either that or she’d had a candle burning before they’d gotten there, and had just blown it out. The apartment was what his mother would have called a mess. There were books on the floor, some of them open, and a little pile of what looked like sweaters and dishrags next to the couch. The rug was a bright, Oriental embroidered thing, all blazing reds and yellows where it wasn’t worn away in thready gray patches.

Lucas sat down heavily on a green velvet recliner, and it squeaked when he did, and he made a little face, like maybe something had jabbed him in the back. Perry sat on the couch, which looked old and tired, too, but was comfortable, and had a fancy lamp beside it shedding a warm golden light through a lacy lampshade. It seemed to Perry that everything in the apartment could have been either bought at a garage sale for fifty cents or an expensive heirloom—or both. It was, he thought, about the most interesting place he’d ever seen outside of a movie. He had never been able to picture Professor Polson in her apartment, but now that he was here, he knew this is what he would have imagined. When she came in carrying three mugs, he said, “I like your apartment.”

Professor Polson rolled her eyes a little, handed him a mug. “Be careful,” she said, “it’s hot.” Lucas looked up at the cup as she held it down to him as if he had never seen a mug of tea before. Eventually, he reached up and took it.

Since Perry had gone by his place to pick him up, Lucas had been doing everything this way, in slow motion, and Perry had finally just come out and asked him, after Lucas spent about twenty minutes trying to zip up his jacket, seeming unable to fit the two ends of the zipping apparatus together to save his life, “Are you stoned, man?”

“No,” Lucas said, struggling, albeit languidly, with the zipper. “I’m not doing that anymore. I quit. Bad sleep.”

Perry had been about to offer to zip Lucas’s jacket for him when he’d finally managed to do it himself.

“Thanks for coming over, guys,” Professor Polson said. She sat down beside Perry on the couch and rested her mug of tea on the flowered patch on the knee of her jeans. “How are you, Lucas? I haven’t seen you yet this year, have I? Was your summer okay?”

“It was okay,” Lucas said. He was staring into the swirling steam over his cup with some apprehension. “Yeah.”

“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.

(Here Professor Polson can be heard in the background, her speech muffled, too far from the tape recorder to be distinguished clearly.)

Yeah. Well I tell myself that every day. But, you know, you can’t get around the fact that if I’d just said, No, man, you seem too freaked out, and I don’t want you driving my car, or whatever. If I said I couldn’t find the keys, or I’m taking the car someplace myself, they wouldn’t have had the accident and Nicole wouldn’t be dead. Nobody else around here had a car to loan him. Well, whatever. It doesn’t matter now, but basically I thought about that all spring. And the memorial service, and the posters, and . . . And I wasn’t sleeping then either. And I was still smoking a lot. And I probably should have gone home or taken the job in Montana I was supposed to take for the summer, but I decided to stay here, I don’t know. I didn’t even really finish the semester, even though my profs gave me B’s and let me slide on my finals and all that. So, I was here all summer, and it was like the whole town was empty except for me and Murph, and Murph was not doing that well either, for different reasons. His girlfriend. And also he got into speed, which was having this effect on him, so I wasn’t even hanging out with him. I was subletting this apartment in a building over there on Coolidge, and the building had like forty apartments in it, and they were all empty, I think, except for one where there was this Meth Lady, and she was walking around the halls at night with black eyes and shit, talking about how she was looking for a baby and all this crazy stuff, and it was really creeping me out, so I started staying out of the apartment most of the time, walking around town listening to Coldplay on my iPod. That last CD, it’s all about death. And that’s when I started seeing her.

(There’s a pause. In the background, Professor Polson: “Nicole?”)

Yeah.

(Another pause. A question is asked that can’t be heard on the tape.)

Okay. Sure. I knew. I mean, it wasn’t a matter of wondering if it was her. It was her. I recognized her. She’d dyed her hair, but it was Nicole. She knew it was me, too. The first time, she pretended she didn’t see me, and she turned around and started walking fast in the opposite direction. It was over by Barnes and Noble. It looked like she’d just bought a book. I totally froze. It was like, I don’t know. Not like seeing a ghost. It was like seeing . . . into a crack.

(Pause. Another question.)

Exactly.

(Professor Polson: “I’m sorry to ask, Lucas, but were you stoned?”)

No. I wish I had been. That would have explained it. I was taking a break because I was applying for this seasonal job with the Road Commission, after I realized it would take me at least another year to graduate, and for the application there was going to be a drug test, but I ended up not going for the test anyway. And then that afternoon, I went back and got stoned—I knew I wouldn’t pass it anyway, with all the shit I’d been smoking a couple weeks before—and then I started seeing her everywhere. She was sitting with some guy at the bar at Clancy’s. They were doing something, like, looking at the screen of a laptop, typing things in. I knew it was her again. I mean, the hair was different, but that was it. And then I saw her a couple days later, crossing the street by the Law Quad, and she saw me. She was like, I don’t know, fifty feet away, and I know she saw me because she smiled and gave me this little wave, and then, the last time, it was late, and I was coming back from Murph’s, and I’ll admit it, I was stoned, weed, and there were some other drugs involved, but I know what happened, I know—

(Clears throat. Pause.)

She was a block behind me, following me, and I kept looking behind me, and I could see that it was her.

(Professor Polson: “Wasn’t it dark?”)

Street lights. It was bright out. I knew it was her, and I was trying to hurry, and then I guess I just thought, what am I doing, and I stopped, and I turned around, right outside the door to my apartment building, and I said, I know it’s you.

She laughed, and she kept walking toward me, and I said, I’m going inside, and I kept walking, and went to my apartment and unlocked it, and went inside, but I didn’t lock the door behind me—I guess I wanted her to come in. So I just sat on the couch and never even turned the lights on because, I don’t know, it seemed worse to look at her in the light, and that’s when she came in, and she just kind of hovered in the threshold for a minute, and I could really see her in the light from the hallway, and she was smiling, and she said, “Can I come in?” and I was like, “Yeah. You can come in,” and then she shut the door behind her, and it was just like the first time, she unbuttoned her shirt, which was sort of filmy and white, and took it off, and unzipped her shorts, and then she slid down next to me on the couch and we were kissing, and I think I was even crying, and when we were done she said, Told you, didn’t I?

And then she put all her clothes on and left.

(Question. Pause.)

I don’t know. I don’t remember what I said, or if I even asked her. I—It was like we were somewhere else. I was scared. Excited, too, but really scared, and I was shaking. I remember she laughed about that. My teeth were chattering. She thought it was funny. She was like, I’m the one who’s supposed to be cold.

And now I haven’t seen her since, but it’s like I see her all the time. Every time I turn a corner, but then it turns out not to be her. I sleep with the light on, or I just don’t sleep. I . . .

(Here the interview ends.)

“Lucas,” Professor Polson said. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I really have to do something now. I’m going to pick up the phone now and call Mental Health Services, and make an appointment for you.”

Lucas nodded, as if he’d seen this coming.

Professor Polson was in the kitchen, on her phone, for what seemed to Perry like a long time, and finally came out with a scrap of paper and the name of a therapist and an appointment time for Lucas in the morning. Lucas looked at Perry, as if questioning whether he should take the scrap, and Perry nodded at him, feeling sad and relieved at the same time.