A wolf would strip that body to bones in no time.
A wave of unreality washes over Emma. A sudden headache spikes right where it always does, under that lacy cranial plate the doctors screwed into place between her eyes so her brain wouldn’t bubble out. (When the doctors had first shown her the plate, she’d thought, Great, the perfect accessory for every occasion.) The pain is blinding, and she shuts her eyes against the sudden tilt as the world seems to slump and run like superheated glass.
“Right. Wasn’t that interesting, Emma? I thought it was. And now let’s listen to yours, shall we? You’ve no objection if I read while you follow along?” Kramer asks, but it’s one of those rhetorical questions a person knows better than to answer. As Kramer drones, she stares at words and sentences that, up to five seconds ago, she thought were hers alone.
There had to be a way of calculating how long it would take. There must be rules, like physics or math; there were variables to take into account. Temperature, of course, but also the clothes. Maybe he should’ve stripped the clothes, but then what? He couldn’t bury them. The ground was frozen solid, and burning wouldn’t work because zippers, snaps, buttons didn’t burn and Gore-Tex melted.
Didn’t how long depend on how hungry you were? How badly you wanted something, and how much you were willing to risk? So if you were a coyote and starving to death because the snow was deep and the Wisconsin winter, hard—and then you stumbled on something that couldn’t fight back? Meat that was free and for the taking?
God help him, but he knew: a coyote would strip that body in no time.
“Other than your substitution of Wisconsin for Wyoming?” Kramer drills her with a look. “You see my problem.”
Emma just shakes her head. She is so mortified she wants to melt into the linoleum. God, maybe she really should be better about taking those damn pills. Better to be a zombie than feel this.
“I said, write in the style of Frank McDermott,” Kramer seethes. “I didn’t say steal.”
4
THE SEMINAR WAS a mistake.
She’d had an open slot for a junior-year elective. Any class coy enough to be called “Out of Their Minds: Madness and the Creative Process” made her nervous. Her adviser was more direct: Are you sure about this? The admin people at Holten Prep knew her … ah … shall we say, unusual circumstances. But since the only other alternative was animal husbandry, which was a Wisconsin thing and included a unit on neutering piglets, it was kind of a no-brainer.
What she hadn’t realized was that Kramer meant for them to write the occasional story in the style of fill-in-the-blank. This was a problem. Creative writing already weirded her out, and now she had to crawl around the heads of these guys, too? Seriously? Most of these writers ended up killing themselves. But there was no way she was getting sucked into making little Wilbur squeal.
The Bell Jar had been on this past summer’s reading list, and she’d decided to get a jump on it, starting right after finals and a couple days before her seventeenth birthday. Well … big mistake. The book completely freaked her out. Somehow she got … she became lost, slipping into the story the way she might slide into a tight pair of skinny jeans, and then into Esther’s head. Started looking at the world differently, too, as if staring through a bizarre set of lenses that showed her phantoms no one else could see. And once or twice, swear to God, she heard someone call her name, only to turn and find no one there.
Yet that feeling was … familiar, somehow. Like, I know this. This once happened. At some point, I was really and truly nuts. As if by reading all about Esther Greenwood, Plath’s stand-in for herself, she was remembering what it was like to go slowly insane; to be trussed in a straitjacket and forced to gag back too-sweet medicines and then locked away beneath a bell jar to rave. Which was crazy.
The Bell Jar was bad: an infection, a fever raging through her body, burning her up. It got so awful she spent a couple hours studying a wickedly jagged razor of clear glass, filched from the discards bucket at the hot shop, and thinking, What if? Go on, do it, you coward. You know you want to; you know this is the best way, the only way to pass through into …
Through? Into what? What she’d found down in Jasper’s cellar years ago? (And nope, no way she was thinking about that, nosirreebob.) And go where? Who the hell knew?
She hadn’t sliced and diced—obviously—but the temptation to cut, to filet herself, really hack those arteries and watch the blood bubble, still occasionally slithered into her mind like the black tangle of a nightmare she just couldn’t shake.
Honestly, after that whole Bell Jar mess, the prospect of studying the work of insane writers, slipping into their skins, made lopping off Wilbur’s balls almost attractive. But she was stuck.
5
THE CLASS HAD started with science fiction, which was okay, although Kramer was in love with the sound of his I’m-from-Cambridge-and-you’re-not voice: To paraphrase the incomparable though deeply disturbed Philip K. Dick, whoever manipulates words manipulates the existential texture of reality, as we blahdiddy-blahdiddy-blah-blah. But when Kramer began bloviating about quantum foam and Schrödinger’s cat and dark matter and more blahdiddy-blahdiddy-blah-blah, and everyone else was oh, awesome, that’s like, dude, so Star Trek … she just couldn’t help herself. Dark matter could only be inferred. In the case of Schrödinger’s kitty, collapsing probabilities through observation had nothing to do with massless particles popping out of quantum foam. And quantum effects could be observed on the macroscopic level at near absolute zero within the energy sink of a Bose-Einstein condensate, which therefore proved Hardy’s Paradox regarding the interaction of quantum and anti-quantum particles that might actually coexist in related timelines and alternative universes …
A single death glare from Kramer, though, and she clammed up. Fine. Be ignorant. Mangle science. See what she cared.
After that, the class drifted to horror, specifically Wisconsin’s Most Famous Crazy Dead Writer, Frank McDermott, who was originally from somewhere in Wyoming and lived in England a good long time, but who was keeping score? Besides writing a bazillion mega-bestsellers, McDermott’s claim to fame was getting blown to smithereens by his equally wacko nutjob of a wife. (Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin murders, McDermott—Wisconsin was full of ’em. Had to be something in the water.) With his new! important! biography! Kramer hoped to solve the BIG MYSTERY: where was Waldo … er, Frank? Because, after the explosion, not one scrap of McDermott remained, not even his teeth. Which was a little strange.
Originally a quantum physics star—lotsa theories about multiverses and timelines and blah, blah—Meredith McDermott was fruitier than a nutcake. Years in institutions, suicide attempts—the whole nine yards. Maybe she turned to glass art the way a patient might take up painting, but what she made was unreal; museums and collectors fell all over themselves snapping up pieces.