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.
Turned out the lady was also a complete pyro. She would’ve had plenty on hand in her studio, too: propane tanks, cylinders of oxygen, acetylene, MAPP. To that she’d thrown in gasoline and kerosene and, as a kind of exclamation point, a bag of fertilizer.
The fireball was immense. The explosion chunked a blast crater seventy feet long and fifteen feet deep. Emma bet Old Frank was tip-typing away in writer heaven before he knew he was dead.
Even so, there ought to have been plenty of Frank McDermott shrapnel: bits and pieces zipping hither and thither at high speeds to get hung up on branches or blast divots into tree trunks. Science was science. No matter what the movies said, for a person to completely vaporize, you needed either an atomic bomb or about a ton of dynamite. So why couldn’t the police find a single, solitary bone? A watch? Something? All that was recovered at the scene were the barn’s iron bolts, sliders, and hinges—and a coagulated lake of slumped, amorphous glass.
And only the barn burned. The house hadn’t. Neither had Meredith’s workshop or the woods or even the fields, despite the fact that the local fire department was twenty miles away and no response team arrived until hours after the explosion. Just plain weird.