should be nice to me, gorgeous, I’m stinking rich,” the bully replied. “The name’s Nolan Paine—as in Paine’s Funeral Services. Heard of us? We’ve got a hundred homes from coast to coast, and pretty soon yours truly is going to be running the whole show. I’m only here to get the token certification and make Daddy happy.” He leaned closer until his mouth was only inches away from Lucy’s ear. “You really should get to know me. You might like it.” He brayed in laughter again, but was cut off by the professor calling the class to attention.
“Okay, people. Quiet everyone. Let’s get started.” Flam turned and directed his attention to the teacher. He was a tall, dour-looking old man, whose anatomical lines seemed to be out of alignment by a few degrees, making him look like a skeletal old barn about to collapse.
“My name is Mr. Basillie and the class is Microbiology. Together we will spend the next fourteen weeks learning about the many different organisms that spring up to feed on the dead.”
Without even realizing he was doing it out loud, Flam joked, more to himself than to any audience, “Ahhh . . . so there is life after death.” To his shock, it broke up the classmates around him. Flam reddened as laughing faces swivelled to stare at him in appreciation, but felt a sweet aftertaste of satisfaction to know he had amused his fellows. Warm memories of himself as a boy, standing on the counter of Page Turner’s bookstore, and entertaining the inner circle of regulars with his dramatic recitations, flashed back to him.
The micromoment of satisfaction was abruptly interrupted by Nolan Paine’s loud voice. “Yeah, you oughta know,” he sneered, “you’re dead from the neck up!” The heckler’s guffawing at his own joke drowned out the rest of the class.
“Okay, okay, settle down!” Mr. Basillie admonished his students. “We’ll begin today with an in-depth look at the different classes of bacteria . . ..”
Flam slunk down into his seat. What little self-confidence he had brought to the classroom had suddenly decomposed, and as always, his accursed name, so easy a target, was at the core of it. It was grade school and high school all over again. Why had he thought this was going to be any different? As soon as this class is over, Flam told himself, I’m going over to the registrar and I’m dropping out. However, in the midst of the dark emotions seething within him, another voice spoke up. No. You can do this. The past is dead. This is your destiny and no one’s going to take it away from you. Ignore them. Ignore them all. He straightened, took a calming breath, and focussed his attention on the lecture. Soon he was lost in the unfolding world of cocci and spirilli.
After class, Flam practically ran for the door, tripping over Lucy’s long legs in the process. This became his pattern—first into the next classroom, first out, keeping largely to himself. It proved impossible, however, not to bond to some degree with his classmates, if only because of the atypical career choice they all shared. Despite his flagrant introversion, day by day, class by class, one snippet of painfully extracted conversation at a time, he grew friendly with most of his fellows, who were quick to note Flam’s intelligence and wit.
One exception was the self-obsessed Nolan Paine, who assumed dominion over his fellow students, and made Flam his favourite target. Flam tried persistently to avoid Paine and the humiliation the bully habitually dispensed, but the geography of the Funeral Services classrooms made it difficult. Although Flam steadily accumulated enough of a store of self-esteem to make forays out of the island fortress of his timidity, his newfound confidence was constantly tested by the intolerable Paine. The bully took every opportunity to berate Flam, with cruel jabs that threatened to send the introvert’s raped ego cowering back to its hole.
For once, though, Flam allowed the full extent of his intelligence to surface. He quickly rose to the top of the class, easily excelling in every subject they encountered. Above all, Flam remained a rapacious bookworm, becoming a familiar fixture in the college’s library, and a regular scrounger through the book bins in the local Salvation Army and Goodwill stores, often voluntarily skipping meals to save money to buy more volumes in volume. Unplugged from the social network of his schoolmates, Flam contentedly spent his evenings and weekends alone in his tiny apartment reading, or in front of the computer. The pieces of furniture his mother’s parish had supplied were soon overrun by mound upon stack of book upon book, in several corners literally running up to the ceiling.
The Funeral Services curriculum was an eclectic mixture of general courses and technical instruction related to the profession. The vocational subjects, on embalming and restorative techniques, were supplemented by college-level science courses on anatomy and pathology, and Flam’s compulsive extracurricular reading kept him at a level far above the mediocre standard expected by the college.
Much of the study had to do with the basic operation of a funeral services business, including management practices, accounting, computer systems, law, and funeral merchandising. Flam meticulously soaked up this content as well, by now also serving as informal tutor to a few of the weaker students, including the lovely Lucy Giles. He noticed that Paine, who was otherwise an arrogantly apathetic student, seemed to wake up for these management subjects, evidently seeing them as valuable to his future anointed role as mortuary tycoon.
But there was another side to the business, the one that stressed the role of the funerary profession as caregivers, bereavement counsellors, and dignitaries in the ageless ritual of death. These sociology, psychology, and history courses were the ones that truly appealed to Flam, awakening a bottomless fascination. Entranced by the subject, he plunged beyond the stock readings and assignments prescribed in the syllabus, absorbing everything he could find in the libraries and bookstores and on the Internet.
At the end of his first year, after sizing up the state of his finances, Flam chose to stay in school during the summer. He took extra day and night courses from other faculties that were related to his newfound obsession, and devoted all his spare time to further reading and research. He immersed himself, body and soul, in the customs and mythologies of death, discovering the field even had its own name—thanatology. The more Flam read, the more he wanted to know, glimpsing among the mosaic of traditions and beliefs some higher order and pattern.
His sophistic paths led him from the mummification practices of ancient Egypt to the funeral pyres of India, via Heaven, Hell, Limbo, and Purgatory, among ghosts and zombies, into the inner workings of life-support hardware and medical maps of the mind, through accounts of near-death experiences and past-life remembrances, via a maze of mausoleums and monuments, past Boot Hill cowboys and New Testament miracles, all wrapped in white linen and cold as the clay.
His prodigious readings gave Flam a new perspective. While he had always felt a personal connection to death, which he could constantly feel hovering nearby, offering a potential escape from life’s torments, now he saw it as a universal constant and the great equalizer that united him with all of humankind, past and present.
Chapter 6
In their final semester, as part of the college’s ongoing struggle to raise its academic credentials, graduating students were required to take supplementary general arts courses. Flam, after vacillating over its complete lack of practical value to his profession and personal research, enrolled in a poetry appreciation course, succumbing to the phantom feelings that still throbbed in the amputated love of literature that had sustained him in his adolescence.
The course was taught by a wrinkled old relic of a woman named Ms. Dichter, who quickly surprised her students by springing to life during lectures with an energy, passion, and wit that was as unexpected as a polka party in a morgue. Ms. Dichter turned out to be a bona fide published poet of minor note. Her outrageous past spanned six decades and an equal number of continents, and included a Parisian studio, a lunatic asylum in Montevideo, a gilded Manhattan penthouse, a log cabin in Finland shared with twin brothers, and a sailboat, The Ancient Mariner, she had skippered solo throughout Micronesia. How these dots had connected to bring her to the backwater of Prentice College was a mystery she never expounded on, other than once to exclaim exuberantly, “Ah! Can you not smell the poetry in the air here?”
Ms. Dichter’s class was attended by a mixture of students from various vocational programs, including would-be audio engineers,