Читать книгу Flam Grub - Dan Dowhal - Страница 9

Chapter 5

Flam anxiously appeared for his first day of classes in September, his ingrained timidity heightened by the roomful of strangers around him. As he waited for the lecture to begin, out of reflex he stuck his nose into a textbook, and tried to shut out the people shuffling in to take their seats around him.

“I was expecting a roomful of weirdos,” a female voice commented from beside him.

Flam reddened, thinking perhaps the statement had been some kind of barb directed at him. He pretended not to hear, and resumed concentrating on his book.

“Mind you, they’re probably saying the same thing about us: ‘Those two look normal enough,’” the voice added, and Flam realized the tone was self-deprecating, not derisive.

He turned to reply, and his mouth practically plopped open as he took in the young woman who had addressed him. She was a ravishing blonde with sparkling aquamarine eyes and a halogen-intensity smile. Even though she was seated, he could see she was tall and extremely shapely. To Flam, the girl looked like she would be better suited to strolling fashion runways than rolling away caskets. The thought of speaking to any woman, let alone one so beautiful, petrified him. Still, she had addressed him first, and her look was casual and inviting, so he swallowed hard and replied.

“Yeah . . . I was kind of curious myself as to what kind of student body would show up to study bodies,” he quipped, and was rewarded with an appreciative chuckle.

“Hi, I’m Lucy, by the way. Lucy Giles,” she introduced herself.

“Hi . . . um . . . I’m Flam . . . Flam Grub,” he replied, and could instantly feel a flush of embarrassment come over his face.

“Ha! Great name!” someone exclaimed from the row behind them, then laughed—a loud staccato cackle that sounded like an air horn had been mated with a jackhammer. Flam spun in anger, but the speaker, a well-tanned young man with stylishly spiked brown hair and an expensive-looking sweater knotted around broad shoulders, seemed unfazed by Flam’s ire; instead, he leaned forward with a menacing squint in his eyes.

“Something on your mind?” he snarled.

“Just ignore him . . . he’s a jerk,” Lucy whispered.

“You 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.