Second Life. Paul Griner

a peculiar tattoo (though exactly of what was unknown), when we learned of her, Buddy hoped we’d finally found our woman, that he could at last give McDonald’s some closure. Even if she had no family, she could have a name, a burial, a headstone. But no luck, since dental records and DNA from Carmine didn’t match with McDonald’s, no luck, and now we were going to make it worse by reclassifying McDonald’s as an accidental death—yet another discarded dead woman, left to fend for herself in the next world as she probably had done in this one.

      I amended her report on both the computer and the page, as Buddy had asked, reclassifying her death as accidental, wrote a group e-mail to local and regional police departments explaining our reasoning, and sat for a good ten minutes deciding whether or not to hit Send. A train whistled mournfully outside of town, a car honked nearby, crickets chorused in the heat. Finally, I couldn’t do it. This was the first time I’d ever gone against Buddy’s wishes, but I felt so dirty reclassifying her in the morgue that I couldn’t bring myself to send her changed status out into the world. It’s all right, I told myself, deleting the email and shutting off the computer. There’ll be time enough for that in the weeks to come.

      It was absurd and wrong and irrational, yet before I put McDonald’s file away, feeling that something had changed, that now that we’d rechristened her as a newly minted accidental death long after we’d swapped her blood for formaldehyde, now that her paperwork would be filed away and forgotten, I wanted some tangible link to her past. So I took out the sheet with the names and vital information for all the women she could have been, should have been, and folded it into squares and stuffed it in my purse. Finally, as old-timers in the country around here sometimes did, I picked the shiniest quarter from the change clustered in the bottom of the bag and tucked it under McDonald’s tongue.

      It was supposed to bring luck to the dead, and lord knows McDonald’s needed it. If I weren’t so superstitious, I’d have tucked one in my mouth too.

4

      I was back in Louisville, back near University Hospital, just after lunchtime. It had stormed as I drove, the drumming, sheeting rain so straight up and down it looked ruled, cars pulled to the side of the road or stopped in their lanes to wait out the sudden blackness, so dark it felt like an eclipse. Twice I’d come close to rear-ending one of the parked cars, a Midwestern phenomena that drove me crazy, and then the sun had come out and the cars sped up, surrounded by individual clouds of mist as if they were all smoking, ready to burst into flame. I’d run by my apartment just long enough to grab my old files from under the kitchen counter: Doctor Sold Cadavers; Body Brokers Gone Wild; Dawn and Dusk for the Dead. In each of the articles the Stefaninis had sent me—dozens—my name was circled in red.

      Now the air was dry and cool, a rare, pleasant break for August in Louisville, when the temperature rarely dropped below ninety, and on impulse I decided to kill the remaining two hours over an outdoor lunch, glad I’d brought a sweater. I was anxious to see Dr. Handler, but she taught late-afternoon and early-evening hospital practicums and didn’t show up until at least three, and sitting outside her office for two hours seemed foolish. People were sure to remember me. The Garage was an old gas station converted to a pizza and shellfish restaurant, its parking spots a freshly graveled seating area, its bays a bar.

      I wasn’t the only one attracted by the weather, so I had to wait for a table, which didn’t bother me, as it allowed me to flip through the files while I sat in the shade under the plane trees lining the sidewalk, half of their leaves already spent, an autumnal bell-pepper yellow after enduring the long summer heat. If anyone had asked why I’d brought the files, I wasn’t sure. Perhaps to remind myself that I’d started out one way and been surprised to find myself another? Hardly original, but still, my fall shamed me, and the articles laid bare all my sins in merciless detail.

      How I’d left my position as diener at University Hospital to go to work for CGI as a corpse wrangler; how five years into it a friend’s father died and I’d harvested his skin and collagen, his heart valves and patellas, his femoral fascia and cranial bone and spine without permission; how I didn’t tell his family for another five years and wouldn’t have ever, if a reporter hadn’t informed me of an upcoming exposé about illegal body brokering featuring me as the central character; how this was all part of my system of illegally recovering body parts from Louisville-area funeral homes, working with funeral directors when they knew, with funeral parlor employees after hours when they didn’t; how I recovered the same body parts from area morgues, operating rooms, and ERs, working with corrupt nurses, doctors, and surgeons; how I created false identities to sign permission slips for tissue recovery when permission hadn’t been granted; how I falsified the ages of corpses and causes of death so tissue processors received body parts from us that came only from patients under fifty who were free of cancer, hepatitis, and AIDS; how even when I had permission to remove certain tissue from bodies at area hospitals, working in those cases with good doctors, nurses, and surgeons, I’d taken extra parts to sell on my own; how I created false demand for surplus cadavers from the willed-body programs at the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky, saying that I was transporting them to smaller medical schools in desperate need of corpses and stripping them instead; how a venal funeral parlor director worked with me, combining the various cadaver parts left over after stripping—corneas and ligaments and heart valves from one body, a spine and tibias from another, hips and collagen from a third—and cremating them together, then parceling out the cremains into various bags so that each package returned to individual families weighed roughly the correct amount; how immensely profitable this had been for CGI; how willfully, perhaps criminally blind many of the hospitals and clinics and big surgical suppliers I worked with were to this entire dirty business.