Broadway was deserted, the broad arcing pavement a pale fish-gray under the streetlights, no one filling up at the two lighted gas stations or spilling out of the three neon-signed clubs clustered on a single block, though the cop car lurking at the intersection of Clay turned my stomach.
I tapped the brakes and said, Please please please, hoping he wouldn’t stop me. I no longer had a curfew as part of my probation—that had ended after eighteen months—but at this hour I’d still have a hard time explaining what I was doing in that part of town; bars were off-limits and there were all-night gas stations in my neighborhood and I couldn’t tell them I was going to the morgue. Even a speeding ticket would provoke a potentially disastrous probation review. For nearly three years I’d been on probation; in another three months I’d be done with it and could go or work wherever I wanted, but until that time, a single mistake would likely land me in prison to serve out my sentence.
Yet the cop didn’t budge and all the stoplights turned green for me, as if the city’s transportation department had been alerted I was on my way, which wasn’t a good thing. The closer I got to the hospital, the more nervous I became, and on Jackson, two ambulances idling at the dock, I felt as if I was going to hyperventilate, so I pulled over and parked. Prison, if someone reported me having been in the morgue; my PO, Joan, had been explicit about that from the start. The late hour would only compound my offense. But I wouldn’t get caught, I told myself; I’d be careful. Not that I believed it.
I knew everything that was ahead of me, the sights, the smells, the sounds, the dim buzzing fluorescent lights of the overheated basement corridors, bleach, formaldehyde, the greasy scent of Chinese take-out, bones and bodies laid out for autopsies and anatomy students, the world I’d inhabited for fifteen years. Still inhabited, in a way, since I now worked in the Danville coroner’s office, though not nearly in the way I once had. Only a part-time participant, an observer, mostly, whereas before I’d been a full-time body wrangler.
But I had to hurry. Odds were, seventy-two hours into it, that Lia might no longer be in the city, or that, if she was, she’d already been cut into constituent parts, depending on market demands. A swarming world descended on the dead, as coldly efficient as an army of beetles, and an unclaimed body in a hospital was like a zebra corpse on the veld. Everyone wants a part of it, and humans are the best scavengers of all: we make use of even the bones. Her skin would be shaved off and sold to burn units; her eyes plucked out for the corneas or for ophthalmological research or to harvest collagen; her shoulders, arms, torso, and legs used to practice new surgical techniques or refine old ones. Or her bones could have been removed, ground up, and mixed with polyurethane and metallic salts and cow parts to create implants for the living, jaws for facial reconstruction, hip, elbow, and knee replacements, discs for spinal patients, new molars to take the place of vanished ones. The list was practically endless. Useful, necessary, life-altering, but just as often a mark of vanity: new skin to cover newly enlarged breasts or old tattoos, collagen to plump thinning lips, fat to fatten tiny buttocks, pectoral implants for men, bone to sculpt a more pleasing jawline, and cartilage to turn up the end of a woman’s formerly beaked nose. And all of it incredibly lucrative.
In the right hands, properly cut up and parceled out judiciously, Lia’s body could bring back a couple hundred thousand dollars, after which what was left of her would be cremated, likely with several other donors, and finding her then would be impossible. I hoped it hadn’t happened, hoped instead for the best-case scenario, that because she hadn’t been autopsied she was still intact and had been shipped to one of the poorer medical schools, one without a willed-body program, which were always hungry for corpses. I knew, because for ten years, I’d tracked them down for those very schools.
At last I took a series of deep breaths and bucked myself up, since putting this off wasn’t going to make it go away. Nothing to it but to do it, I heard Lia say, followed by her big, bubbling laugh, loud as a gobbling turkey. It was our eighth-grade gym teacher’s pet phrase, which we’d adopted mockingly, but which had become a talisman, the way so much of life seems to accumulate around odd, unanticipated snags—God knows I’d never expected to become a corpse wrangler. So, with Lia’s voice in my ears, I stepped out into the muggy, still air and made my way toward the hospital, asking a janitor outside on a smoke break to let me in.
You gotta go in the front, she said, pointing the way with her glowing cigarette. They don’t want nobody coming in this way.
Her round, pale face was free of any makeup and partially hidden behind huge glasses and a tight helmet of blonde curls, and she seemed both tired and wary. She smelled of smoke and something spicy—Dr Pepper, I realized, when I saw the can beside her on top of a wheeled trash can—and was too young to remember me. Too bad, as I’d hoped some of the older janitors might be around. One of them might be more inclined to let me in, but then again, many had lost their jobs in the aftermath of the scandal. One more thing to feel bad about. Which I did, and which I used to my advantage, letting grief and guilt thicken my voice.
No, I said. It’s okay. I’m going to the morgue.
Oh, she said, her shoe rasping as she scraped it over the cement loading dock, putting out her cigarette, a trail of sparks flaring behind her shoe like a comet’s tail. Sorry for your loss, she said, and looked as though she meant it.
Thanks, I said, and touched her arm before she could go on. I don’t want to have to go through all the paperwork just to get to see my dad, I said. I just got into town, and I know it’s not the normal thing, but please, could you let me in this way? I used to work here so I know where I’m going.
When she didn’t answer, I let my eyes fill up and squeezed her forearm, though playing her made my skin feel dirty. Hush, I told myself, at least it’s in the service of a good cause. And when she turned to see if we were in line with the cameras (we weren’t, I’d already checked) I knew I had her.
The old skills. To get at the dead, you have to know how to dance with the living.
She punched in the entry code, and I was inside a hospital again for the first time in three years, the first hallway brightly lit and smelling of the bagged garbage waiting to be hauled to the dumpsters, the next ones dimmer and with exposed pipes and whooshing fans and seven or eight narrow painted lines on the cement floor, each a different color leading to a different area of the hospital, and the next hallway with only one line left, the black one, dimmer still and descending and smelling of chemicals. Bleach and Pine-Sol and, faintly, but growing stronger, formaldehyde. As always, it reminded me of the scent of a vet’s office. The air grew hotter the farther I descended.
She walked with me to the first turning, then watched me make the next one to be sure I really did know where I was going, and as I felt myself getting closer, my skin goose-bumped and the hair on my forearms stood up, an involuntary response. I’d always loved anatomy and autopsies, which was why I’d been so good, why I still was, and which I’d tried to explain to Lia a few times, unsuccessfully. To various boyfriends too over the years, with as little luck.
Most people don’t want to draw back the curtain between this world and the next. But there was something about the human body that fascinated me, which was partially why I’d worked five years as a diener in this very hospital, and another ten as a corpse wrangler. Once again in recognizable territory, the quiet hum of distant hospital machinery a comfortingly soothing background noise, the uncomfortable subbasement heat both unwelcome and familiar, I began to whistle.
Outside the morgue, posted on a large metal placard, was a set of rules. NO SMOKING, EATING, DRINKING, OR PHOTOGRAPHS IN THE MORGUE. DO NOT PLAY MUSIC—USE HEADPHONES. And, in larger, darker letters:
ABSOLUTELY NO ANATOMICAL MATERIAL MAY