Sure. He was more animated now, happier, having something to tell me and suspecting that I wasn’t going to worry about his minor infractions.
They’re in room B437, he said.
And who’s in charge of them these days, Dr. Handler still?
Yes.
Good. Thanks for your help. I’m going to look at them. The code still 3377?
4451, he said, and then, realizing what he’d done, Wait. That’s supposed to be confidential.
It’s all right, I said, pausing at the double doors. I’m not going to turn you in, Amed, for that or for mishandling the specimen or for minor cadaver mistreatment. Then I pushed through before he could say anything else, as it was better to get in the last word and leave him doubting.
Still, I didn’t want to linger; he might develop a conscience and alert a guard, though I suspected he still had no idea who I was, and that I knew a former code told him I had to be someone important.
Three-quarters of the storage drawers were full, some of the bodies already embalmed, theatrically pink or tan or brown or black, features set, eyes neither popped nor sagging, all looking younger than they would have at the time of death, healthier too—embalming did that, smoothing out their skin, plumping their lips—and I opened each one only long enough to determine that it didn’t contain Lia, always a possibility since cadavers were sometimes mismarked. But no luck this time; not one of them held a female under the age of sixty. Not especially unusual—mortality rates weren’t high for that age group, and summertime had fewer fatalities. But still, something to contemplate. Perhaps there’d been a run on young female cadavers for some new surgical procedure; I hoped not.
Most of the bodies were ravaged, even after the embalming process.
The less, Dr. Giorgio had once called them, when, at eighteen, I first began working in the morgue, having taken the job as a diener on a dare. I must have looked appalled, because he’d quickly added, Homeless, toothless, moneyless, friendless. Which means we have to take more care of them, and here was proof of Dr. Giorgio’s words, the destitute and the drug addled and deranged, who came to the ER only as a last result and often too late, and who had no one to watch out for them after they died, no one to protect them, when their bodies became both useful and easily taken advantage of. To people like me, and by people like me, their body parts harvested and sold, often for good purposes and just as often for high profit; the violent second life of bodies, which nearly everyone was oblivious to and even those in the know refused to talk about openly. All the more reason Lia would have been valuable.
Finished, no wiser than when I’d begun, I washed up and headed up the long sloping hallway into cooling air, avoiding Amed, avoiding everyone, mourning that I’d missed Lia, and still with the foolish hope that she might somehow return. It all led to a nauseating swirling in my stomach, always, for me, a prelude to déjà vu. And just like that I remembered standing to the side of a third-floor operating room a decade earlier, just after I’d become a corpse wrangler, where a surgeon had kept his students behind to work on a woman who’d died on the table, wanting them to observe some technique. Ten minutes he’d held them there, fifteen, twenty, lecturing long after the woman’s death had been recorded and now and then opening the abdominal incision to make his point more vividly, when, without any medical intervention on his part, the monitors had picked up a pulse. The Lazarus syndrome, he’d said, as shocked as I was to see her come back to life, and I realized what I’d been hoping: that mistakenly pronounced dead, Lia had somehow miraculously returned to life.
Oh, wouldn’t that be lovely, I thought, knowing that I had a special affinity for the Lazarus woman because I’d been stillborn myself, or so my mother had been fond of telling me. She’d gone into labor in a bus station and only women were around and they all helped her, but even so I came out blue and still.
It was only the encircling crying women who seemed to bring you back, she always said.
Why only women? I’d always asked.
I don’t know, she’d reply. Some kind of conference. Nuns, mostly.
Later, she said, Maybe it was fated from birth. You getting mixed up with the dead.
I don’t believe in fate, I said, fingers crossed behind my back.
I don’t either, she said, looking at me over her rimless glasses, but I don’t know how else to explain it.
Now, I thought, if I couldn’t live by the hope that Lia was secretly alive, I had to live by a new one: that I could find her. I couldn’t restore her to life, but I could protect her body and accompany her to the grave.
I pushed open the loading dock door without a backward glance and lighted a cigarette and stood smoking in the humid air. Even here in the city the katydids and cicadas sent up their mechanical racket. The sky was just beginning to pale, though it was cloudy and smelled like rain. August in Louisville; seventy-five before dawn and a hundred before noon, water from the faucet warm enough to make tea, the air thickening and the massing clouds darkening into the inevitable ozone-scented evening thunderstorms: burnt toast and car exhaust and the hint of cooler air. But that relief was a dozen hours away.
A few more cars were on the roads, some delivery trucks chugging by, a handful of sleepy, silent pedestrians; the world was waking up. Not me, I thought, and tossed aside the cigarette and headed back toward my car, sweating after the stale air-conditioning of the hallways. If I felt eviscerated by Lia’s death and uncertain about my chances of finding her, if I was out of whack with the world, having spent half my night chasing a body before others had even begun their days, I felt myself in familiar territory as well, returning to the one thing I’d ever been skillful at, a thing the world alternately despised and needed.
For three years I’d been despised. It felt appallingly good to once again be needed.
I wiped down the embalming table with a sponge first, so nothing splattered, then bleached it and hosed it off, and all the loosened epidermis and coagulated embalming fluid sluiced down the drain, leaving the nicked and dented table shiny and ready for the next body. I poured the drain and tissue buckets into the proper biohazard trash cans, sealed them, swapped the used scalpel blade out with the Qlicksmart remover and slipped it into the sharps container, then snapped off and discarded my latex gloves. Since I’d already slid the body with the McDonald’s tattoo back in the cooler, I was done.
Done with the easy part, anyway. On the ninety-minute drive to Danville, past rolling hills planted with tall green corn and stubby yellow-green tobacco, past church after church after church interspersed with distilleries, past horse farms marked by miles of black running-board fences and cattle farms where Black Angus and bone-white cows clustered by the water troughs in the blazing sun, I’d thought incessantly about Lia and how desperate I was to find her. I had plenty of time, the drive slower than normal because farmers were going to their fields on their tractors and I was stuck in a long line of pickups behind them. We had Lia’s name; we didn’t have her corpse. And of course that made me think of McDonald’s, a corpse we had in Danville without a name. She was well preserved, if a bit dry after five months in the cooler—no amount of Biostat could change that—yet we still had no idea who she was. McDonald’s was about my age, about Lia’s, and my boss Buddy had said after we’d had her for about a month that she could be my sister.
Gross, Buddy, I’d said. That’s awful.
I don’t mean it that way, he said, but you sure you don’t have a missing long-lost relative? Same height, same hair, same facial features, mostly. And with your mother gone, you’re both orphans now. Unlike you, though, maybe she was a woods colt. He’d had to explain to me that that was Kentucky slang for illegitimate.
I