by Richard Kadrey
Using my pull with an acquaintance at the city morgue, I convince the attending Medical Examiner to let me watch your autopsy.
He begins with a traditional Y incision, cutting two diagonals across your upper chest until they meet at your sternum, then a single long, straight slice down to your crotch. He opens you with a crack, snapping ribs and connective tissues, laying you open and bare, more exposed than you’ve ever been in a lifetime of extreme exposures. I stand quietly, a little behind the Examiner, clicking away with the cheap little pocket camera I bought on the way over.
This Examiner is a true professional, experienced and respected for both his precision and the speed of his work. But now that he’s opened you, he’s just standing there, looking down, his head craning slowly up and down the length of you. He reaches forward and pushes a finger into your abdomen, scooping out what he finds and pressing it quizzically between his fingertips. Your body appears to be packed with a pinkish-yellow modeling clay. The Examiner makes a face and scoops out more with his hands, trying to find his way through the muck to your organs. Without warning, he lets out a little yelp and pulls back his hands. He says that he felt something move inside you. Using forceps, he reaches tentatively into you and pulls something free—a hissing rattlesnake.
After disposing of the creature in the incinerator, he examines your insides further, this time using scissors and a metal probe. He soon hits a pocket of what looks like black tar. It oozes up through the clay, darkening it. The Examiner’s probe drags new things from your gut. Rosaries. Straight razors. Old bottles of laudanum and arsenic. He finds your baby teeth. Leather wrist restraints. The hand-stitched belt your daddy used on you when you needed discipline.
With his forceps, the Examiner digs into the thick clay and pulls out your heart. Instead of a fist of muscle, what he holds in the forceps is a glowing red coal, spouting a steady flame from the top and wrapped with barbed wire, like a miniature crown of thorns.
He turns and looks at me, holding up the glowing coal as if I might have an explanation. I shrug and snap a picture. “What’s that?” I ask, nodding at your body. The Examiner turns to look and I reach around from behind, slicing his throat from the jugular to the carotid artery in one smooth motion, using the scalpel I stole from his instrument tray. He burbles once and I let him drop, bleeding into the cavity from which he’d extracted your burning heart. Snapping another quick photo, I run my hands down your throat, across the open halves of your chest, and along your legs, using my fingernails the way you always liked.
In the late 1990s, I read about new electronic scanning techniques that led to brain studies which revealed that our minds and bodies are all utterly unique. The neural pathways that mean pain and discomfort for some equal pleasure and contentment for others. The chemical compositions of our cerebral and spinal fluids can vary widely from person to person, perversion to perversion. Our desires are defined by our brains and our bodies are shaped by our desires. As William Blake once said, “Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.” The unrestrained, I wonder, watching the last of the Medical Examiner drain into you, who knows everything the unrestrained are capable of?
There’s a bubbling in the bloody clay. I touch you more insistently now. Your lips. Your thighs. Your genitals. Something rises from the muck. A hand. Then an arm. Another hand beside them. I work you harder and your body begins to convulse in orgasm. You pull free from the clay, up and out of your corpse. Covered in blood and muck like an infant, you’re reborn from your own body, this stranger’s blood, and our overwhelming desire. You rise up to your knees, breathe into your new lungs and open your mouth, searching for your voice. Finding it, you touch my cheek and say, “I told you I’d never leave you.”
I wrap you in the Examiner’s lab coat and take you home.
Richard Kadrey is the New York Times bestselling author of the Sandman Slim supernatural noir series. Sandman Slim was included in Amazon’s “100 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books to Read in a Lifetime,” and is in production as a feature film. Some of Kadrey’s other books include The Grand Dark, The Everything Box, Hollywood Dead, and Butcher Bird. He’s also written for Heavy Metal Magazine, and the comics Lucifer and Hellblazer.