Chapter 14

Let's forget about Virginia. Let's get back to working at the morgue.

The morgue was full of shiny tools and the smell of chemicals. It was clean. Sterile. The front desk, where I would spend most of my time, housed a computer and drawers filled with writing utensils and all manner of things you would expect to find at a front desk. The wall behind the desk was lined with filing cabinets.

The back of the morgue was surprisingly similar to the front desk. There was a desk with a computer and writing utensils and everything you'd expect to find at a desk. There were a couple sinks for washing hands and tools, two tables for autopsies and whatnot, a cabinet full of all sorts of chemicals with familiar names and smells. And the back wall was lined with filing cabinets, refrigerated filing cabinets, full of people rather than paper.

After my first few days, I started showing up early. And when I say I was early, I mean I was early. Forty-five minutes, an hour. I wasn't having sex anymore, so I had plenty of time to show up early.

I started showing up early because I was becoming fascinated by the dead bodies sleeping completely covered in pale blue blankets that almost matched the skin. I studied the bodies. The way a woman's breasts would hang down to the sides, into her armpits. The way the fingers and toes never really looked relaxed, or tense. The way veins would show up in the oddest places, like holding a flashlight up to and egg.

I studied them because, well, I'd never really studied dead bodies before. I'd only eaten them.

One of my first early days, I found myself alone. Dick was out, Eli was out. It was just me, in the morgue, with two new bodies in the back. I'd already gone over the paperwork: a forty-seven year old woman who'd had a heart attack, and a kid, sixteen, who'd been shot in the chest.

I couldn't help myself. I had to do it.

I slid the woman out of her little drawer and looked for a moment at the sheet covering her body. It reminded me of a loaf of bread, covered by a dishtowel, cooling on the kitchen counter. The only real feature was the little tent at the bottom, pitched with the poles of her feet.

I pulled the sheet, folded it up, and set it on the examination table a few feet behind me. The loaf of bread took shape; a little round, a little pale, and a little cold. A transubstantiation the Catholics would go ape-shit over. (Thank God they don't burn people at the stake anymore. Although I'm sure this sentiment is quite capable of landing a few protesters on my lawn.)

The muscles had grown tired of holding all the fat and skin in their proper places, and the fat and skin hung at the sides. The breasts had slid to rest on the arms, a mudslide brought on by the rains of death. The fat belly had flattened, or migrated, so the fat sides were now really fat sides. It went the same for the meat of the arms and legs, the way the topsoil is pushed aside to make room for the expanding gas chamber of a volcano threatening to blow.

This woman, though, she would never blow anything again. Not the steam from a spoon of hot soup or the candles on a birthday cake. Not a fat line of cocaine or an entire paycheck at the mall. Not her husband or her lover.

She was done. Everything building up inside her, everything ready to explode – it all just stopped. All that power that had taken years nearing the surface, it was all trapped. She could never let it out. She was a false alarm, and I felt sorry for her. Or, more accurately, I felt sorry for all that stuff she'd never be able to let out.

I imagine that as she was dying, clutching at the arm they say hurts when your heart gives out, she was sorry for all that stuff, too. There was so much of it in there, and now it would rot away with the stretch marks on her hips and the cellulite on her ass. She had to have thought about it, that poor woman. Knowing there's more in there than what you've been able to set free in the last half-century. If her heart hadn't already failed her, I'll bet it would have broken at the thought.

I looked at her face, and I had myself convinced that she had moved her mouth. Or tried to move her mouth. Like I could see the muscles trying, trying so hard, to get those lips open. To tell me something. To let something out.

The mouth, that's where all the power is. The gateway to what's inside. Breathing, eating, drinking, speaking. It's the mouth that allows all of it. At least, that's the way I thought about it then.

All these bodies used to be people, people with strength and some sort of power (or soul, or spirit, or aura, or whatever), and now, because the mouths were out of order, this power was just stuck in there, in those fleshy sarcophagi.

I'd once read that certain tribes (in the South Pacific, mostly, although probably in other places, too) believed that a dead body still contained the strength of the person who had inhabited it while alive. The warriors would eat their defeated enemies and absorb that strength. This same book also said that some cultures were known to eat the flesh of their dead relatives. They believed they would carry the soul of their dearly departed grandfather around in their veins until their own grandchildren ate them. And so on. And so forth.

I learned all this in an Anthropology class in college.

This was when I didn't pay too much attention to theories about Big Namba or Small Namba tribal culture. This was when my biggest problem was trying not to show that I was there, in class, hung-over and fighting my need to vomit.

I learned about this in college, and I hadn't thought about it since. Now, standing over this corpse of this woman, I thought about it again, and it made sense.

I poked and prodded like a farmer looking over a pig, deciding if it is good enough, fat enough, healthy enough, to serve to my family for Christmas dinner.

I poked and prodded, comparing the feel of the thighs to my recollection of Erica's. Erica's thighs were thin and athletic, muscular, great to look at and easy to chew, like the most tender of human filets. These thighs, you could tell they'd be a little chewy, fatty. Slow roasted, like a nice prime rib, they would have been fantastic. But raw, not so much.

You might think I'd have caught myself thinking about all this and stopped myself because it was disgusting and twisted and wrong. You might think I'd have thrown that sheet right back over that loaf of cold bread, walked back to the front desk, called Dick Pearson, told him I quit, and run out the door.

I guess maybe I should have.

Yes, I did realize that the goings-on in my head were a little, well, off the mark. And no, I did not believe that eating this woman would somehow allow her, or those things trapped inside her, to live on. I'm not fucking crazy.

Sure, I thought about what it would be like to cut her up, cook her up, chew her up, swallow her. I thought about which ways to cook which cuts. I thought about what it would be like to eat her, but in that way you imagine what it might be like to fuck a chicken.

I did not think about what it would be like to actually eat her.

So my mouth watered a little. So what?

I was squeezing the right triceps when Eli showed up. "New one?"

I dropped the arm, which bounced off the table and fell swinging over the edge. "Holy shit, Eli. Don't sneak up on me like that. You could give someone a heart attack."

"Like her, huh?" He stepped in for a closer look. "She's a heart attack, right?"

"Did you look at her file?"

He cracked his neck, then his fingers, out in front of him, like an arthritic pianist. "No. I can just tell most of the time."

"That's creepy."

He smiled. "Yeah. Comes with the territory." He picked up the folded sheet from the exam table. "What are you doing back here, anyway?"

Hmmmm. "Nothing, really. Just looking." Looking, yes. Sweating now, too. "Thinking about what it's like to die."

He seemed to buy it, walked to the side of the table, and looked the woman over slowly from feet to head. "You're new. You won't think about that anymore, not after a while. After a while, you'll forget they're even people. Of course, they're not people. Not anymore. The people part is gone. Poof. And all that's left is this." He punched her in the stomach, and she farted. She farted, and Eli laughed. "Ah. That'll never get old."

I covered her back up, slid her back into her drawer, and went to spend the rest of my morning filling out and filing paperwork. To spend the rest of my day thinking about why I was thinking about whether a cabernet or a merlot would go best with a nice, tender rump roast.