Smoking cigarettes is bad for me. I know it. And my parents knew it, and some of my friends know it, and my dead grandparents all know it first-hand. Smoking is bad for me, and by this point in my life I'd been doing it for almost a decade. There was an eighteen month period when I'd quit, not had one cigarette, even if I was drinking, even after sex, but I'd since started up again. I knew I had to quit then because the stairs were beginning to look more like Everest every time I approached them, and the balls of phlegm that I coughed up in the morning were growing larger, a little more discolored. I knew I had to quit because eventually you realize that things are getting worse, and someday they'll be irreparable. You know that someday a doctor will tell you that you have cancer, emphysema, whatever. He'll tell you you're going to die, and you should have stopped before it got to this point.
And the bitch of it is, he'll be right.
Surgeon General's Warning: Cannibalism can lead to such horrifying diseases as Kuuru (or the laughing death, as it's referred to by tribes in New Guinea, which is sort of like the Mad Cow Disease of humans). It can also lead to jail-time or, more likely, a death sentence.
It says so right there on the box.
There are many ways to quit smoking. There's the gum, the patch, the rubber-band around the wrist, the hypnotherapy, the acupuncture therapy, the twelve step programs. They call them aides, helpers, crutches.
I call them crap.
The only way to quit doing anything is to quit fucking doing it. Just stop. No aides. No crutches. If you think you have to stop eating so much, then don't put all that food in your mouth. If you have to stop drinking and driving, don't drink, or don't drive. If you have to stop smoking, stop lighting things on fire and sticking them in your mouth. You get the idea.
If you have to stop wondering what it would be like to have people as your main source of food, as a preference rather that out of necessity, then you have to stop reading about it. You have to stop watching your documentaries. Stop sitting around your apartment with all that access to cannibalism web-sites. It would help if you could stop going to work at the morgue, too, but a man has to work, and the benefits are a major plus.
But the thing is, you have to stop doing all these things NOW, before the doctor tells you your nervous system is completely shot and soon you'll collapse, trembling onto the floor and losing your ability to speak, before you start breaking all those rules you made for yourself only a couple chapters ago. Before the police catch you with body parts in your freezer, you have to stop all of it.
They call it cold turkey.
I call it way more effective than all that other crap.
I woke up one morning, a couple days after meeting Synchek at James Street, and the first thing in my head was, I wish I had to work today. I want to feel-up another dead person. If I'd become this addicted to the idea, just imagine what the actual practice would do to me. Finally, my conscience recognized this as a very bad thing. I was killing myself, just like with the cigarettes. And one form of slow suicide is plenty, thank you. At least the cigarettes don't hurt anyone else. At least the cigarettes don't mean you've completely lost your senses of humanity and of right and wrong.
So I decided to quit. Cold turkey. No crutches. If I could survive months of being alone and starving and broken in the mountains, in the snow, in the tragedy and death of that fucking accident, I had to be strong enough to stop myself from getting deeper into this addiction.
I disconnected my computer, threw my books into the incinerator in the basement, returned the documentaries to the library, and I quit. Just like that.
The thing about working at the morgue is it's much more difficult to quit your addiction to dead people – eating them, thinking about eating them, or otherwise, if you swing that way – when you have to be around them all day. It's like an alcoholic carrying a full flask in his jacket pocket, like a gambling addict moving to Vegas.
I should have quit my job.
But I didn't. I decided I would just have to deal with it. Piece of cake. I spent most of the time at the front desk anyway, an entire hallway separating me from my vice. I could bury myself in paperwork, reorganizing files, cleaning.
And I did. Come August ninth, I hadn't even looked at a dead body. I kept busy answering the phone, ordering chemicals and new tools, scrubbing the waiting room floor. I kept busy by whatever means necessary, and it was working. And it certainly didn't hurt that nobody seemed to be dying. At least not in the city.
August ninth, and Pearson came out from the back. "So much for the undertaker always having work, huh?"
I was busying myself, putting new labels on the file folders. "Yeah. I guess so."
He sat on the corner of the counter, picked up a couple of paperclips, and started bending them up, sculpting. "You feeling all right, Travis? You seem like you're getting a little too involved with all this cleaning up out here."
I pulled a faded yellow label from its plastic holder at the top of the folder. I-J, it said. "Yeah, I'm fine."
"I noticed you've been coming in early. That's good. It shows you care about your work." He looked down at the paperclip figure in his hand, curled his lip, and went back at it. "Seems like you're settling in nicely. That's good, too. Sometimes this place makes people a little weird."
"I guess I'm doing all right. I like it well enough." I stuck a nice, new, bright orange I-J label on the folder and slid it back into its drawer.
"Are you interested in any overtime work? There's something I need to do tomorrow night, and I think I'll need a hand."
This was perfect. A few more hours at work, and actually working, would help me hold my focus. I'd stopped going to the bar because I was still having trouble looking at women as anything other than sexy sides of beef hanging in the butcher's window. I'd spent the last few nights hiding out in my apartment, smoking dope, eating Mac 'n Cheese, watching television, and playing video games. Puzzle games. With no blood. I knew I’d held onto my NES and The Legend of Zelda for a reason. I'd been avoiding phone calls, allowing voicemail to politely lie for me. "I can’t answer the phone right now," my voice would say, "Leave a message, and I'll get back to you." It must be easy to keep a straight face when you have no face. Lucky voicemail.
"Sure, I can help you tomorrow night. What are we doing?"
He stood back up. "We're going to deliver a few bodies to a place in the South Side. Unclaimed bodies. Or unidentified. For research."
Oh, grand. "Yeah. I can do that."
"Good," he said, pitching his botched wire sculpture to the trash. "It'll be much easier with two people." He started towards his office.
"Hey, Dick. It's your job to do that?"
"What's that?"
I stood up. "To deliver the bodies. That's your job?"
"Oh. No," he said. "It's just something I do. I know the head of the research department. He's doing great things, or trying to anyway. I like to stop in and see how things are going." He headed for his office again, but stopped, this time of his own accord. "Since you're helping out tomorrow, and nobody's dying, how about you take the morning off. I'll still pay you for it."
"Sure thing." I wasn't positive staying home was going to be a good idea, but a day away from such easily accessible corpses couldn't hurt, particularly if I’d be handling body bags stuffed with the tasty morsels all night. I was sure I'd be able to find something to keep me busy. Maybe I'd pay some bills, go through my fan mail box. Maybe I'd just sit around and look at porno mags all day, wishing I could masturbate, thinking about how Virginia could very well have been the last girl I'd ever sleep with.
Maybe I'd get back to thinking about my poor dead friends and their poor grieving families. Maybe I'd get back to writing. After all, I now had plenty of material. I could do what the doctors said I'd have to do. I could get my hands dirty digging up all the memories I'd been trying not to think about. It would be the perfect distraction, the ideal way to keep myself from thinking about this new thing I was trying to keep out of my head.
I could get specific, down to the blood stain on Jason's jeans that looked just like South America. Down to the way the snow drift, steadily growing over the plane, threatened to swallow the entire scene. Down to the details of how I'd built myself a little shelter out of ski poles and scraps of metal.
Nothing takes you out of reality like a good day of creative self-wallowing.
I pulled the K-L file from its place in the drawer. "What time should I get here tomorrow?"
"Be here at six."