Читать книгу Second Life - Paul Griner - Страница 9
ОглавлениеIt was four AM before I got to University Hospital, a time I used to arrive there often. Tissue recovery happens at the oddest hours, and it seemed that whenever I was on call it happened in the middle of the night. A trick of memory, yet it still felt as if I’d been thrust back into my old life, and I had to stop myself from checking for my tools, the scalpels and skin shavers, the retractors and drills, which I’d always kept sterilized and ready to go during the ten years I worked for a tissue-recovery company, CGI. And, as in those times, I’d pressed frozen cucumber gel packs to my eyes before leaving the house, to reduce the puffy swelling, though this time, unusually, I’d left my phone at home. I didn’t want any data about where I was going showing up in front of curious eyes.
But everything seemed now as it once was, that I’d returned to serving as a guide for the newly dead as they began their journey into the other world, the underworld, a kind of life in death, which had confused and exhilarated me—the exhausting work of mining the dead for the living. Oh, it was physical work I did, bones not easy to cut or break but necessary to harvest for those whose own bones had been eaten away by cancer or shattered in accidents or ruined by genetics, the gross motor skills called for there, and then the fine ones right after, stripping veins or tendons, ferreting out the tiny malleus and the tinier stapes bones, removing clavicles and pelvises and invaluable heart valves, harvesting collagen and corneas.
I remembered that during my years as a body broker, peaches lost their savor, that weather reports became a predictor of accidental deaths, ice storms especially, but even heavy rains were good, tornadoes like diamond mines surfacing on their own, whole families wiped out, the surviving relatives, distant and stunned, willing to sign anything, that the eleven o’clock news told me whether or not the next day might be busy, that death had its seasons: winter’s murders, spring’s suicides, summer’s drownings, autumn’s coal-mine explosions, that eventually I became a kind of weird human spider, hiding in my lair, waiting for yet another fool to wander into the sticky web of death. That I didn’t fully realize it until the scandal broke, detailing my various misdeeds, thereby ending my connection with the Stefaninis, and turning me into a villain of almost cartoonish proportions.
I don’t do well without breakfast, so I’d eaten a big one—eggs and Canadian bacon—despite what was ahead of me, and cleaned the kitchen (I’ve always hated coming home to a messy house, unlike Lia, who never let it bother her), and showered and stared at myself in the mirror for a long time before dressing. I was putting it off, afraid of violating my probation and filled with superstitious dread that once I walked out the front door I would make Lia’s death real, and at last I knelt on the floor and prayed.
Not that I’m a believer, but I do pray at times, for strength. We live by hope, after all. But we cannot die that way. So I prayed for the strength to bring Lia home.
There on my knees with my eyes closed, I called up pictures of her: at the beach in her apricot bikini; at junior prom in a high-necked emerald dress that I’d been envious of and that had always been her favorite; of her smiling at me over her shoulder in front of a tobacco barn in Anderson County, the clumps of drying ochre leaves hanging down behind her in a long tunnel inside the black, slatted barn, every other slat thrown open for circulation. Whenever I looked at that picture, I could always smell those leaves hanging from the rafters, their seductively rich, ruddy scent, which was funny, since neither of us smoked, but we both loved the barns, the crop, part of our adopted heritage. It was what first drew us together in middle school, our shared outsider status—she was from Wisconsin and I from upstate New York—and then our mutual love of the landscape of the new home that neither of us ever felt quite part of. That was the picture I still had of her on my phone, though she’d stopped taking my calls and texts years ago.
The images allowed me to recall her loud, breathy voice and her loud footsteps too; you always knew when Lia was on the march, tall and so blonde her hair glowed at dusk. I hoped her death had left a similar kind of marking, would be remembered by those whose hands she’d passed through as she began her voyage in the wilderness of death. Otherwise I might not be able to do anything for Mrs. Stefanini, who only wanted to say good-bye to her daughter. Which I wanted too. Our quests would be the same, then, though our journeys would be different.
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 BE TAKEN FROM THE MORGUE WITHOUT SPECIFIC WRITTEN PERMISSION, AT ANY TIME UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. RESPECT THE DEAD.
They weren’t new rules, but they’d never been posted when I’d worked there, and they were probably posted now because of me. I’d never been disrespectful, had never taken photos of myself with the newly dead or nicknamed the cadavers (Beef Jerky had been a favorite, though The Admiral wasn’t far behind, given all the naval tattoos we saw), and I wasn’t much for music, but of course I’d seen all of that, and more. It all looked bad, especially in the reports that came out, made sensational for the news, and a lot of it was—there was no positive way to spin the photo of a morgue attendant using a cadaver’s penis pump to give the corpse a stiffie—but a lot of it had to do with a different way of teaching. Medical students and morgue workers, we’d all been brought up old school, which meant a certain callousness toward the dead, as a way to get past normal squeamishness. It wasn’t easy slicing open an abdomen or cracking ribs to get at the lungs or cutting the skin of the forehead to fold back a face, and for a long time, the best way to go from this side of the curtain to the other was to make the leap with some disdain.
Now, though, anatomy courses focused on more reverential treatment of the dead, or most did, and that seemed to have taken hold here; everything was in order when I came in, though the years of underfunding had taken an obvious toll: the light still dim and unflattering (missing bulbs, flickering fluorescents), old machinery and ancient tools, dull, dented surgical stands, cabinet doors that wouldn’t close or lacked handles, poor ventilation, and an autoclave that wheezed rather than hummed and that seemed to have been recently repaired by a blind man with access only to clothes hangers and electrical tape. A single attendant stood with his back to me at one of the tables, his bobbing brown head bent over some specimen.
A foot, which looked recently harvested, the skin still pink and taut.
Headphones on, he was partway through a dissection, repeating aloud a memory aid, so engrossed in his work that he didn’t notice me until I was right beside him, at which point he looked up and pulled his headphones from his ears and said hello. Late twenties and tired; probably a med student. Behind him, on another table, a donated body was in the process of being embalmed. That there was only one body made sense; summer was always a slower time in morgues, and for some unknown reason, donations peaked in winter.
The corpse lay on a metal table, shaved and washed, a centrifuge pumping pink embalming fluid into the carotid artery through a long narrow tube, the tube taped to the neck so the pressure wouldn’t blow it out. The right side of the body was already noticeably pinker, the skin beginning to blister. About half of the requisite three gallons had already been pumped in, but the veins of the hand were bulging, a bad sign, as it meant the fluid was being injected at too high a pressure and the attendant not paying attention; he should have been massaging the body throughout the process, pushing the blood out, allowing the embalming solution to flow in, otherwise the eyes might pop and the body become impossible to work on later. I didn’t waste time pointing that out, simply lowered the volume on the centrifuge and opened the jugular drain tube to release the fluids, which jetted out at first, then settled to a more steady burble as they made their way down the channel cut into the table.
His glance went to my chest, not to check me out, but in search of a name tag, because of his inattention and because a skeletal specimen was next to the foot he was working on, which wasn’t allowed. No doubt at four AM he hadn’t expected anyone else in the lab, and if I was someone important—a doctor, say—he might catch hell for his double fouls: lack of care for a corpse and placing the specimen too close to flesh.
A nonexistent name tag didn’t really tell him anything, but that I knew my way around the embalming process did; he slid a muslin sheet over the bones and smiled at me and said hello again.
Hi, Amed, I said, reading his name tag. Elena. Didn’t mean to startle you. You look like you were caught stealing candy, I said, taking advantage of his discomfort. Without a word I picked up the injector gun from the corpse’s stomach and lay it where it belonged with the other tools on a different tray; his third strike. Respect, respect, respect, I thought, knowing he’d had it drilled into him. Always treat the corpse with respect and be aware that family members might walk in at any point, which meant, among other things, not leaving tools on the body. Of course all of us had listened to the same sort of lecture and taken it to heart and then forgotten all about it as we became inured to death, or overwhelmed by work.
No, he said, and flushed quickly. It’s just that I wasn’t expecting anyone.
Sure, I said. Odd time. I let that hang a minute, and then gave him an out. That a recent amputation?
He smiled, unable to help himself. Yes. I was just trying to figure something out. There’s a structure I’ve seen twice now in anatomy lab, and I wanted to look at it on my own. With his scalpel he pulled back one of the muscles and peered inside.
Hard to, when you’re sharing with your tablemates, I said. Let me guess. Motorcycle accident?
Yes. He smiled again, impressed. How’d you know?
It’s the same in most trauma centers, I said, not wanting to give too much away. He’d no doubt heard about the scandal, which had started local and quickly gone national: Reddit, Twitter, even CNN; if you Googled me it’s all that came up. Besides, it was better that he be off balance. The less he knew, the more likely it was that I could get what I wanted. So I slid the muslin sheet back and picked up the specimen. Blood on the navicular bone. Without saying anything, I sponged it off and dried it and put it back on the central table, where it was supposed to be handled.
So, I said. You down here often?
Once or twice a week. He swallowed. It helps me pick up stuff that I don’t get in the labs. I want to get better.
You’re going to, I said. I’ll bet you’re the only one in your class who’s doing this, right? Just try to keep things in their proper place, I said, and patted the specimen. It’s important.
I know, he said, and nodded. His words started to tumble out. It’s just that I got caught up in it and the foot stuff is so complex and I don’t know. I mean, I do, I shouldn’t have, but it just sort of . . . happened.
That’s okay, I said. But I have to ask, you’ve heard about what happened here a few years ago?
He looked horrified and his glance flashed to the cadaver being embalmed, the veins of which were no longer bulging. The embalming fluid was moving smoothly now through the corpse, steadily pinking it. The selling of body parts? he said. I didn’t have anything to do with that. I wasn’t even in school then. Well, I was in school, but not anatomy classes.
Of course not, I said. It’s not then that I’m worried about.
It took a moment for him to understand what I was saying, and during the lag the voice on his iPhone droned on, Posterior tibial vein, tibial nerve, and then the air conditioning kicked in and the rush of air seemed to make things click for him.
No, wait, you’ve got it all wrong, he said. He put down the scalpel as if holding it might somehow indict him and stepped away from the table. I’m not selling anything here. I’m studying. It’s all science, I swear.
I’m sure, I said, and touched his forearm. Just like the janitor, he needed reassurance. It would be pretty hard to sell body parts out of here now, I’ll bet.
I wouldn’t know.
No, I didn’t think you would. I squeezed, letting him know I was on his side. I complimented him on the job he’d done washing the cadaver, on inserting the eye caps and making the mouth look natural, on moisturizing the lips and eyelids, then decided it was time to get to my point before he either relaxed or became belligerently defensive. But what about the bodies? I said. Whole cadavers? Do you see them coming and going when you’re here?
Well, he paused, looked at the table, turned the scalpel over, and aligned it with the Metzenbaum scissors. Sure, but I mean, they come and go all the time. People who die, the autopsies, the funeral home workers who come and get them.
And the willed bodies, the ones donated to our med school? The surplus ones we sell to other schools?
I don’t know anything about those.
Not even where they’re kept? You must know that. Orientation?
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.
