by Brian Hodge
She could count miles, though. She’d come nearly 2,000 of them on the longest of long shots. A whirlwind evening flight, and unless she ran into problems or detours, she could be back in Pittsburgh and at the shop before anyone who mattered knew she was gone. On a night like this, sleep was for planes, or not at all. It was worth that much for the hope alone.
Manon kept low to the floor as she crept across the room, past guttered tables of stainless steel that caught the dim light from the windows and gleamed hard and cold beside her. All the way to the wall of lockers, each with a square door and a levered handle, and it was times like this when she wished there was something left to pray to.
From her pocket she pulled a penlight; flicked it on but trapped its beam in her hand, turning loose only as much pinkish glow as she needed to read the names printed on cards slid into the little metal frames centered on each door. They were in no order that she could discern, and so each had as much promise as the one before.
Sendelbach, Marilyn S., no…
Crandall, Ronald J., no…
On and on, the names of the deceased, none of whom she had known in life or ever would now, until she’d exhausted every possibility. What better place for hope to die? For a moment, Manon was tempted to yank open the doors that had no name cards at all—empty from outward appearances, but maybe there was a mistake waiting for her to catch it, and even though the body wouldn’t be identified by name, she would no doubt recognize it by its wounds.
She knew better.
Manon had come as soon as possible; had booked her flight in the middle of the afternoon, while Andrei was still reeling from the investigator’s drop-in this morning. And still, she’d been too late.
Unless the body had been moved somewhere else in town.
Did the attendant carry a gun? He’d been too far away to see much detail, but she didn’t think so. He hadn’t looked to be a gendarme; more like a clerk accustomed to paperwork and long, quiet nights.
Manon killed the penlight and slipped it into the pocket of her coat, a longish wraparound that hit her just above the knee. Hated to do this, preferring to slip away during his next break, but the choice wasn’t hers anymore. She checked the workstands at the head of each steel table and had no luck there, so she eased over to the cabinets along another wall, opening doors and drawers until she found their utensils. She chose a scalpel and held it loose in her curled fingers, blade-up along the inside of her wrist, arm hanging at her side so that her hand appeared empty.
She returned to one of the autopsy tables. On its adjacent workstand sat a metal specimen bowl, waiting for some organ or fluid, extracted bullets or broken blade. She gave it a nudge over the side. It hit the tiles with a clatter loud enough to wake the dead.
The attendant didn’t exactly rush to the door—in a morgue, who would want to? Manon crouched behind the table, the sort of thing a stowaway would do, out of sight when his head appeared in the window. Keys rattled in the lock and he swung open both doors, silhouetted against the flood of light from the hallway and, in a voice that sounded belligerent but not very confident, demanded to know who was there.
In slow fits and starts, she stood, both eyes very wide. In every age, in every land in which she’d lived, men had always let themselves be disarmed by this. The sun had risen with less certainty.
“Don’t hurt me,” she said.
“Jesus, you scared me,” he told her, and his shoulders lost most of their squaring, as she’d known they would. “Case you haven’t noticed, this is the last place you expect to hear anybody bumping around. What in hell are you doing in there?”
“I needed a place to sleep, this seemed safe.” She came forward a halting step or two at a time. “I sneaked in during one of your breaks earlier, the door wasn’t locked then, but I got hungry and started looking for something…”
He flipped on the overhead fluorescents, already over his fright, flushed out by equal parts relief and exasperation, and probably a tingle of lust—find a misplaced waif and they couldn’t help it. He was a fairly young man, not much older than Andrei but bigger in every way, taller certainly, and thicker through the middle, with a shape that would be like a ripened pear after a few more years at this undemanding job. He smelled of tobacco and onions, and his neck was sprinkled with blemishes.
“You can’t sleep in there, are you crazy?” he said. “Where are you from, anyhow, you don’t sound like you’re from here.”
Manon let him grasp her sleeve in an effort to steer her toward the hallway. A fumbling gentleman, at least, he wasn’t presumptuous enough to grab her by the wrist.
After a couple of steps she grabbed him by his, and twisted and spun, and swung her leg at the back of his knees. He buckled and she torqued his arm to send him the rest of the way to the tiles, and before he could know what was happening she perched atop him with a knee in his chest and the scalpel aimed at his eye. In her experience, surprisingly, they feared for their eyes even more than their balls.
“I’m from a lot of places,” she said, because an answer, any answer, was likely to keep him calm. “But this is really nothing you should worry about now.”
“I can see that,” he said, his breath gone shallow in his chest. “I don’t have much money, please don’t be mad when you don’t find much there.”
“Don’t worry about your money, either. What’s your name?”
“Darren. Darren Price. My car’s a piece of shit too, don’t be—“
“Darren! No more volunteering things I don’t care about.” She glared down at him until he took it to heart. “There would’ve been a young woman here. Butchered, a terrible death. Her name was Kim, or something like that. Do you know who I mean?”
He gave crisp little nods, mindful of the scalpel and eager to please. “Kimberly Matteo, you’re talking about.”
“So I am, yes. Is her body still here?”
He hesitated, and Manon knew before he said a word that the girl was gone, because he so obviously knew his answer was the wrong one.
“She, uh…she was.”
“Is she still in town? Somewhere near?”
When he hesitated again, she dimpled the skin beneath his eye with the flat of the scalpel, and that brought him to life.
“I couldn’t tell you for sure, one way or the other. They finished up with her here and her parents claimed her out yesterday morning. Morning before last, I mean. They had her sent to a funeral home and then they were going to fly her back wherever. She wasn’t from here, I don’t know where, if you want I could look it up, maybe…”
It wouldn’t matter. She’d heard enough to know that by now the body would already have been embalmed, gutted a second time and saturated with chemicals and beyond all use to her.
“Were you…related to her? Or something?” Darren asked, because he had clearly seen some deep pain twist across her face but had no idea what to make of it…and how nice to live a life like his, skinny wallet and shitty car and all, ignorant of the reasons that could compel someone to fly 2,000 miles in search of a corpse, a special corpse, the kind of corpse that had come to define her existence.
“Whatever we were,” said Manon, “it’s finished now.”
He sensed that too. She could feel the fresh tension in his body, Darren knowing that the situation was about to get a lot better or a lot worse, except he didn’t have a clue which direction it would go. He might do anything in this state. Dumb things, dangerous things.
“I’m going to leave now,” she told him, “but I need to make sure you don’t call anyone and cause me problems fifteen minutes from now. Don’t tell me you won’t, because you will. It’s what anyone does after something like this. I’m going to let you up, so don’t turn stupid on me and forget I have the scalpel. All right, Darren? You’re not going to force me to do something I really don’t want to do?”
Oh, but he already had, hadn’t he? Even if he was only the messenger.
“I’d rather I not, no,” he said.
>
Manon eased her knee from his breastbone and backed off a few steps as he pushed up off the tiles and massaged his chest. She gave the scalpel a couple of flicks toward the wall of shiny square doors. Questions in his eyes, No, you don’t mean…?, and she nodded. His shoulders sagged as he trudged toward what the staff probably called the meat lockers, something dismissive like that.
She had him open one of the empties near the bottom, low enough that he wouldn’t have trouble climbing onto the sliding tray. Once he was on the metal slab, she stared down at him, as he stared up at her from what must have been the most uncomfortable bed he’d ever known, and she found such sad uncertainty in his eyes, Darren perhaps chiding himself for cooperating with her, for failing to fight, letting her lead him every inch of the way to the place where she was going to slice his throat.
At the very least, he had to be thinking that one day he was going to end up in one of these cabinets for real.
“Darren, do you believe in God?” she asked.
His hands began to tremble at his sides and she knew that he’d heard a different question from the one she had asked—intent was everything—that she was setting him for the kill with a cheap line from thirty predictable movies he’d seen in lieu of any better way to spend his time.
“Usually,” he said with a quaver. “It’s hard sometimes but…I try…”
She used to feel such a deep and aching empathy for men like this that she didn’t know how she could stand it another day—the Darrens of the world, all of them, no matter what their names and nationalities, Darrens and their wives and their mothers and fathers and children, and their children too, and on and on into the future. Generations of them on their knees begging the sky for succor, straining to make their lives ever more perfect acts of supplication.
And for what?
Your reward is neither here, nor after.
“How much time do you have left in your shift?” she asked. “Before someone comes in to relieve you? To let you out of there.”
He angled his head to peer at the far wall, where a round white clock ticked away each noisy second. “About three and a half hours. Unless somebody brings in a body.”
She supposed the empathy was still there, though. Why else would she continue to consider herself a part of this struggle, this quiet war, however much it might seem more futile than Don Quixote’s tilting at windmills? At worst, her yearning to spare the Darrens of the world their fate—and she had been one of them once—came and went like the waxing and waning of the moon. Some years her reserves were exhausted to shadows and dust, while other years her purpose seemed to shine so bright and clear it felt impossible that she could ever go astray again, and forget to care.
“Do you know much about cremation?” she asked, and he said not much. “You would think it would be the bones that are the last to burn…the hardest for the fire to consume. But they aren’t.”
Manon leaned down to place her free hand over his chest, felt the rapid hammering inside his ribs, and knowing there was no risk in this, that he wouldn’t fight, he was beyond stupid and dangerous things now because he had a need to know what came next.
“It’s the heart that remains longest. Bones will break, bones will shatter. But the heart is an engine made of the toughest muscle, and it never rests. They said that when Joan of Arc was burnt at the stake, and the people stirred the ashes after they’d cooled, they found that all that remained of her was her heart. I can almost promise you that’s true, and if it isn’t, it might as well be.”
She used the toe of her boot to slide the tray the rest of the way inside the locker.
“I’m going to give you something to think about in there while you wait for them to find you in the morning. See you in a minute or two.”
Manon latched the door behind his head, then backtracked to the morgue’s double doors and locked them too, in case someone came. She shucked her coat and rolled up the sleeves of her sweater, scalpel in hand as she returned to the warehoused bodies, not just checking names this time, but opening their doors and rolling them out for a look. One chalky body after another, their rumps and backs and lower shoulders stained the brutal color of bruises where the blood had pooled. One elderly woman must have died sitting up; her feet were swollen and purple as grapes.
She wanted a younger one, though.
Manon settled on a woman who looked to be in her late forties or early fifties, her dirty blond hair threaded with silver strands and her pale breasts flattened upon the sides of her bony chest. She must not have been here long; there was no large, crudely repaired autopsy incision yet. Manon deliberately ignored the card in the door; did not want to know this woman’s name. Cause of death? Impossible to say—there were no outer signs—but she didn’t have that rotten whiff of cancer, which would have made this unpleasant in so many more ways than it already was.
As she worked, Manon wondered what Darren could hear, if anything—more than the thudding of his pulse and the shallow panting of his tobacco-and-onion breath in the cold, confining dark. Could he hear the slicing of the scalpel through skin and muscle and the deeper tissues in her way? Did he lie there two drawers down, petrified by notions of what could be causing the moist peeling of fat and membranes? Did he hear her grunt, and wonder at her exertion? Were his ears sensitive enough to pick up the scraping of the blade along the underside of wet bone, and the hacking through of cartilage? Did he recognize the end had come with the sucking sound as she finally withdrew her hand and her prize?
Or was everything new and unexpected to him as she yanked the latch and flung open his door and rolled him out only as far as his head, leaving him no room to fight. Darren blinked at the transition from darkness to fluorescent glare, but couldn’t miss the way it glistened from her reddened hand, and he looked as though he were about to gag.
“It may not seem that I’m doing you much of a favor, but you just will have to trust me that I am,” she said. “I don’t care what you believe in. Believe in Buddha, or Brahma, or the Goddess, or your own divinity…or believe in nothing at all. You should be okay then, on that day you’re lying there for real. Are you with me so far?”
He had no words left, only his eyes, fixated on the heart clenched in her fist. He could nod, though, however spastic it appeared.
“But if you insist on the other, I have a question for you to think about while you wait for morning.” She held up the heart, slick and wormed with veins, so it became his sun, his moon, his world. “You know how tough this thing is now. Ask yourself what God must really be if It would not only permit something like me to exist, but be the thing that made me. Ask yourself what purpose there is in creating someone who has the need to do this…”
And she made him watch as she ate it, her teeth and jaws encountering little more resistance than his would’ve met at the green skin and fibrous white flesh of an apple, picked before its time.
V
Eight days hating her, seven telling himself she was a flake…
And now four more straight days staring at the same old walls.
It was upon him again, the awful knowledge, Andrei sensing the weight of a million ways to die. The feeling was like finding himself submerged in the blackest trenches of the sea, no suit, no sub—just naked against the pressure, the inevitable implosion.
She’d done everything right. So far as he knew, Kimmy had made her life as safe as she could possibly make it, just as he had, paring it down and taking almost no chances until it was debatable whether what was left was much of a life at all…yet death had still caught up with her. Had walked through her front door and nailed her to her own wall.
Andrei supposed that this could be death dropping by right now, what with the banging around down in the kitchen, then the heavy steps coming up the stairs, the tap at his bedroom door. Except death probably never yelled to announce itself as it came in from outside, or sang R&B in a big-bellied, deep-chested falsetto while it worked.
“Okay if I open
the door?” said the voice on the other side. “If I open the door, you ain’t gonna throw shit at me, are you?”
“No,” Andrei told the door. “Come on in.”
Corey took it slow, the hinge creaking and his big cannonball head poking in as though taking a careful look to make sure he wasn’t about to get beaned after all. Nope, nothing to see here, just an oily-haired freak sitting in the corner next to a didgeridoo painted the colors of algae and tree frogs, while the stereo played soft and low. The CD player must have cycled through the same discs in the carousel…well, how many times would they go around in four days?
“I hope you don’t take offense at my saying so,” Corey told him, “but it’s getting nine kinds of funky in here. Not the good kind of funky, neither, not the George Clinton kind of funky. If you ain’t gonna be showering soon, how about you open up the window, at least?”
Andrei shook his head, pointed. “There’s a rip in the screen.”
Corey frowned and blinked. He didn’t get it. How could he not get it?
“Mosquitoes,” Andrei explained. “West Nile virus. There’ve even been people get malaria in the States.”
“Man, it’s October in Pennsylvania. I ain’t never got a mosquito bite in October, and if they ain’t going for my juicy self, they ain’t gonna be going for you.”
“Says you.”
Corey nodded, didn’t push the argument, and took a lingering look around. “Well, as long as you ain’t gonna be taking any chances with skeeters, you probably don’t wanna be taking any chances with flies, neither, so you mind if I take away them dirty dishes you got piling up over there?”
Shit—he was right. Flybait, the scummy remains of the meals that his sister had been leaving outside the door. Bacteria, too, you had to figure. He didn’t want Corey to have to take care of them, something Andrei knew he should be doing for himself, but then, he could barely work up the nerve to touch them.
“Did Janika send you over?”
“She might’ve dropped a hint or two.” Corey grinned. “Thought it might do you some good to have somebody around with some testosterone for a change. Between her and Manon and the rest of them, that’s a whole lotta estrogen to have to balance out.”