CS: Matthew?
MH: They were right. There’s nothing… [Sound of empty glass bottle being shattered.]
CS: Matthew, please. There’s no need to…
MH: I did this. I did this. I… [Sound of Subject 5 collapsing on floor. Sound of wet coughs/exhalations. Faint sound of specimen clicking/squealing from interior of Subject 5. Sound of door opening/boots shuffling/Subject 5 moved to stretcher.]
CS: Goddamn it, [REDACTED]. I said plastic bottles only. Triage?
DPDx: Subject 5 at ISS 75. Both major sources of blood flow to brain severed, trachea punctured. He was committed.
CS: The specimen?
DPDx: Significant damage. Suggest immediate retrieval attempt.
CS: Agreed. Prepare for transfer to Surgical Theater 8, movement protocol in place.
DPDx: Confirmed. [Brief pause.] Director?
CS: Yes?
DPDx: If I didn’t know better, I’d think this dead fuck was grinning right at me.
CS: Could be a symptom of the parasite attempting to exit the damaged host. Stay far from his mouth until we’ve assessed specimen mobility. And let’s keep it moving. Perhaps Matthew’s got a second chance at fatherhood.
DPDx: [Muffled laughter] Yes, sir. Rolling out.
END TRANSCRIPT
The Caller ID reads “Unknown” but the man on my phone says he’s with the Thurston County Coroner’s Office in Washington. I know precisely zero people up north so I peg the call as a prank or a particularly grim dialing error.
Darry is travelling on business, but I spoke with him this morning. He was fine.
Mistakes like this happen every day, right?
I can smell my breath on the phone, stale hints of cinnamon toast and mimosas light on the orange juice. The voice on the other end continues to intrude into my lazy afternoon, verifying my name is Elloise Broderick, and the sunshine coming in through the kitchen window suddenly feels too hot on my skin. That heat and the tone of the voice create a flash-fever in my belly that spreads quickly to my fingertips. I can imagine flowers wilting next to that warmth, petals curling, dropping.
Delirium. The blood in my head whirlpools down, a tornado spinning out of existence, rendering me transparent. So when the voice on the phone says, “I’m sorry to inform you that your husband has been in a fatal traffic accident,” it’s easy to imagine that the “you” being addressed is someone else, maybe someone standing directly behind me, someone older, someone who has three kids and a half-paid mortgage.
Not that the statement regarding the death of that other husband will hurt that person less. But it would seem, at least, appropriate. More real. Because my husband’s not dead. Can’t be. I’ve only had him two years since last October. The expiration date for a guy like him is so far off that I can’t even conceive of it.
“You” could, though. The “you” being addressed on the phone has had her share of life, with its troubles, even its deaths. She isn’t the one with weekend bar-hopping plans and a yellow plastic cell phone in her hand that feels sweaty and toy-small. She isn’t the one getting nauseous, eyeing the distance to the kitchen sink because her belly might evacuate its contents. “You” understands mortality, may even have found some strange peace accord.
Mistakes like this, I’m sure they happen all the time. That’s why I ask the misguided voice on the phone if I can see the body.
Static, then a hesitant, “Yes… actually we are required to have someone, family or friend, identify the body, to satisfy coronial procedure. But you may not want to be the one who does this. The accident was high velocity, and the body… ”
Then he’s telling me about the condition of this body that’s not Darry’s; how useless the dental records will be in the absence of, you know, teeth. He details the projected speed of impact, the rain on the roadway, the delayed response from authorities that allowed physical evidence to be dispersed by passing traffic.
Even finger-printing is a lost option. The poor bastard that they think is Darry tried to shield his face on impact. His delicate, thick-veined hands are as much a part of the interstate landscape as his well-bleached enamel.
Crow’s breakfast, all of it.
His teeth now tucked in SUV tire treads, chewing up pavement.
If he didn’t have his mind on the road before, well…
I’d caught a bad case of gallows humor during my short-lived stint at the Windy Arbor elder care facility. An old man named Percy Heathrow caught me weeping in a storage closet, sorry little red-faced me unable to handle the sight of all these intentionally forgotten people slogging away their last years. He called me over. I came forward, chugging back snot and wiping the corners of my eyes with the inside of balled fists. He didn’t say anything, but his knobby hands floated down to his waistline and lifted up his shirt. I thought I was about to get perved on. Instead I saw a fresh colostomy bag hanging from the side of his belly, “SHIT HAPPENS” written on the plastic in black felt-tip.
That got me through the week; that moment where Percy and I were in on the cosmic joke. Since then my humor’s veered obsidian black. So somehow my face harbors a misplaced smile even as this coroner dumps details.
The kind of wreck Darry’s been in is called a “rear under-ride.” This is what happens when a car hits the back of a semi-trailer and keeps going. The Freehoff trailer Darry didn’t brake in time for acted like a guillotine on tires. Darry’s death would have been instantaneous.
Because it’s not really Darry we’re talking about, I laugh quietly at this part. The voice on the phone said “instantaneous” like auto-dealers say “zero down,” like it’s a blessing. Like this guy they think is Darry died so quick, he might just come back.
This information is conveyed in the programmed, caring polite-speak of someone who talks death all day. It’s me applying the realities, putting sauce on the steak. I remember a semi-snuff video Darry had me watch with him, how at the moment this hapless Russian girl got hit by a train she turned from a moving, breathing person to a flying sack of tissue and bones and nothing else. I’ve seen that side of death. I’m de-sanitizing this whole affair. Easier work for the brain than coming to grips.
“There are a few tattoos, Mrs. Broderick, that we believe could assist in the identification process.”
I pictured Darry, home from getting his second tattoo, showing off the still-bleeding black cursive lines between his shoulder blades. There it is, stuck under his skin, my name marking him forever, more than any ring—Elloise. I’d run my fingers through the soft, warm ointment coating it and felt the abraded ridges where his skin had been torn by needles. This feeling, I think of it later, months later, while I’m masturbating. It helps me finish.
I prefer those tattoos that look like Japanese tapestries—dragons and whirlpools, ornately-scaled fish. But I couldn’t argue with the intensity of seeing my name trapped under his skin.
His first tattoo, some random black tribal band encircling his left arm, he had that before we met. The kind of mark that binds you to the Tribe of Other Dudes Who Think That Shit Looks Cool.
His phrase for it was, “Purely aesthetic.”
My response—“But it looks stupid.”
We never spoke on it again. Verboten, you could tell from the silence following my comment.
Yes, I know his tattoos.
I ask for the address of the morgue before the voice can say anything else about identifying ink. The address is in Olympia.
Darry’s “Introduction to Data Marketing” conference was in Olympia too, downtown, just off the water. Maybe I’d visit him at his hotel after I told the people at the morgue that I’m sorry I couldn’t be of assistance. Wish them the best of luck, offer telegrammed sympathies to “you.”
They’ll want to apologize for the worry they’ve caused me.
They’re used to apologizing, I’m sure. Mistakes like this…
Sweat beads along my hair line. If it runs I’ll get hairspray in my eyes, like some cosmetic company test
rabbit. My stomach is not altogether in the right place now. It’s plastic-wrap tight around a belly full of nothing, relocating acid to the back of my throat.
The phone call has had the necessary effects.
It’s the unnecessary effects that have me so goddamn confused.
Moments after I hang up the phone I get this feeling—warm, sweet molasses spreading down the inside of me from underneath my belly-button. That’s the start. Then fullness, a subtle pressure as I expand against the fabric of my underwear. Then my heartbeat heads south, steady, filling me up, exposing my nerve endings.
The phone call’s natural response should be crying, right? Even with my textbook denial there should be tears at the rims of my eyes, waiting to run down my cheeks.
No tears. And I need to get off.
I try to rationalize. This sudden urge is a biological sidekick to mortality. It has nothing to do with Darry. I’m not a whore, not sick. We oppose death by fucking. It’s our weapon.
But Darry can’t ever know how the false news of his death has triggered this need…
He can’t know how much his death makes me want to fuck. More precisely, how I have never before, not in the recorded history of Elloise, so desperately wanted to be fucked.
These responses, my denial, my instant want… I can see them for what they are, but I can’t shake them. So I stay in motion. I start packing bags for the drive up to Oly.
The new focus—grabbing my toothbrush, deciding which gas station will have the best mocha for the road, not looking in the mirror, not getting my vibrator out of the closet, picking my favorite towel because I never like hotel towels, wondering how long my sandals can go without falling apart, remembering that Darry is still alive, remembering that mistakes like this are commonplace, getting the gummies out of the corners of my eyes, putting fresh saline solution in my contacts case, not calling Darry’s gorgeous friend Peter, not even thinking about how big Peter’s hands are, not even letting this stream of thought go any further…
STOP!
Deal with the problem.
I flop onto our bed and catch a quick whiff of Darry’s sweaty sleeping-boy smell, soaked into our lumpy old goose-down comforter. I’m so used to Darry’s smell that my nose won’t pick up the scent for long. An accepted part of my life. No need to process.
I undo the top button on my pants. I can’t separate the buckle of my belt quick enough. Reason has vacated this moment.
My fingers do their work, tracing the paths of familiar sense memory, making my back arch and my stomach tighten. I can’t remember the last time I was this wet.
I can’t remember the last time I felt this good.
Slow circles turn to pressure. I close my eyes and there’s Darry’s friend Peter, watching me, lying next to me, sliding one of his huge hands up and down my belly. I can feel the calluses on his hands, an accumulated roughness that Darry’s data marketing job would never give him.
I’m close to coming and Peter turns into the checker at the grocery store, the one with the jet-black hair and blue eyes, the one that told me about the detergent coupon. His breath still smells like black licorice.
Behind my closed eyes, far from my desperate hand, parades of men are waiting for their turn with me.
Hips are lifted, calves are squeezing tight. So close. My body drops back into the comforter and stirs up another wave of boy-smell.
I smell my boy. My Darry.
I can’t come.
The wave crashes that quickly.
Fucking Darry.
I try again, try to climb the peak, but now I’m numb. I’m only touching myself now, meat on meat, no sacred shock of nerves. Just a sudden guilt, virus-quick through my system, flushing me with heat. Staring at the ceiling with my right hand cupped against pulsing warmth. Thinking about the last thing I want to acknowledge.
Darry and I have been together so many times in this bed. Too many times, I guess. That’s why I’ve needed more lately—my fantasies, the images that I’ve transposed onto Darry’s body while he’s inside of me.
I don’t think he’s caught on. Even with me always turning the lights off beforehand, and asking him not to make noise, and asking him to come in from behind. Even with all my delicate fantasy preparations—these little tricks that allow me to screw another man when I’m married and faithful to a fault—he hasn’t seemed to notice.
The thing making it easy for me to ignore who he is while he’s inside of me—his weakness—is that he loves me too much. I guess his love is my weakness, too, because the love itself—his fingers running through my hair at night, his hand soothing my sore belly after I developed my first ulcer—is wonderful. His type of true, warm affection is more suffocating and alluring than any hotel fling or office tryst.
The idea that this lust, even now creeping back through my skin, is suddenly upon me because Darry’s dead and now I’ve got a chance to be with other men… it worries me because it feels true. And knowing that it’s wrong hasn’t given me power over it.
If he is dead, I’m sick. Sick and alone.
I’m thinking too much. I sigh a long, shaky sigh and can feel myself on the verge of tears now, but I don’t know if I’d be crying for Darry or myself. I just know I hate the delicacy of trembling air leaving my chest.
In five more minutes I’m in my car, headed north on I-5.
Even as my right leg becomes fatigued to shaking from the two hundred mile drive, I take comfort in the inappropriateness of my situation; in the fact that I’ve received this misguided message. It’ll make for a crazy story at the least. I wonder how Darry will respond when I tell him that the rear end of a semi-truck tore off his head.
He’ll want details, of course. To flesh out the morbid fantasy of his own brutal, blood-and-diesel demise. I’ll tell him about this drive—how I flinched at every bit of sulfur-smelling road-kill that littered the roadside, at every tuft of skunk hair shifting in the wind of traffic. How the bright red flashing brake-lights of each semi-truck I passed were fists squeezing my heart.
Tonight, as we’re curled up in bed together, I’ll lay out the whole absurd affair for him. And he’ll laugh. That’s the easy thing to do. I’ll feel the familiar heat of his breath on my neck, rub my head against his chest, and we’ll both acknowledge this strange truth:
For a moment, he was dead.
This is what the world, excepting us, had believed.
The coroner’s name is Brad Fuller, and he has hands that could casually palm a basketball. Or a human skull, which must be a more common occurrence for him. He’s tall and butterfly symmetrical. Strong forehead. Wide jaw. Alpha all the way. He smells like nothing because he works in a place that goes to great lengths to smell like nothing, provided you don’t take a deep whiff. Brad’s younger looking than I expected from his professional demeanor on the phone, and I wonder if he’s even past his third decade.
I’m smiling at him and extending my hand, saying, “Nice to meet you, Brad.” I want to feel the size of his hand over mine. He seems a little off-center, unsure of how to respond to my casual greeting.
“Good to meet you, Mrs. Broderick.”
Even hearing myself addressed as Darry’s other half doesn’t save me from the feelings that have returned to my belly. Brad Fuller is politely dressed in a dark blue suit that I’d like to peel away from his skin.
The fact that I’m standing in the clinical foyer of an Olympia morgue does not make me want Brad any less.
It should. I know this as a basic truth. But it doesn’t.
The desires that I’d managed to repress on the long drive up are soaring through my skin now, crashing into my borders, speeding up every breath.
I’m not letting go of Brad’s hand.
“Mrs. Broderick?”
“Oh, sorry.” I release my grip, feel the heat from his fingers slide off the thin skin on the back of my hand. “My first name’s Elloise.”
“Are you expecting any other family members to arrive before we
view the body?”
“Um, no. It’s just me. Darry’s mom lives in Tennessee, and his Dad’s passed on. So it’s just me.”
“Okay. We can proceed unless you’d like a moment for yourself.”
“Aren’t you closing soon?”
“Only technically. In our line of work, we can’t assign any set hours to our responsibilities. So take your time if you need to. Chantel at the front desk has already prepared the required paperwork.”
My pulse picks up, faster now, this time because of the confidence Brad Fuller has that I’m the right person to identify this body. He’s willing to go through with this charade.
I can do this. I’m not afraid. Go in there, give my negative identification, and head across town to Darry’s hotel. Surprise him with the best sex of his life. Behind my eyes, I’ll be seeing Brad Fuller. Darry won’t care. He won’t know, and I’ll make him feel so good.
“No, I’m ready to go now.”
“Alright then... I’d like to let you know in advance, that once you’ve made the identification, you can request to spend time with the body, if you want to. If you believe that this is something you want, you just let me know and we can facilitate it. In this case, Darry’s body will need to remain covered, due to the extent…”
We Live Inside You Page 15