Morgue Drawer Four

by Jutta Profijt

  I got off at a plaza with lots of people and a news kiosk, invested my sock money in alcoholic beverages, and took a train back downtown. I started getting tanked while I was still on the train. I got off somewhere—naturally I had the great fortune of landing in the middle of a roadwork site. And here I didn’t think we were still investing in infrastructure in this country anymore. I climbed up some temporary stairs along with other riders, elbowing my way through the congestion points, then I got lost and at some point took a pedestrian overpass bridge labeled with a sign saying “All Downtown Lines: Straight Ahead.” Meanwhile my field of vision had dramatically narrowed, the noises from my surroundings reached my jug ears as though from a great distance, but at least I wasn’t all that worried about my debts.

  I felt the impact on my back despite my drunken stupor. It caught me at the least opportune moment. In front of me there were two landings of stairs leading downward, with temporary railings. My foot reached out a bit farther than planned because of the impact, causing me to miss the first step. The second step was covered with snow and was thus slippery, so my worn sole slid over the edge. The thin board that was supposed to serve as a railing had about as much hold as a tow rope made of elastic. The nail that was supposed to connect the temporary railing to the support column on the left gave way immediately and without hesitation, and the nail on the right followed shortly thereafter. In those seconds my gift of observation was indescribably good, good as never before, and perhaps that alone should have given me pause, but I had no time for that. My feet slid forward through the railing, I tipped backward, and the back of my head hit the wood forming the surface of the bridge unbelievably hard before I completely sailed over the side. I experienced my plummet into the depths in slow motion. Spinning around some kind of axis I slammed onto the pavement six meters below. The noise that my body and above all my cranium made on impact startled even those who couldn’t have seen my plummet at all because their backs were to me. As I was lying on my stomach with my face to the side, I was still able to make out faces turning toward me, but then I couldn’t see anything anymore.

  The darkness lasted for just a short moment, and then suddenly, I suppose after about ten seconds, I was able to observe the entire scene very clearly—from above. Now, I’m sure we’ve all seen our fill of those near-death-experience ghouls who haunt talk show after talk show, describing their mystic experiences. They all observe their bodies from the outside, and then comes the tunnel, and the light, blah blah blah. So I didn’t give it much thought as I was floating over my twisted outer shell, which was littering the ground. I waited for the tunnel, the light, and ultimately to grow up again inside my own body. That’s how those reborn TV freaks always end up describing it.

  So I hung around and waited. I watched people giving my body a poke, someone taking charge and blathering something about calling for an ambulance, someone pressing on my wrist and carotid and with a serious face taking the cell phone from the man calling the police, reporting into it that the accident victim was dead.

  Now wait just a second, I thought, that guy is totally exaggerating. He’s welcome to pretend like he’s in charge if he thinks he’ll impress women that way, but there have got to be limits, thank you very much. Plus, his theatrical performance wasn’t even resulting in the fairer sex throwing themselves at him, sobbing. The bystanders were just doing what bystanders do: standing around and staring.

  I don’t want to bore you with all the details, so I’ll give you just the digest version of the most important things: the police came, determined that I had fallen off the makeshift pedestrian overpass, pronounced me—as I still thought, inaccurately—dead, and called the coroner’s office.

  “Hi, Rolf,” said the short, chubby man in a dark brown duffle coat (really, I swear, he came in a duffle coat) to the uniform, as he set down his bag and checked my body for life signs. “Hi, Martin,” Rolf, the policeman, replied.

  “How long has he been here?” Duffie asked the crowd of gawkers who were now stamping their freezing feet behind the red and white cordon that had since been strung up.

  “Seventeen minutes,” answered the eager hero with paramedic training. Brownnoser.

  “Accident or foul play?” Duffie asked.

  “Unclear,” replied a guy in civilian clothes who had given the orders for where the red and white tape should be strung up, and who generally gave the impression of being the guy calling the shots.

  Policemen were scurrying around taking a thousand pictures of me, the bridge, the railing, and the bottle that had fallen out of my hand. They retraced the way I had come, measuring distances and angles, and they all looked terribly busy. Duffie—that is, Martin—knelt down next to me in the softly falling snow, studying me top to bottom, part of it actually through a magnifying glass he had pulled out of his bag. He combed every centimeter of my head, paying particularly close attention to the spot on the back of my head that had hit the plank on the wood overpass bridge, and then he crawled around with his face nearly to the ground trying to see as much as possible of the left half of my face, which I was lying on, before he finally turned me over. Then he did his examination again on my now-visible front side with the magnifying glass, and finally, finally he was through. He put the magnifying glass back into his bag, scanned around him, discovered what he was looking for, and gestured with his left hand. Two men came over, stuffed my body into my to-go box, and hauled me away.

  As you can well imagine, I was totally freaked out. Those near-death-experience talk show attention-seekers on TV never mentioned the whole thing taking so long. They never said a word about people coming, recording your death, coroners staring at you like an insect under a magnifying glass, getting plopped into a box and hauled off.

  Hauled off—where to? I suddenly wondered, feeling panic take over. How the hell am I supposed to find my way back into my body if I don’t know where it is? You can imagine my horror. So I whooshed over behind the two figures who had just loaded the casket containing my body into a vehicle. Fortunately, and unlike the pallbearers, I did not slip on the icy street; instead I just whooshed through the air and flashed into the vehicle. Perhaps this as well should have given me pause, but we’ve already addressed this topic. I didn’t have any time for pauses. I was just happy that I was still with my body as the vehicle started.

  I didn’t look out the window; I wasn’t particularly interested where they were taking me so long as I was just with my body. At some point they went down a ramp, and then the vehicle’s door opened; a long corridor was waiting for us, and then a door. They pulled open a stainless steel drawer and set my body inside; I wafted in afterward, of course, and then the drawer closed—and we lay in the dark, my body and I.

  Again, because of my confusion, and maybe as a side effect of the alcohol—I really didn’t know if you could be wasted as a ghost having a near-death experience—I lacked any sense of time, but at some point the drawer opened, my body was placed onto a gurney, pushed into a tiled room, and transferred onto a stainless-steel table with an outlet strainer at the foot end, and then Duffie/Martin stepped up to the table along with another man. The other man was holding a Dictaphone and spoke the introduction into it. “Autopsy of a male body for the Cologne District Attorney’s Office. Identified by the police as Sascha Lerchenberg, age: twenty-four, height: one hundred seventy-three centimeters, weight: sixty-nine kilograms.”

  I was still pretty confused, but that was entirely appropriate because what ensued was truly horrific. My initial confusion blossomed into full-on panic as I saw what Martin was holding in his hand: a gleaming scalpel that looked pretty damn sharp. He put it into position and sliced my entire torso open, starting at my chin in a straight incision going so far down you really couldn’t go any farther. I expected a torrent of blood, but nothing happened. Meanwhile, Mr. Blabbermouth commented into his stupid recorder on each incision and every finding while I circled above the autopsy table in extreme agitation. I felt sick. Layer by l
ayer my skin was peeled off, the fat tissue underneath exposed and folded back—I don’t remember all the details very well anymore—until the situation started to get really disgusting: Martin grabbed my testicles.

  “Dude, get your monkey beaters off my balls!” I roared with the greatest urgency, and Martin spun around, so startled I thought he might slash his colleague right open. That was the moment I realized he could hear me.

  TWO

  “What is it?” the guy with the Dictaphone asked. I couldn’t make out his whole face because slicer guys wear these ridiculous face masks when they’re dissecting bodies, but his eyes had grown a little bigger out of fear as Martin’s scalpel hissed through the air in front of his abdomen.

  “I, uh, I don’t know,” Martin stammered, and I sensed his uncertainty. Ditto on that, plus I felt really indignant (that’s another cool word Martin’s taught me), I’m sure you can imagine. I mean, what would you say if some perv in green scrubs started by professionally filleting you and then wanted to cut your balls off? That’s what I’m talking about.

  “Do we need to prepare the testicles?” Martin asked, sounding somehow sheepish.

  “Nah,” came the response from behind the mask, the guy’s eyes narrowing. He smirked big. “Only our female colleagues enjoy that. Leave them, it’s OK. Cause of death is clear, right?”

  Martin nodded. “Occipital blunt force trauma resulting in cardiopulmonary collapse due to massive brainstem injury, presumably the result of falling from the bridge onto the back of the head.”

  The other guy put the Dictaphone back up to his mask and said, “Preparation of testicles not necessary,” then he switched it off and stretched. “Gotta pee.”

  Martin nodded. Martin stayed with me but took a step back from the table and watched his diminutive assistant, who was putting the pieces that Martin had cut out of my organs into Mason jars. At the time I wasn’t able to make heads or tails of the scene, but since then I’ve learned that a fine tissue sample is taken from every organ, which in hospital slang is called a histo sample. Comes from histology, but you don’t need to know that. Cutting the body open is only one part of an autopsy. There’s also the toxicology report and even a genetic test, if they need one.

  During my own autopsy, though, all I could do was circle around gawking, but otherwise I kept quiet. Martin was also unnaturally quiet. It was as though he were listening intently, uncertain whether he should be listening outwardly or inwardly. At first I left him alone.

  The autopsy of my body was completed according to regulation and without further disruptions; the slaughterhouse—as I call the white-tiled room—was cleaned; and I—that is, the physical shell of me that had since been rather nastily disemboweled, restuffed with all the organs that had been taken out, and then sewed back up—was returned to my refrigerated drawer, labeled “Morgue Drawer 4.” At the last moment before the drawer fully closed, I changed my mind, whooshed out of the narrow slit, and took position near the ceiling lamp where I had a good view of the room. There wasn’t that much to see, because there wasn’t anything to see apart from the refrigerated morgue drawers—inside which, incidentally, the prevailing temperature is four degrees Celsius. I hung out for a while wavering, then I made an attempt to get out into the corridor through the narrow crevice between the swinging doors. Bingo! Apparently quitting time had arrived down here because there wasn’t a soul in the entire basement, which consisted of long corridors, the morgue and autopsy section, and a few storage rooms. Except for me, because I believe the term “soul” applies to no one as well as it does to me. I haunted (another word that had suddenly gained currency) around aimlessly and haphazardly. After spending quite a while like that, at some point I got bored, but I didn’t trust myself to leave the basement, so I went back over in front of the door to my morgue drawer and daydreamed a little there in front of myself. At least I hadn’t lost this skill, one I had always excelled in.

  Again Martin was the first person I saw the next morning, and he exuded a distinctly palpable, nervous unease. Like when you’re faced with a job you know is way over your head.

  “Hi, Martin,” I said, and from the terrified expression on his face I could see that he’d heard me again, or at least somehow sensed me, because when I write here that I “say” something, this of course has nothing to do with the production of sound waves, since for that one obviously needs vocal cords. Mine, however, were cut up into little pieces inside the dissected throat of the mincemeat corpse in Morgue Drawer Four.

  “I’m Pascha, the guy in Morgue Drawer Four. You wanted to cut my balls off yesterday?”

  Not the lowest-stress way to introduce myself, I admit, but at least it was direct and pertinent. He should know right away who he was dealing with.

  “Sascha,” Martin whispered. Of course he could have no way of knowing that I had changed the first letter of my name from S to P ever since that schlocky TV show with that guy named Sascha on it, and so now I go by Pascha. Nothing to do with Turkish brothels. I was nice enough to explain this to him.

  Martin stood at the wall, his chubby face twitching and wriggling, its color resembling that of his chilled clients. He wiped his trembling hand nervously over his eyes.

  “I’m hearing voices.”

  He didn’t say that—he thought it, and I could hear it! Awesome!

  “If you’re hearing multiple voices, you should see the doctor, but if you’re hearing just my voice, that’s OK—after all, I’ve been talking with you the whole time!”

  “Who are you?” he whispered.

  “I just told you,” I said, slightly annoyed. “I’m the guy who got pushed off that bridge; you examined me at the scene, and yesterday you practically puréed me on your table!”

  “But you’re dead; you can’t speak to me,” he objected.

  All right, the man is a scientist, but still, for an academic I thought he was acting pretty stupid.

  “Haven’t you ever heard any of those near-death stories? You know, the soul leaves the body, hangs out for a while, and then at some point makes its way through the tunnel.”

  “Yes,” he breathed.

  “But there isn’t any tunnel here; I don’t know where I’m supposed to go.”

  He didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything either, and so we each dwelled on our thoughts, with his forming a bewildered mess.

  Suddenly the chaos of neurons within his brain reorganized itself, and a thought formulated itself clearly and distinctly out of the soup of letters: “You said you were pushed?”

  “Duh,” I said. “What, do you think I’d go and take a nosedive off a temporary bridge J4K?”

  I couldn’t literally see the question marks popping out of his gray matter, but the scientist was obviously unfamiliar with the truncated communication style of today’s youth.

  “You were severely inebriated,” he objected, cautiously.

  “Well, yeah…” I conceded. “I’d had a few…”

  “Your blood alcohol level was three point seven,” Martin countered; he likes to be precise, but I think I mentioned that already.

  “Three point seven! Right on!” I was extremely impressed with myself. This pleasure did not persist, however, since my inebriated condition was apparently being used against me here. My murderer was going to get away with it because the official opinion was that my self-induced state of intoxication was the cause of my tumble from the bridge. That’s just not what happened! And even worse, my buddies were going to think I was so wasted I died from my own stupidity. What kind of an obituary is that? “He was wasted and fell off a bridge!” So at that point, my vanity took over: the afterlife has to include a little bit of vindication, too.

  “I was pushed,” I emphasized, perhaps somewhat more expressively than was absolutely necessary, but in any case Martin rubbed his temples and groaned.

  “All right,” he moaned. “Please stop yelling at me that way.”

  “Take it easy,” I said, making an effort to sound cool
. “So tell me one more time exactly what the epitaph is that the cops are going to be carving onto my tombstone.”

  I felt those question marks popping up again like bubbles in the bathtub when you let one, but Martin had already understood more or less what I wanted from him.

  “The police investigation didn’t yield any suspicion of exogenous effect, nor did the autopsy. In view of the blood alcohol level, the snow on the stairs, and the poor condition of the railing, the cause of death was determined to be an accident resulting in fatality. However, there will also be an investigation because of the railing.”

  “That’s bullshit,” I said clearly and distinctly.

  Martin winced.

  “You’ve got to tell them that’s not right,” I demanded.

  I considered this demand to be logical and quite simple. Pick up the phone, call the cops, let them know, done. But of course with academic types nothing is easy, let alone straightforward.