by Maud Casey
“Got it,” Lucy said to Mildred, now waiting at the door for confirmation of her hanging-by-a-thread authority.
“Good,” Mildred said. She slammed the door behind her for punctuation. She tried to storm off, but her coat got caught and jerked her back. She opened the door again without looking at Lucy, pulled her coat out, and then stormed off.
Alone in the small, windowless basement office of the university’s medical center, Lucy pictured piles of ashes, piles like chimney soot, aboard a barge headed out into the Pacific. A barge like a giant ashtray, which reminded her of the tiny piles of ashes all over her apartment. Since arriving in San Francisco a little over a month ago, Lucy had been living in an apartment with two French girls who needed a third to make the rent. The girls never brushed their hair and were nonchalantly, effortlessly beautiful. They ate only bread and chocolate yet remained mysteriously, aggressively svelte in their American designer jeans. They chain-smoked, ashing in or on anything available—crumb-filled plates, Lucy’s potted plant, windowsills. Ash floated constantly in the toilet bowl, unflushed.
Lucy copied Release of Claim forms, sorting them into careful piles. She made copies of the informational packet. There were certain medical conditions that prevented people from donating their bodies to science. Medical students needed to work on “clean” bodies, as Mildred liked to explain over and over again as if it were an incantation, as if by saying this she could ward off hepatitis, HIV, tuberculosis, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, whatever that was. Lucy figured she still had a good fifty, sixty years to go in her own body. She appreciated the muscle in her licking tongue, the smell of her arm, an earthy smell that she had, until just the other day, attributed to her cross-country lover until she realized that it was the smell of her own epidermis (Lucy liked to use medical terms on the job). She imagined small fossils of her life lodged in the sedimentary layers of her epidermis, secretly and forever, tiny gifts to herself.
Lucy heard Brenda’s mail cart in the hallway. She quickly ducked beneath her desk, fixed her face in the maniacal way she practiced whenever she went to the bathroom, and popped up when Brenda opened the door. Brenda, who hadn’t thought this was funny the first five times, barely flinched. Without a word, she threw the mail on the chair beside the door and resignedly rolled her cart away.
Since she’d started working at the whole-body donation program, the French girls’ tiny piles of ash had started to creep Lucy out. This morning before work, she had asked them to smoke outside the apartment.
“But zese new American laws,” the thinner, dirtier, slightly more beautiful one protested, suddenly bursting into English, having barely uttered a non-French word since Lucy met her. “If we cannot smoke een our own houze, where would we zmoke?”
“How about on zee ztoop?” Lucy asked. Neither of them spoke to her for the rest of the morning, though the slightly less beautiful one had cracked a window and angrily puffed her smoke outside. “Ça suffit?” she’d said to her friend, who rolled her eyes.
Ryan, the removal service driver, stuck his head in the door. “What goes on, my friend?”
Lucy never heard him coming, but Ryan didn’t inspire her to spring like a maniacal jack-in-the-box from underneath her desk. Ryan was the first adult who had treated Lucy like an equal. He was handsome in a craggy, been-around-the-block kind of way and older than Lucy, older even than the twenty-eight-year-old cross-country lover—a word Lucy liked to say out loud in the bathroom after she practiced her maniacal face. “Lover,” Lucy would say dramatically, pursing her lips and pouting a little. Lucy suspected Ryan might even be in his early forties.
“You’ve still got your scarf on,” Lucy said, touching her own throat. Ryan pulled one end of the flowery scarf he wrapped Audrey Hepburn–like around his head whenever he drove. It swirled around his neck as he pulled; then he stuffed it deep into the pocket of his gray coveralls. Ryan wore women’s clothes when he moved bodies, a hangover from his delinquent days before he found his calling in transporting cadavers. He’d accumulated several DWIs, had his license revoked, and started dressing in drag to evade the cops. He grew to like the way the skirts left room for a breeze, the way the scarves billowed silkily against his face, the way the big movie starlet sunglasses hid his face. He slipped the coveralls on and off easily over his outfits before he entered a home or the medical center.
“That’s a lot of work for a little silk,” Lucy said.
“It’s a ritual,” he said, shrugging. “Something to keep me out of trouble. Back in a minute—I left my smokes in the morgue.”
Lucy could understand a ritual like that. Sometimes she gripped the edges of her desk in an effort to keep herself from vanishing into thin air. Please stop. Lucy felt the slip begin. She felt herself sliding out of normal time. Minutes flying, whizzing, by her. She was nauseated from all the flying and whizzing. She clung to the arms of her chair, waiting for it to pass.
The same thing had happened the morning after she and the cross-country lover spent the night in the van outside a rest stop. After a dinner of potato chips and whiskey, she woke up in the morning to the sounds of a little girl learning to ride a bike in the parking area. Her father ran behind her. “Keep it up! Keep it up!” he cried. “I can’t, I can’t,” she said, but she did. Lucy shook her cross-country lover awake to explain how waking up in the same clothes she’d worn yesterday with whiskey on her breath, smelling of drunken, halfhearted sex on the side of the road to the sounds of her own lost innocence made her feel like something was rotting inside her, like her heart was black and shrinking. She needed him to understand that. Could he understand that?
“You’re young, you’ll get over it,” he said. As he liked to remind her, twenty-one and just out of college was light-years away from twenty-eight. “You’re hungover. You just need a greasy meal,” he said.
Ryan stuck his head back in the door. “Gotta run. I’m late. I stayed to help clean up again. This one was a real mess—a recluse with fifteen cats.” He aspired to one day running his own cleanup company, providing maid services for the families of the recently deceased, cleaning up the area where the person died so the family didn’t have to. Changing sheets, sweeping up. He had the perfect French maid’s outfit at home.
“But before I go—Mrs. Sally Calhoun,” Ryan said, reading the name off a sheet of paper.
“Sally Calhoun,” Lucy repeated, thinking back over the calls she’d taken. “Sally, Sally, Sally. Calhoun, Calhoun, Calhoun.” In an effort to help Lucy feel more connected to her job, Ryan told her the names of the bodies he transported in case they ever matched a person whose intake she’d done. So far, they hadn’t.
“Nope,” Lucy said.
“Hey, you might finally get your earthquake,” Ryan said.
“Don’t tease me, Ryan.” Lucy longed for her first earthquake, the big one, the quake that would come and shake her life, sievelike, until the secrets dislodged from the sedimentary layers of her epidermis, revealing themselves to her.
“Last night on the news, there was an earthquake that stretched from San Diego to Santa Barbara. Six point three. Humboldt started shaking today.” He wagged a scolding finger at her.
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“It’s not something you see,” Ryan said. “It’s like death.”
“Yeah, whatever, you’re not going to give me that lecture again, are you?” Ryan often expounded on his theory of existence: if humans could really see forward to their own deaths, they’d never move forward, a balking mule of a species.
Lucy did her best bray.
“I’m out of here.” Ryan winked and was gone.
Lucy felt the earthquake moving toward her. It would knock a few sizable pictures off the wall and send a quiver so hard up her thigh she would have multiple orgasms. But still, the feeling that her organs were decaying slowly, that she was dying, wouldn’t lift. This morning she’d woken up convinced again that she had AIDS. The cross-country lover had injected heroin years
ago. He’d slept with bedloads of women and a handful of men. “Have you been tested?” she asked him one morning, shaking him awake. She was always shaking him awake.
“Several times,” he’d assured her without opening his eyes. So maybe she had cancer. She could feel its slow, deliberate movement through her system. “What does cancer look like?” she asked, putting her hand on his arm. “I don’t believe this,” he said, wrapping the lumpy motel pillow around his head and turning away from her.
“Maybe it’s all the fast food,” he suggested when Lucy burst into tears outside a Jack-in-the-Box. “Too much grease.”
They bought fruit in a grocery store, lingering in the spray that followed a thunderclap in the fruit and vegetable aisle. Lucy looked around at all the other people pushing shopping carts, somehow leading normal lives, deciding between whole milk or 2%, unperturbed.
“We’re trespassing,” Lucy said. Maybe she had a disease that no one had ever heard of, something so complex and insidious that doctors would only be able to find it after she died. “Will you make sure someone does an autopsy on me when I die?”
“Let’s get the fucking fruit and get out of here,” he said.
“We’re homeless,” she said. “Transients, nomads.” She knew she was being melodramatic. She wanted him to scream at her, give her something to work with.
“You’re a nut,” he said, drawing her to him. She’d wanted to punch him.
Her first day on the job, Lucy had been quick to make excuses. “I got this job through a temp agency,” she told Ryan before he even asked. “You know, it’s the kind of thing you talk about later—that crazy job you had.” The temp counselor had given it the hard sell—a good job, benefits (unheard of!), but Lucy didn’t need convincing. The job was exactly right, the giant question mark at the end of the sentence that was the cross-country death march, an opportunity to look her deepest fear in its cold blue face.
“It’s an experience on the way to something else,” Lucy continued to explain when Ryan didn’t respond. She thought she was being deep in a shallow kind of way. She assumed he’d agree with her, that he felt the same way about working for a corpse removal service.
“An experience on the way to what?” Ryan asked. He wasn’t smiling, and Lucy blushed so deeply her hairline burned with the spreading heat.
But Ryan was serious. He wasn’t trying to embarrass her; he was genuinely curious.
“I don’t know,” Lucy confessed.
“It sounds melodramatic, but handling the dead is my destiny,” Ryan said.
Lucy wished she could take back her attempt at cynicism and cleverness now that she knew melodrama was allowed.
“I wasted a lot of time,” Ryan said. “Now, when I take someone’s body from their home to the place where they’ll serve science, I feel like I’m doing something useful, something real.”
“Yeah,” Lucy had said, wishing she could say more.
When Lucy met the cross-country lover, she’d been ready for reality herself. She’d barely made it through college. She couldn’t figure out why she was there in the first place. She skipped most of her classes (picked at random from the enormous course catalog—“Nuclear War” and “TV and the Evolution of the Postmodern Family: Happy Days to Once and Again”). She was wowed by the possibilities of living on her own. She learned to flirt and have opinions. She created a little business out of making fake ID for freshmen, earned enough money for the cross-country trip so her parents wouldn’t hassle her. She had planned to drive alone. The cross-country lover was a bonus.
She’d met him when she went to see a play at the community theater. It was a play written by a local author about terrorists who formed a ballet troupe as a front for the terrorism. Over the course of the play, they learned to love to dance. The cross-country lover played the tough, wary terrorist who was the last to learn to love ballet.
He and Lucy went for drinks after the show. She’d complimented him on his performance.
“For that, the girl deserves a drink,” he said, still wearing his stage makeup.
“How could I possibly refuse?” Lucy took his arm. He could be a relationship on the way to other relationships, a relationship that might teach her valuable lessons.
“The director said I needed to be tougher, more of a terrorist, before I give in to the life of a ballerina,” he said, half laughing. A relationship that would teach her, but still she had wanted him to worship her just a little, to suggest impossible things. “I’m terrorist enough, don’t you think?” he said. “How much terrorist does this guy need?”
Come live with me and bear my children! he would plead. No way, she’d say, and it would drive him crazy with love.
Lucy’s face too would someday be tough and blue, dizzy with formaldehyde, but as Ryan often pointed out, Lucy didn’t really know that now. She knew she would be dead the same way she knew she might be married one day or have children. She knew it the same way she knew she might someday have a permanent job, which was to say it wasn’t something she could imagine at all.
Lucy decided to stretch her legs. She wandered toward the morgue, walking as slowly as possible to eat up the minutes on the clock, reading all the posters on the bulletin boards along the way—a brown bag lunch on intestinal disorders, an appeal from administrators to the doctors to practice professional behavior in all areas of the hospital, no discussing patients in the elevators (We’re a nation of litigators! someone had written very lightly in pencil).
At a rest stop in the wide open heat and big sky of west Texas, a toothless guy who’d pitched a tent near the bathrooms tried to pick Lucy up. The cross-country lover interfered. “Hey, man,” the toothless guy protested. “This is America. I’ve got rights.” Lucy laughed for hours in the car about this. She took it up as her motto for wanting anything unreasonable—the window up or down, the radio more loud or less loud, driving faster or slower. “Hey, man, this is America. I’ve got rights!” She said it whenever possible, trying to integrate it into the conversation of their relationship. She wanted it to be their private joke, but it never took. “Why do you keep saying that?” the cross-country lover finally said somewhere in the endless desert of Nevada. “It’s not funny.”
When Lucy finally reached the morgue, the door to the embalming room was the tiniest bit ajar. She stood at such an angle that she could see—like watching a horror movie through her fingers—the top of a skull and Hank and Frank (his name was Fred, but it was funnier to call him Frank), the embalmers, maneuvering their way around the body. The movement of their arms suggested tubes and the draining of blood.
Pinned against the wall, looking at the top of the man’s head without the man inside, Lucy thought, This is just a body. Just the vehicle for whoever that was lying there on the table like food, and now that whoever is gone. Gone somewhere else. This man had offered his shell to feed science, to feed the world, food for mankind.
In Arizona Lucy had bought a broad-rimmed hat to protect her fair skin. She’d hoped that the cross-country lover would buy the hat as a surprise, but when it became clear that he had no surprises in him, she bought it for herself. They stopped on the side of the road to wander through the saguaro cactus Lucy had only seen pictures of in travel magazines.
“They’re at least one hundred years old,” the cross-country lover said. Lucy ignored him, bored with his knowledge. The sun filled the whole sky. The arms of the saguaros were like humans gesticulating and Lucy stood next to one, her arms held up in imitation. “Who? Me?” she asked, shrugging like a cactus, but the cross-country lover was already heading back to the truck. Lucy stumbled after him, faint with heat, and tripped over what looked like giant ribs made of wood. The cross-country lover was already behind the wheel. “Hey,” she cried. She stayed on the ground by the wooden ribs. When he saw her, she was pleased to see him jump out of the van with alarm and run back to her.
“What is this?” she said, running her hand along the smooth wood, when he reached her.
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br /> “Saguaro ribs,” he said, annoyed that she was uninjured. “Their skeletons are made of wood. You’re covered with dust, Lucy.”
Lucy scrutinized the sleek wood under her hand. This was all that was left of one of these great giants. She had expected something green, or soft, something to show it was once alive.
Now Lucy stared at the tufty skull of the man on the embalming table, imagining his blood running thick through anonymous tubes. Worse still, his lifeless hands. Hands were the first thing you touched when you met a person. Here, they hung limp with unintentional gesture. That his hands didn’t mean anything anymore disturbed Lucy the most. She imagined the medical students cutting into the hundreds of bones in the man’s frozen hands like marzipan.
Lucy slipped into the women’s rest room to splash cold water on her face. She stared at herself in the mirror, trying to separate herself from her body, like meat from the bone, until she began to look pale. She looked deep into her own eyes. Where was she in there?
She strode down the hall, back toward the office, under the insectlike buzz of the fluorescent lights. The cross-country lover had been a runway model. For a very, very short time, for money, he’d assured her over those initial drinks. This was before he began his full-fledged career as an actor.
“Community theater is considered full-fledged?” Lucy asked as he motioned for the check.
“Funny, really funny,” he’d said, because in the beginning these kinds of questions were what he’d loved about her. An hour later they were back in the apartment she shared with three other girls. It was spring, a few days before graduation, and there were packed boxes everywhere ready for cities bigger and more promising than the college town. She and the cross-country lover wove their way through the maze of boxes on their way to Lucy’s bedroom, where they shut the door and tore at each other’s clothes until they were completely naked.