Fuck—those extra minutes Luis had spent cowering under the table.
A detective was already hovering. He gruffly introduced himself as Detective Walker. He had the straight, sandy hair of fairy-tale princes and seemed as eager to get out of there as the pedestrians and motorists. He barked for a subordinate to string up police tape and then, after getting Luis’s name and qualifications, ripped a sheet from a clipboard and tried to hand it to him.
“Pronounce him dead,” Walker said, “He’s part of my crime scene.”
Luis stared at the form while anger foamed in his gut. In a few hours, this dead man would be a one-sentence news item people scrolled past in their news feeds without a prick of emotion.
He displayed his bloody hands. “I am not ready to pronounce.”
Detective Walker pointed, “You see that cross street? I got three ambulances trying to shove through that mess. This guy’s going to be ice cold by then. You haul him to a hospital, you cause me a whole night of headaches, amigo. Leave him here, where he can do some good, huh?”
“These aren’t necessarily kill shots,” Luis said. “We get this man to a hospital, we might be able to resuscitate—”
“You understand English? I said, we’re in a bottleneck. Every car you see is filled with people trying to get home and binge their shows. So help me out here. I would hope you’d give a shit. It’s your kind that killed this guy.”
Luis turned, his heel squishing through coagulating blood.
“My kind?”
Detective Walker was as forthright with his prejudices as he was with his work.
“Fucking A, José,” Walker growled, “Mexicali gangbangers killed this man. Later on, we’ll be counting on you to prove it. So wipe that cherry pie off your hands and fill out this fucking form.”
The anger in Luis’s belly thickened. “What do you mean you’re counting on me?”
The detective loomed over him. His features were compact, a thumbprint pressed into dough. His starched collar dug deep into his neck flab, threatening bisection. Spit fizzed at the corners of his lips.
“We get these greasy perps on a murder charge, we got an airtight case.”
“Are you saying you want this man dead? Because it’ll help your case?”
Detective Walker shrugged. “I didn’t say that. I didn’t say nothin’. I didn’t say nothin’ about some worthless homeless fuck nobody’s ever going to miss.”
The simple tools in Luis’s med kit couldn’t save a man riddled with bullets, but Luis had a notion they’d do a fair job mutilating this asshole cop. The kit’s tourniquet would look quite smart twisted around the detective’s neck. The scissors would be a stylish accent when planted in the detective’s jugular. Luis tamped down his rage, old hat in a long career of taking shit. He glanced left and saw the lights of the closest ambulance.
Luis’s boss, San Diego medical examiner Jefferson Talbot, was at a convention in Las Vegas. There was no way to pass the buck. Luis was stuck with this case, and that meant he had to do it right or suffer consequences from JT worse than Detective Walker’s. Luis stood and waved his med kit at the ambulance down the block, hoping an EMT would see and come running. He turned to Walker, concealing neither disgust nor hope.
“I believe this man can still be saved, if we move our asses,” Luis said. “I’ll do it without you, But it’ll be easier if you help. Come on. Grab his legs, Let’s get him to that ambulance. You and me. Right now. What do you say?”
Everyone was a gray murk. Luis had learned that maddening lesson on the job. Blowhard assholes saved the day by knowing CPR, loathsome politicians pulled kids out of car wrecks, ex-cons with child-porn raps saved people from burning buildings. Detective Walker was the same as any of them—when you came down to it, the same as Luis Acocella. The cop unleashed a swarm of filthy phrases as he tossed aside his clipboard and grabbed the homeless man’s filthy ankles. Together, they rushed the dead-or-dying man down the sidewalk until two EMTs met them, releasing the wheels from their gurney.
Luis didn’t hang around after that. Other ambulances were arriving, His work here was done. That didn’t mean his work for the night was even close to finished. If the sawbones at St, Mike’s pronounced the man dead, and they probably would, then Luis would be obligated to perform a forensics exam. But he’d be damned if he was going to let it ruin his weekend trip to see his family in La Paz. He’d do the autopsy tonight, get it over with. He pulled out his phone and texted Rosa the news. There wasn’t a damn thing to do but go back to the morgue and await the call. He’d do it with Charlene if she was willing, by himself if necessary. Just one more body to chop up, he told himself. One more VSDC record to file. One more John Doe.
This Is the Place
The plaque had hung in his office for so long, Luis should have stopped seeing it. He couldn’t count how many times a perfectly forgettable lunch hour, spent trawling through alarmist political posts, had been disrupted by its unblinking presence. It pissed him off. The plaque was shorter than most social media updates, but because Luis couldn’t click it into oblivion—it was bolted to the wall above the door—it managed to draw his dry, news-feed-reading eyes back into active service.
HIC LOCUS EST UBI MORS GAUDET SUCCURRERE VITAE
His chief regret of his time as assistant medical examiner was that, roughly six months after taking the job, he’d googled the translation. Now, apparently, he was doomed to obsess over it. It was just the kind of open-ended Ouroboros proclamation he’d hated since medical school, expressly designed to drive readers mad.
THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE DEATH REJOICES TO HELP THOSE WHO LIVE
On the most basic level, he got it. The dead assisted the living by offering their bodies for autopsy. He should have quit there, wrenched the plaque from the wall, and chucked it in the dumpster. But the dead didn’t really “give” their bodies to “help” us, did they? We took them. Luis thought of other Americans who had been taken as “help”: women as wives and property, Africans as slaves, the disabled and deformed as medical playthings.
The idea that death “rejoiced” felt true. It gave voice to a thought Luis had always kept private. Anytime he opened the chest of a corpse, the vivid colors and textures beneath seemed excited to finally show off. The confetti of sinew sprayed by a bone saw; the blinding brightness of blood; the wet wink of the brain; the bloomed chrysanthemums of mammary glands; the balloon-animal arteries of the heart; the high-fashion leather satchel of the stomach; the golden surprise of the pancreas. His rational mind knew these were not celebrations. They were the first blushes of the mushrooming spoil to come.
It was the plaque’s final three words that got Luis most turned around. It was peculiar phrasing, wasn’t it? Not “those who are alive”—a low bar that even he, a lethargic lunchtime screen-scroller, surmounted—but “those who live.” That was an active phrase, referring to those celebrating existence. Luis wondered if he, in this too-dark morgue in too-bright San Diego, qualified as one “who lived.” The plaque suggested an equality between the dead and the living, a relationship that, if properly handled, would result in transcendence.
His desk phone rang, and Luis was glad. Circular thinking was pointless. He closed out his news feeds (if “news” was what you could call animal GIFs, subtweet backbiting, fine-dining humblebrags, and sponsored shopping), checked the time, and snapped up the receiver at what his gadgets agreed was 8:22 p.m.
The news was what he’d expected; death, once you were familiar with it, held few surprises. St. Michael the Archangel had pronounced John Doe dead at 7:18 p.m., with an ETD of 6:10 p.m. The source of this pronouncement, Luis learned after several questions, was an intern. A fucking intern. First, Detective Walker herds John Doe toward the grave like a rude usher, and then St. Mike’s lets a pimpled idiot, probably eager to beef his résumé, make the final call. If John Doe hadn’t been homeless, it wouldn’t have gone down like this.
Luis Acocella, at least, would get a second chance to do righ
t by John Doe. The body was on its way to their unhappy reunion. Honestly, Luis was starting to look forward to it. He’d flay John Doe head to foot if it meant finding proof the gunshots had been survivable and that John Doe’s death had, at least in part, been Detective Walker’s fault. If he could sink Walker, and every SDPD fuck like him, then truly he’d be one “who lived.”
Luis dialed Charlene Rutkowski, his diener. Being a regular human being with a life, she didn’t pick up. He texted instead, giving her the straight dope. He had a gunshot victim to slice, it had to be done tonight, and she had every right to ignore this message. He hesitated before adding a final sentence, because he knew Charlie as well as he knew anybody, and if he made it personal, she’d drop everything and come. Luis hated having this kind of sway over a subordinate. But he also didn’t want to cut up this guy alone. It’d been a hell of a day. He’d almost been shot, for Christ’s sake.
St mikes had an intern call it. A FUCKING INTERN.
The response was immediate:
Bastards. Be there in 30.
The warm gladness Luis felt was subsumed by hotter flames of shame. Charlie knew Luis’s moods better than Luis’s own wife, and even though he enjoyed that intimacy, he felt a stab of guilt every single time he fostered it.
On that night of October 23, the night of John Doe, Luis Acocella was forty and had been married for sixteen years to Rosa del Gado Acocella, They had met when she was sixteen, undocumented from El Salvador, and he was a Mexican-born twenty-six-year-old who’d become a U.S, citizen five years earlier. Though it was another four years before they began dating, the age gap haunted him, particularly when he thought of the attraction he’d felt for her when she’d been a teenager and illegal in more ways than one.
Back then, Rosa was scheduled to be deported along with her mother, who had paid everything she had to coyotes in order to smuggle the girl into the States. Luis took pride in riding to the rescue like John Wayne. Scholarships and help from his family had seen him through med school, and though he’d intended to specialize, he had loans to repay. So he opened a humble office near Los Penasquitos, studying at night and working as a GP by day, mostly for Spanish speakers, seeing Rosa whenever he could.
Rosa told her mother that Luis was “muy hombre,” a “simpático” who had done his best over the years to help the undocumented. Mama del Gado had wanted Luis to tell deportation officials Rosa was sick and couldn’t be moved until she was well again. It was a ridiculous plan, though Luis admired the woman’s spunk, Instead, Luis used every trick he knew to delay deportation hearings. Over time, he slowly decided the best way to save Rosa was to marry her.
She was beautiful. So there was that. Delicate bones, honey skin, dark eyes, She claimed to love Luis, and he had no reason to doubt her beyond the obvious protections he offered. But those eyes—he never did manage to penetrate them, and, to add to his other shames, he came to prefer not to. She fit into his life every way a wife ought to, brought him the right kind of social capital, all that.
But Rosa couldn’t fix his professional quandaries, His early experiences in general surgery failed to switch on any surgical lamps of enlightenment. With every disappointment on the operating table, what he hoped to get out of helping people only became obscurer. It was part of why Luis was looking forward to this weekend’s trip to La Paz. With his brother, Manolo, now living in Bangor, Maine, strapped to a paralegal position that ate up his nights and weekends, Luis had been forced to turn to his father, Jeronimo, for advice. Fifty-five at the time of Luis’s marriage, he’d looked fifteen years older; sixteen years later, nothing had changed. But somehow, the man’s overall ill health had lifted from him old-world prejudices, leaving behind a plain-talking, white-mustached monk who delivered replies like shots of tequila. He didn’t give a shit if you drank them or not.
“It’s the most helpless job in the world,” Luis had explained, years earlier. “If someone keels over on the sidewalk and you, Papá, can’t save them, it’s not your fault. But I’ve got all the training. All the tools. All the assistance I need. I’ve spent my whole life preparing. And they still die, right under my hands.”
“They do not go away,” his father said. “God takes them when it is their time.”
“A boy, five. A girl, three, In the last month, Papá. How could it have been their time?”
“God’s plan takes centuries to unfold.”
“We’re an ant on a blade of grass, I know, I know.”
“You understand your relationship to God. Let this bring you peace.”
“Maybe I understand it. But I don’t like it. If this is the God I know, I prefer not to know him. I should be able to give life, Papá. Even if people die, if I do my job well enough, I should be able to bring them back from death.”
No anger remained in Jeronimo Acocella, only resolve, “That is God’s job.”
Conversations like these guided Luis toward his specialty, While still a practicing GP, he took night courses. With a prodigious stamina he didn’t know he had, he managed a four-year internship, emerging with a degree in pathology, As time passed, and with Rosa by his side, he found himself increasingly surrounded by Latino supporters whose goal was to see him become San Diego’s first Latino medical examiner.
He ran. The competitive streak that made him excel as a med student compelled him to fight for the job with both fists. When he lost, it hurt.
The winner was Jefferson “JT” Talbot, who, Luis believed, got the knee-jerk support of both the Black and gay communities. Luis had the Latinos, of course, but they weren’t enough. Thinking of the race in racial terms—a race about race—made Luis feel shitty, but he couldn’t help it. America was crisscrossed with ley lines upon which ethnic groups gathered, locked arms, and stuck together, no matter what.
JT was magnanimous. Luis swallowed his pride and took the offered post as assistant ME, Medical examiner was a position, with esteem, authority, and deference. Assistant medical examiner was a job. Instead of JT’s battery of fine suits, Luis required white smocks, rubber gloves, and plastic visors to keep viscera off his face.
While JT was his boss, Luis found it impossible to think of the man as superior in any way. The disgruntlement got under his skin, as surely as if he’d scalpeled himself open and stuffed it in there. Was it any coincidence his relationship with Rosa also deteriorated over the years as if by cancerous infection? Her physical changes felt like a betrayal. Her honey skin grew patchy. She gained weight, a lot of it. Those deep, dark eyes that once seemed to hide secrets now failed to hide her naked desire for care and comfort.
They were the worst years of Luis’s life. Was he really an asshole who cared about physical appearance more than anything? He diagnosed himself with clinical depression. Instead of seeking treatment, he drank. That Rosa accepted the change in him without a word only deepened his self-hatred. She’d expected this. All along, from the day they’d exchanged vows, she’d expected him to recede from her, to fade away, like every other husband she’d ever witnessed.
Luis didn’t like admitting that his marriage might be one more reason he so readily decided to spend tonight in his chilly chop shop. He retracted his feet from his desk, stood up, and took one more look at the plaque: THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE DEATH REJOICES TO HELP THOSE WHO LIVE. Curiously, for all the times he’d ruminated over the morphemes of the Latin phrase, he’d never focused on the first four words: THIS IS THE PLACE. There was something foreboding about the phrase. As if this unassuming morgue in some bland San Diego neighborhood had been ordained as the site of something miraculous or dreadful.
Outside, a car door slammed shut. Either Charlie arriving from the Gaslamp Quarter or the corpse arriving from St. Mike’s. The living and the dead—they sounded the same if you didn’t listen close enough.
It’s the Twixt That Gets You
Luis snapped on blue latex gloves from the cardboard dispenser.
“A fucking intern,” he reminded.
“You,” Charlie sa
id, “are a complainer.”
“I don’t deny it.”
“Deny it? You enjoy it.”
“Yes, I do.” He pointed. “Scalpels, please, diener.”
The telltale cymbal of sharp objects dropped to a metal tray.
“Complaining raises blood pressure, Acocella, Causes insomnia. In my medical opinion, you need another hobby.”
“I don’t agree. If you have a taste for, say, caviar, foie gras, Château Latour, you get enjoyment from it one, two, maybe three times a year. A perfect steak, a Cuban hand-rolled on a woman’s bare thigh, sex itself—all too rare. The secret to leading the most satisfying life possible is to find enjoyment in something you can indulge in every day. Now what might that be, diener?”
Charlie’s tone was dry. “Your captivating seminars?”
“Good answer! Here’s an even better answer. Each and every day, there are hundreds of moments that drive our moods into the dirt. Thus and so, if we wish to get the most out of life, we must learn to twist those moments to our advantage. To enjoy the act of not enjoying!”
“And what are you not-enjoying right now?”
“An intern, A fucking intern!”
Luis and Charlie were prepping Autopsy Suite 1 for John Doe. It was a square room dominated by six autopsy tables and bordered by counter workstations. Stainless steel, all of it, smeary in the violet fluorescents. Charlie took a sprayer and hosed down the first table, gently, so as not to conjure an aerosol of effluvial droplets. The liquid drained to a catch basin, which was tubed to a biohazard sink, Luis finished calibrating the organ scale and began making room inside a curing cabinet, where bits of clothing from homicide cases were drip-dried for later testing.
The Living Dead Page 2