Sharpening his anger into darts of humor aimed at Detective Walker and the racist pigs he represented alleviated pressure. Charlie helped the catharsis by snatching those darts midair and hurling them back. They were playing roles for each other and knew it, but Luis wouldn’t give it up for the world. As the sign above his office door said, this was life, humming right along in a place where it was supposed to have vacated the premises.
Luis glanced at Charlie affectionately. He’d pegged her wrong when she’d started two years ago. Something of a floozy, he’d thought. Charlene Rutkowski, Bronx-born with big, country-western blond hair and the swagger to go with it, was as out of place in a morgue as a cadaver would be at the Grand Ole Opry, Charlie seemed to enjoy the dichotomy. Outside the autopsy suites, she wore playfully patterned dresses that showed off cleavage and thighs. Scrubs were required in the labs, but Charlie was a magician with the shapeless green bags—they weren’t shapeless on her.
Part of their routine was interspersing bawdy interplay (verboten in most workplaces, but rather common in jobs dealing with the dead) with faux-serious boss-to-underling directives, punctuated by Luis calling Charlie by her title of diener—an attendant responsible for cleaning and preparing corpses, handling tools, and helping with record keeping. Charlie relished repeating the word back to him in a French accent: dee-en-ay. Despite all their ribbing, Luis knew its limits; he hadn’t the heart to tell her the word was actually German and meant servant.
“Don’t be so hard on interns. We were both interns once,” Charlie said.
“And our internships included lessons on how to bottle up youthful enthusiasm. We’ve both come a long way since then.”
“Have we? Let’s see.” Charlene tapped her chin with a latex-gloved finger. “I’m less happy, get less respect, and am paid less money. I made more waiting tables. My mom used to tell me if I fucked guys in good positions, I’d wind up in a pretty good position myself. My mom said that! Mrs. Mae Rutkowski!”
“Didn’t work, huh?”
“Well, look around. I’ve fucked my way to the bottom.”
“That’s an offensive characterization of my lab.”
“Ah yes, Your lab. On a Friday night. I feel like a princess.”
“Roll me a drum of formalin, will you, Your Highness? And you might as well prepare the shears. We’ve got four bullets to hunt down.”
“See, this is what I’m saying. Hand me this, get me that. Men always have to be on top.”
Even by morgue standards, this was ribald, so Luis kept his reply to a noncommittal “Mmmmm.” He was gratified by Charlie’s pout, She’d gone on record saying anytime she conquered him conversationally, he retreated to a professorial Mmmmm. Now he made the sound as often as possible. He chuckled, slipped his phone from his pocket to check the time, as well as the news-feed notifications, and tried to use fingerprint identification to open it. He cursed. Damn latex.
“Acocella. Enough already. Seek help, you addict.”
His battery was low. Luis walked to a counter where he kept a spare charger, plugged in the phone, and switched it to mute.
“Addict,” he repeated. “That reminds me.” He kneeled, pulled open a junk drawer, and rooted through it. “All I’m saying is you and I, as lowly interns, wouldn’t have had the bowling-ball cojones to make a call like that. This is a man’s life we’re talking about.” He stirred the contents of the drawer more vigorously. “Those shots—you’ll see. I mean, they’re close to lethal. The jugular, the axillary, the femoral, maybe the kidney. But—what’s the phrase? ‘There’s many a slip…’”
“‘Twixt the cup and the lip,’” Charlie finished, “It’s the twixt that gets you.”
Luis found the dented pack of Marlboros he’d been hunting as he pictured the blood all over John Doe’s ragged suit. A lot of blood, but not that much when you considered the man had absorbed four bullets. The pack took on an anvil’s weight. Was all of it pointless, a doctor’s perpetual raging against death? When he found himself splitting hairs between a lot of blood versus a whole lot of blood, it sure felt pointless.
“As much as I despise your phone, I prefer it to the smoking,” Charlie said. “JT would fire you if he knew you lit up in here.”
“It’s just … You should have seen this man’s suit, Charlie. Like something from JT’s closet. And his hair. He had good hair. And cuff links! He was somebody. Not all that long ago, he was somebody.”
“Oh, and the somebodies deserve better treatment, is that it? Would you be crumpled on the floor like the Pietà if it’d been some needle-marked panhandler in secondhand Padres sweats?”
“That’s insulting.”
“You know what an expensive, tailored suit says to me, a humble diener? It says white-collar crime. It says to me, here’s a guy who had sacks of money, probably sat on the board of some corporation, and got caught screwing over the workingman. Luis, come on. You tell stories about playing in the dirt in Mexico without a cent to your name. Me and my sisters used to gather used needles in the park and stick our dolls with them. Now that’s fucked. That’s unfair, You’re feeling sorry for the wrong people.”
“If we’re right, and this guy was some bigwig, why doesn’t anyone know his name?”
Charlie quit tabbing through blank death certificates, “St. Mike’s didn’t figure it out?”
“First name John,” Luis confirmed, “last name Doe.”
Charlie crossed her arms. “You know who else wears a fancy suit?”
“Who?”
“A dead man, Any dead man. In a casket.”
Luis pulled out a stale cigarette, placed it between his lips—betwixt, he corrected—and began rooting for a light. He came up with a dusty box of matches. He tried to strike one. It snapped in two. He tried to strike another. The tip came off. A third left a red residue on the striking surface but never ignited.
“Fuck,” he muttered.
A shadow interrupted the bright overhead lights. Charlie had moved next to him. She’d already taken her gloves off and was holding out her hands in a cupping gesture. This was the other Charlene Rutkowski: absent of ego and quick to apologize when she felt she’d hurt any feelings. Luis relinquished the matchbook. Charlie tore free a match and, with great care, pressed the phosphorus head to the strip. It lit. She shielded the flame and touched it to his cigarette.
He took a needy puff. The nicotine made him dizzy, and for a moment, Charlie turned into two or three dieners. He didn’t like that; Charlie, and Charlie alone, deserved his focus. He stood, grunting, and with repentance dipped the cigarette into yesterday’s coffee.
“If I hadn’t packed such a shitty med kit,” he said quietly.
“Acocella,” Charlie said.
Luis sighed. “Or if I were still a doctor. A real doctor.”
“Luis.”
The tenderness in her voice was a soft stroke against his cheek. He gazed at her through smoke that looked like a ghostly replica of the rib cage they’d soon sever. It wasn’t only Charlie’s tone that had changed. It was her stance, thrust forward and yearning, every point of sarcasm smoothed, With the chugging from the cooler’s air ducts and the buzzing of the refrigerated cabinets, there was never silence in the morgue, But this came close.
Both retreated from the moment, eyes and hands suddenly busy.
“So what’s the deal? When’s the stiff arrive?” She spoke hurriedly.
Luis looked at a watch that didn’t exist—his phone performed that service now.
“Any time now,” he said.
Charlie brusquely swiped the back of her hand under her nose, as if trying to be unappealing. Her eyes had gone pink, giving her usual heavy mascara a hellish glow.
“Gotta pee,” she mumbled.
Luis nodded and watched his diener move across the lab with an adolescent awkwardness. It only made Luis like her more. She had no idea she’d just given him a gift. He was energized to have been the object of her desire. He felt worthy of the office plaque: THOSE W
HO LIVE. At the same time, he felt a surge of affection for Rosa, He couldn’t wait to crawl into their bed and expound upon every detail of this long day.
Even the intricacies of inner body systems, he marveled, could not match the pinprick sensitivity of emotions, those little slips of twixt that made the living so difficult to predict. He gazed at the cigarette in his coffee, disintegrating just as his life might if he made the wrong choices in this lab. It would be good to get started on John Doe, There was no twixt with the dead. The dead didn’t want, didn’t lust, didn’t hunger, and frankly, Luis couldn’t wait to get reacquainted.
Who’s Got the Last Laugh Now?
The delivery bell rang at 9:42, the same digital ding-dong as the chimes at Charlie’s hairdresser, and Charlie’s instinct was the same: to take the opportunity to check herself in the mirror, She’d tidied her mascara as best she could with the washroom’s toilet paper, but some must have melted into her pores. She was gray-skinned, dark-socketed. It was a look she saw five days a week, on faces rolled from the cooler and unzipped from bags.
Luis’s voice rumbled through the washroom door.
“Charlie? They’re here.”
She’d stared herself down in circumstances direr than this. She pinched both cheeks, one of her mother’s tricks. Crying eyes looked less pink when the cheeks beneath them were pink as well. As a side benefit, the sting braced her like a pull of whiskey. She swallowed the final, hot, sorry-for-herself tears, chose a smile of the determined variety, and bounded out the door.
“I’m here too,” she announced.
Luis stopped pacing between the third and fourth operating tables. He had a serious, tentative expression that’d be no good at all for a late-night cut-up. She hated that she’d caused it.
“Hey,” he said. “I can handle this one. Why don’t you head home? It was shitty of me to drag you out this late.”
“No. I’m in.”
“I was doing my drama bit before. This is straightforward stuff. I really don’t need you.”
“Yes, you do, Acocella.” She picked up a pair of forceps and snapped them at him. “You just don’t know it yet.”
He gave her a doubtful look, maybe wondering which part of him she was picturing caught in the forceps, before trundling to the loading doors. Charlie opened a cabinet and withdrew a death certificate and autopsy report. The form was printed with the outline of a human figure, upon which she would draw circumcision, identifying moles, birthmarks, tattoos, scars, abrasions, and wounds, This sketch work was as vital as the more intrusive tasks. Once, she’d failed to notice a decedent’s missing fingertips—lost from frostbite when he’d rescued a friend from an icy lake—a detail so significant to his family they refused to believe Luis and Charlie had cut up the right guy, Complaints like that reached JT and got ugly quick.
Her purposefully raucous dropping of knives, chisel, mallet, bone saw, and bowel scissors into the tray blocked out the distant conversation of the St. Mike’s paramedics. They blocked out Charlie’s emotions too. She brought out her sticker-decorated PM40, the best scalpel in the biz, and set it beside Luis’s own. She laid out the remainder of their PPE (personal protective equipment): nylon aprons, plastic sleeve protectors to cover them from wrists to biceps, and plastic visors, which they’d need if things got messy. From all indications, things would.
She was piling her thick blond hair into a hairnet when Luis rolled their lucky gurney into Autopsy Suite 1. By the orca squeak of the front left wheel, she could gauge the decedent’s weight—170, 180 tops. She nabbed Luis’s hairnet and slingshotted it at him. He caught it.
“No booties,” he said.
“Tsk, tsk. Protocol.”
“If I have to slip and slide in booties at this hour, I’m going to cry.”
“Wow, special occasion,” Charlie monotoned. “Had I known, I would’ve worn heels.”
She put on her booties anyway. It was a pleasure to submerge into work. At this hour, there were no young doctors fulfilling residencies, no touring med students, before whom Luis and Charlene would have to conduct themselves like professionals. Carrying out their tasks in easy, crisp concert had a calming effect on Charlie. Kicking down the gurney wheel stoppers, those four metallic clucks. The one-two-three-lift of transferring the body to the autopsy table. The crinkle of unwrapping heavy-duty blue-roll paper towels. Luis had a fussy way of adjusting every elastic strap of his PPE that rivaled a ballplayer’s batting-box ritual, And, of course, the long, slow purr of the zipper splitting open the white plastic body bag.
John Doe was naked. His suit, scissored apart at St. Mike’s, was packed separately. Luis and Charlie husked John Doe of his bag and shifted him to the steel table. Death had been too recent for the body to have started smelling. That was good. What was bad was Charlie could feel the body’s warmth through her gloves, She hated cutting into warm corpses. She figured any sane person hated it. Dead flesh ought to be cold and claylike, not indistinguishable from living.
She maneuvered an overhead arm that enabled a Pentax to shoot angles front, right, and left. Luis was close beside her, checking John Doe’s hospital bracelets, yet the work, now that it had begun in earnest, allowed her to think of him at more of a distance. She’d never known anyone like him, that was true. But wasn’t that her fault? Wasn’t that the side effect of the places she’d placed herself and the people who habituated those places?
Charlie couldn’t think of a single man other than Luis Acocella who hadn’t, at some point, made her uncomfortable. This experience stretched back as far as kindergarten and as recently as today’s morning coffee run. She’d been the kind of teen who’d gotten charges from flipping off catcallers and shouting at friends’ dads to quit looking at her boobs. They were thrilling days, screaming with girlfriends in cars with the windows down, half-excited, half-terrified, electric with their own vulnerability, feeling every moment as if running fast down a steep hill. Every bit of it, though, had been preemptory resistance against infringing males.
Crushing on her superior made her feel like a stupid kid. At the same time, disregarding society’s views on proper behavior brought back the windswept stimulation of her youth, when doing the wrong thing felt like it kept her definitively alive. Few spurned her advances then; few spurned them now, even the married ones. Luis was different. Even thinking of his potential rejection hurt. The body on their slab was an excellent distraction.
John Doe had to be turned onto his belly so the camera could photograph his back. Luis helped, and Charlie watched the delicacy with which he held the man’s shoulder and hip. It looked fatherly to Charlie, though she knew that was only aggravating emotions again, Gentleness was just smart doctoring; you never knew what to expect from a decedent’s back—gaping stab wounds, maggoty bedsores, she’d seen it all. John Doe’s back, though, had a babyish perfection.
The autopsy table was also a scale. Just as she’d estimated, John Doe weighed 176 pounds. Charlie let herself shift into autopilot. Took measurements. Shot x-rays. Drew blemishes on the autopsy report’s blank model. It was like the mnemonic jobs of her youth. Bartending, mopping up a country club, operating a blow-mold machine at a factory. She’d felt as dead as John Doe at those jobs. One exhausted night, she remembered, she could have sworn everyone on the factory floor was a corpse, propped up alongside whirring machines, a grotesque tableau vivant.
She never got that feeling at the morgue. Procedures were routine but vital; Luis knew the stakes of his job. Stakes were what Charlie had desired when she’d shocked her mother by announcing she, the girl her own mom called “a Bronx bombshell,” was going back to school for medicine. Only upon seeing Mae Rutkowski’s look of pity—utter disbelief that Charlie had the brains or dedication—did she know she meant it. Having a job of actual import must underlie her feelings for Luis. The theory made enough sense that she planned to run with it.
Only one part of her job bothered her. She didn’t talk about it; to give it air was to risk it blooming into
full-scale neurosis. Charlie knew it was part of why she depended on Luis’s presence.
Charlene Rutkowski, professional diener, lipsticked-and-tattooed commander of her own destiny, was still afraid to be alone with a dead body.
She did whatever she could to avoid it. Little things other people would never notice. Kept strict business hours so the morgue was always bustling when she was working. Timed her trips into the cooler so someone else was already there. If that was impossible, she drew the door open to its widest extent, so it would take extra seconds to close, during which she chattered to herself like a madwoman about frivolous bullshit—TV shows, pet memories—as she unshelved the corpse and rolled it toward the door with careless speed, the fear in her chest coagulating into a cold certainty that the cooler door wouldn’t open.
The fear was rooted in a recurrent nightmare. The type of dream didn’t matter. It could be a flying dream, a school anxiety dream, a sex dream. It could take place anywhere. An office building, a supermarket, a public pool. All that was costuming. The nightmare was sharking under the surface. At some point in the proceedings, Charlie would walk through a door and learn the truth: the nightmare had been there all along.
The nightmare was always the same but for two details.
Charlie steps into an autopsy room. It is very dark, save a center table, where a high-intensity surgeon’s lamp throws a circus spotlight on a dead man. She comes closer. Each time, it is the same dead man dressed in a snappy tuxedo. His face seems vaguely familiar, but she can’t identify it.
It takes a moment for her to realize the room is sealed off. The door through which she entered is gone. No other doors exist, no windows, no escape. The corpse speaks.
“Hello, Charlene.” He has a musical voice.
He sits up.
The dreaming Charlene races around the room, slapping at walls, looking for a hidden seam. She glances over her shoulder and sees the corpse swing his feet, clad in shiny dress shoes, onto the floor. She watches him stand. Sees him walk toward her with unexpected spryness. She backpedals into a corner, and the second her back hits the wall, she thinks how stupid she’s been, that if she could control her fear and stay in the middle of the room, she might be able to evade him. In the corner, of course, he gets her every time.
The Living Dead Page 3