The Living Dead

by Kraus, Daniel

  Inches away, the corpse lifts his slender arm, elbow relaxed, palm up.

  “Shall we dance?” he asks with a smile.

  The smile changes into a snarl. Then back to a smile. It wavers like water.

  The most frightening aspect of the dream was not knowing if the dead man was safe. Wasn’t that all men, though? Except Luis Acocella? After suffering the nightmare for a year, Charlie visited her mother in Parkchester, near the Whitestone Bridge, and found herself alone in the dining room, gazing at the plastic, three-dimensional depiction of Jesus on the cross that had lorded over the family meals of her youth. Charlie moved her head slightly to the left, then right. The depiction seemed to change. A smiling, benign Jesus appeared from one angle, while from the other, his face was wrenched in agony.

  Was it an illusion of light and perspective? Charlie didn’t know, but figured the corpse’s shifting face in her nightmare began with this likeness of another walking, talking corpse. After two years as a diener, how could she picture the risen Christ in any other way? Youth Bible groups (only memorable to Charlie for the passing around of V. C. Andrews books) taught her Jesus rose on the third day. Her medical training translated third day to seventy-two hours. Jesus’s membranes would have ruptured. The limbs with which he’d performed miracles would be stiff with rigor mortis. When Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene outside his tomb, so said the gospels, she didn’t recognize him. Of course she didn’t, thought Charlie. The savior would have been purple-hued, obese with gases, leaking bloody foam from nose and mouth.

  Jesus wasn’t the only face Charlie recognized during that visit to her mother. Mae Rutkowski, age fifty-four, had settled into the sofa with a glass of green crème de menthe, the only booze she kept in the house. The veins of her skinny wrists pushed through papery skin as she pressed buttons on the TV remote. Channels blabbered for attention. Charlie rubbed the aching temples that came free with every visit and, too tired to think better of it, mentioned the workplace nightmare that was ruining her sleep.

  “Why do you stick?” Mae asked. “Doing what you’re doing, I mean. All my life, I didn’t like a job I was doing, I quit!”

  “Money’s good,” Charlene replied robotically. The money, of course, wasn’t good, not nearly enough to chip away at med school loans. Charlie knew the real reason she wasn’t trading up for a better job, but there was no way she was telling Mae Rutkowski about Luis Acocella and the three strikes against him. He was Charlie’s boss. He was married. He was Mexican.

  “Remember Carol Springer?” her mother shouted over the TV. “Lived over on the Grand Concourse? She became a flight attendant. Her mother told me Carol has nightmares every night. Her plane goes down in flames every single night!”

  Charlie knew this line of conversation too well. She was thirty-five. In Mae’s view, the years spent becoming a diener would have been better used locking down a husband and having babies. But Charlie’s interest in children began to putrefy the day she’d assisted Luis in the autopsy of a pregnant car-crash victim. Opening the woman’s uterus had revealed a fetus that, in contrast to the mother’s pulverized body, was in immaculate shape, its features as delicately rendered as a china doll. Holding the tiny human in a single palm froze a part of Charlie’s mind that had yet to thaw; Luis had to instruct her twice to put the fetus back into the uterus. He would be buried like that, inside his mother. For the rest of the autopsy, Charlie’s mind spun in infinite spirals. The fetus, living for a while inside a dead mother; the dead mother being planted into live earth; the Earth existing inside the death of space; space existing within God’s supposed life-giving embrace.

  Luis registered her discomfort and gently explained how, for some fetuses, a womb could be a tomb.

  Charlie never forgot that comparison. A womb, a tomb.

  Had Jesus’s interment spot been both?

  “Oh, now here,” Mae Rutkowski cried.

  She’d happened upon a black-and-white movie, a skinny man in a black suit with tails, white bow tie, and white boutonniere, tap-dancing across a glossy stage, making marionette jerks in front of black-gowned women all wearing identical masks, Charlie’s reaction was one of repulsion—this must be a horror film—but her mother spilled her crème de menthe in excitement.

  “This is a good one,” Mae said. “Shall We Dance.”

  Charlie recognized the man from her nightmare, the corpse who stood, walked, and extended a hand to take hers.

  It was Fred Astaire.

  Mae bobbed her head, following the dancer’s twirling with Ginger Rogers, Charlie felt like Ginger, caught in Fred’s bony grip and spun so quickly she was sick to her stomach. The duo turned to the camera, arms interlocked, Ginger having been transformed into the same sort of mindlessly grinning creature as Fred. They offered their free arms to the audience, inviting them to join the dance inside a grayscale world that hadn’t rotted in decades and might withstand age forever. In unison, their jaws unhinged and loosed the number’s last, uncomfortable lyrics.

  But oh-ho-ho, who’s got the last laugh now?

  “I always loved Fred Astaire,” Mae sighed.

  “Not me,” Charlie said, looking away. “He always looked to me like…”

  “Like what?” Mae didn’t look away from the cursive title that had taken over the screen: THE END.

  Charlie noted how her mother’s green liquor looked like something that might drain from a liquifying corpse. Regardless, she wished she’d accepted a pour of it when asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Like a guy who’s been dead for a while.”

  Invisible Hands

  Charlie made the first incision at 10:17 p.m. Ignoring all bullet wounds for now, she began with a notch behind the left ear before drawing her PM40 toward the breastbone in a Y cut. John Doe’s flesh split like dough. She copied the cut from the left ear and proceeded down the abdomen, dodging the navel with a juke to the right before stopping at the pubis. There was blood, but barely any. Dead hearts don’t pump. She reflected back the skin and tissues of the chest like saloon doors. Revealed were a set of ribs not so different from the sauce-slathered racks Charlie and Luis often shared at Damon’s #1 Ribs.

  John Doe was old enough that his rib cartilage had begun to morph into bone. Charlie used a serrated knife to saw through the fused cartilage, then took up the stainless steel rib shears. She liked operating these two-handed chrome-glossed scissors; like riding motorcycles and changing her oil, the act felt outsized and brash. She notched the jaws around individual ribs and cut through them. It was the loudest part of any autopsy. Wet cracking noises echoed about the room.

  “Maybe we should all go topless,” she suggested.

  Luis smiled and gestured with his chin.

  “Just Mr, Doe,” Luis said. “Look sharp now.”

  Charlie lifted the man’s breastplate in a single piece and set it in a steel pan on the counter. When she returned, Luis was hovering over the open body, inhaling. If you were good, he always said—inferring he was, in fact, good—you could smell the sweetness of diabetes or the bar-floor stink of alcoholism, This sniff looked indecisive.

  “What do you see?” he asked, and his tone brought Charlie joy. His questions had become less pop quizzes, more requests for a knowledgeable second opinion.

  “Bit of green fluid.” Her mother’s crème de menthe flashed through her mind. “Pneumonia, probably.” She raised a reproachful eyebrow at Luis, “And he was obviously a smoker.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Based on the entry wound, your best guess.”

  “Right lung.”

  “Prove it, querida.”

  With a steadiness she was proud of, Charlie cut through the pleural adhesions gumming the lungs to the chest interior, typical of an older man in a stricken condition. She severed the trachea and esophagus. At last, she slid her hand past the warm ball of the heart and made two long incisions on either side of the spine to release the lungs. She scooped out the right lung first. You had to be careful with internal org
ans. The little suckers liked to weasel away. Especially livers, especially from alcoholics. Fatty growths made them as slippery as water balloons.

  She carried the right lung to a dish near John Doe’s feet, then did the same with the left, However, she could not, as Luis had requested, “prove it.” The right lung was black with nicotine and showed signs of pleurisy but was free of contusions that would indicate a bullet impact. She glanced at Luis, who winked. He’d known the airbags were a dead end. Charlie didn’t accept defeat; she went back for the entrails, almost hungry for them. She parted the bottom of John Doe’s Y cut, detached the rectum, and snipped through the web of fat that kept the intestines in place. She reeled the long, ropy organ into a steel mixing bowl.

  The intestines were not her quarry, The liver, she’d decided, was where the abdominal bullet was hiding, and with the intestines cleared, no organ was easier to extract. Three vessels and a few ligaments later, the big, blubbery organ was in her hands. She settled the liver in the pan alongside the lungs and massaged it.

  “Touchdown,” she said. Picking up her forceps, she began to extract the bullet.

  “Vital?” Luis pressed.

  “Nyet. I’d say a rib stopped it.”

  “Uh-huh.” Luis punched a fist into his opposite hand. His gloves, wet with fluid, smacked. “And that was the likeliest kill shot.”

  Charlie got the picture. Did she ever. Luis wanted to prove the four GSWs—gunshot wounds—weren’t what, in Luis’s phraseology, “shut this guy down.” Charlie had zero interest in interdepartmental San Diego civics, but couldn’t deny the dented bullet she let plunk into a specimen jar.

  “I’m coming around to your paranoia, Acocella. Bed rest, a little hospital mush, some light narcotics, this dude walks home.”

  “Hot damn, That Walker fuck is history.”

  Charlie smiled uneasily. Antiestablishment oaths spoken in a state facility made her wonder if, among all the high-tech equipment, there were hidden a secret microphone. More likely, their words would be picked up by the mic Luis wore. With the touch of a button, it recorded his comments and transcribed them to text. The completed, full report would be uploaded to a prescribed list of city and county agencies; a separate command could email the same text to the VSDC system in D.C. That was the last thing Charlie needed, some upstart at the Census Bureau flagging her morgue for rebellion.

  “City living’s what killed this guy,” Charlie said, “Wrong place, wrong time.”

  “Mmmmm,” Luis replied, touching a finger to the Record button.

  The voice-recognition processor was designed to make the pathologist’s job easier, but the technology was, to say the least, imperfect. Long after the day’s dirty work was done and the cadavers rolled back into the cooler, Luis could be found in his office, correcting transcripts he claimed had a 20 percent error rate. He was rigorous with autopsy reports; that’s why he let Charlie do the wet work while he made vocal notes into the mic and ink ones into a binder.

  “White male,” he said. He took his finger off the button and smirked at Charlie. “Let’s see how they fuck that one up. Flight meal? Wire mule?”

  “You have an accent, Acocella. Might as well accept it.”

  “Lord forbid someone in this country has an accent.”

  “Hey, I have one too, so I’m told.”

  “I’d love to see how this doohickey would manhandle your lovely brogue.”

  “Machines, man.” Charlie shuffled over to John Doe’s neck, the second of the four shots. “That mic? That phone attached to your hand? You realize it’s all going to fuck us in the end, right? Have you ever had a single problem understanding me?”

  She glanced up from the body and watched his Record-button hand halt. Her body went just as still; she hadn’t realized what she’d said. It might be late, this might be a morgue, and their activities might be suffused in malodorous smells, but this pause of theirs was abundant in soft, sandy textures and floral scents, better even than the night’s earlier cigarette-lighting intrigue.

  “Never,” Luis replied.

  Charlie lowered her plastic visor to hide her face.

  “Mmmmm,” she said.

  He laughed and she was relieved, though her heart was racing.

  Within forty minutes of John Doe’s arrival in the autopsy room, while Luis Acocella took fastidious notes and spoke into his mic, Charlene Rutkowski, working roughly from the head down, removed a total of three bullets and several more vital organs from the corpse, taking breaks to razor off samples that she submerged in preservatives for later testing. Luis’s insistence that John Doe was “somebody” dug at her, but she had to admit he’d been on to something. Teeth were a corpse’s capsule history, and John Doe’s molars showed evidence of good dental work. Charlie finished by digging into the body’s right thigh, not even close to the femoral, and pulling out a bloody lump of lead.

  “There you have it,” Luis celebrated.

  “What do you figure?” Charlie asked. “Heart attack?”

  “Dig it out. Let’s see.”

  Charlie raised her visor and patted at perspiration with blue-roll.

  “We hardly need to,” she said. “Nothing hit this guy’s vitals. He’s old, Out of shape. Smoker’s lungs. Alcoholic’s liver. A kid in a Halloween costume could have scared this guy to death. Four bumps from an Uzi? Forget about it. Heart attack. Hundred percent chance.”

  Luis surveyed the notes in his binder and clicked the Record button on his earpiece with obvious gusto.

  “Cause of death not—repeat, not—ballistic insult. Proceeding with examination of the heart. Checking for occlusion. Cardiomyopathy. And not just on the left. Could be an arrhythmogenic right ventricle. Or could be purely electrical. An inherited condition. Brugada, possibly.”

  He sounded genuinely happy. Charlie knew this had nothing to do with her fine performance and everything to do with what she saw as a petty grudge. With reluctance, she picked up her PM40, purple with blood. She didn’t want the autopsy to end, she didn’t want to have to grab the suction tubes and start cleaning up. Was there any sillier thing? She wanted to be happy alongside Luis, to suggest they celebrate over drinks, maybe even a second cigarette.

  She sliced John Doe’s pericardial sac, then finned her hand beneath the heart and wrapped her fingers around it. Warm as a desert rock. She used the PM40 to disjoin the vascular attachments, set down her scalpel, and lifted the organ out. She cradled the tired, brown-red muscle in her cupped hands and carried it to the examination basin, only to find she wasn’t ready to let it go.

  How many times had she held someone’s whole heart in her hands? Such a corny sentiment had no place in the mind of the cynical Charlene Rutkowski. While Luis droned into his mic, oblivious to her melancholy, she let the heart’s ripe warmth cloud her senses until she saw the heart not only as John Doe’s but her own as well. The throb in her chest slowed, beat by shuddering beat, until it was as inert as the hunk of meat she held. Charlie had the strange notion an invisible hand had reached inside her—billions of invisible hands, maybe, inside everyone on the planet—hands belonging to dieners skilled beyond comprehension, sifting, prodding, slicing, and determining if humans were truly alive or if the whole herd of them had been dead on their feet for some time.

  Days later, when she had a moment to dwell upon anything beyond survival, Charlie would tell herself if only she could have kept cradling that heart, things might have turned out differently. The invisible hands would have cradled her back, cradled everyone, given humanity a chance to correct course. But she couldn’t hold on. The eviscerated corpse next to her moved, entirely on his own, and Charlie dropped the heart. It fell to the floor, landing with a light thump. Instantly, the invisible hand became visible. It was the slender white hand of Fred Astaire, and with dawning horror, Charlie saw she’d taken it and couldn’t pull free from its grip.

  Fred smiled. He had no teeth, no tongue, nothing but a black hole.

  “Shall we dance?” he ask
ed.

  The Miscarriage

  The neck torqued. Luis’s finger, instantly sweaty, slipped from the Record button of his earpiece and landed on a binder full of notes that seemed to lose all factual status.

  The corpse’s neck was striped with gore from Charlie’s incisions. The right-side cord, known to medical texts as the sternocleidomastoid, was taut as a bridge cable. Three separate drops of blood snailed down it toward the slab. The rest of the world, in a tease of things to come, had gone dead—the silence was absolute. Luis’s breath and Charlie’s breath held tight; it felt like the fate of the world hung on that single flexed neck muscle. Then, a dull gonging: John Doe’s skull knocking against the table.

  “Jesus,” Luis whispered. His hand moved across his chest in a holy sign he hadn’t made in decades, “Madre de Dios.”

  He heard a soft thud on the floor and noticed in his peripheral vision the skid of a dropped human heart, bumped by Charlie’s bootie-covered shoe, He tore his eyes from John Doe—it felt like his eyes were being spooned out, what doctors called enucleation—and found Charlie holding her empty, blood-slicked, gloved hands before her.

  Nothing upset Luis more than the slide-whistle tone of his stalwart diener.

  “How long,” she gasped, “after … after a—”

  “Muscle contractions. The muscles—”

  “—after a body dies—”

  “There’s cases. I mean, I’ve read—”

  The corpse opened his eyes with a sound like the tsk of a tongue, a swift damnation of the stupid sputtering of an outdated race. Luis’s last, worthless word banged around metal surfaces as the corpse flexed his neck again, harder this time, and turned his head, attention apparently drawn by Luis’s voice. And there he was: John Doe, looking at Luis Acocella. Beneath drooping lids, the corpse’s eyes were clouded with mucus. Irises once the color of black coffee had turned mocha from some internal milk. Luis swayed his body to the left as he might to test an unleashed dog’s intent, and the eyes followed. The movement was uneven, but of course it was—the vitreous humor was skipping across dry sockets.