“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.