Carcass Trade (5 page)

It's the smell of the formalin that slugs me. In its usual state as a preservative, it's a solution of formaldehyde and water but it's also used in powder form, sprinkled in the cavities of bodies so violently disrupted by autopsy. Early household deodorizers contained formalin, not so much to hide the odor as to numb the ability to smell. Unfortunately, it doesn't work all that well. Not so much in the autopsy room, but in the refrigeration room where the treated corpses wait until removal to a funeral home, I have to use something for my nostrils, sissy or not.

Dr. Schaffer-White was working on a male in the first station. Schaffer-White's a strong sister and very feminine. Always she has pearls or diamonds around her neck. Tall, slender, and blonde, she works fewer hours than the rest of the staff because she has a two- and a four-year-old at home. The only chink in her armor is that she doesn't work on child cases.

Dr. Watanabe was at the second station, with his two favorite assistants, both women. The air vent beneath the basin by his legs had filter papers with blood smears on them drying against the louvers. Later, the filters would be plucked off and stored in the freezer. On Watanabe's table was a young man with distinct ligature marks around his neck and what I could recognize as electrical burns on his ankles even from where I stood. A torture victim. The doctor was showing the techs how the electrical cord that still bound the victim's left ankle had been shaved back on the ends, the better to apply power.

A doctor who looked to be East Indian and who I didn't know, was sitting in a chair at the next station, watching a young man who looked like a college halfback use rose cutters to sever the ribs of a heavy woman.

On the table next to her, a tech was preparing to remove the tongue of a suspected cocaine courier. I shifted positions so I wouldn't see. Removing the tongue is the one step in the autopsy procedure I avoid. It's done to check for injury to the larynx. But when they sever the piece and lift it dangling to the scale, it's as long and limp as a salmon, and the loss seems so cruelly nullifying. Without a tongue, is a being human, even in death?

In by two, out by seven. That's the unofficial motto at the Orange County morgue. Our coroners work on a contract basis. When you come right down to it, that's piecework, and in this impartial inventory of parts, something is lost to the idea of reverent handling.

Once I watched a performance here in a case of severe decomp that gave me new respect for the morgue people. Severed hands had been brought in after they had spent a few days in a moisture-filled trash bag. A morgue tech named Barney, for Rubble, we tell him, slipped the skin off and soaked it in saline to bring up the ridges. When it was ready, he pulled it on like gloves to ink for prints. Even if a corpse is mummified by heat, the fingers can be hydrated by injecting saline, inflating into slender balloons ripe for rolling.

At the last station lay a thing that looked like burned and sea-soaked timber off a ship that had broken apart after an explosion and floated ashore. The legs, or stumps, were as shiny black as japanned wood. This poor piece of human flesh and sometime bone that the coroner's caddies extracted from the husk of ravaged steel in Carbon Canyon would be examined systematically and thoroughly; and if we were lucky, the thing would emerge a person with an identity.

Doug, behind me, looked solemn and very pale, but when I gazed at him, he whispered, “I'm okay.” He looked away from the bodies and into the empty viewing room where people come to ID their relatives.

The photographer leaning against the wall between Watanabe's and the East-Indian doctor's stations stepped forward to shoot, fulfilling the requirement for all autopsies to be photo-doc'ed. In high-profile cases, such as those involving serial killers, a couple thousand shots may be filed; and in jail deaths, the autopsy is videotaped; cover your fanny, the first rule of the road. I did not know this photographer very well, and sort of missed the man he replaced, a cheeky guy named Billy Katchaturian, the one who was fired for using blood spatter shots in a photo exhibit. You grow older, your tolerance level deepens, I guess, and so even I, after a while, along with the rest of my tasteless colleagues, came to think his flagrant lack of judgment was funny.

At our Jane's table was Dr. Margolis, without a mask, as were all the doctors except Schaffer-White in her clear plastic guard, though all but one wore gloves. There are eyewash areas and first aid kits nearby, but I think we all get a sort of fatalistic attitude about what might happen to any of us who hang around the dead. A story went around for a while about a killer virus that escaped from a corpse into the air-conditioning system of a morgue, knocking off members of the medical examiner's office somewhere in the East. I was never sure the story was legit and the doctors here didn't seem worried, even about squirts and splashes that might be carrying the AIDS virus.

Doug took a position so he could observe only our corpse, not the others.

Dr. Margolis's shoulders bumped the scale, sending it swinging on its hook. He looked up, switched off his mike, and said, “Pretty picture, huh?”

“Not too,” I said. There was no sign of Les, and I was surprised they started without him. “Is Detective Fedders here, Doctor?”

“Who?”

“The homicide investigator for this case.”

The doctor and a male technician moved out of each other's way as the tech finished suctioning out the pool of blood filling the peritoneal cavity, using a device much like the one in a dentist's office, with a screen in it to capture any possible bullet fragments. Dr. Margolis picked up a scalpel, stared blankly at me a second, and I'm sure forgot the question.

The tech was busy at the sink, and so the doctor asked if I would get him the turkey baster from the cart. He always recognizes me but never remembers my name. Once he called me Stormy. I thought, hey, not half bad.

“Could I get you to aspirate here?” He pointed to a pool of bright blood in the lower cavity. “Give me some of that in the vial there, will you? Flush the rest.”

I didn't really want to do it, but I did, and would have even if Doug weren't watching. I put the baster down on the counter and stepped back as though that was enough of that while the doctor dictated, lifting out a 60-gram ovary distended with chocolatey fluid. Then he removed the 7- by 6- by 5-centimeter, 132-gram uterus, laying it in the scale. A woman named Mai Lu who stood at the erasable board at the end of the room wrote this information on it as the doctor recited.

“Presence of papillations suggests neoplasm,” the doctor said. Then to Doug, whom he didn't know, “Likely cancer.”

Maybe the woman knew she had a malignancy and decided not to go through with the rigors of treatment, driving her car off a cliff. It crosses one's mind: Not long ago I worried about the same thing. My mother took a drug called DES. It kept me in the womb when I was in my first restless mood to move on. In my case there was no cervical dysplasia, no precursor of cancer, but because of other chronic problems, my doctor rid me of the pear-shaped organ similar to the one now in the scale. If today I have regrets, they pass soon. On whom should I inflict these renegade cells? I used to wonder what a child of my union with my dead husband would have been like, but that's a don't-think zone.

I asked, “What would you say is the age of this victim, Doctor?”

His glasses were on the tip of his nose. The fluorescent light gave his olive skin an unhealthy green glow.

“By the look of the hipbone,” Dr. Margolis said, “and the involvement of suspicious uterine tissue, I'd say this victim was thirty-five or forty.” He put the tip of his knife on the bone. “In the public symphysis we see residual ridging. Older than middle-aged, these ridges would be gone. Also, the edges would be worn and the bone material fairly porous under microscopic examination. Now, over here,” he said, shimming more tissue away from the hipbone, “we see a slight concavity. In a youngster, this area is furrowed. Later it becomes flat, and later still concave. There's no remarkable arthritic degradation, though I see here by this grainy area at the major muscle attachment that she may have had some occasional inflammation.”

I stopped making notes because there was no way I could keep up with him, and we'd get the transcribed report later.

Doug said, “How tall, would you say?”

“Femur measurement indicates she was five six to five ten. On X ray, no sign of trauma to the ribs or shoulder blades. Has not borne children, either.” He pointed out a barely visible groove in a bone near the lower spine. “This groove would be wider and deeper. In some women after childbirth, what we call dorsal pits form on the front of the pelvis.”

I asked, “Did X ray show any wound damage, gun—”

He shook his head no. “Lungs are clear.”

My gaze went automatically to the chest, which lay open, with the ribs folded back and the two bean-shaped organs already removed.

“She was dead before the car burned, then.”

“No smoke inhalation,” Dr. Margolis said. Then he added, moving forward to the chest area and folding back a chest flap, “We have implants in both breasts.” With his scalpel, he probed the base of the charcoal weld, exposing a rubbery flap that resembled a brown mushroom petticoating a tree.

Doug gave me a look, and I lifted my shoulders to say don't ask
me.

“X rays show no fractures of the hyoid bone,” the doctor said, “which means she was not strangled. Of course, a full osteobiography is only done on skeletonized subjects.” He looked at me over his glasses, raising his wiry white eyebrows. “You have Meyer Singer coming in for the teeth?”

“Yes. Thank you, Doctor. We appreciate your help,” I said.

Mai Lu came around behind us from Dr. Schaffer-White's table and laid a liver in the scale.

Doug and I could leave now, return to the day's sun and the tall stalks of purple lilies of the Nile taking deep encores in the breeze as the lunch crowds exited around Civic Center Square.

In the hall by the rear door, Dr. Watanabe's assistant was squawking her wide pen on a whiteboard propped against a wall on an empty gurney. She drew a red box around a note in green letters. It read “ATTN TECHS: Please do not put B.G.'s brains away—she's coming in tonight.”

I looked around as I heard the back doors slide open and the grumble of wheels from a new gurney being wheeled in. The nude form of a young Hispanic male was aboard. Three hot, raw holes pegged his chest.

The beat goes on.

The next morning I stood on my balcony overlooking the Upper Newport Bay, called Back Bay by locals, and searched for a hint of heron among the soaked bulrush tassels. Sometime during the night, a cloister of cloud had drawn down. I looked for a clearing in the fog and hoped to see, at the bottom of the reeds, the bowling-pin shape of a brown bittern, or the flashy pink legs of a black-necked stilt, these names, these birds, all new to me in the last three years since I'd come to live in my aunt's condo.

The telephone rang. It was my brother. Even though my feet were cold, I brought the portable phone back out to the balcony and continued to look through my field glasses. On the near bank, a cat darted out of sight as if falling from earth.

I'm eleven years younger and an entire personality apart from my brother. Nathan calls from his home in the East maybe once a year. Despite our emotionally distant family, he carries a peculiar sentimentality about the twenty-fifth of December. Usually he'll slip in a minilecture about my not keeping in touch with our parents, but I doubt he does a much better job at it. Once he said keeping in touch is what women do. Not this one, I said. The truth is, I do, but at my own choosing, not out of protocol. I figure our parents in Florida are doing fine and so is he and so am I, so what more needs doing? They never call me.

“Don't tell me I owe you money, Nathan. I haven't borrowed money since college.”

“A simple hello would do.”

“It's a joke, Nathan.”

I pictured my brother. Even with infrequent sightings, when I did see him I could recognize him as a good-looking man: trim, five eleven, even features, with a vertical crease in the tip of his nose that made him look much less serious than he was. The last time I saw him, a flattering gray had crept in among the dark brown hair at his temples.

“You sound like you just got up.”

“I did.”

“It's late.”

“Is it?” I knew what time it was. Already I was beating myself up, counting the number of errands I could have accomplished by now. “Fancy that.”

Northeast, a cattail bent nearly horizontal in the foggy layer, bobbing from the weight of a yellow-headed blackbird.

Nathan said, “Pretend the phone just rang.”

He could be a smug SOB. But I went along. “Oh hi, Nathan. Good to hear from you.” I walked back in, closed the slider, and took the phone into the kitchen, thought I'd try out new tea.

“I'm fine. How are you? See, that's how it's done,” he said, but his voice sounded funny.

“Something wrong? Are Mom and Dad all right?”

“You could phone them once in a while.” I let silence reign, as the saying goes, while I filled a cup and put it in the microwave. He said, “I'd like to stop by if you're going to be home.”

“Sure,” I said, an edgy feeling overtaking me. “What brings you out here?”

“I live here.”

“No shit.”

“In Sierra Madre. You know where that is?”

“Above Pasadena. Nate, I just talked to you Christmas. What is this, summer home/winter home?”

The microwave quit beeping, and I took out the cup and waved a raspberry tea bag over it until it landed and began to bleed into the water. Unraveling the terry dish towel from the oven handle and tossing it on one shoulder, I took my tea and sat down with my feet propped on a chair and wrapped the towel around them. Popsicle toes. There used to be a song. . . .