Morgue Drawer Four (3 page)

As you can well imagine, I was totally freaked out. Those near-death-experience talk show attention-seekers on TV never mentioned the whole thing taking so long. They never said a word about people coming, recording your death, coroners staring at you like an insect under a magnifying glass, getting plopped into a box and hauled off.

Hauled off—
where to?
I suddenly wondered, feeling panic take over. How the hell am I supposed to find my way back into my body if I don’t know where it is? You can imagine my horror. So I whooshed over behind the two figures who had just loaded the casket containing my body into a vehicle. Fortunately, and unlike the pallbearers, I did not slip on the icy street; instead I just whooshed through the air and flashed into the vehicle. Perhaps this as well should have given me pause, but we’ve already addressed this topic. I didn’t have any time for pauses. I was just happy that I was still with my body as the vehicle started.

I didn’t look out the window; I wasn’t particularly interested where they were taking me so long as I was just with my body. At some point they went down a ramp, and then the vehicle’s door opened; a long corridor was waiting for us, and then a door. They pulled open a stainless steel drawer and set my body inside; I wafted in afterward, of course, and then the drawer closed—and we lay in the dark, my body and I.

Again, because of my confusion, and maybe as a side effect of the alcohol—I really didn’t know if you could be wasted as a ghost having a near-death experience—I lacked any sense of time, but at some point the drawer opened, my body was placed onto a gurney, pushed into a tiled room, and transferred onto a stainless-steel table with an outlet strainer at the foot end, and then Duffie/Martin stepped up to the table along with another man. The other man was holding a Dictaphone and spoke the introduction into it. “Autopsy of a male body for the Cologne District Attorney’s Office. Identified by the police as Sascha Lerchenberg, age: twenty-four, height: one hundred seventy-three centimeters, weight: sixty-nine kilograms.”

I was still pretty confused, but that was entirely appropriate because what ensued was truly horrific. My initial confusion blossomed into full-on panic as I saw what Martin was holding in his hand: a gleaming scalpel that looked pretty damn sharp. He put it into position and sliced my entire torso open, starting at my chin in a straight incision going so far down you really couldn’t go any farther. I expected a torrent of blood, but nothing happened. Meanwhile, Mr. Blabbermouth commented into his stupid recorder on each incision and every finding while I circled above the autopsy table in extreme agitation. I felt sick. Layer by layer my skin was peeled off, the fat tissue underneath exposed and folded back—I don’t remember all the details very well anymore—until the situation started to get really disgusting: Martin grabbed my testicles.

“Dude, get your monkey beaters off my balls!” I roared with the greatest urgency, and Martin spun around, so startled I thought he might slash his colleague right open. That was the moment I realized he could hear me.

“What is it?” the guy with the Dictaphone asked. I couldn’t make out his whole face because slicer guys wear these ridiculous face masks when they’re dissecting bodies, but his eyes had grown a little bigger out of fear as Martin’s scalpel hissed through the air in front of his abdomen.

“I, uh, I don’t know,” Martin stammered, and I sensed his uncertainty. Ditto on that, plus I felt really indignant (that’s another cool word Martin’s taught me), I’m sure you can imagine. I mean, what would you say if some perv in green scrubs started by professionally filleting you and then wanted to cut your balls off? That’s what I’m talking about.

“Do we need to prepare the testicles?” Martin asked, sounding somehow sheepish.

“Nah,” came the response from behind the mask, the guy’s eyes narrowing. He smirked big. “Only our female colleagues enjoy that. Leave them, it’s OK. Cause of death is clear, right?”

Martin nodded. “Occipital blunt force trauma resulting in cardiopulmonary collapse due to massive brainstem injury, presumably the result of falling from the bridge onto the back of the head.”

The other guy put the Dictaphone back up to his mask and said, “Preparation of testicles not necessary,” then he switched it off and stretched. “Gotta pee.”

Martin nodded. Martin stayed with me but took a step back from the table and watched his diminutive assistant, who was putting the pieces that Martin had cut out of my organs into Mason jars. At the time I wasn’t able to make heads or tails of the scene, but since then I’ve learned that a fine tissue sample is taken from every organ, which in hospital slang is called a histo sample. Comes from
histology
, but you don’t need to know that. Cutting the body open is only one part of an autopsy. There’s also the toxicology report and even a genetic test, if they need one.

During my own autopsy, though, all I could do was circle around gawking, but otherwise I kept quiet. Martin was also unnaturally quiet. It was as though he were listening intently, uncertain whether he should be listening outwardly or inwardly. At first I left him alone.

The autopsy of my body was completed according to regulation and without further disruptions; the slaughterhouse—as I call the white-tiled room—was cleaned; and I—that is, the physical shell of me that had since been rather nastily disemboweled, restuffed with all the organs that had been taken out, and then sewed back up—was returned to my refrigerated drawer, labeled “Morgue Drawer 4.” At the last moment before the drawer fully closed, I changed my mind, whooshed out of the narrow slit, and took position near the ceiling lamp where I had a good view of the room. There wasn’t that much to see, because there wasn’t anything to see apart from the refrigerated morgue drawers—inside which, incidentally, the prevailing temperature is four degrees Celsius. I hung out for a while wavering, then I made an attempt to get out into the corridor through the narrow crevice between the swinging doors. Bingo! Apparently quitting time had arrived down here because there wasn’t a soul in the entire basement, which consisted of long corridors, the morgue and autopsy section, and a few storage rooms. Except for me, because I believe the term “soul” applies to no one as well as it does to me. I haunted (another word that had suddenly gained currency) around aimlessly and haphazardly. After spending quite a while like that, at some point I got bored, but I didn’t trust myself to leave the basement, so I went back over in front of the door to my morgue drawer and daydreamed a little there in front of myself. At least I hadn’t lost this skill, one I had always excelled in.

Again Martin was the first person I saw the next morning, and he exuded a distinctly palpable, nervous unease. Like when you’re faced with a job you know is way over your head.

“Hi, Martin,” I said, and from the terrified expression on his face I could see that he’d heard me again, or at least somehow sensed me, because when I write here that I “say” something, this of course has nothing to do with the production of sound waves, since for that one obviously needs vocal cords. Mine, however, were cut up into little pieces inside the dissected throat of the mincemeat corpse in Morgue Drawer Four.

“I’m Pascha, the guy in Morgue Drawer Four. You wanted to cut my balls off yesterday?”

Not the lowest-stress way to introduce myself, I admit, but at least it was direct and pertinent. He should know right away who he was dealing with.

“Sascha,” Martin whispered. Of course he could have no way of knowing that I had changed the first letter of my name from S to P ever since that schlocky TV show with that guy named Sascha on it, and so now I go by Pascha. Nothing to do with Turkish brothels. I was nice enough to explain this to him.

Martin stood at the wall, his chubby face twitching and wriggling, its color resembling that of his chilled clients. He wiped his trembling hand nervously over his eyes.

“I’m hearing voices.”

He didn’t say that—he thought it, and I could hear it! Awesome!

“If you’re hearing multiple voices, you should see the doctor, but if you’re hearing just my voice, that’s OK—after all, I’ve been talking with you the whole time!”

“Who are you?” he whispered.

“I just told you,” I said, slightly annoyed. “I’m the guy who got pushed off that bridge; you examined me at the scene, and yesterday you practically puréed me on your table!”

“But you’re dead; you can’t speak to me,” he objected.

All right, the man is a scientist, but still, for an academic I thought he was acting pretty stupid.

“Haven’t you ever heard any of those near-death stories? You know, the soul leaves the body, hangs out for a while, and then at some point makes its way through the tunnel.”

“Yes,” he breathed.

“But there isn’t any tunnel here; I don’t know where I’m supposed to go.”

He didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything either, and so we each dwelled on our thoughts, with his forming a bewildered mess.

Suddenly the chaos of neurons within his brain reorganized itself, and a thought formulated itself clearly and distinctly out of the soup of letters: “You said you were pushed?”

“Duh,” I said. “What, do you think I’d go and take a nosedive off a temporary bridge
J
4
K
?”

I couldn’t literally see the question marks popping out of his gray matter, but the scientist was obviously unfamiliar with the truncated communication style of today’s youth.

“You were severely inebriated,” he objected, cautiously.

“Well, yeah…” I conceded. “I’d had a few…”

“Your blood alcohol level was three point seven,” Martin countered; he likes to be precise, but I think I mentioned that already.

“Three point seven! Right on!” I was extremely impressed with myself. This pleasure did not persist, however, since my inebriated condition was apparently being used against me here. My murderer was going to get away with it because the official opinion was that my self-induced state of intoxication was the cause of my tumble from the bridge. That’s just not what happened! And even worse, my buddies were going to think I was so wasted I died from my own stupidity. What kind of an obituary is that? “He was wasted and fell off a bridge!” So at that point, my vanity took over: the afterlife has to include a little bit of vindication, too.

“I was pushed,” I emphasized, perhaps somewhat more expressively than was absolutely necessary, but in any case Martin rubbed his temples and groaned.

“All right,” he moaned. “Please stop yelling at me that way.”

“Take it easy,” I said, making an effort to sound cool. “So tell me one more time exactly what the epitaph is that the cops are going to be carving onto my tombstone.”

I felt those question marks popping up again like bubbles in the bathtub when you let one, but Martin had already understood more or less what I wanted from him.

“The police investigation didn’t yield any suspicion of exogenous effect, nor did the autopsy. In view of the blood alcohol level, the snow on the stairs, and the poor condition of the railing, the cause of death was determined to be an accident resulting in fatality. However, there will also be an investigation because of the railing.”

“That’s bullshit,” I said clearly and distinctly.

Martin winced.

“You’ve got to tell them that’s not right,” I demanded.

I considered this demand to be logical and quite simple. Pick up the phone, call the cops, let them know, done. But of course with academic types nothing is easy, let alone straightforward.

“On what basis should I make such an assertion?” Martin asked.

The question brought me precipitously close to the limit of my patience. Here he’s got the ultimate witness to a murder, namely, the victim himself, and the doctor is asking on what basis he should disseminate the victim’s knowledge of the details of the crime. Seriously?

“On the basis of my statement,” I said, choosing my wording carefully and judiciously so as not to stoop to obscenities and insults, because I naturally wanted the good man to persist in his good will toward me. The problems you’ve got to put up with as a dead guy!

“That won’t work,” Martin objected. “No one will ever believe me.” And after a short pause: “I don’t believe it myself.”

He rubbed his forehead again and passed his flat hand over his neatly trimmed haircut, a haircut that made him seem like one of those snooty do-gooders hosting some after-school special, and he hastily left the cold room. I let him keep his lead, strolling—if that’s what you might call slowly gliding along without any hustle or bustle—behind him.

At first I kept close to Martin, using any doors that he opened so I could slip through myself, but that was pretty seriously slowing me down. So I started hanging back a bit, testing out my maneuverability. I could get through the narrowest crack in a door without any problem, and I could even whoosh through a keyhole. I brushed up along the ceiling, right over the floor, and even behind cabinets, and I determined that the only interesting vantage point is from above. You don’t see much from behind a cabinet.

I grew braver and left the basement. In the stairwell I floated up one story step by step, but then I created my own sort of elevator by no longer zigzagging up the stairs but just shooting up vertically straight to the top through the center of the stairwell. When that got too boring, I entered the top floor and looked around there. That level—like the rest of the building, but at that point I of course didn’t know this—was also full of offices and laboratories. Men and women, many of them in their let’s-play-doctor coats, were sitting at lab tables and writing desks, standing in break rooms or crouched in front of whatever random equipment there was. They were acting like normal people—talking, making phone calls, drinking coffee and tea out of these unspeakably huge mugs the size of swine troughs with random witty quotes, horoscopes, or pictures of their babies on them. In other words, typical German office culture that, should a UFO occupation force land here one day, will prompt them to completely annihilate the human race. And we won’t be able to blame those ooze-ridden creatures from outer space one bit!

Most of these folks, apart from their stupid mugs and lab coats, looked like totally normal people. So it wouldn’t necessarily have occurred to anyone that all of them were spending their days slicing open bodies to remove their hearts, livers, kidneys, and other accessories and have a look-see at what the deceased had most recently eaten and when they had last screwed and whether there might somewhere be some kind of clue that Grandma didn’t kick it from advanced age but rather had met her demise at the hands of a son, son-in-law, grandson, or the director of nursing services who was hoping to come into a fat inheritance soon. Now that’s fucked up.

So far I had been crawling through the narrowest of crevices, but now I was ready to find out for sure: I assumed position in front of a wall separating two offices, concentrated, and—flashed through. Just like that. I didn’t even feel like I had to rearrange my hair. Of course, I didn’t have hair anymore, but you understand what I’m trying to say, right? I took the same way back through, and the only thing that was unpleasant about it was the visual perception. In other words: “What do you see?” And that’s exactly the problem: “Nada.” To be precise, I can’t see what’s behind a wall that I want to go through. So, it’s like taking a running start, barrelling full steam ahead, and then you’re already there. Where you may not even have wanted to go! It just felt somehow safer floating carefully through a door. It wasn’t as abrupt.

I didn’t feel like messing around by myself anymore, so I went in search of Martin, who I found in the break room. His cup was filled with weak tea, the little paper tag from the teabag hanging over the rim, mercifully concealing some motto by a Zen master printed on the cup’s side.

Suddenly I wondered what cruel fate had bound me specifically to this man because—I had determined this immediately upon floating into the break room—I was receiving thought signals from no one else but Martin. I would really have preferred any type of signal at all from the other person present. It was a she, and bada bing. Long legs in well-worn jeans; tight turtleneck; wide, smiling lips; dark eyes; and a curly black mane she had casually tied back with a rubber band. Her white lab coat looked a little goofy, but no biggie—this was straight-up the Woman of My Dreams. Hanging out with chubby, Zen-tea-slurping Martin here in the break room. Didn’t she have anything better to do?