Morgues

I don’t remember why Joey and I drove to Tulsa. I’d never been, so I was keen to go, I know a friend of ours, Christa, lived there so maybe it had something to do with that. I remember going to an outdoor adventure store, but that can’t have been the reason. I remember driving there, going to the store, driving back.

The reason I remember Tulsa at all was because of what happened when we got back. Joey, an anxious pre-med, had applied for a job at the Oklahoma City Morgue as the after-hours guy that receives the bodies of those people who die alone at inconvenient times. So we stopped by for a tour given by an acquaintance who had set Joey up for the job.

I remember everything about that night. Except the acquaintance’s name. He showed us around, where one spends the 24 hour shifts watching television or studying, or making time pass. It’s a horrible pun, but there’s a lot of dead time in this job. Except when it’s dead time, and then things come alive. I know, I’m groaning too, but it is a curious paradox.

Then we went into the cooler. There were several bodies there, the first time I had seen a cadaver that wasn’t packaged in a coffin or draped with a sheet. I was seeing the bodies before morticians had the chance to fill them full of formaldehyde and ram broomsticks down their backs. The body we focused on was a homeless man, looking older than he probably was, dead from a hit and run. He had been drunk and was crossing a street, the car didn’t stop, obviously not before hitting him and not afterwards either. I began to tell myself his story, his body a foreign language that I puzzled out, but one that spoke of sadness, of loneliness, of senseless death and of the pause to pay tribute to a man’s life and death, the pause that didn’t happen when the murderous car drove away, that was only happening now that a young man made up stories about a cadaver. His legs were broken, still at odd angles despite the hospital-like setting of the morgue that led one to expect some kind of fixing. I stood there for awhile.

Then a phone call, a woman calling to inquire about her dead daughter. You’d expect that, in a morgue. Except (again that word), the daughter had been dead for a couple of years, she had hanged herself in her jail cell, according to the file. Except the mother was sure that it wasn’t suicide, her call was to find out if anything else had been found out. Apparently the police couldn’t or wouldn’t give the answers she sought, so she called another place where her daughter’s body might have left a message. We went (probably leaving rules twisted like the homeless man’s legs or bent like that last bit of prose) and pulled her file. It was closed, she had killed herself in her cell. There were pictures, horrible pictures, evidence of the story that had been told about her cadaver. The mother just wanted a new interpretation, wanted knowledge that her daughter’s body language was written in a different code for which the doctors and detectives did not have the key. The call was not the typical, horrible, call inquiring after fresh death. Except that it was typical, our acquaintance said that he got those kinds of calls all the time. Apparently there are answers in the morgue, a possibility for new stories that help explain away the old ones. Sometimes you need a body to stop moving so that you can read it. Sometimes you need years to study a motionless text to understand it completely. Sometimes you hope that such is the case.

And then a newly-stilled body arrived. And then another. The first was an eerie double of our closed case. This time a man, who had used the bedsheet in his cell to hang himself. His head lay at an angle similar to the legs of the homeless man. He looked like he would have enjoyed country music, he had a cowboy mustache. The second was a young man, large. His father had died a couple of weeks before and so, this young man drank a bottle of Drano. His neck and face had turned purple. Another suicide. A young man for whom a father’s death had reconfigured his world, but had configured it so that there was no place for him either, I suppose. I tried to read this new text, but could not. I could only stare. The cowboy, the homeless man, the incarcerated woman, I could read them, I understood their stories. The young guy who followed his father in death, the man with whom I had something in common, I couldn’t figure out. The signs on his body, the signs of his body, didn’t make any sense.

Then we left. I never went back, but that experience gave me a feeling of knowing insider when Joey would tell us stories over the year or two that followed about his experiences with the dead.

And then Joey was killed in a car accident and was taken to that morgue.