Michael Baden - Remains Silent

“Because people lie about how tall they are?”

“Right. Studies of drivers’ licenses show people- especially short people- often add inches to their height.” He handed her the pad and pen. “Now, a sample of the vitreous humor of the eye.” He picked up a syringe.

“Wait!” Manny screamed. “You’re going to stick that thing into her eye?”

“You bet. The fluid in the white part of the eye can tell us time of death as well as toxicology. We’ll take some from both eyes and put it in two separate test tubes. Notice that the eyes are jaundiced.”

She turned her back. “Tell me when you’re done.”

“Finished,” he said, half a minute later. “Next, the external examination. To a forensic pathologist, the skin is the body’s most important organ.” He ran his fingers over the body. “We look for signs of injury- gunshot wounds, stab wounds, blunt trauma. In the case of Mrs. Alessis, none. There’s no apparent bruising, no injury to the neck that could indicate strangulation. Write that down, please.”

She realized Jake was easing her discomfort by teaching her as he worked, but her feeling of gratitude disappeared with his next words.

“Help me turn her onto her side and hold her steady.”

“Me?”

He looked around the room. “I don’t see another diener.”

I’ll diener you. Manny put down her notebook. The woman’s skin felt icy, even through the latex gloves. Although she knew logically that dead flesh would be cold, she had unconsciously expected it to feel like living tissue. But it feels like death itself. She was only able to hold on by fixing her gaze on the big institutional clock on the morgue wall. One-thirty. Mycroft and I should be in bed.

“Lividity along the back and the backs of the legs and neck shows that the red blood cells settled while she was lying on her back after she collapsed,” he said, demonstrating by pressing on the skin as he spoke. “Lividity is nonblanching. It’s not really an issue here, but it indicates she died more than eight to ten hours ago.”

“Nonblanching?”

“If you press on it, the maroon color doesn’t fade.” He reached for her hand. “I’ll show you.”

She looked away. “I believe you.”

“There’s an old autopsy adage: ‘You watch one, you do one, then you teach one.’ ”

“There’s another old saying, one you should be familiar with: ‘Not over my dead body.’ ”

He didn’t laugh. No sense of humor. “Let her down now, very gently. Thank you.”

She eased the body onto its back again, thankful for the gloves- not much, but better than nothing.

“Keep writing,” he told her. “Shame I couldn’t find a tape recorder. She has a lot of dark hair on her arms and legs. I want to check for puncture wounds from a needle, make sure a new suitor didn’t kill her by injection.” He put a new blade on the scalpel handle and shaved the hair from the underside of her forearms, particularly near the bend of the elbows. Then he moved to her legs, her varicose veins revealed as the hair fell away.

He handles the scalpel masterfully. Not a nick. What would it feel like if he shaved my legs? She hoped he didn’t see her blush. Temporary insanity due to chemical intoxication. Let’s not take this any further.

“Not a pinprick,” Jake said. “We move to the internal examination.”

Goody.

He put a new blade on the handle. “We must evaluate the internal organs. That means taking them out.” He reached for the body, hesitated. “You can step out for a moment if you need some air. Sometimes first-timers faint, but it’s always the men, never the women.”

She thought of the sandbox. Damned if I’ll be the first. “I’m fine.” She knew how unconvincing she sounded. Even the corpse doesn’t believe me. “Go ahead.”

With the slightest pressure, he cut across the upper left chest and shoulders, curved the scalpel under the breasts to the right shoulder, and continued down to the lower abdomen just to the left of the belly button.

“It’s called a Y-incision.”

“I’d never have guessed.”

The thin cut widened almost instantly as the skin pulled apart, revealing a ravine of flesh and fat. Manny forced herself to watch, trying not to hyperventilate as Jake’s scalpel sliced through layers of pale skin, glistening yellow fat, and pink muscle. He’s peeling poor Mrs. Alessis open like an orange. A few small rivulets of blood ran down the sides of the corpse into the holes in the autopsy table.

“Some people believe that dead bodies don’t bleed,” Jake explained. “But when we die our vessels are filled with blood and will leak if they’re cut, just like a garden hose leaks water.”

He pulled out a handheld electric saw and turned it on.

“Yikes!” The sound was like a dentist drill magnified a thousand times.

Jake, though, seemed unperturbed as he cut through the breastplate to get at the internal cavities. He looked up as he cracked the breastplate away from the skin incisions. “Are you all right?”

She knew she had gone pale. Her uncovered shoes were dotted with blood. “I think I’ll take that VapoRub now.”

He motioned to the jar, and she took off her gloves to wipe a glob under her nose. “Put on new gloves,” he said. She obeyed.

Jake was holding Mrs. Alessis’s heart in his hands, raising it for her to see. “The heart is just a muscle,” he said. “It’s a pump. The lungs are the bellows. The kidneys are the plumbing. The skeleton is the scaffolding. The stomach and small intestines are the furnace, turning fuel- food and water- into energy. The liver, gallbladder, urinary bladder, kidneys, and large intestines are the sanitation department; they get rid of waste. And the brain- ah, the wonder of it!- is a high-powered computer so sophisticated that other brains don’t begin to understand it.”

“Fascinating,” she croaked. Don’t faint. Don’t vomit. Pretend you’re paying attention.

“I’ve never been a religious man,” he went on, “especially considering the horrors I see, day in, day out: the dead children, the victims of violence, the awful waste of life. But when I look inside the human body, I can understand why people believe in a grand design. It’s an awesome machine, don’t you think?”

“You are so right.”

“Heart’s of normal size.” He took a blood sample to be sent to toxicology. “Lungs pink and healthy. She wasn’t a smoker.” Jake removed the organs from the body and weighed them, the quickest way, he said, to tell if they were normal. The image of the bloody organs hanging from the scale prompted another round of nausea. I’m never going inside a butcher shop again.

“Next, the head,” he said cheerfully.

Uh-oh.

He sliced the scalp from ear to ear and peeled the skin forward over the face. Then he fired up the electric saw, cut open the skull plate, and loudly cracked it back to reveal the brain, which he pulled out and sliced into cutlet-sized pieces.

“They say lawyers don’t have brains,” Manny managed. And without question, medical examiners have no hearts.

Two hours later, the autopsy was over. Washed and doused with perfume but still feeling sick, Manny ventured outside. This is what paradise feels like, she thought, and filled her lungs with the nectar of the night. In her mind she retained the vision of Jake opening Mrs. Alessis’s stomach and ladling- yes, ladling!- its soupy contents into a plastic container. She reminded herself that he was simply trying to determine the cause of the woman’s death, to give her family some peace of mind. But how could a man spend his life routinely cutting up corpses? She’d never witnessed anything so barbaric. If he ever touched me, I’d remember the ladle and the heart. I’ll bet he’s still a virgin.