When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,37
nothing if not professional, and his response to my observations was always the same: “Well.” He’d sigh. “Not really.”
After a week in the autopsy suite, I still couldn’t open a Denny’s menu without wanting to throw up. At night I’d close my eyes and see the buckets of withered hands stored in the office’s secondary cooler. The cooler contained brains too, a whole wall of them shelved like preserves in a general store. Then there were the bits and pieces: a forsaken torso, a pretty blond scalp, a pair of eyes floating in a baby food jar. Put them all together, and you had an incredibly bright secretary who could type like the wind but never answer the telephone. I’d lie awake thinking of things like this, but then my mind would return to the freshly dead, who were most often whole, or at least whole-ish.
Most of the them were delivered naked, zipped up in identical body bags. Family members were not allowed inside the building, and so the corpses had no context. Unconnected to the living, they were like these strange creatures, related only to one another. A police report would explain that Mrs. Daniels had been killed when a truck lost control and drove through the front window of a hamburger stand, where she had been waiting in line for her order. But that was it in terms of a narrative. Did the victim have children? Was there a Mr. Daniels? How was it that she found herself at this particular hamburger stand on this particular afternoon? In cases like hers, I needed more than a standard report. There had to be a reason this woman was run down, as, without one, the same thing might happen to me. Three men are shot to death while attending a child’s christening, and you tell yourself, Sure. They were hanging out with the wrong crowd. But buying a hamburger? I buy hamburgers. Or I used to, anyway.
This medical examiner’s office was in the western United States, in a city where guns are readily available and drivers are known to shoot each other over parking spaces. The building was low-slung and mean-looking, set on the far edge of the downtown area, between the railroad tracks and a rubber stamp manufacturer. In the lobby was a potted plant and a receptionist who kept a can of Mountain Glen air freshener in her desk drawer. “For decomps,” she explained, meaning those who had died alone and rotted awhile before being found. We had such a case on Halloween, an eighty-year-old man who had tumbled from a ladder while replacing a lightbulb. Four and a half days on the floor of his un-air-conditioned home, and as the bag was unzipped the room filled with what the attending pathologist termed “the smell of job security.” The autopsy took place in the morning and was the best argument for the buddy system I had ever seen. Never live alone, I told myself. Before you change a lightbulb, call someone from the other room and have him watch until you are finished.
By this point in my stay, my list of don’ts covered three pages and included such reminders as: never fall asleep in a Dumpster, never underestimate a bee, never drive a convertible behind a flatbed truck, never get old, never get drunk near a train, and never, under any circumstances, cut off your air supply while masturbating. This last one is a nationwide epidemic, and it’s surprising the number of men who do it while dressed in their wife’s clothing, most often while she is out of town. To anyone with similar inclinations, a word of warning: after you’re discovered, the police will take snapshots of your dead, costumed body, which will then be slid into photo albums and pored over by people like me, who can’t take the stench of an incoming decomp, so hole themselves up in the records room, moaning, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God,” not sure if they’re referring to your plum-colored face or to the squash blossom necklace you’ve chosen to go with that blouse.
I hadn’t timed my visit to coincide with Halloween, but that’s the way it worked out. You’d think that most of the casualties would involve children, trick-or-treaters hit by cars or done in by tainted candy, but actually the day was just like any other. In the morning we had our decomposed senior, and after lunch I accompanied a female pathologist to a