“An experience on the way to what?” Ryan asked. He wasn’t smiling, and Lucy blushed so deeply her hairline burned with the spreading heat.
But Ryan was serious. He wasn’t trying to embarrass her; he was genuinely curious.
“I don’t know,” Lucy confessed.
“It sounds melodramatic, but handling the dead is my destiny,” Ryan said.
Lucy wished she could take back her attempt at cynicism and cleverness now that she knew melodrama was allowed.
“I wasted a lot of time,” Ryan said. “Now, when I take someone’s body from their home to the place where they’ll serve science, I feel like I’m doing something useful, something real.”
“Yeah,” Lucy had said, wishing she could say more.
When Lucy met the cross-country lover, she’d been ready for reality herself. She’d barely made it through college. She couldn’t figure out why she was there in the first place. She skipped most of her classes (picked at random from the enormous course catalog—“Nuclear War” and “TV and the Evolution of the Postmodern Family: Happy Days to Once and Again”). She was wowed by the possibilities of living on her own. She learned to flirt and have opinions. She created a little business out of making fake ID for freshmen, earned enough money for the cross-country trip so her parents wouldn’t hassle her. She had planned to drive alone. The cross-country lover was a bonus.
She’d met him when she went to see a play at the community theater. It was a play written by a local author about terrorists who formed a ballet troupe as a front for the terrorism. Over the course of the play, they learned to love to dance. The cross-country lover played the tough, wary terrorist who was the last to learn to love ballet.
He and Lucy went for drinks after the show. She’d complimented him on his performance.
“For that, the girl deserves a drink,” he said, still wearing his stage makeup.
“How could I possibly refuse?” Lucy took his arm. He could be a relationship on the way to other relationships, a relationship that might teach her valuable lessons.
“The director said I needed to be tougher, more of a terrorist, before I give in to the life of a ballerina,” he said, half laughing. A relationship that would teach her, but still she had wanted him to worship her just a little, to suggest impossible things. “I’m terrorist enough, don’t you think?” he said. “How much terrorist does this guy need?”
Come live with me and bear my children! he would plead. No way, she’d say, and it would drive him crazy with love.
Lucy’s face too would someday be tough and blue, dizzy with formaldehyde, but as Ryan often pointed out, Lucy didn’t really know that now. She knew she would be dead the same way she knew she might be married one day or have children. She knew it the same way she knew she might someday have a permanent job, which was to say it wasn’t something she could imagine at all.
Lucy decided to stretch her legs. She wandered toward the morgue, walking as slowly as possible to eat up the minutes on the clock, reading all the posters on the bulletin boards along the way — a brown bag lunch on intestinal disorders, an appeal from administrators to the doctors to practice professional behavior in all areas of the hospital, no discussing patients in the elevators (We’re a nation of litigators! someone had written very lightly in pencil).
At a rest stop in the wide open heat and big sky of west Texas, a toothless guy who’d pitched a tent near the bathrooms tried to pick Lucy up. The cross-country lover interfered. “Hey, man,” the toothless guy protested. “This is America. I’ve got rights.” Lucy laughed for hours in the car about this. She took it up as her motto for wanting anything unreasonable — the window up or down, the radio more loud or less loud, driving faster or slower. “Hey, man, this is America. I’ve got rights!” She said it whenever possible, trying to integrate it into the conversation of their relationship. She wanted it to be their private joke, but it never took. “Why do you keep saying that?” the cross-country lover finally said somewhere in the endless desert of Nevada. “It’s not funny.”
When Lucy finally reached the morgue, the door to the embalming room was the tiniest bit ajar. She stood at such an angle that she could see — like watching a horror movie through her fingers — the top of a skull and Hank and Frank (his name was Fred, but it was funnier to call him Frank), the embalmers, maneuvering their way around the body. The movement of their arms suggested tubes and the draining of blood.
Pinned against the wall, looking at the top of the man’s head without the man inside, Lucy thought, This is just a body. Just the vehicle for whoever that was lying there on the table like food, and now that whoever is gone. Gone somewhere else. This man had offered his shell to feed science, to feed the world, food for mankind.
In Arizona Lucy had bought a broad-rimmed hat to protect her fair skin. She’d hoped that the cross-country lover would buy the hat as a surprise, but when it became clear that he had no surprises in him, she bought it for herself. They stopped on the side of the road to wander through the saguaro cactus Lucy had only seen pictures of in travel magazines.
“They’re at least one hundred years old,” the cross-country lover said. Lucy ignored him, bored with his knowledge. The sun filled the whole sky. The arms of the saguaros were like humans gesticulating and Lucy stood next to one, her arms held up in imitation. “Who? Me?” she asked, shrugging like a cactus, but the cross-country lover was already heading back to the truck. Lucy stumbled after him, faint with heat, and tripped over what looked like giant ribs made of wood. The cross-country lover was already behind the wheel. “Hey,” she cried. She stayed on the ground by the wooden ribs. When he saw her, she was pleased to see him jump out of the van with alarm and run back to her.
“What is this?” she said, running her hand along the smooth wood, when he reached her.
“Saguaro ribs,” he said, annoyed that she was uninjured. “Their skeletons are made of wood. You’re covered with dust, Lucy.”
Lucy scrutinized the sleek wood under her hand. This was all that was left of one of these great giants. She had expected something green, or soft, something to show it was once alive.
Now Lucy stared at the tufty skull of the man on the embalming table, imagining his blood running thick through anonymous tubes. Worse still, his lifeless hands. Hands were the first thing you touched when you met a person. Here, they hung limp with unintentional gesture. That his hands didn’t mean anything anymore disturbed Lucy the most. She imagined the medical students cutting into the hundreds of bones in the man’s frozen hands like marzipan.
Lucy slipped into the women’s rest room to splash cold water on her face. She stared at herself in the mirror, trying to separate herself from her body, like meat from the bone, until she began to look pale. She looked deep into her own eyes. Where was she in there?
She strode down the hall, back toward the office, under the insectlike buzz of the fluorescent lights. The cross-country lover had been a runway model. For a very, very short time, for money, he’d assured her over those initial drinks. This was before he began his full-fledged career as an actor.
“Community theater is considered full-fledged?” Lucy asked as he motioned for the check.
“Funny, really funny,” he’d said, because in the beginning these kinds of questions were what he’d loved about her. An hour later they were back in the apartment she shared with three other girls. It was spring, a few days before graduation, and there were packed boxes everywhere ready for cities bigger and more promising than the college town. She and the cross-country lover wove their way through the maze of boxes on their way to Lucy’s bedroom, where they shut the door and tore at each other’s clothes until they were completely naked.