He pretended he didn’t notice me at all. For a moment I panicked, thinking that now even this last connection to the world of the living had been severed, but then I sensed the amount of effort he was devoting to not noticing me.
I waited for another moment, but he didn’t give in. So I said again, “Martin, I asked you to forgive me.”
No reaction.
“I’m sorry, now don’t hold a grudge,” I tried again.
Nothing.
Martin entered the building, went into his office, hung his duffle coat up on the coat rack, put on his lab coat, and went downstairs. There was an autopsy waiting. I stayed close to him, although I didn’t look at the gory details, and I kept sending apologies in his direction. He by contrast had totally walled himself off. I begged again and again, and he ignored me again and again, in a huff. He was slowly starting to piss me off.
I gave him another hour, apologizing another three times. Then I changed tack.
He was standing alone in the break room waiting for the water for his tea to boil when I planted the idea in his brain that his fly was open. He looked down reflexively and checked the zipper—and right at the moment Katrin stepped into the break room, too. I had seen her coming; my timing was perfect. Martin blushed.
“Hello, Katrin,” he mumbled.
“Hi, Martin.” An embarrassed gesture toward the coffee machine. “Any coffee left?”
“Uh, yes, I think so.”
Katrin squeezed past Martin, grabbed a cup from the cabinet and poured herself some coffee. “Everything OK with you?” she asked as though in passing, but her intonation wasn’t as relaxed as the question was supposed to sound.
“Yes, yes, everything’s great,” Martin said, the whole left half of his face purple from his bruise and his eyes bloodshot. “Everything’s dandy.”
“Good,” Katrin said, pouring milk into her coffee and leaving the break room.
“That happened because you’re ignoring me,” I said. “Accept my apology and let’s be friends again.”
Martin didn’t respond. I was starting to get really mad. What else could I do? I couldn’t kneel in front of him, I couldn’t hang banners from an overpass over the autobahn, I couldn’t buy him a beer, and I couldn’t apologize to Birgit for him.
I had been practicing the only thing I could do, for hours. I had apologized. Mountains of apologies. And still he insisted on being pigheaded. He apparently wanted no peace.
Fine. Then war it was.
Martin walked down the stairwell with a couple of his colleagues, and I screamed, “Watch out, a step is missing!” He hesitated in the middle of stairs, gripping the arm of the colleague next to him in terror and throwing him off balance. They both staggered but didn’t fall. Everybody stared at Martin.
“Uh, somehow I twisted my ankle,” Martin mumbled.
His colleagues gave him compassionate or concerned looks, and much too quickly they added that people did sometimes twist their ankles on these stairs, even though that was only semibelievable.
He was in the middle of an autopsy, where he was wielding the knife, and as he reached for the liver I yelled, “Don’t touch!” Again he winced, his hands trembling, and his colleague with the Dictaphone staring at him with a furrowed brow. He opened the chest cavity, removed the heart, and in my saddest voice, which I normally reserve for very, very sad situations, I said, “You’re hurting him.”
Martin dropped the heart. He was breathing shallowly, and there were beads of sweat on his forehead. He stabbed the scalpel into the body’s upper thigh and left it there jutting out, quivering. The Dictaphone guy and the dissection guy both gawked at Martin, stunned. Martin tore the mask off his face; he was as white as the wall, and his eyes were glowing frantically. He staggered to the men’s room and revisited his breakfast.
“Let’s be friends again,” I said as he was rinsing out his mouth.
He ignored me.
His boss was waiting outside the bathroom door.
“Jochen took over the autopsy,” his boss said, taking Martin by the arm. “Come on. We’re going to have some tea, and you’re going to tell me what’s got you so frazzled.”
Martin nodded. I was tense.
Of course Martin didn’t say what had him so frazzled. He sipped the fancy-schmancy upland Darjeeling FTGFOP 1-2-3 garden tea that his boss orders through a licensed importer—in special packaging at a special price—and listened to his boss’s spiel about the especially fine bud tips of this particular tea’s leaves, the weather in the Himalayas, and the training of the women who harvest the tea leaves, but he was only half paying attention. He wasn’t able to concentrate, and his boss noticed that.
“So, what’s up with you then? We’ve known each other for twelve years, and I’ve never seen you like this before.”
Martin looked into his teacup. “I think I’m coming down with a cold,” he mumbled.
“That may be,” replied his boss, who of course was also a doctor. Specifically a corpse doctor, but at some point in their training they must also practice on living people. His boss knew his stuff, you had to hand it to him: he actually came up with the impressive diagnosis that Martin’s issues could not be solely due to a cold. The lack of concentration, the nervousness, the absentmindedness. (As if his ability to concentrate had given up the ghost—ha!) There had to be something else going on.
“Me,” I interjected, but unfortunately Martin’s boss couldn’t hear me.
“Are you having personal problems?” his boss asked.
Martin winced. “Uh, no.”
Liar!
“Are you involved in some sort of dispute with someone?”
This was quite an obvious question, of course, given Martin’s post-boxing-match face.
“No,” Martin said again.
Another lie!
“Do you think you can continue to perform your work in a professional manner?”
At this point Martin should have said no, but instead he said yes.
Yet another lie. There was no way Martin could seriously assume he could. Not if he was at war with me. I had the upper hand, and Martin knew it. But Martin displayed a pride and doggedness that I had not thought him capable of. Although of course his tenacity in absolutely no way presented any kind of obstacle for me. I would break him; of this I didn’t have the slightest doubt.
Martin’s boss left him alone, and Martin snuck back up the stairwell to his office. I briefly wondered why he never took the elevator, but then as we were going past it the elevator doors opened, giving us a view of a man who wasn’t wearing a lab coat but a regular winter coat. A visitor. Only after Martin and I were almost back to his office did I realize who it was: I’d seen him somewhere before. I zoomed back down a floor, but I couldn’t find the visitor anywhere. Meanwhile I wasn’t sure anymore myself if I hadn’t been mistaken. I hesitated for a moment and then whooshed back to Martin.
He was sitting at his computer dictating reports. This report obsession was getting on my nerves. What a boring job. A dead-boring job, ha! On the other hand, writing reports struck me as pretty opportune at this particular moment because I could exert a direct influence on them. I waited for him to type a couple of lines. He was commenting on the visible external injuries when he handed the perfect spot to me on a silver platter, describing the head wound as “a calvarial fracture obviously sustained from a blunt object.” I supplemented: “We fear rain has been leaking into the poor bastard’s braincase.”
Martin’s upper body, which had been leaning back in his chair, fairly relaxed—or limp, if you will—shot upward. He leaned forward and hammered on the keyboard, deleting my insertion. Such a shame; that would have livened a dry report up a bit for once. Five lines later I inserted a question about what the deal was with the postmortem stab wound that the deceased had sustained to the upper thigh. Same reaction, this time even accompanied by involuntary snorting, like an angry bull. His office mate sitting across from him flashed a furtive glance in Martin’s direction.