I didn’t look out the window; I wasn’t particularly interested where they were taking me so long as I was just with my body. At some point they went down a ramp, and then the vehicle’s door opened; a long corridor was waiting for us, and then a door. They pulled open a stainless steel drawer and set my body inside; I wafted in afterward, of course, and then the drawer closed—and we lay in the dark, my body and I.
Again, because of my confusion, and maybe as a side effect of the alcohol—I really didn’t know if you could be wasted as a ghost having a near-death experience—I lacked any sense of time, but at some point the drawer opened, my body was placed onto a gurney, pushed into a tiled room, and transferred onto a stainless-steel table with an outlet strainer at the foot end, and then Duffie/Martin stepped up to the table along with another man. The other man was holding a Dictaphone and spoke the introduction into it. “Autopsy of a male body for the Cologne District Attorney’s Office. Identified by the police as Sascha Lerchenberg, age: twenty-four, height: one hundred seventy-three centimeters, weight: sixty-nine kilograms.”
I was still pretty confused, but that was entirely appropriate because what ensued was truly horrific. My initial confusion blossomed into full-on panic as I saw what Martin was holding in his hand: a gleaming scalpel that looked pretty damn sharp. He put it into position and sliced my entire torso open, starting at my chin in a straight incision going so far down you really couldn’t go any farther. I expected a torrent of blood, but nothing happened. Meanwhile, Mr. Blabbermouth commented into his stupid recorder on each incision and every finding while I circled above the autopsy table in extreme agitation. I felt sick. Layer by layer my skin was peeled off, the fat tissue underneath exposed and folded back—I don’t remember all the details very well anymore—until the situation started to get really disgusting: Martin grabbed my testicles.
“Dude, get your monkey beaters off my balls!” I roared with the greatest urgency, and Martin spun around, so startled I thought he might slash his colleague right open. That was the moment I realized he could hear me.
TWO
“What is it?” the guy with the Dictaphone asked. I couldn’t make out his whole face because slicer guys wear these ridiculous face masks when they’re dissecting bodies, but his eyes had grown a little bigger out of fear as Martin’s scalpel hissed through the air in front of his abdomen.
“I, uh, I don’t know,” Martin stammered, and I sensed his uncertainty. Ditto on that, plus I felt really indignant (that’s another cool word Martin’s taught me), I’m sure you can imagine. I mean, what would you say if some perv in green scrubs started by professionally filleting you and then wanted to cut your balls off? That’s what I’m talking about.
“Do we need to prepare the testicles?” Martin asked, sounding somehow sheepish.
“Nah,” came the response from behind the mask, the guy’s eyes narrowing. He smirked big. “Only our female colleagues enjoy that. Leave them, it’s OK. Cause of death is clear, right?”
Martin nodded. “Occipital blunt force trauma resulting in cardiopulmonary collapse due to massive brainstem injury, presumably the result of falling from the bridge onto the back of the head.”
The other guy put the Dictaphone back up to his mask and said, “Preparation of testicles not necessary,” then he switched it off and stretched. “Gotta pee.”
Martin nodded. Martin stayed with me but took a step back from the table and watched his diminutive assistant, who was putting the pieces that Martin had cut out of my organs into Mason jars. At the time I wasn’t able to make heads or tails of the scene, but since then I’ve learned that a fine tissue sample is taken from every organ, which in hospital slang is called a histo sample. Comes from histology, but you don’t need to know that. Cutting the body open is only one part of an autopsy. There’s also the toxicology report and even a genetic test, if they need one.
During my own autopsy, though, all I could do was circle around gawking, but otherwise I kept quiet. Martin was also unnaturally quiet. It was as though he were listening intently, uncertain whether he should be listening outwardly or inwardly. At first I left him alone.
The autopsy of my body was completed according to regulation and without further disruptions; the slaughterhouse—as I call the white-tiled room—was cleaned; and I—that is, the physical shell of me that had since been rather nastily disemboweled, restuffed with all the organs that had been taken out, and then sewed back up—was returned to my refrigerated drawer, labeled “Morgue Drawer 4.” At the last moment before the drawer fully closed, I changed my mind, whooshed out of the narrow slit, and took position near the ceiling lamp where I had a good view of the room. There wasn’t that much to see, because there wasn’t anything to see apart from the refrigerated morgue drawers—inside which, incidentally, the prevailing temperature is four degrees Celsius. I hung out for a while wavering, then I made an attempt to get out into the corridor through the narrow crevice between the swinging doors. Bingo! Apparently quitting time had arrived down here because there wasn’t a soul in the entire basement, which consisted of long corridors, the morgue and autopsy section, and a few storage rooms. Except for me, because I believe the term “soul” applies to no one as well as it does to me. I haunted (another word that had suddenly gained currency) around aimlessly and haphazardly. After spending quite a while like that, at some point I got bored, but I didn’t trust myself to leave the basement, so I went back over in front of the door to my morgue drawer and daydreamed a little there in front of myself. At least I hadn’t lost this skill, one I had always excelled in.
Again Martin was the first person I saw the next morning, and he exuded a distinctly palpable, nervous unease. Like when you’re faced with a job you know is way over your head.
“Hi, Martin,” I said, and from the terrified expression on his face I could see that he’d heard me again, or at least somehow sensed me, because when I write here that I “say” something, this of course has nothing to do with the production of sound waves, since for that one obviously needs vocal cords. Mine, however, were cut up into little pieces inside the dissected throat of the mincemeat corpse in Morgue Drawer Four.
“I’m Pascha, the guy in Morgue Drawer Four. You wanted to cut my balls off yesterday?”
Not the lowest-stress way to introduce myself, I admit, but at least it was direct and pertinent. He should know right away who he was dealing with.
“Sascha,” Martin whispered. Of course he could have no way of knowing that I had changed the first letter of my name from S to P ever since that schlocky TV show with that guy named Sascha on it, and so now I go by Pascha. Nothing to do with Turkish brothels. I was nice enough to explain this to him.
Martin stood at the wall, his chubby face twitching and wriggling, its color resembling that of his chilled clients. He wiped his trembling hand nervously over his eyes.
“I’m hearing voices.”
He didn’t say that—he thought it, and I could hear it! Awesome!
“If you’re hearing multiple voices, you should see the doctor, but if you’re hearing just my voice, that’s OK—after all, I’ve been talking with you the whole time!”