Suddenly I wondered what cruel fate had bound me specifically to this man because—I had determined this immediately upon floating into the break room—I was receiving thought signals from no one else but Martin. I would really have preferred any type of signal at all from the other person present. It was a she, and bada bing. Long legs in well-worn jeans; tight turtleneck; wide, smiling lips; dark eyes; and a curly black mane she had casually tied back with a rubber band. Her white lab coat looked a little goofy, but no biggie—this was straight-up the Woman of My Dreams. Hanging out with chubby, Zen-tea-slurping Martin here in the break room. Didn’t she have anything better to do?
Martin was actually managing not to constantly stare at her nicely shaped bazooms but look her in the eyes. How was he doing that? I searched his brain for the order printed in bold black capital letters: LOOK HER IN THE EYES! But there wasn’t anything in there. He was just managing it. Was this guy queer?
“How was your weekend, Martin?” the fair maiden asked.
“Fantastic,” Martin said. “And successful. I found four new maps.”
“New new-maps, or new old-maps?” the Dream Woman asked.
“Old,” Martin answered with a stupid grin.
What kind of garbage were these two blathering about? New old/new maps?!?
“And how was your weekend, Katrin?” Martin asked.
“Challenging,” she replied, and I was about to start imagining what a challenging weekend with this woman looked like, but then she kept talking. “My brother and I had to clean out my parents’ house, now that they’ve passed away.”
“Doesn’t she have a boyfriend?” I asked Martin.
Martin was in the middle of murmuring something that sounded like an apology and condolences, but my interim question threw him off. He hesitated mid-sentence and quickly took a sip from his mug.
“Push her down on her back,” I challenged him. “A good screw will help her through her problems more than a bunch of crap condolences.”
He snorted with a start into his tea, which slopped over the edge and ran down his sweater and pants.
Katrin reacted quickly, turning around to grab a towel. All right! I thought, into it. Now she was rubbing Martin’s pants dry. He likely saw that coming, but instead of closing his eyes in pleasure and letting things run their course, he took the towel out of her hand and hectically tried to wipe his coat dry himself. How stupid can a guy be? An opportunity to get one rubbed out good by small, fast, feminine hands isn’t something you pass up! What kind of issues had I stumbled across here, exactly?
“Aren’t you feeling well?” Katrin asked.
The question had crossed my mind as well, although I had been thinking more about the mental and hormonal health of my fleshly friend, but she was surely asking because Martin’s nose had gone pale and his cheeks were softly flushed, and he was acting all agitated.
“Yes, yes,” Martin answered much too quickly. “I’m just fine, thank you.”
Katrin didn’t look convinced, and I couldn’t blame her. It seemed like she wanted to say something else but thought better of it and said goodbye with a friendly, “See you this afternoon?”
Martin nodded.
“Have you no sense of decorum?” Martin hissed at me. And he really hissed it, even though thinking it would of course also have sufficed. “I would be truly grateful to you if you would refrain from interfering in my conversations.”
I wanted to draw his attention to the fact that someone was standing in the door to the break room, but Martin kept on chewing me out.
“In particular I would like to request that there not be any dirty commentary or sexual innuendos from you when I’m speaking with female colleagues.”
The man who was still standing in the doorway craned his neck forward a bit so he could get a view of the whole break room. Of course, he found no one in there apart from Martin.
“Hi, Martin. Everything OK?” the white lab coat asked as he walked in.
Martin spun around; now there was no further trace of paleness in his face—he was red as a lobster. “What? Oh, yes, yes, everything’s just fine. How are things with you?”
The white lab coat nodded, stepped over to the coffee machine, glanced askance at Martin once more, and poured himself a mugful. Then something apparently occurred to him.
“Hey, did you catch the latest scoop on our favorite Bundestag representative, Dr. Christian Eilig?” he asked.
“No,” Martin replied, sipping his tea.
“The paper has started calling him ‘Dr. Christian’ for short, and he wants to ban autopsies now.”
“You’re joking,” Martin stammered, speechless.
“Unfortunately not,” Martin’s colleague said. “He says it violates the ‘dignity of the human body’ to cut it open.”
Well, I could see where that guy was coming from, actually, but how did he know anything about it? Did they have Bundestag representatives who were dead, too? I wondered. And if so, how’d that bastard get back into his body?
Martin shook his head; whether out of aversion to the notions of their favorite Bundestag representative or just to shake himself free from my thoughts, I couldn’t tell. “Didn’t we have this debate already?” Martin asked. “About a thousand years ago?”
“Well, it’s a hot topic again,” his colleague said. “The TCP has been hitting seventeen percent in the latest polls.”
“The ‘True Christian Party,’” Martin muttered. “Ugh, how did we get stuck with a Bundestag representative like that?”
“Because the wise voters in Cologne elected him,” his colleague replied. “Cologne Cathedral is apparently more important to them than forensic medicine.”
“That man should stick to collecting all his high-end cars and let respectable people do their jobs,” Martin grumbled.
His colleague nodded, patted Martin on the shoulder, picked his coffee mug back up, and left the break room.
Martin dumped the rest of his tea out into the sink and stormed in long strides down the hallway and into the stairwell, skipping every other step down, and finally arriving slightly out of breath in the morgue’s refrigerated storage area. He pulled out Drawer Number Four and stared at me—or more precisely, at my body.
“How is that you’re not dead?” he asked the body, which looked so dead it couldn’t possibly look deader. Especially because of the really roughly resutured seam extending from my chin to my—well, you already know. His intonation was somehow irritated, and I didn’t like the sound of it one bit. First of all, in contrast to the assertion he had just made, I was indeed quite dead; to that extent Meticulous Martin was mistaken—plus, I was the one who was in the really shitty situation here and not him. So if anyone should be irritated, clearly it should be me.
“Fuck you,” I snarled at him. “I’m dead and no one knows that better than you; after all you’re the one who sliced me clean open from top to bottom, ripped out every organ in my body individually, and then stuffed them all back inside, and you sewed me together so inelegantly that Dr. Frankenstein himself would be embarrassed about that suture.”
By the time I finished talking, Martin was leaning against the morgue drawers next to mine; his legs were shaking so badly he could hardly stand. “But you’re talking to me,” he objected.
“Yeah, because it’s pretty boring being all alone without any entertainment,” I replied, although I knew very well what he was getting at. But I didn’t have an explanation, either. I didn’t remember missing a turnoff at any point. I hadn’t been given any choice between moldering around here or hopping into a conga line with some procession of cherubim to convey me to the Pearly Gates, where Saint Peter would fling them open and ask if I’ve been a good boy. How was I supposed to answer? Anyway, I didn’t know why I was hanging out around here, myself, and I didn’t know where all the other souls were, either. If they were anywhere at all. An old souls’ home, a haunted house, some kind of heavenly Halloween hotel. So I couldn’t explain anything to renowned no-clue-ologist Dr. Martin here, either; too bad for him.