The airplane was cold and the air dry- the type of air that made my nose burn. A baby wailed up in row 18, seat F. The mother sat beneath it, murmuring hushed tones and making cooing sounds.
“Someone should sedate that baby,” was my first thought. Unwilling to be the volunteer, even though I knew half the plane was wishing the same thing; I buried my nose into my sweater, hoping to shield it from the harsh air. My sweater was as old as my couch, maybe older. It was a faded olive green, knitted with thick cabling on the shoulders. Unfortunately, despite it comfort, it was rather unflattering. The bottom of the sweater hung just a little too low on my thighs, and would cover any pair of short shorts if I had chosen to wear some. The sleeves dangled just below my wrists, the edges fraying a bit, leaving straggling threads tickling the tips of my fingers and dragging through my soup. The sweater had been worn far too many times, as evidenced by the stretched out neck that once was tight over the circumference over my head. Now it was more of a scoop shirt. My pants were a ruddy brown, complimenting my sweater only in the sense that it made me look like a style-less androgynous hobo. My fish-belly white stomach poked through the small holes in my sweater, physical remnants of my time as a professional destroyer of clothes.
Not that I was paid for it, destroying clothes, it was just an odd pastime of mine. I loved dragging the tip of a pencil through the fibers of my shirt watching as the small graphite tip stretched and displaced the fabric around it. I soon graduated from pencils, opting for a more dangerous, risqué approach. I probably started using Exacto blades about a year after I started ruining clothes. I thought that the best pair of pants that I owned was the pair that had the most fabric elegantly sliced and dangling by its remaining threads. If clothing destroyer were an actual job, I would be the head of the profession. I don’t get paid for doing anything other than my job, which is a mindless one, performing menial tasks for the minutiae of the company, which makes me less important than the paperweight in the cubicle over. In all honesty, I’m not a very important person, just a random one actually, one of the 6.6 billion out there. Obviously not anything special. My parents always used to tell me that I was awesome, and that I was special, you know, one-in-a-million.
That’s the thing that always fascinated me about parents, and actually, adults in general. It’s their uncanny ability to blatantly lie to someone’s face. Especially their kids, I mean, if it were I, I’d tell my kid straight out:
“You’re dumb as a brick,” I’d say, all nonchalant.
“Uh wha?” Would be my hypothetical child’s response.
“And you can’t articulate things either, you should consider working on that.”
At this point, my kid would be all flustered and feeling like an idiot, which is when I would go in for the final blow.
“Kid, you’re adopted.”
Yes I know, cruel, but, in my opinion, necessary. There is just too much bullshit in the world for me to be adding more. And if that’s my greatest contribution to this planet, putting my kid in their place, then so be it. I might have used the whole one-in-a-million line though, because, honestly, if someone told that to me and I was old enough to understand it, I would be offended. Who wants to be told that there are 6,600 more freaks exactly like them out in the world? I think it all originated from some point in time where the world was far less populated, when there were, say, a million people populating the entirety of this planet. To say it then, under those circumstances, would make sense. Because that’s like saying that they are unique, and thus, of indespensible use and of the upmost importance, because there is nobody else exactly like them. Now that, right there, is a compliment if I ever saw one.
The murd’rous cry of the baby jolts me out of my peaceful reverie and leaves my eyes to land upon the flight attendant pushing the drink cart.
“My is she looking spiffy in all her airport gear, all gussied up to fly from Toronto to Baltimore. Check out her cool pane pin, why don’t you have one of those, it looks so awesome, oh yeah, it’s because you aren’t a fucking flight attendant.”
I order a rum and coke as homage to my father, who drowned himself in the stuff. Not literally of course, he just liked to drink rum and coke the same way I drink water- twice a day and only after a nice jaunt to the good ol’ water closet. And that was also false; my point was simply that he was a fan of rum and coke.
I would have leaned my seat back and enjoyed the extra eight degrees of reclining action, but my tickets damned me to the middle seat in the last row of the plane, so reclining is unfortunately not an option. A greater concern to me though, is the state of my row. It would seem that I am overwhelmed by fat. The flabby cellulite of the pleasant old woman next to me sleeping with her mouth open was spilling over and under the armrest, dribbling onto my leg and certainly within my personal space. It wasn’t all bad though; the gangly man next to me sat quietly aside me, earbuds glued into his ears, staring out the window as if there were some magnificent sight to see. But who am I to judge, for all I know, and I don’t know much, this man seated next to me has just had a cornea transplant, and is seeing for the first time in his entire life. Which, as I imagine, would be a spectacular sight.
I slipped my sweating rum and coke onto Ms. Flab’s tray table, and attempted to stretch as best as I could. I tried to straighten my legs, my bulky shoes clinking against the life preserver of row 24 B’s seat. My shoes, a muddy brown, retreat, returning to their cramped station under my tray table. I wriggled my toes inside my shoes, mostly to make sure that my toes were still there. My shoes were more like boots, with an iron toe at the tip- to protect me from potential toe-steppers, and worn laces with missing aglets. Reaching down and loosening the laces, I picked up Gangly’s fallen ipod, which he must not have noticed in all his stupefication.
The baby has finally been silenced, although I’m not convinced it was of its own accord. I’m sure that it’s mother carries around some sort of muzzle for it, because babies are a lot like dogs. I gulped down the rest of my rum and coke, humming idly as I crunched the ice between my teeth. The spiffy looking flight attendant walked down the aisle with a trash bag just as my hand was becoming tired of holding the plastic cup that once housed my rum and coke. Tossing the cup into the trash, the PA system buzzed to life, bursting eardrums and ruining naps across the plane.
“Uhm, hello this is the pilot speaking, we will be making our final descent into Baltimore’s Airport, please fasten your seatbelts and the flight crew will prepare the cabin for departure.” For a man, the pilot had a pretty nasaly voice. It sounded as though he were squeezing the words out of his mouth, like steam out of a teapot.
“That’s how people have heart attacks and strokes,” I thought, simply allowing the first, albeit ridiculous thought that flowed into my head to run its course. I found myself thinking about the welfare of the pilot, what if he were to have a hear attack? Or a stroke? What would the secondary pilot even do, what could they do, other than take over the plane? It would be odd to have to sit beside a man who just suffered a heart attack/stroke while piloting a plane. As someone with a medical degree, I was honestly astonished that my initial thoughts were so indescribably stupid and implausible.
The plane dipped lower, the acceleration causing me to note our descent more fully. My stomach dropped a little, and I smiled. The take-off and landing are always my favorite part. As soon as the plane’s wheel touch the ground, I think about the limited amount of strip available to the plane. From a cruising speed upwards of five hundred miles per hour, down to a sloth’s pace of just twenty knots in the span of just a few short seconds. The feeling of deceleration- is that even a word, is astonishing and always forces me to marvel at the strength of the parts of the wings that force the plane to stop. Things like this make me want to become a physicist, or watch Modern Marvels.
I don’t watch much T.V, but when I do, I certainly do not watch crap. As someone who was an intern for years in a hospital, I know that the value of sleep is underrated, and surpasses the value of a good T.V show by light-years. That is another reason why I would have liked to be a physicist, so I could use units and terms like parsec and light-year. Them when people look at me dumbly I could just turn to them and say;
“A parsec, short for a parallax of an arc second, which is a thirty-six hundredth of a degree of an angular distance, is one sixtieth of an arc second. Equal to about 3.25 light-years. Light-year, the distance light travels in one year, equal to 9.5x1012 km, or nearly 6 trillion miles. Light travels at 3.00 x 108 m/s. “
I would stare at them intently, just to make them feel more uncomfortable. I would then avert my eyes and laugh as they blinked their glazed over eyes trying to comprehend what I had just said. Ah, the joy in the act of spewing pure, unadulterated knowledge, if only one could indulge in such a thing without seeming like a complete and utter asshole.
I tapped my feet quietly, impatiently, on the bottom of the next seat, internally rolling my eyes at the inefficiency of the people ahead of me who just did not have their acts together and thus took forever to de-plane. I wondered idly if I would ever get off this godforsaken plane, when finally Ms. Flab stood up, groaning slightly as she did so. At a glance, I would have said that her BMI was easily above 40, and that she was, accordingly, pretty damn obese. The noise that was emitted when she stood up made it seem as though her very bones were bowing under the pressure of gravity and her weight. I felt bad for her poor tibias and fibulas. What would become of them when she became old(er) and bedridden? Absolutely nothing. Her muscles would atrophy from lack of use, and thus make using the muscles harder and harder, it was a vicious cycle. Add it to the fact that her bones would only become more brittle with age, and you have an elderly person who can no longer care for them self. My hand grazed over the red and blue striped seats as I rose to exit the plane. My fingers danced on the cushion as if they knew how to play the piano, which is outrageous, because I can’t play the piano. I thudded down the narrow aisle of the plane, imagining that the noise was the sounds of hands on a doumbek. There is something about bass notes and sounds. The constant beat just seems to be so natural, almost primal. Perhaps it has something to do with the pounding of our hearts in our own heads.
My trip to the baggage claim was uneventful, marked only by an obscenely long line to use the bathroom and the lag between the plane’s arrival and the baggage’s arrival. Even though I’ve never played many video games, from what I understand, lag is a common problem experienced by many who do not have the fastest connection or bandwidth or ample hardware to properly run the game. It’s a little bit comforting that lag, the vernacular, of course, occurs in videogames as well as in real life. Speaking of real life, why do women always have to go to the bathroom, and why in the world do they seem to take so long? I honestly had to pee like a racehorse, which is something that my uncle used to say to me. Never really sure what purpose the phrase served, but I suppose that, used under the right circumstances, it could add a certain sense of urgency to the situation. Aside from peeing, my mission in Baltimore was clear, it was purely a business trip. My career as a forensic pathologist has led me far from my home in Toronto, but from what I can tell, Baltimore is nice enough. Murky brown waters reflect the warm tomes of the sun as it is filtered through the smog, and bird chirp as they fly into airplane jets and newly erected wind turbines. It’s not all bad though, I thoroughly enjoyed the sunglasses hut in the airport, and I thought that overall, Baltimore was pretty charming. The weather was quite fair, with a light breeze that had just a nip of cold air to it. The leaves were rustling on the trees, almost ready to fall with the onset of a new season. Already browning and wilting, the flowers too were beginning to get into the hibernation mode, so to speak. In Toronto the season had already changed, summer had long ago (really only a few weeks actually) transformed into fall, taking with it the warm sun and the stifling air. Fall in Toronto brought a fresh batch of air, fresh out of the air oven, in a manner of speaking. Kind of like fresh baked cookies. The old ones were stale and had lost its scent and novelty, but a new season brings a new batch, delicious and comforting. The sky in Toronto had grayed over, casting away the shadows and replacing it with a general muting of contrast over the entire city. Despite the shift in my hometown, Baltimore still had a week or two of cool summer air to relish.
I hailed a cab, the yellow paint blinding my eyes as it pulled up. A man of about thirty-five exited the car, and helped me to put my luggage in the trunk. He smiled oddly and I wondered lazily if he had a stroke of some kind. His stubbly face, which had probably not been shaven or trimmed in about a week, hid some of the clues, but I still saw it. His right eye did not lift quite as high when he smiled at me, and the right corner of his mouth did not curl up in quite the same manner as the left side of his face did. Instead, his cheek muscle twitched slightly, making his smile look more like a smirk. I wondered if that got him into trouble sometimes, if that smile-smirk actually made some people uncomfortable or uneasy in his presence. If, in the deepest corner of some people’s mind, his intentions were fundamentally misunderstood because of the way he smiled. In return, I gave him my most genuine smile, but even so it did not quite reach my eyes, and I knew it was fake. But who can fake being genuinely happy to see a stranger, to see anyone? I think that it is impossible to fake an emotion, because emotions are things that some one feels, inside of them (that’s what she said, haha), it’s a person’s reaction to that emotion that clues us in as to how they are feeling. Aren’t we all a little like Pavlov’s dog in that sense? We have been conditioned to see a reaction to an emotion, a facial expression really, and at its most basic level, a contraction of muscles. We have been conditioned to interpret, out of those muscle contractions, an emotion, as we assume that it is that emotion that someone is feeling. Why, in fact, does a smile represent happiness? Why not agony or pain or sadness? I’m not sure why I’m obligated to smile at my driver in order to convey to him that I am happy to see him, but I do it anyway.
He gets in behind the wheel, telling me his name, which I immediately forget, and asks me about my time in Baltimore. I tell him that I am a doctor here for a consultation, but nothing more. The truth is, I don’t know exactly what I’m doing here. I wasn’t told precisely what I was in Baltimore to do; all I was told was that there was a body that needed to be examined, and that it was of the upmost importance. I had nothing better to do other than examine the hoards of bodies back home, so off I went to Baltimore. Although I feel a little guilty about it, I’m not sure it matters that I can’t remember this name. In a city of almost seven hundred thousand, and god knows how many cabs (probably somewhere in the thousands), the probability that I will see him again is slim. The probability that I will see him and that we will both recognize each other is even less significant, especially as I have no clue as to how long I will be in Baltimore for.
Cabbie drops me off at Johns Hopkins Hospital, the total $22.70. I give him $25 dollars, which is a bit stingy on the tip side. While $25 dollars is only a $2.30 tip, I thought that $30 would be a very large tip, homing in at $7.30. I didn’t have any singles on me, and didn’t want to ask for change, so $25 would have to do. It wasn’t like I was even obligated to give a tip in the first place, he would be grateful no matter what. He gave me another smile and took the money from me, his nails in serious need of some work. Not that he needed a manicure, just some hot water, industrial strength soap, and a good scrub down. The tips of his nails were ragged, most likely from nail-biting and brittle nails stemming from a poor diet. They were covered in grime, perhaps from the car or something else dirty, it’s hard to be specific when all you can see is grime, because there are a lot of dirty things out there. I gave Cabbie one more grin as I stepped out of the vehicle. I took my luggage, which wasn’t much, because I pack light and strolled into the hospital, planning on leaving it in the locker room. My chocolate brown suitcase was filled with a few blouses, slacks, a pair of sneakers and a set workout clothes. Folded and pressed under everything beneath that lay my lab coat, with my name, Aurelia Cyrus, sewn onto the left breast. I take off my fuzzy slippers, which occasionally double as shoes, because I don’t travel in discomfort. I replace them with a far more professional (and socially acceptable) pair of low-ish heeled shoes. I changed out of my sweater, my warm and baggy green one, and instead opted towards a blouse. It was navy blue and silky, the kind that needs to go to the dry cleaner to get cleaned. I slipped it over my head, letting the smoothness of the shirt graze my arms and torso. My bare arms were suddenly craving the touch of fabric, missing the warmth that the sweater brought. As a poor replacement I donned my lab coat, the starched feeling of the jacket causing the slightest hindrance to my movement. The collar had a very small thread hanging off the side, and I spent a few minutes trying to tuck it away, pull at it, and rip it off before I finally take off my lab coat and bite it off with my teeth. Feeling a little self-conscious that maybe somebody saw that, I feel myself blush. I must have looked like a savage ripping the thread off my jacket with my teeth. Hopefully nobody watches the locker room security tapes for fun. I thought about it for a second and realized that they probably didn’t. Are there even security cameras in a locker room? My first thought is hell no. Because that would be a breach of privacy, am I correct? Laughing at myself, I opened up the door that was the exit to the locker room, stepping out into halls.
White. Everything is white. Even though I’ve worked at a hospital for some time now, I can never get over the whiteness of it all. Everything so sterile, so perfect and pristine, it makes we want to take a box of crayons and draw up and down the walls as if it were a big canvas. Or buy tons of paint as just splatter it onto the walls, like Jackson Pollack. Or maybe I would pull a Rothko, and paint the wall into sections, examining colors and the marriage of paint on a wall. Exploring the possibilities of color, the permutations and shades, everything. But I suppose that the whiteness of the walls was not supposed to extract that kind of reaction, of longing. It was supposed to create an immediate connotation of the hospital as a clean and pure place; a place where dirt and everything dirty is washed away.
I’m not entirely sure of where to go, but I know that I have a meeting somewhere around two o’clock. Right now it’s 1:15, but I’m not hungry so I walk to the nurse’s station to introduce myself in the hopes of figuring out what exactly I was doing here and where exactly I had to be at two.
“Hello, my name is Aurelia Cyrus and I was brought down here from Toronto for a consultation. I have a meeting at two o’clock with the board that brought me here, can you tell me where that is and what we will be discussing?” The nurse’s station is also white. I’m leaning on a white counter, it reaches to the top of my ribs, a bit of an awkward placement because of my height. I’m not sure what it’s made of,, the counter, but it’s smooth. Smooth and cold. The nurse looks at me, and mutters something like; “Just a moment and I will be right with you, Dr. Cyrus.” I probably nod my head in response, but at this point it’s more of an automatic gesture. What I’m noticing is the situation. There are three nurses at the station. All three are dressed in the same scrubs. Not the itchy, scratch disposable scrubs from the dog days of internships and residencies, but nice, more formal, fabric scrubs that can be washed and re-worn. The desk they all worked at had four computers, but I wasn’t sure what the fourth was for, seeing as there were only three nurses there. I scanned the desk and saw many patient form and admissions papers awaiting entry into the system. Underneath the papers I can see another pristine white surface, and six hands punching away at QWERTY keyboards, eyes glued to monitors, phones nestled in between ears and shoulders. The three nurses tap at their computer keyboards as if their lives depended on it, but in reality, it’s the lives of others. I mentally berate myself for even thinking such a cheesy thought. Ugh. Makes me want to gag, what is wrong with me?
Nurse “your nametag is obscured by your hair” looks up at me and gives me a look that I can only interpret as “You don’t seem busy, Dr. I forgot your name, so why don’t you sit yourself down and I will get to you as soon as possible”. Annoyed I give her a death stare, which I assume isn’t all that intimidating, because she turns her head back towards her computer and starts muttering into the telephone.
“Yes, someone here,”
Silence.
“No, I don’t know what to do with her, says her name is Dr. ahhh . . . Cyrus. “
Not entirely interested in the conversation the Nurse is having with the phone, I scanned the room, looking for something remotely entertaining. The clock on the wall read 1:32, not much time had passed, but I knew that seventeen minutes of my life had just passed that I would never get back. I started doing the math in my head. In America, the average healthy white woman lives to be seventy-eight, and I would consider myself to be both healthy and white. There are twenty-four hours in a day, seven days in a week makes one hundred and sixty-eight hours a week. There are fifty-two weeks in a year, and that makes eight thousand seven hundred and thirty-six hours in a year. Multiply that by seventy-eight and you get six hundred and eighty-one thousand, four hundred and eight hours. Convert that into minutes by multiplying by sixty again. That makes forty million, eight hundred and eighty-four thousand, four hundred and eighty minutes in seventy eight years, not including leap years, which would make the total rise by twenty-seven thousand, three hundred and sixty minutes. I suppose that puts thing into perspective, by both illustrating the finite amount of time we have alive, while at the same time demonstrating the insignificance of a mere seventeen minutes. Nonetheless, I felt jipped.
Nurse whoever finally removes the phone from her ear, which I was beginning to think was a surgical implant, and tells me that I was to meet the board later, and to go immediately to the morgue, where I would be told the details regarding my visit. I nodded my thanks, not because I was thankful, but because I was polite-to an extent. She didn’t need to sound so urgent when she told me to go to the morgue, if she had completed my request as I had asked, when I had asked neither of us would be in the situation w were in right now, I thought as I shoved my arm into the closing door of an elevator. Lucky this hospital is pretty new and there are motion sensors, I reflected, imagining the outcome if there weren’t any. I suppose that it would be unfortunate if I were to lose an arm, or any other limb for that part. Of course there are some doctors, mostly surgeons, who will insure their arms, hands, whatever. I never really understood that practicality of it all. I imagine this is how it all works out: Let’s see, if, by some horrible, unintentional accident, I am to lose one of my limbs, I’m going to need, you, the insurance company to send me a check for a ton a money. Capiche? Oh, and also, I need that money because I lost my arm, and can no longer work the way I used to. It’s almost as if I’ve gone brain-dead, how can you just expect me to move into another branch of medicine? Did you think that I had gone to med school or something? I can’t do anything unless I have my hands.
In any case, I press the button that says basement, because that’s where they keep the dead people, and usually the morgue. I avoid making eye contact with the man standing next to me, who is also clad in a white lab coat, which I assume means that he is also a doctor. The last thing I want to do is meet his green eyes and have to start a conversation about how he has never seen me before and who am I, what am I doing here, and the like. It‘s really all rubbish that I don’t really find pertinent. I certainly don’t want to have to look like an idiot in from of him when I tell him that I have no idea what I am doing here, and that I work in a morgue, which for some reason gets a bad rep among “real” doctors. I must confess that I very much like it down there, alone with my thoughts. It’s quite comforting to know that when you are alone in a morgue nobody is expecting you to fill the silence with mindless chatter. I let out a deep breath as I exit the elevator, happy that the other doctor did not feel the need to begin a conversation, and, if he did, kept it to himself. The sigh of relief goes unnoticed to anybody’s ears except my own, because as far as I know the only person in the basement floor is myself.
Every hospital is the same in the sense that they all organize it in the same fashion. With the exception of a few specialty hospitals (the exception proves the rule, of course) all hospitals are separated into roughly the same wings, with a similarly proportioned staff. And I find it uncanny how one thing that always remains constant, no matter how many hospitals I visit. The morgue- it always looks exactly the same. The only variable between hospitals is its size.
Some morgues are vast, and, unless you are the resident pathologist, one could get lost in them. The columns of brushed aluminum (is that even what they are made out of these days?) may rise high above your head to perhaps six feet, and the rows may stretch on for the length of ten pushes on a wheeled chair. It can be a long and hard endeavor; the journey down the rows, but somebody has to do it. In my short reverie I must have, at some point, struck a very majestic and heroically awesome pose, because the moment that I snap out of it, nay the reason I snap out of it, is because I hear a soft cough behind me. What I can tell you right off the bat is that I certainly was not flustered. I was certainly not embarrassed. The man who walked in on me was certainly not the man from the awkward elevator ride. And the final thing I can tell you is that my pride undoubtedly remained firmly intact. I immediately resumed a more traditional stance, a look of I don’t even know what to call it crossing my face. He was looking at me expectantly, as if he thought I might do something else completely ridiculous in his presence. I will try my best not to, but the odds are that something similar will happen again during my time in Baltimore. What I would like to say now is that this is all wonderful- absolutely fantastic. I blinked a few times very quickly, composing myself for a final time, before walking over to him in my most professional manner possible and introducing myself as Dr. Aurelia Cyrus. He shook my outstretched hand, potentially a good sign, I thought, and gave me a smirk that may have indicated that he thought I was crazy, in a sort of funny way- I hope.
“Nice to meet you, Dr. Cyrus. My name is Simon Odste, and I was the primary physician of the patient that you are about to perform an autopsy on.” He let go of my hand, and the chill of the morgue reunited with my hand once again, and it was a bit unwelcome, in fact. I pivoted back around on my heel walking to the desk, a matching minimalistic brush aluminum, and leafed through the papers on the desk.
“For the urgency that I was called here for, I can’t seem to find a body that would match the time of death without it being treated with chemicals to maintain the integrity of the body. Where is the patient file?” I asked.
Dr. Odste looked at me carefully before responding, “Because of the, um, importance of this patient, we have temporarily neglected to file the paperwork in the system yet. You won’t find the file in there.” And with that he walked over to the table and reached under it. He came up with the patient’s file, which was in worse condition than any other patient file that I had seen. It had obviously been taped to the underside of the table. Droplets of coffee stained the outside of the file, perhaps from long nights spent pouring over symptoms. His eye met my own and he pursed his lips, as if deciding whether or not to actually share the file with me. Logic must have gotten the better of him, because he stepped over to me and gave me the file, letting out a small breath and nodding at me. I opened up the file carefully, expecting for it to explode from the state to which it was filled. Upon opening the file I found that it was surprisingly neat and organized. I leafed through the folder, making note of the things that jumped out at me. Delusional. In excruciating pain, pain so bad they had to sedate him almost full=time. Loss of feeling in extremities, traveling towards the center to the body. Extreme drop in core temperature. It seemed that in the first week of his stay at the hospital his temperature fluctuated between 100 degrees and 94 degrees. His second, and final week in the hospital his core temperature stabilized, but at 91.2, not 98.6. His doctors became increasingly worried until the day before his death, where his blood boiled with a 105 degree fever that no amount of ice baths or cooling blankets could bring down. The patients name had been scratched out, something that I assumed only Dr. Odste would know.
Seeing that I was finished reviewing the file he approached me, “ Dr. Cyrus I know that this must seem suspicious and odd to say the least.” I nod at him, expecting him to continue, “Now, you must understand the circumstances which surround this patient’s death. We already know why he died, but what we need to know is what caused that. Right before the patient’s death, when his temperature was still spiking, his blood actually began to coagulate, effectively becoming a solid in his veins. Dr. Cyrus, his blood turned into a solid while his temperature was 105 degrees, his brain should have been melting. This caused the patient’s death, who we will call a John Doe until further notice. We don’t know if whatever he had was contagious, and I don’t want you to take any chances. Please understand that because of the oddity of his case, we do not want to release the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death just yet. “
I nodded, and even though I didn’t want to trust Dr. Odste, I was, admittedly, intrigued by the peculiar case in from of me. He motioned for me to follow him, and he led me down two rows of bodies, stopping at the second to last container. He tapped the middle one, the one that suits my height best, actually, and, without further ado, pulled it open. I had been around dead bodies before, I had worked with hundreds of them, and I had not expected for this one to be any different. This John Doe was different. The first thing I noticed was the stench. Even though it was normal for a body to have a certain odor after an amount of time, the noxious scent that this body emitted was nothing like anything I had ever smelled. It was sulfurous and smelled acidic, as though someone had brined it in rotten eggs and hydrochloric acid. The second thing that hit me was the look of the body. While it still looked distinctly human, it seemed as though every single capillary had burst. His eyes were bloodshot and turning brown, his lids a fleshy color but more red, as if someone had looked at it through a red filter. But the most odd part was that even though he had been dead for a few days, he had not yet gotten rigor mortis. His hands were pliable and almost seemed life like except for the fact that they were cold. Dr. Odste then sputtered a bit, requiring my attention once again.
“Dr. Cyrus, I understand the intriguing qualities of this case, but I must urge you so that you may fully comprehend the weight of the situation. Although John Doe died a few days ago, I must warn you that if this autopsy does not glean any results concerning the exact nature of his death, we will be at a loss, because there are two other patients which have presented with similar symptoms, if a bit milder.” Unaware that my autopsy had any bearing on living patient, as they usually did not, my eyed widened, indicating my surprise.
“Dr. Odste, I’m really not sure that I’m qualified for this sort of thing, I was under the impression that the autopsy I am supposed to conduct is for the information of the physicians concerned, mainly yourself of course. I did not think that the results of the autopsy would be considered when deciding upon the treatment plan of others. I really-“ I began, but he cut me off.
“Dr. Cyrus, do you really believe that we would have flown you from your home in Toronto to Baltimore if we were not confident that you would be able to enlighten us? If we thought, for even just a second, that you were not the best? Dr. Cyrus, you really need to understand the magnitude of this situation, this is not a run-of-the-mill autopsy, this autopsy affects real people, and we need you, Dr. Cyrus, to do it. Because whatever this is, this unprecedented disease, it’s killing people, and we don’t know how to stop it, we don’t even know how to treat it. So I’m begging you, not for my own sake, or my own curiosity, but there are lives at stake, because whatever this is, it’s spreading.”
I averted my eyes, my face blushing, not caring that I had an image to maintain, and a professional one at that. I thought for a moment about his statement, and decided that he really knew his way around a conversation, and that he was a master manipulator. And honestly, I didn’t mind a little manipulation once in a while. It allows me to add the techniques of others to my own repertoire. I kept my eyes on my hands, and began tapping them on the aluminum desk. I imagined I was playing a piano, or fingering the chords of a guitar. I had always wanted to learn how to play an instrument.
Because it was already getting late, about six thirty, Dr. Odste and I agreed that because the two patients were stable for the time period, I would do the autopsy early the next morning. The two patients who seemed to have the same disease, virus, whatever as John Doe had were doing far better. They both seemed to be at the same stage in the, let’s call it a virus. They were both in the same stage in the virus. Both patients were still male, and both has temperatures that were beginning to vacillate between ninety-six degrees and one-hundred degrees> not bad yet, but if they followed anything similar to the course that John Doe was on, they were in trouble and, unless I figured it out, headed towards a nice life with the creepy crawlies underground.
“Someone should sedate that baby,” was my first thought. Unwilling to be the volunteer, even though I knew half the plane was wishing the same thing; I buried my nose into my sweater, hoping to shield it from the harsh air. My sweater was as old as my couch, maybe older. It was a faded olive green, knitted with thick cabling on the shoulders. Unfortunately, despite it comfort, it was rather unflattering. The bottom of the sweater hung just a little too low on my thighs, and would cover any pair of short shorts if I had chosen to wear some. The sleeves dangled just below my wrists, the edges fraying a bit, leaving straggling threads tickling the tips of my fingers and dragging through my soup. The sweater had been worn far too many times, as evidenced by the stretched out neck that once was tight over the circumference over my head. Now it was more of a scoop shirt. My pants were a ruddy brown, complimenting my sweater only in the sense that it made me look like a style-less androgynous hobo. My fish-belly white stomach poked through the small holes in my sweater, physical remnants of my time as a professional destroyer of clothes.
Not that I was paid for it, destroying clothes, it was just an odd pastime of mine. I loved dragging the tip of a pencil through the fibers of my shirt watching as the small graphite tip stretched and displaced the fabric around it. I soon graduated from pencils, opting for a more dangerous, risqué approach. I probably started using Exacto blades about a year after I started ruining clothes. I thought that the best pair of pants that I owned was the pair that had the most fabric elegantly sliced and dangling by its remaining threads. If clothing destroyer were an actual job, I would be the head of the profession. I don’t get paid for doing anything other than my job, which is a mindless one, performing menial tasks for the minutiae of the company, which makes me less important than the paperweight in the cubicle over. In all honesty, I’m not a very important person, just a random one actually, one of the 6.6 billion out there. Obviously not anything special. My parents always used to tell me that I was awesome, and that I was special, you know, one-in-a-million.
That’s the thing that always fascinated me about parents, and actually, adults in general. It’s their uncanny ability to blatantly lie to someone’s face. Especially their kids, I mean, if it were I, I’d tell my kid straight out:
“You’re dumb as a brick,” I’d say, all nonchalant.
“Uh wha?” Would be my hypothetical child’s response.
“And you can’t articulate things either, you should consider working on that.”
At this point, my kid would be all flustered and feeling like an idiot, which is when I would go in for the final blow.
“Kid, you’re adopted.”
Yes I know, cruel, but, in my opinion, necessary. There is just too much bullshit in the world for me to be adding more. And if that’s my greatest contribution to this planet, putting my kid in their place, then so be it. I might have used the whole one-in-a-million line though, because, honestly, if someone told that to me and I was old enough to understand it, I would be offended. Who wants to be told that there are 6,600 more freaks exactly like them out in the world? I think it all originated from some point in time where the world was far less populated, when there were, say, a million people populating the entirety of this planet. To say it then, under those circumstances, would make sense. Because that’s like saying that they are unique, and thus, of indespensible use and of the upmost importance, because there is nobody else exactly like them. Now that, right there, is a compliment if I ever saw one.
The murd’rous cry of the baby jolts me out of my peaceful reverie and leaves my eyes to land upon the flight attendant pushing the drink cart.
“My is she looking spiffy in all her airport gear, all gussied up to fly from Toronto to Baltimore. Check out her cool pane pin, why don’t you have one of those, it looks so awesome, oh yeah, it’s because you aren’t a fucking flight attendant.”
I order a rum and coke as homage to my father, who drowned himself in the stuff. Not literally of course, he just liked to drink rum and coke the same way I drink water- twice a day and only after a nice jaunt to the good ol’ water closet. And that was also false; my point was simply that he was a fan of rum and coke.
I would have leaned my seat back and enjoyed the extra eight degrees of reclining action, but my tickets damned me to the middle seat in the last row of the plane, so reclining is unfortunately not an option. A greater concern to me though, is the state of my row. It would seem that I am overwhelmed by fat. The flabby cellulite of the pleasant old woman next to me sleeping with her mouth open was spilling over and under the armrest, dribbling onto my leg and certainly within my personal space. It wasn’t all bad though; the gangly man next to me sat quietly aside me, earbuds glued into his ears, staring out the window as if there were some magnificent sight to see. But who am I to judge, for all I know, and I don’t know much, this man seated next to me has just had a cornea transplant, and is seeing for the first time in his entire life. Which, as I imagine, would be a spectacular sight.
I slipped my sweating rum and coke onto Ms. Flab’s tray table, and attempted to stretch as best as I could. I tried to straighten my legs, my bulky shoes clinking against the life preserver of row 24 B’s seat. My shoes, a muddy brown, retreat, returning to their cramped station under my tray table. I wriggled my toes inside my shoes, mostly to make sure that my toes were still there. My shoes were more like boots, with an iron toe at the tip- to protect me from potential toe-steppers, and worn laces with missing aglets. Reaching down and loosening the laces, I picked up Gangly’s fallen ipod, which he must not have noticed in all his stupefication.
The baby has finally been silenced, although I’m not convinced it was of its own accord. I’m sure that it’s mother carries around some sort of muzzle for it, because babies are a lot like dogs. I gulped down the rest of my rum and coke, humming idly as I crunched the ice between my teeth. The spiffy looking flight attendant walked down the aisle with a trash bag just as my hand was becoming tired of holding the plastic cup that once housed my rum and coke. Tossing the cup into the trash, the PA system buzzed to life, bursting eardrums and ruining naps across the plane.
“Uhm, hello this is the pilot speaking, we will be making our final descent into Baltimore’s Airport, please fasten your seatbelts and the flight crew will prepare the cabin for departure.” For a man, the pilot had a pretty nasaly voice. It sounded as though he were squeezing the words out of his mouth, like steam out of a teapot.
“That’s how people have heart attacks and strokes,” I thought, simply allowing the first, albeit ridiculous thought that flowed into my head to run its course. I found myself thinking about the welfare of the pilot, what if he were to have a hear attack? Or a stroke? What would the secondary pilot even do, what could they do, other than take over the plane? It would be odd to have to sit beside a man who just suffered a heart attack/stroke while piloting a plane. As someone with a medical degree, I was honestly astonished that my initial thoughts were so indescribably stupid and implausible.
The plane dipped lower, the acceleration causing me to note our descent more fully. My stomach dropped a little, and I smiled. The take-off and landing are always my favorite part. As soon as the plane’s wheel touch the ground, I think about the limited amount of strip available to the plane. From a cruising speed upwards of five hundred miles per hour, down to a sloth’s pace of just twenty knots in the span of just a few short seconds. The feeling of deceleration- is that even a word, is astonishing and always forces me to marvel at the strength of the parts of the wings that force the plane to stop. Things like this make me want to become a physicist, or watch Modern Marvels.
I don’t watch much T.V, but when I do, I certainly do not watch crap. As someone who was an intern for years in a hospital, I know that the value of sleep is underrated, and surpasses the value of a good T.V show by light-years. That is another reason why I would have liked to be a physicist, so I could use units and terms like parsec and light-year. Them when people look at me dumbly I could just turn to them and say;
“A parsec, short for a parallax of an arc second, which is a thirty-six hundredth of a degree of an angular distance, is one sixtieth of an arc second. Equal to about 3.25 light-years. Light-year, the distance light travels in one year, equal to 9.5x1012 km, or nearly 6 trillion miles. Light travels at 3.00 x 108 m/s. “
I would stare at them intently, just to make them feel more uncomfortable. I would then avert my eyes and laugh as they blinked their glazed over eyes trying to comprehend what I had just said. Ah, the joy in the act of spewing pure, unadulterated knowledge, if only one could indulge in such a thing without seeming like a complete and utter asshole.
I tapped my feet quietly, impatiently, on the bottom of the next seat, internally rolling my eyes at the inefficiency of the people ahead of me who just did not have their acts together and thus took forever to de-plane. I wondered idly if I would ever get off this godforsaken plane, when finally Ms. Flab stood up, groaning slightly as she did so. At a glance, I would have said that her BMI was easily above 40, and that she was, accordingly, pretty damn obese. The noise that was emitted when she stood up made it seem as though her very bones were bowing under the pressure of gravity and her weight. I felt bad for her poor tibias and fibulas. What would become of them when she became old(er) and bedridden? Absolutely nothing. Her muscles would atrophy from lack of use, and thus make using the muscles harder and harder, it was a vicious cycle. Add it to the fact that her bones would only become more brittle with age, and you have an elderly person who can no longer care for them self. My hand grazed over the red and blue striped seats as I rose to exit the plane. My fingers danced on the cushion as if they knew how to play the piano, which is outrageous, because I can’t play the piano. I thudded down the narrow aisle of the plane, imagining that the noise was the sounds of hands on a doumbek. There is something about bass notes and sounds. The constant beat just seems to be so natural, almost primal. Perhaps it has something to do with the pounding of our hearts in our own heads.
My trip to the baggage claim was uneventful, marked only by an obscenely long line to use the bathroom and the lag between the plane’s arrival and the baggage’s arrival. Even though I’ve never played many video games, from what I understand, lag is a common problem experienced by many who do not have the fastest connection or bandwidth or ample hardware to properly run the game. It’s a little bit comforting that lag, the vernacular, of course, occurs in videogames as well as in real life. Speaking of real life, why do women always have to go to the bathroom, and why in the world do they seem to take so long? I honestly had to pee like a racehorse, which is something that my uncle used to say to me. Never really sure what purpose the phrase served, but I suppose that, used under the right circumstances, it could add a certain sense of urgency to the situation. Aside from peeing, my mission in Baltimore was clear, it was purely a business trip. My career as a forensic pathologist has led me far from my home in Toronto, but from what I can tell, Baltimore is nice enough. Murky brown waters reflect the warm tomes of the sun as it is filtered through the smog, and bird chirp as they fly into airplane jets and newly erected wind turbines. It’s not all bad though, I thoroughly enjoyed the sunglasses hut in the airport, and I thought that overall, Baltimore was pretty charming. The weather was quite fair, with a light breeze that had just a nip of cold air to it. The leaves were rustling on the trees, almost ready to fall with the onset of a new season. Already browning and wilting, the flowers too were beginning to get into the hibernation mode, so to speak. In Toronto the season had already changed, summer had long ago (really only a few weeks actually) transformed into fall, taking with it the warm sun and the stifling air. Fall in Toronto brought a fresh batch of air, fresh out of the air oven, in a manner of speaking. Kind of like fresh baked cookies. The old ones were stale and had lost its scent and novelty, but a new season brings a new batch, delicious and comforting. The sky in Toronto had grayed over, casting away the shadows and replacing it with a general muting of contrast over the entire city. Despite the shift in my hometown, Baltimore still had a week or two of cool summer air to relish.
I hailed a cab, the yellow paint blinding my eyes as it pulled up. A man of about thirty-five exited the car, and helped me to put my luggage in the trunk. He smiled oddly and I wondered lazily if he had a stroke of some kind. His stubbly face, which had probably not been shaven or trimmed in about a week, hid some of the clues, but I still saw it. His right eye did not lift quite as high when he smiled at me, and the right corner of his mouth did not curl up in quite the same manner as the left side of his face did. Instead, his cheek muscle twitched slightly, making his smile look more like a smirk. I wondered if that got him into trouble sometimes, if that smile-smirk actually made some people uncomfortable or uneasy in his presence. If, in the deepest corner of some people’s mind, his intentions were fundamentally misunderstood because of the way he smiled. In return, I gave him my most genuine smile, but even so it did not quite reach my eyes, and I knew it was fake. But who can fake being genuinely happy to see a stranger, to see anyone? I think that it is impossible to fake an emotion, because emotions are things that some one feels, inside of them (that’s what she said, haha), it’s a person’s reaction to that emotion that clues us in as to how they are feeling. Aren’t we all a little like Pavlov’s dog in that sense? We have been conditioned to see a reaction to an emotion, a facial expression really, and at its most basic level, a contraction of muscles. We have been conditioned to interpret, out of those muscle contractions, an emotion, as we assume that it is that emotion that someone is feeling. Why, in fact, does a smile represent happiness? Why not agony or pain or sadness? I’m not sure why I’m obligated to smile at my driver in order to convey to him that I am happy to see him, but I do it anyway.
He gets in behind the wheel, telling me his name, which I immediately forget, and asks me about my time in Baltimore. I tell him that I am a doctor here for a consultation, but nothing more. The truth is, I don’t know exactly what I’m doing here. I wasn’t told precisely what I was in Baltimore to do; all I was told was that there was a body that needed to be examined, and that it was of the upmost importance. I had nothing better to do other than examine the hoards of bodies back home, so off I went to Baltimore. Although I feel a little guilty about it, I’m not sure it matters that I can’t remember this name. In a city of almost seven hundred thousand, and god knows how many cabs (probably somewhere in the thousands), the probability that I will see him again is slim. The probability that I will see him and that we will both recognize each other is even less significant, especially as I have no clue as to how long I will be in Baltimore for.
Cabbie drops me off at Johns Hopkins Hospital, the total $22.70. I give him $25 dollars, which is a bit stingy on the tip side. While $25 dollars is only a $2.30 tip, I thought that $30 would be a very large tip, homing in at $7.30. I didn’t have any singles on me, and didn’t want to ask for change, so $25 would have to do. It wasn’t like I was even obligated to give a tip in the first place, he would be grateful no matter what. He gave me another smile and took the money from me, his nails in serious need of some work. Not that he needed a manicure, just some hot water, industrial strength soap, and a good scrub down. The tips of his nails were ragged, most likely from nail-biting and brittle nails stemming from a poor diet. They were covered in grime, perhaps from the car or something else dirty, it’s hard to be specific when all you can see is grime, because there are a lot of dirty things out there. I gave Cabbie one more grin as I stepped out of the vehicle. I took my luggage, which wasn’t much, because I pack light and strolled into the hospital, planning on leaving it in the locker room. My chocolate brown suitcase was filled with a few blouses, slacks, a pair of sneakers and a set workout clothes. Folded and pressed under everything beneath that lay my lab coat, with my name, Aurelia Cyrus, sewn onto the left breast. I take off my fuzzy slippers, which occasionally double as shoes, because I don’t travel in discomfort. I replace them with a far more professional (and socially acceptable) pair of low-ish heeled shoes. I changed out of my sweater, my warm and baggy green one, and instead opted towards a blouse. It was navy blue and silky, the kind that needs to go to the dry cleaner to get cleaned. I slipped it over my head, letting the smoothness of the shirt graze my arms and torso. My bare arms were suddenly craving the touch of fabric, missing the warmth that the sweater brought. As a poor replacement I donned my lab coat, the starched feeling of the jacket causing the slightest hindrance to my movement. The collar had a very small thread hanging off the side, and I spent a few minutes trying to tuck it away, pull at it, and rip it off before I finally take off my lab coat and bite it off with my teeth. Feeling a little self-conscious that maybe somebody saw that, I feel myself blush. I must have looked like a savage ripping the thread off my jacket with my teeth. Hopefully nobody watches the locker room security tapes for fun. I thought about it for a second and realized that they probably didn’t. Are there even security cameras in a locker room? My first thought is hell no. Because that would be a breach of privacy, am I correct? Laughing at myself, I opened up the door that was the exit to the locker room, stepping out into halls.
White. Everything is white. Even though I’ve worked at a hospital for some time now, I can never get over the whiteness of it all. Everything so sterile, so perfect and pristine, it makes we want to take a box of crayons and draw up and down the walls as if it were a big canvas. Or buy tons of paint as just splatter it onto the walls, like Jackson Pollack. Or maybe I would pull a Rothko, and paint the wall into sections, examining colors and the marriage of paint on a wall. Exploring the possibilities of color, the permutations and shades, everything. But I suppose that the whiteness of the walls was not supposed to extract that kind of reaction, of longing. It was supposed to create an immediate connotation of the hospital as a clean and pure place; a place where dirt and everything dirty is washed away.
I’m not entirely sure of where to go, but I know that I have a meeting somewhere around two o’clock. Right now it’s 1:15, but I’m not hungry so I walk to the nurse’s station to introduce myself in the hopes of figuring out what exactly I was doing here and where exactly I had to be at two.
“Hello, my name is Aurelia Cyrus and I was brought down here from Toronto for a consultation. I have a meeting at two o’clock with the board that brought me here, can you tell me where that is and what we will be discussing?” The nurse’s station is also white. I’m leaning on a white counter, it reaches to the top of my ribs, a bit of an awkward placement because of my height. I’m not sure what it’s made of,, the counter, but it’s smooth. Smooth and cold. The nurse looks at me, and mutters something like; “Just a moment and I will be right with you, Dr. Cyrus.” I probably nod my head in response, but at this point it’s more of an automatic gesture. What I’m noticing is the situation. There are three nurses at the station. All three are dressed in the same scrubs. Not the itchy, scratch disposable scrubs from the dog days of internships and residencies, but nice, more formal, fabric scrubs that can be washed and re-worn. The desk they all worked at had four computers, but I wasn’t sure what the fourth was for, seeing as there were only three nurses there. I scanned the desk and saw many patient form and admissions papers awaiting entry into the system. Underneath the papers I can see another pristine white surface, and six hands punching away at QWERTY keyboards, eyes glued to monitors, phones nestled in between ears and shoulders. The three nurses tap at their computer keyboards as if their lives depended on it, but in reality, it’s the lives of others. I mentally berate myself for even thinking such a cheesy thought. Ugh. Makes me want to gag, what is wrong with me?
Nurse “your nametag is obscured by your hair” looks up at me and gives me a look that I can only interpret as “You don’t seem busy, Dr. I forgot your name, so why don’t you sit yourself down and I will get to you as soon as possible”. Annoyed I give her a death stare, which I assume isn’t all that intimidating, because she turns her head back towards her computer and starts muttering into the telephone.
“Yes, someone here,”
Silence.
“No, I don’t know what to do with her, says her name is Dr. ahhh . . . Cyrus. “
Not entirely interested in the conversation the Nurse is having with the phone, I scanned the room, looking for something remotely entertaining. The clock on the wall read 1:32, not much time had passed, but I knew that seventeen minutes of my life had just passed that I would never get back. I started doing the math in my head. In America, the average healthy white woman lives to be seventy-eight, and I would consider myself to be both healthy and white. There are twenty-four hours in a day, seven days in a week makes one hundred and sixty-eight hours a week. There are fifty-two weeks in a year, and that makes eight thousand seven hundred and thirty-six hours in a year. Multiply that by seventy-eight and you get six hundred and eighty-one thousand, four hundred and eight hours. Convert that into minutes by multiplying by sixty again. That makes forty million, eight hundred and eighty-four thousand, four hundred and eighty minutes in seventy eight years, not including leap years, which would make the total rise by twenty-seven thousand, three hundred and sixty minutes. I suppose that puts thing into perspective, by both illustrating the finite amount of time we have alive, while at the same time demonstrating the insignificance of a mere seventeen minutes. Nonetheless, I felt jipped.
Nurse whoever finally removes the phone from her ear, which I was beginning to think was a surgical implant, and tells me that I was to meet the board later, and to go immediately to the morgue, where I would be told the details regarding my visit. I nodded my thanks, not because I was thankful, but because I was polite-to an extent. She didn’t need to sound so urgent when she told me to go to the morgue, if she had completed my request as I had asked, when I had asked neither of us would be in the situation w were in right now, I thought as I shoved my arm into the closing door of an elevator. Lucky this hospital is pretty new and there are motion sensors, I reflected, imagining the outcome if there weren’t any. I suppose that it would be unfortunate if I were to lose an arm, or any other limb for that part. Of course there are some doctors, mostly surgeons, who will insure their arms, hands, whatever. I never really understood that practicality of it all. I imagine this is how it all works out: Let’s see, if, by some horrible, unintentional accident, I am to lose one of my limbs, I’m going to need, you, the insurance company to send me a check for a ton a money. Capiche? Oh, and also, I need that money because I lost my arm, and can no longer work the way I used to. It’s almost as if I’ve gone brain-dead, how can you just expect me to move into another branch of medicine? Did you think that I had gone to med school or something? I can’t do anything unless I have my hands.
In any case, I press the button that says basement, because that’s where they keep the dead people, and usually the morgue. I avoid making eye contact with the man standing next to me, who is also clad in a white lab coat, which I assume means that he is also a doctor. The last thing I want to do is meet his green eyes and have to start a conversation about how he has never seen me before and who am I, what am I doing here, and the like. It‘s really all rubbish that I don’t really find pertinent. I certainly don’t want to have to look like an idiot in from of him when I tell him that I have no idea what I am doing here, and that I work in a morgue, which for some reason gets a bad rep among “real” doctors. I must confess that I very much like it down there, alone with my thoughts. It’s quite comforting to know that when you are alone in a morgue nobody is expecting you to fill the silence with mindless chatter. I let out a deep breath as I exit the elevator, happy that the other doctor did not feel the need to begin a conversation, and, if he did, kept it to himself. The sigh of relief goes unnoticed to anybody’s ears except my own, because as far as I know the only person in the basement floor is myself.
Every hospital is the same in the sense that they all organize it in the same fashion. With the exception of a few specialty hospitals (the exception proves the rule, of course) all hospitals are separated into roughly the same wings, with a similarly proportioned staff. And I find it uncanny how one thing that always remains constant, no matter how many hospitals I visit. The morgue- it always looks exactly the same. The only variable between hospitals is its size.
Some morgues are vast, and, unless you are the resident pathologist, one could get lost in them. The columns of brushed aluminum (is that even what they are made out of these days?) may rise high above your head to perhaps six feet, and the rows may stretch on for the length of ten pushes on a wheeled chair. It can be a long and hard endeavor; the journey down the rows, but somebody has to do it. In my short reverie I must have, at some point, struck a very majestic and heroically awesome pose, because the moment that I snap out of it, nay the reason I snap out of it, is because I hear a soft cough behind me. What I can tell you right off the bat is that I certainly was not flustered. I was certainly not embarrassed. The man who walked in on me was certainly not the man from the awkward elevator ride. And the final thing I can tell you is that my pride undoubtedly remained firmly intact. I immediately resumed a more traditional stance, a look of I don’t even know what to call it crossing my face. He was looking at me expectantly, as if he thought I might do something else completely ridiculous in his presence. I will try my best not to, but the odds are that something similar will happen again during my time in Baltimore. What I would like to say now is that this is all wonderful- absolutely fantastic. I blinked a few times very quickly, composing myself for a final time, before walking over to him in my most professional manner possible and introducing myself as Dr. Aurelia Cyrus. He shook my outstretched hand, potentially a good sign, I thought, and gave me a smirk that may have indicated that he thought I was crazy, in a sort of funny way- I hope.
“Nice to meet you, Dr. Cyrus. My name is Simon Odste, and I was the primary physician of the patient that you are about to perform an autopsy on.” He let go of my hand, and the chill of the morgue reunited with my hand once again, and it was a bit unwelcome, in fact. I pivoted back around on my heel walking to the desk, a matching minimalistic brush aluminum, and leafed through the papers on the desk.
“For the urgency that I was called here for, I can’t seem to find a body that would match the time of death without it being treated with chemicals to maintain the integrity of the body. Where is the patient file?” I asked.
Dr. Odste looked at me carefully before responding, “Because of the, um, importance of this patient, we have temporarily neglected to file the paperwork in the system yet. You won’t find the file in there.” And with that he walked over to the table and reached under it. He came up with the patient’s file, which was in worse condition than any other patient file that I had seen. It had obviously been taped to the underside of the table. Droplets of coffee stained the outside of the file, perhaps from long nights spent pouring over symptoms. His eye met my own and he pursed his lips, as if deciding whether or not to actually share the file with me. Logic must have gotten the better of him, because he stepped over to me and gave me the file, letting out a small breath and nodding at me. I opened up the file carefully, expecting for it to explode from the state to which it was filled. Upon opening the file I found that it was surprisingly neat and organized. I leafed through the folder, making note of the things that jumped out at me. Delusional. In excruciating pain, pain so bad they had to sedate him almost full=time. Loss of feeling in extremities, traveling towards the center to the body. Extreme drop in core temperature. It seemed that in the first week of his stay at the hospital his temperature fluctuated between 100 degrees and 94 degrees. His second, and final week in the hospital his core temperature stabilized, but at 91.2, not 98.6. His doctors became increasingly worried until the day before his death, where his blood boiled with a 105 degree fever that no amount of ice baths or cooling blankets could bring down. The patients name had been scratched out, something that I assumed only Dr. Odste would know.
Seeing that I was finished reviewing the file he approached me, “ Dr. Cyrus I know that this must seem suspicious and odd to say the least.” I nod at him, expecting him to continue, “Now, you must understand the circumstances which surround this patient’s death. We already know why he died, but what we need to know is what caused that. Right before the patient’s death, when his temperature was still spiking, his blood actually began to coagulate, effectively becoming a solid in his veins. Dr. Cyrus, his blood turned into a solid while his temperature was 105 degrees, his brain should have been melting. This caused the patient’s death, who we will call a John Doe until further notice. We don’t know if whatever he had was contagious, and I don’t want you to take any chances. Please understand that because of the oddity of his case, we do not want to release the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death just yet. “
I nodded, and even though I didn’t want to trust Dr. Odste, I was, admittedly, intrigued by the peculiar case in from of me. He motioned for me to follow him, and he led me down two rows of bodies, stopping at the second to last container. He tapped the middle one, the one that suits my height best, actually, and, without further ado, pulled it open. I had been around dead bodies before, I had worked with hundreds of them, and I had not expected for this one to be any different. This John Doe was different. The first thing I noticed was the stench. Even though it was normal for a body to have a certain odor after an amount of time, the noxious scent that this body emitted was nothing like anything I had ever smelled. It was sulfurous and smelled acidic, as though someone had brined it in rotten eggs and hydrochloric acid. The second thing that hit me was the look of the body. While it still looked distinctly human, it seemed as though every single capillary had burst. His eyes were bloodshot and turning brown, his lids a fleshy color but more red, as if someone had looked at it through a red filter. But the most odd part was that even though he had been dead for a few days, he had not yet gotten rigor mortis. His hands were pliable and almost seemed life like except for the fact that they were cold. Dr. Odste then sputtered a bit, requiring my attention once again.
“Dr. Cyrus, I understand the intriguing qualities of this case, but I must urge you so that you may fully comprehend the weight of the situation. Although John Doe died a few days ago, I must warn you that if this autopsy does not glean any results concerning the exact nature of his death, we will be at a loss, because there are two other patients which have presented with similar symptoms, if a bit milder.” Unaware that my autopsy had any bearing on living patient, as they usually did not, my eyed widened, indicating my surprise.
“Dr. Odste, I’m really not sure that I’m qualified for this sort of thing, I was under the impression that the autopsy I am supposed to conduct is for the information of the physicians concerned, mainly yourself of course. I did not think that the results of the autopsy would be considered when deciding upon the treatment plan of others. I really-“ I began, but he cut me off.
“Dr. Cyrus, do you really believe that we would have flown you from your home in Toronto to Baltimore if we were not confident that you would be able to enlighten us? If we thought, for even just a second, that you were not the best? Dr. Cyrus, you really need to understand the magnitude of this situation, this is not a run-of-the-mill autopsy, this autopsy affects real people, and we need you, Dr. Cyrus, to do it. Because whatever this is, this unprecedented disease, it’s killing people, and we don’t know how to stop it, we don’t even know how to treat it. So I’m begging you, not for my own sake, or my own curiosity, but there are lives at stake, because whatever this is, it’s spreading.”
I averted my eyes, my face blushing, not caring that I had an image to maintain, and a professional one at that. I thought for a moment about his statement, and decided that he really knew his way around a conversation, and that he was a master manipulator. And honestly, I didn’t mind a little manipulation once in a while. It allows me to add the techniques of others to my own repertoire. I kept my eyes on my hands, and began tapping them on the aluminum desk. I imagined I was playing a piano, or fingering the chords of a guitar. I had always wanted to learn how to play an instrument.
Because it was already getting late, about six thirty, Dr. Odste and I agreed that because the two patients were stable for the time period, I would do the autopsy early the next morning. The two patients who seemed to have the same disease, virus, whatever as John Doe had were doing far better. They both seemed to be at the same stage in the, let’s call it a virus. They were both in the same stage in the virus. Both patients were still male, and both has temperatures that were beginning to vacillate between ninety-six degrees and one-hundred degrees> not bad yet, but if they followed anything similar to the course that John Doe was on, they were in trouble and, unless I figured it out, headed towards a nice life with the creepy crawlies underground.
