=15=

Dead, as always, Neena lies on her back, crossed arms over chest, feet splayed out at heels, toes curled under. She is in a drawer, or a kind of drawer, something made of stainless steel, and set on smooth, silent casters, which has just been slid out by a man in a white lab coat, a photo ID clipped to his left breast pocket. Looking closer, one might notice that the little square photo looks nothing like the man whose pocket it adorns, but like someone fifteen years older, thicker hair, square of jaw, forced to smile.

Neena pretends to notice none of this, of course, how could she, being dead, her eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling, so fixated on nothing that whoever it is standing over her could prick the cornea of her eyeball with the pin on the back of the aforementioned photo ID and she wouldn’t see it coming. As it happens, the man does just that, plunges the pin-tip dead center in the pooled dark pupil, the jelly sticking when he pulls the pin back out, clinging, for a suspenseful moment to the pinpoint, a glistening thread of blindness, before it snaps back into the ruined orb.

There is laughter, or perhaps just giggling, some obscenities, and an overdone feigning of disgust, the latter issuing from two young women, who, intoxicated and playfully bumping into each other, have seen, and hope yet to see, much worse.

The insensibility and immodesty of the naked woman in the drawer, whose toe tag, entirely superfluous, has been deliberately—and distastefully—mismarked (though the body is easily recognizable as that belonging to our long-suffering heroine, who, by now, is familiar at least to us, as “Neena”), is apparently the source of great amusement, ribaldry, and general, if somewhat leisurely, fascination to whoever they are (attendants, nurses, first-year residents, custodial staff, college pranksters) on the morgue’s late-shift. Here at three or four a.m., under fluorescent lights, in windowless rooms, after untold ounces of coffee and equally liberal doses of appetite suppressants, pilfered amphetamines, and other illicit chemicals have been greedily consumed, these necrophiliac orgies, secret desecrations, and depraved hijinks hardly seem unthinkable; in fact, it’s hard to imagine any but the most determined sort of Pollyanna who wouldn’t concede their possibility, even likelihood, anyone who still has so stubborn a belief in the goodness of human nature as to categorically deny that such dark shenanigans probably don’t “happen all the time in morgues when no one is looking.”

Whatever the cause of death (or deaths), Neena is lying flat on her back tonight, (as opposed to how some jokers sometimes like to pose her in the drawer—rump up, for instance, to accommodate the taper in her bumhole), which, because she was dispatched from behind this time, is probably for the best, at least aesthetically speaking (and for those with weaker stomachs), as it hides the majority of the damage done to the back of her body. There is, however, ample evidence (i.e. gore) of whatever it is that killed her on the sides and front of her body, an exit wound or several, on her chest and/or belly, certainly “someplace vital,” as they never tire of saying. But, significantly, this wound and/or wounds will always exclude the head, face, and, often, even the throat, at least to the degree that said parts are transformed into what any chronicler might describe as “a sunflower of raw meat.” 

Even so, someone, most likely one of the techs (janitor, grad student, etc) has, upon instructions from the surgical amphitheatre (the amphitheatre? Who the hell’s up there at this hour?!), laid an open napkin, which, incidentally, came with his midnight double McWhammy Pounder, over whatever wound there is, which is meant, one might suppose, to suggest less a reaction to any form of squeamishness than a kind of mocking sensibility, a tongue-in-cheek nod to modesty, perhaps, as if the wound had taken the place of the sexual organs as the most intimate part of Neena’s body. Intimate, indeed, inasmuch as this wound is closer to the core of her being, which is now non-being, the inverse of the cunt by which she was brought and might have brought life into the world: all wounds being in this regard “exit” wounds.

Discount not, we advise, the specific instructions Neena herself left regarding the disposal of her remains following her murder. These must be taken into consideration and while not always acceded to, or even necessarily respected, they should be consulted, considered, when they exist, at least cursorily, just in case; for sometimes it’s been found that the victim herself will come up with some pretty good ideas no one had ever thought of before. Just when you think you’ve heard it all…

Unable to determine in any general way what exactly is taking place here, let us, for the sake of accuracy if nothing else, limit ourselves to what seems to be indisputably true. 

Specifically. This much we can determine with relative certainty: two men in white lab coats, yes, they have regulation white lab coats (and why wouldn’t they? Such coats are easy enough to obtain without any special authorization at any uniform shop), have masturbated themselves to full erections, which they’ve produced from the unbuttoned fronts of their “navy-style” button-fly trousers. They are spattering, or very soon to spatter, let’s say that they are on the brink of spattering, with cum, the dead girl’s expressionless face, making certain to also adorn her cold breasts with droplets, her belly, and, if their seminal capacity proves up to the task, her shaved slit, which—it might have been foreseen—seems in particular to have agitated these highly-agitated fellows.

A third man, considerably older, who could be a kind of director of something, as he has that incompetent, if supremely confident, authoritarian air of the vague administrator, as well as a fine head of the often requisite wooly white hair, is being vigorously fellated by one of the previously giggling women, who, incidentally, is also wearing a lab coat but nothing else save red high-heels, (all of them, to make a long story shorter, are wearing lab coats). The other giggling woman (formerly giggling, no longer giggling now) is instead of giggling or fellating, having finished both for the time being, is engaged in re-drawing her lips in a compact, and asking, incessantly, without managing to receive an answer, if anyone feels like driving to the ocean to look for sand dollars. One suspects that this must be a way of speaking in code, if it isn’t simply intoxicated babbling, but what it might possibly be a code for, if it is a code and not simply intoxicated babbling, well, that’s still anybody’s guess.