This shuts me up.
We pull in front of a new high-rise: OFFICE OF CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER, CITY OF NEW YORK/BOROUGH OF QUEENS. The guy at the desk is young, wears throwback Reeboks with his scrubs. Says only, “Name?” when we approach the desk. Donnie reaches out, takes my hand.
We’re led down a hallway through double doors. I hear our footsteps, the buzzing halogen lights. The hairs on the back of my neck prickle. I see the hot Florida parking lot, Lisa Greaph with her purple fingernails pulling the handle from the wall. The table within. The clavicle.
I start to sweat. Donnie glances at me.
It’s an enormous room of stainless steel and linoleum, with a hallway leading to other rooms, cavernous, hyperlit. We follow the guy to a wall of drawers, the same kind we saw in Florida. The room tunnels, my ears cotton. It’s suddenly harder to breathe.
He takes hold of the handle and pulls. The table extends. I bend at the waist. Donnie whispers, “Sharon, honey.”
I close my eyes and tuck my chin in, trying to breathe. My lungs are collapsing. “I can’t do it.”
The morgue guy rubs his nose, distracted. Says, “You’re required by law to identify the body as hers before we can release it. That requires looking.”
Donnie puts her hand on my back.
“She doesn’t look, the body stays here,” he tells Donnie. “Tell her to look.”
She pulls me in. “Don’t you dare talk to her that way. This woman was her partner. Have some respect.”
He rolls his eyes.
Donnie rubs my arm. “Sharon.”
I look.
Mel’s hair has been slicked back from her face. She’s blue from her forehead to her chin, skin sleek and glasslike. She is thin, so thin. Her collarbone is like a knife handle through the flesh. Her mouth is small and white.
I think about Dad. I think about seeing him in his casket at Damron Brothers in Faulkner, how he seemed so temporarily stilled, the air electric with energy unused. Maybe it was physics, maybe it was dumb hope, but I was never more sure of the unkillable quality of energy particles as when I looked at his dead body: Life has to go somewhere. This can still be reversed. He doesn’t have to be dead. He doesn’t have to be.
But here, Mel is the opposite of movement. Maybe because she was so constantly in motion, jumping and fidgeting and wriggling and flailing all the time. She was ADHD incarnate. She doesn’t even look asleep. She is tapped, inanimate. Hard. There is no smell. This is not the body of someone who will talk or drink or dance or draw ever again. My belly starts to burn.
I turn quickly to avoid spewing on Donnie. She murmurs, gathers my hair back. When I straighten, she produces a tissue, motions to my mouth. I wipe.
The morgue guy grimaces and flips the sheet back up. “That’s wonderful,” he sighs, and pulls a walkie-talkie from his pocket. “We need someone in seventeen with a mop.” He slams the drawer back into the wall. We hear a thump from the inside.
“Hey, goddammit,” Donnie says. “Watch it.”
“Now, please,” he snaps into the receiver.
“If you bruised her, so help me God, we will sue you.”
“No one would notice,” he counters. “Alcohol poisoning with a DXM overdose? They can paint her up, but she’ll still be blue.”
“I’m reporting that cocksucker,” Donnie says as she guides me out.
—
Back at the office, I am repeatedly hugged. People keep springing up to give me their chairs. Someone has taken the clothing from my luggage, washed and folded it. It is understood that I will not be going home. A plate of food is put in front of me. Mugs of tea. Assistants and interns shuffle by, gawking. Donnie ushers away anyone showing even a prelude to tears.
I see all this from a strange distance. If I try hard enough, I can watch myself from the outside, like when I had the stroke. Will myself to float to the ceiling, look at myself breathe. Sit. Stare ahead. Nod when spoken to.
Fart comes by with a strawberry pie he’s made. He tells me he grew up on a berry farm in Ohio. When he hugs me, he nearly lifts me out of my seat, clapping me on the back like a dude. Slips a fourth an ounce of bud into my pocket with a one-hitter. “We love you, hoss,” he tells me hoarsely.
It occurs to me that I never slept with Fart. I wonder why. He would have been an excellent refuge fuck. A big old friendly bear fuck. Now I’m glad I didn’t. It would have saddled this sweet moment with obligation.
There’s a balcony outside Donnie’s office. I take the one-hitter there, pack it, toke quickly. This is upper Midtown on the twenty-fifth floor. There’s traffic and Times Square and the new Freedom Tower to the south, striking into the sky.
I can feel everyone’s eyes on my back, but no one comes to join me. I inhale, wait to float out of my skin again.
—