Luster(23)
“It doesn’t matter,” she says as we head into the cafeteria, where she pulls out a chair and asks me to sit down. She settles down across from me, brings out the peanut butter. She takes a spoon out of her coat and cleans it on her lapel. “Why didn’t you call? I left you a voicemail,” she says, opening the peanut butter, hooking her finger into the oil collecting at the top.
“I’ve been busy,” I answer, but as I say this I think about her message, about the huskiness underneath the words, the suspicion I have that she may have been smiling. The voice she has now is different. It sounds like a voice anyone might have. “In the app it said Becky Abramov.”
“Maiden name.” She sucks her finger, frowns into the jar. “This is dangerous work for a woman. How can you know who’ll be on the other side of the door?”
“This city isn’t really dangerous anymore.” As I say this, I relish the feeling of a vintage lie. A thing I would say to my father when he was alive and trying to make an effort to call. “I lost my job,” I say, thinking it will feel cathartic and realizing immediately that I am wrong.
“I’m sorry about that.” She pushes the peanut butter over to me, extends her spoon.
“What’s the saw for?” I turn the spoon around to look at my reflection, and even though I know how the image will refract, it still takes me aback.
“I work here at the VA, as a medical examiner. The guy I have today has the hardest skull I’ve ever seen. My husband didn’t tell you what I do?”
“We don’t talk about you,” I say, wondering if it will hurt her. I resent her presumption that we would talk about her at all until I see her disappointment.
“We talk about you,” she says, and I get the feeling that I’m meant to ask what about, so I don’t. But I want to know. I want to know what he’s said, and when she smiles I know she can see it on my face.
“And you like that? Hearing about what we do?”
“It’s not that I like it. But I like to be informed. Control for variables. I know that’s not your thing.”
“How would you know?”
“Because you don’t care who’s on the other side of the door.” She pauses and looks at me, her eyes distant, studious. “Let me show you something,” she says, screwing the top back on the jar and striding to the elevator, which is papered in flyers that say things like: Need Help? Did the war come back home with you?
* * *
We go to the floor below basement parking. We step into a room awash with fluorescent light, and it looks like the pre-owned section of Ikea, everything straightforward but a little lopsided, a small desk strewn with sheaves of that pink, perforated paper, a lone computer chair with no arms, a small calcified shower in the corner. She rifles through a plastic bin and brings out a gray Tyvek suit. “Here, put this on,” she says, shrugging off her white coat. She ties up her hair with a plain rubber band, takes off her clothes, and steps into a suit of her own. As she does this, I notice a tattoo on the base of her neck that says the grateful. “You don’t have to take your clothes off. I just can’t tolerate the heat.” It’s not that I’m threatened by her body, but I am uncomfortable undressing in front of her now that I’ve seen it, the marbled flesh of her thighs, which, even without the assistance of clothes, appear to go all the way up to her neck, her depressing beige bra and high-waisted underwear with Wednesday on the back. Her complete nonchalance at being seen like this. I’ve exposed my body for nothing. For a tip, for lunch, for a hand attached to a man I couldn’t see. But now I take the suit and feel it is insufficient to have hand-washed my underwear. I feel her taking inventory of where her husband has been. I keep my clothes on and step into the suit. She hands me a mask, says, “Activated charcoal,” and pops two batteries into a transistor radio. She washes her hands and pulls on a pair of purple gloves. She tells me to take the radio, and when I turn up the dial a silky voice says nothing but Hall and Oates, and in a few, we’ll take some calls. When she rolls her neck and marches toward the metal door, I want to tell her to stop.
“Have you ever seen a cadaver?” she asks, opening the door and sweeping into the room, where the body of a black man is splayed, his scalp peeled neatly away from his skull.
“Yes, my mother,” I say before I can stop it, and she pauses, somehow already deeply involved in a task that involves looping some blue rubber tubing around her arm.
“I didn’t know that,” she says, turning back to her task. “Does Eric know that?”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“That’s good,” she says, heaving the body to the side, clearing the waste collecting around his legs. “Keep something for yourself.” She takes the cotton balls and presses them into the cadaver’s anus. I try to look at the body directly. I tell myself that this is ordinary, that within me there is already a catalog of men just like this, supine, darkening the pavement, disappearing into shareable content. But it is too much to see his open mouth and genitals, the pallid bottoms of his feet.
“How did he die?”
“He got hit by a car. Family lost track of him. Dementia.” She unravels the cord for the saw. “Turn the radio up, will you?” When I turn up the volume, the same voice says a successful white ethnostate. This one is for Gerta in Williamsburg. Buckle in for “Private Eyes.” As the song starts up, she palms what is exposed of the skull. She starts the saw, lowers it to the bone.