wanting through the Plexi eyeshield, bopping around in there like a bunch of overage punk rockers pogoing to the Stones.
“Hey, as long as you’ll cover for me if -”
“Sure,” she says. “Got to get your feet wet sometime, Peter. And if you really need me to, I’ll roll back the tape.”
He looks startled. “You can do that?”
She smiles. “Ve haff many see-grets in Autopsy Room Four, mein herr. ”
“I bet you do,” he says, smiling back, then reaches past my frozen field of vision. When his hand comes back, it’s wrapped around a microphone which hangs down from the ceiling on a black cord. The mike looks like a steel teardrop. Seeing it there makes this horror real in a way it wasn’t before. Surely they won’t really cut me up, will they? Pete is no veteran, but he has had training; surely he’ll see the marks of whatever bit me while I was looking for my ball in the rough, and then they’ll at least suspect. They’ll have to suspect.
Yet I keep seeing the scissors with their heartless satin shine-jumped-up poultry shears and I keep wondering if I will still be alive when he takes my heart out of my chest cavity and holds it up, dripping, in front of my locked gaze for a moment before turning it to plop it into the weighing pan. I could be, it seems to me; I really could be. Don’t they say the brain can remain conscious for up to three minutes after the heart stops?
“Ready, Doctor,” Pete says, and now he sounds almost formal. Somewhere, tape is rolling.
The autopsy procedure has begun.
Let’s flip this pancake,” she says cheerfully, and I am turned over just that efficiently- MY right arm goes flying out to one side and then falls back against the side of the table, hanging down with the raised metal lip digging into the biceps. It hurts a lot, the pain is just short of excruciating, but I don’t mind. I pray for the lip to bite through my skin, pray to bleed, something bona fide corpses don’t do.
“Whoops-a-daisy,” Dr. Arlen says. She lifts my arm up and plops it back down at my side.
Now it’s my nose I’m most aware of. It’s smashed down against the table, and my lungs for the first time send out a distress message-a cottony, deprived feeling. My mouth is closed, my nose partially crushed shut (just how much I can’t tell; I can’t even feel myself breathing, not really). What if I suffocate like this?
Then something happens that takes my mind completely off my nose. A huge object – it feels like a glass baseball bat – is
rammed rudely up my rectum. Once more I try to scream and can produce only the faint, wretched humming.
“Temp in,” Peter says. “I’ve put on the timer.”
“Good idea,” she says, moving away. Giving him room. Letting him test-drive this baby. Letting him test-drive me. The music is turned down slightly.
“Subject is a white Caucasian, age forty-four,” Pete says, speaking for the mike now, speaking for posterity. “His name is Howard Randolph Cottrell, residence is 1566 Laurel Crest Lane, here in Derry.”
Dr. Arlen, at some distance: “Mary Mead.”
AUTOPSY ROOM FOUR
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A pause, then Pete again, sounding just a tiny bit flustered: “Dr. Arlen informs me that the subject actually lives in Mary Mead, which split off from Derry in-”
“Enough with the history lesson, Pete.”
Dear God, what have they stuck up my ass? Some sort of cattle thermometer? If it was a little longer, I think, I could taste the bulb at the end. And they didn’t exactly go crazy with the lubricant … but then, why would they? I’m dead, after all.
Dead.
“Sorry, Doctor,” Pete says. He fumbles mentally for his place and eventually finds it. “This information is from the ambulance form. Mode of transmittal was Maine driver’s license. Pronouncing doctor was, um Frank Jennings. Subject was
pronounced at the scene.”
Now it’s my nose that I’m hoping will bleed. Please, I tell it, bleed. Only don’t just bleed. GUSH.
It doesn’t.