Silvera is there: I can hear him briefing the pathologist. Jennifer is there, wearing her toe-tag. That body. The scene photographs in the case folder, with the moist eyes and mouth, could almost be considered pornographic (arty and “tasteful”—kind of ecce femina), but there’s nothing erotic about her now, stiff like out of the deepfreeze, and flat on a slab between striplights and tiles. And all the wrong colors. The chemistry of death is busy with her, changing her from alkaline to acid. This is the body… Wait. That sounds like Paul No. Yes, the cutter is Paulie No. I guess you can’t blame a guy for loving his job, or for being Indonesian, but I have to say that that little slope gives me the creeps. This is the body, he is saying, echoing the sacrament: Hoc es corpus.
“This is the body of a well-developed, well-nourished white female, measuring five feet ten inches in height and weighing approximately one hundred and forty pounds. She is wearing nothing.”
First the external examination. Directed by Silvera, No takes a preliminary look at the wound. He shines a light into the mouth, which is rigored half open, and rolls her on to her side to see the exit. Then he scans the entire epidermis for abnormalities, marks, signs of struggle. Particularly the hands, the fingertips. No takes nail clippings, and performs the chemical tests for barium, antimony and lead deposits—to establish that she fired the .22. I recall that it was Colonel Tom who bought her that gun, years back, and taught her how to use it.
Brisk as ever, Paulie No takes oral, vaginal and anal swabs. Too, he inspects the perineal area for tearing or trauma. And again I’m thinking of Colonel Tom. Because this is the only way that his read works. I mean, for Trader to be involved, it has to be a sex deal, right? Has to be. And it feels all wrong. Some funny things can happen on the cutter’s table. A double suicide can come back a homicide-suicide. A rape-murder can come back a suicide. But can a suicide come back a rape-murder?
Autopsy is rape too, and here it comes. In the moment that the first incision is made, Jennifer becomes all body, or body only. Paul No is going in now. Goodbye. The elevation makes him look like a school child, glossy head dipped, and the scalpel poised like a pen as he makes the three cuts in the shape of a Y, one from each shoulder to the pit of the stomach, and then on down through the pelvis. Up come the flaps—it makes me think of a carpet being lifted after damage by flood or fire—and No goes through the ribs with the electric saw. The breastplate comes out like a manhole lid and then the organ tree is removed entire (the organ tree, with its strange fruit) and placed in the steel sink to the side. No vivisects heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, and takes tissue samples for analysis. Now he’s shaving the head, working in toward the exit wound.
But here’s the worst. The electric saw is circumnavigating Jennifer’s cranium. A lever is being wedged under the roof of the skull, and now you wait for the pop. And now I find that my body, so ordinary and asymmetrical, the source of so little pleasure or pride, so neglected, so parched, is suddenly starting up, acting up: It wants attention. It wants out of all this. The cranial pop is as loud as a gunshot. Or a terrible cough. No is pointing to something, and Silvera leans forward, and then the two men are backing away, in surprise.
I watch on, thinking: Colonel Tom, I hear you. But I’m not sure how much this means.
It appears that Jennifer Rockwell shot herself in the head three times.
No. No, I don’t live alone, I said. I live with Deniss. And just that once I shed tears. I don’t live alone. I live with Deniss.
As I was speaking those words, Deniss, in actual fact, was scowling through the windshield of a U-Haul, taking himself and all his belongings at high speed toward the state line.