From the Waiting Mortuary, Professor Polson’s friend Kurt took them into a hallway lined with doors.
There were numbers nailed to the doors, but the numbers seemed random. Room 3 was adjacent to 11. Room 1 seemed to be missing altogether. Tacked to the door of Room 4 was a photograph of a white cat standing beside a blue mailbox. Perry wondered about that photo, in a place where there were no others, what the significance of that could be, when someone in a pale green shower cap and matching scrubs opened the door and looked out, white light pouring on him (or her), before shutting it again.
Everything in the hallway was bright, and cold. It wasn’t the outdoor, winter kind of cold, but a dry, artificial cold, as if freeze-dried air were being poured down from the ceiling by the fluorescent lights.
When they reached the end of the hallway, Kurt stopped, turned, and held up a hand.
“Thank you for being so quiet,” he said. “We do not have them today, but this is where sometimes a parent or a wife or husband must come to identify a deceased person. It is not like in the TV show, exactly, because we do not bring them into a room and take off a sheet and show them their loved one’s face. Instead they are shown the effects. Wallet, jewelry, et cetera, and then a Polaroid photograph of the deceased’s face. They know, or do not know, and if they are not sure, they must see. If they are sure, but still wish to see the body, they may request. It is easier, the Polaroid. Luckily for us, today, any families have already been and gone.”
Nicole. Nicole had been here, of course, and it had been Josie Reilly who’d come to identify her—and although it was utterly impossible to imagine Josie Reilly clipping down this hallway in some pair of cute little shoes, it was even harder to imagine Nicole in this cold brilliance, laid out in whatever manner they laid out the dead, which he was about to see, and suddenly did not want to.
But wasn’t this one of the reasons he’d taken this class? To see for himself?
He felt exhausted, dizzy, as if a grave mistake had been made by someone he used to be and no longer was. He put a hand to his head.
Professor Polson, standing off to the side of the hallway, looked over and raised her eyebrows as if to ask him, you okay? But she seemed preoccupied, too, looking at Perry as she also held her cell phone to her ear. After a few seconds, she looked at it in the palm of her hand, and then she seemed to be scrolling through her messages, or her address book. The fluorescent light turned her hair to a reddish gleaming that Perry had never quite noticed before. He watched her until he noticed out of the corner of his eye that Karess was staring at him, again, staring at Professor Polson.
“Today,” Kurt said, “is an autopsy, but it is not yet to begin. I am taking you to autopsy room, where there is one body, which you will see it. This is not someone who has been disfigured, but will look typical of a corpse who has died by strangulation, because it is believed he has hanged himself. If you will faint, or be disturbed, you might wish to not.”
Kurt nodded solemnly then, as if they’d all understood what he meant, and then, whether they did or not, they followed him into Room 42—all except Professor Polson, who was again holding her cell phone to her ear, seeming to be trying to get a connection, which Perry thought pretty unlikely, deep in this basement, a place out of which he imagined very few cell phone calls were intended to be made or received.
“We shall proceed,” Kurt said, “four people at a time. You will wear booties, cap, and gown.” He pointed to a doorless locker where the mint green garb was hanging on hooks, and he shrugged. “We have only so many clothes.” He made clothes a two-syllable word, and tapped four students—one of them Karess—on the shoulder, pointing toward the locker. “You must wear such cloth-es when there is a body.”
Karess looked backward then, directly into Perry’s eyes, seeming to be asking for some kind of guidance.
Stupidly, apologetically, Perry smiled frozenly, and she looked away. Her new friend Brett Barber was another one of the four included in the first group, and he leaned over and whispered something into Karess’s hair. Perry guessed it was a bad joke when he saw Karess lift a shoulder as if to block Brett from saying anything else—a flinch—and then she was stripping off her coat and her ratty, lovely sweater, bearing her long, thin arms for the surgical scrubs, and sliding the pale green of them over her body.