TW: Vague medical gore, slight emetophobia
The body was already laid out on the table by the time the rest of the men arrived. I wasn’t the first to enter the room, but I wasn’t the last—not that it would have mattered. Everyone was avoiding each other’s gaze, just as they were avoiding the pale body, stark naked and lying on a metal table.
Three men stood by the head of the body: the doctor, the General, and the body’s lover. The doctor had a small tray of instruments beside him, as well as a tape recorder. His complexion was green—no one wanted to be here, and none less than the doctor. It was strange, I mused to myself. He was the only one here who had any experience with autopsies, and yet he looked the most nervous.
The lover was thin, and gaunt in the face. He was wearing a sweater that hung off one of his shoulders awkwardly, making him look like a child playing dress up with his father’s clothes. It had once belonged to the man who now laid on the table, cold. He was on his knees, his face pressed against the body’s temple.
“They don’t care about us,” the General started. The General wasn’t actually a general. He was a lowly soldier boy, unlucky enough to be shipped over to Vietnam in his youth, and came back with nothing but a sense that he was better than all of us.
But his force was commanding enough that when men started dying, we looked to him. He was the one who started the whispers, telling those who cared to meet here. He told us that we were going to find answers. I don’t know if I truly believed him, but I showed up anyway.
“Good men are dying, and they refuse to do anything about it,” the General continued. “These men aren’t granted a proper burial. The moment he dies, he gets sent off to burn. No answers, nothing. That’s why we’re here tonight.”
“Something like this was happening in California,” a man piped up from the back of the room. “Maybe they know something that can help us?”
“They don’t know shit.” The General’s voice was steely, and cold. “Doctor, if you will.”
As the doctor shuffled forward, the single lightbulb above cast his features into shadows. His hands trembled as he picked up his tape recorder. While everyone in this room was at risk, it was perhaps the doctor who had the most to lose. He was the one who snuck the body out of the hospital. He was the one who was to slice it open for our viewing.
The General put his hand on the lover’s shoulder as the doctor cleared his throat, and hit the record button. The sharp click felt like it echoed throughout the room.
“September eighth, nineteen eighty,” the doctor enunciated into his recorder. I let the basic facts worm in one ear and out the other. The body was pale, with lesions littering his skin, just as the previous deaths were. Specific cause of death was unknown.
The lover’s sobs started anew as the doctor’s voice trailed off, and his scalpel was picked up. The General tightened his grip on the lover’s shoulder.
In the idle moments before I had arrived at the basement of the bar, morbid thoughts were all that I had to entertain myself with. My questions were undoubtedly similar to those of the men around me: what was to be found in this husk? Would someone find it within me too?
When the doctor pulled out the bone saw, he sent an uneasy glance to the rest of the room, almost as if he was trying to give a silent warning. The lover winced at the sight of the saw, but he did not fight to pull away from the General.
Sweat started to drip down the doctor’s forehead, but whether that was from exertion or nerves, I wasn’t sure.
The soft breath of the crowded room seemed to fade as the doctor made the first cut, then the second, and then the third. It was late at night, and the sounds from the bar above us had faded. It was hard to not feel like we were the only people in the world.
A thick smell of rot burst forth from the body. My palms grew clammy as I clenched them into fists. A few of the men standing beside me shuffled, their shoes scraping against the concrete ground.
It was difficult to not flinch at every low and grating sound of the doctor’s tools at war with the body. It crunched, it squished, it made sounds that felt unnatural. Were the body to speak, I was certain it would plead for an end to this dissection. Every so often, the doctor would comment something into the tape recorder in his dull and monotonous voice.
He paused, his eyes flickering to the lover, and then to his enraptured audience. With one last crack of bone, he opened the chest, revealing the man’s insides.
The doctor made a strange noise—a harsh inhale that got strangled in his throat before it could reach his lungs. The scalpel fell to the small tray beside the body with a sharp clatter but the recorder remained steady in the doctor’s other palm. His eyes were wide, nearly bulging, and fixed on the center of the body’s chest.
“Good God above,” the doctor said. The men around him shuffled nervously, the tension in the room forcing them to make a decision: pull forward and see, or push away, against the throng of other men and the claustrophobic shelter?
“What?” The lover asked, finally lifting his head from its home between the cold crook of the body’s neck and shoulder. “What is it?”
“His heart–”
“What about his heart?” This time, when the lover tried to surge to his feet, the General lost his grip. “If it’s his heart, let him have mine. Take mine, and bring him back– my heart has only been his—” Whatever he was going to say next was cut off.
The horrible garbled scream froze the room. Had I not seen the lover’s mouth gape open as the sound ripped from him, I would have assumed the noise had come from some vile and wretched monster.
Wretched may have been the right word for it, regardless. His face was frozen in a look of horror, and I thought that nothing within that body could possibly send more fear through a room than the sound alone.
What could scare a man who has nothing to lose?
Those in this room lived in a constant state of war– it was them versus us, and the only way to get by was to pretend to be one of them. We couldn’t escape it, even in a dark room full of like-minded people.
The sickness rotted us, but the fear was just as poisonous.
“Settle down,” the General boomed, but it did nothing to quell the slowly rising panic. “We are here to get those answers.” He looked to the doctor, but the doctor had not removed his eyes from the gaping cavity in the body. He had not stopped shaking his head since the scalpel had fallen from his fingers.
One man who was standing slightly behind the doctor grew pale, and shoved his way out of the room, only making it past the threshold before bending over. The sound of his retching echoed, intermingling with the guttural wails of the lover.
“Someone shut him up,” the General barked, with the face of a man who was rapidly losing control of a situation that he never had any control over in the first place.
Those who were closest to the body clutched at their own chests, as if feeling for some irregularity. I did the same. My heart beat, as it always had. I couldn’t help but consider that something had always been wrong.
Someone took the lover by the hand, and led him through the throng of men. His sobs slowly faded as he moved further away, until we were unable to hear him at all.
Once there was quiet in the room once again, the General gave one last order, his voice steady and cold once again.
“Burn the body.”
The sound of the doctor’s tape recorder clicking off left my ears ringing.