Authors: Alfredo Vea
Now they lay nameless on a long metal tray, two cooling women, breastbone to breastbone. Struggling together in motionless travail, they had become wholly entwined—their arms, their fingers, their final breaths; even their histories had become entangled. The tags tied to their toes bore the same name.
From a growing distance the dead women watched in nonchalance and saw in the swelling dimness the chief coroner and his assistant doing their lonely work. Unashamed, they saw themselves stripped naked in an airless, comfortless room and they felt dispassionate probing and bloodless cutting as if it were being done to bodies far, far away. From that great distance they watched their own innards sliding out like roe.
Devoid of cushions and warmth, it was a room of numbing dimension, a room made of corners, certainly not a place meant for living things. It was an empty, airless space with walls that concealed gleaming, heartless edges carefully arrayed within rows of silent drawers. Its hidden compartments were lined with finely honed contrivances, sharpened saws, and suction pumps. That nature that so abhors a vacuum must detest a sterile straight razor even more.
It was a chamber of stainless steel and sanitized white tile backlit by banks of lifeless light. Even sounds were frightened to death in a room like this one; bold timbres and shy tenors alike were suffocated, haunted into silence by a legion of echoes. A hall of mirrors for the spoken word.
“My wife says that music happens whenever you take the time to look carefully at another human being. Well, no one on earth looks closer than I do,” he said. He grunted as he shifted the large object beneath the cloth and rudely tugged the material to his right and away from the table. “And I have yet to hear a single solitary note, much less a melody.”
The assistant medical examiner grabbed a stiffened brown shoulder with his right hand and an ivory-colored one with his left. To get a better grip, he pushed his hands between two brassieres and toward the two breastbones. As he pulled, his words reverberated from the walls around him. The sound of his own voice coming back at him again and again never failed to make him dolorous. It was a dolor that had tormented him for three years now. He had consistently mistaken it for a migraine headache. So many echoes, yet no voices ever overlapped in this room; no matter how many spoke at once, each voice always sounded alone.
“My wife keeps telling me that there really is a melody in the slow, shifting weight of a mature woman walking on the beach, the easy metronome of her breasts; that if you watch a child quietly playing alone, you can detect definite musical tones and the overtones of an imagination running wild. Personally”—he shrugged—“I think my wife is worried that I’ve handled too many women. Maybe she thinks it’ll make her body less special to me.”
“What is your wife anyway, some kind of poet?” asked the chief medical examiner, his voice a mixture of humor and disdain. His own wife was waiting at home, and the very thought of her evoked at least a dozen reasons to work late. He nodded his head, indicating his impatience with his assistant. It was a common gesture. The subordinate quickly stepped back, allowing the chief to attempt a solo separation of the women.
“Not really. She’s a dancer and a painter hidden inside the body of an office manager. She’s in a modern dance troupe here in town, but she needs to keep a day job.” The assistant paused to let an image of her form in his mind. “She hates what I do for a living.”
With all his might the chief medical examiner strained to pull the two shoulders apart. He set his legs farther apart on the tile floor, then tried again, holding his breath for strength.
“Give me a hand, will you?” he said, finally exhaling his fatigue and exertion into the room. His assistant moved forward and reached out with both hands, placing one palm in an armpit and the other on the top of a shoulder.
“If the truth be known, I’ve seen a lot more men than women while I’ve been here,” said the assistant. “I guess it’s the nature of this business.”
“I’ve got half a dozen specimens of manhood laid out and cooling in back right now,” answered the chief. As he spoke he nodded toward the darkened morgue. Behind the wall to his back there were five males lying stretched out on refrigerated metal racks. One poor soul had been a bystander at a botched drive-by shooting. Another one was the victim of a carjacking; his body had been found by a jogger in McLaren Park.
Two other bodies were those of homeless veterans who had expired of unknown causes during the night. The corpses had been found beneath the elevated freeway near Potrero Hill. Their dark skin had been hardened by exposure and their knuckles and knees had been indelibly discolored by dirt and grass stains. The fifth body was that of a young schoolboy who had been driven over the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge by years of unnatural affection from his own father. His brother before him had done the same thing.
“Did you hear about John Doe 39? He came in about three hours ago. He was working underneath his classic car when his wife and her boyfriend lowered the jack on him. We got a full name for him just about an hour ago. The guy still has a brake pad embedded in his skull.”
The younger man secured the shoulder closest to himself and the two began pulling in opposite directions, each with one foot on a bar beneath the table for leverage. They had been straining for twenty or thirty seconds when one of them released his hold suddenly and without warning. The other almost fell to the floor, just catching himself by hanging on to the stiffened arm of the smaller woman. The two embracing bodies hung precariously over the edge. The long hair of the smaller woman was hanging down like a shimmering tent, enshrouding their frozen faces.
“Let’s get them back onto the table,” said the chief, out of breath and a bit embarrassed at the crudeness and clumsiness of their attempts. “My wife never lets me touch her anymore,” said the chief. “I think she’s projecting.” He gasped. “I’ve noticed that sometimes she’s repulsed by my hands. She pulls away from my touch.” He examined the mutual death grip more closely. “I think we’re going to have to cut them apart. Is there family listed, any claimants? Someone to object?”
“If we knew the answer to that question,” said the assistant, who nodded toward the toe tags, “we wouldn’t have to Jane Doe them.” The assistant laughed uncomfortably. He had lost his mental balance for a moment. During his three years in this office the chief had never once mentioned his wife or his home life. He had never shared even a single personal opinion or feeling. The assistant knew that his glib remark had offended the chief medical examiner, so he added quickly, “Cut the fingers? Should a procedure like that be included on the protocols? What if the relatives do show up?”
After thinking about it for a moment, the chief shook his head. “We have to do what’s necessary. Cosmetics are the least of our worries. I can see now that just one of them has her fingers completely interlocked. I think we only need to cut her at the tendons. Let’s put that on the 36 protocol. After they’re separated you can work on 37. Well, what do you think?”
“About what? Number 37?”
“No, damn it, about my wife!”
“She’s afraid of you,” said the assistant in a lowered, more respectful voice. “When she’s alone she imagines what your eyes must see when you look at her. She may take her clothes off in front of you, but she knows you’ve seen women far more naked. You’ve seen women stripped of life.”
The chief medical examiner did not respond. There was deep regret in his eyes for having said anything about it. He might have responded a decade ago, before death had become so completely empirical to him, so damned quantifiable. Lately his wife had stopped wearing makeup and she was letting the gray in her hair overrun the auburn. She had even stopped buying wrinkle cream.
“Fire them up!” he snapped.
His assistant nodded, then moved to the console near the back of the room. There he turned on the amplifier and tape recorder marked table 3. The first doctor tapped the microphone softly and watched the VU meters jump. Satisfied, he began to speak.
“Do you think they were lovers?” asked the assistant, who was testing his own microphone. The chief medical examiner shrugged and continued his examination. Then he slowly nodded his head, yes. He disliked looking beyond the bodies to the people who were once there, and now he was beginning to dislike the assistant.
“Must be old age,” said Persephone Flyer. “My fingers are simply aching.” She flexed them and grinned. “Luckily there’s never been any arthritis in my family.” There was a frightened but hopeful intonation in her voice.
Her friend in the next room laughed. “You will never have arthritis. In my country an ache in the fingers means that you want something very badly; your hands are aching to touch something.”
“Certainly not these tomatoes.” Persephone laughed, tossing a large pile of tomato skins and seeds into a small garbage can beneath the sink. She cut the skinned pulpy flesh of thirty tomatoes into squares then tossed the pieces, dividing them evenly, into two eight-gallon pots. She walked to a second stove, where she used a wooden spatula to plow under a tall mound of steaming Italian sausages, rotating the cooked ones to the top and the uncooked to the bottom of an enormous black frying pan with a diameter that spanned two burners. The powerful fragrance of fennel and oil filled the room.
“How are the spices coming?” she called out, as she drew a sleeve across her sweating brow. Outside her makeshift kitchen the glorious scent of her handiwork had commingled with a breeze and was prying at her neighbors’ windows, pushing in over the usual smells of Potrero Hill and the housing projects and overwhelming everything with the combined perfume of Palermo, Baton Rouge, and Saigon.
The sublime aroma broke up baseball games in the street. It silenced a heated game of dice and caused a substantial lull in the local drug traffic. In the projects, the street gangs stopped cleaning their weapons to inhale the scent. Like all armies, they marched on their stomachs, and the boys on the hill were always hungry. For a moment, the Up the Hill Gang, the Down the Hill Gang, the Wisconsin Street Posse, and the Prisoners of the Projects called an uneasy armistice in order to breathe in a few molecules of the sauce. For a moment no one on the south side of the hill looked warily over his shoulder, then checked his waistband for the comforting bulge of a gun.
The aroma even found its way into the nostrils of a drunken sot and momentarily kept him from hitting his cowering wife.
It wafted down afternoon sidewalks and into nearby warehouses where greasy auto mechanics and squinting printers stopped working to anxiously peek at the time clock. Women in nearby houses and apartments were soon busy washing Mason jars, soup kettles, and hermetic cauldrons in which to carry the source of the magical smell.
Children at the Potrero projects ran to tell their weary mothers that something was cooking at that lesbian place up on Missouri Street. Excited shouts were traded over back fences, and telephones were ringing everywhere on Potrero Hill, as the good news was passed from Texas Street to De Haro: “Miss Persephone and Miss Mai are cooking again! The Amazon women are at it again!”
“Is it that cellophane chicken? Never tasted nothin’ on God’s earth like that cellophane chicken!”
“Is it that beautiful jambalaya? Is it okra stew and dirty rice? Did you taste that corn pudding they made last week?”
“Could it be them chicken necks in coconut milk?”
“No, it’s that spaghetti sauce again! Smells like heaven!”
Mai came from the back room, her small hands cradling a large wooden bowl of spices. She was always careful to prepare the spices out of public view, as the recipe was a valuable and closely guarded secret. All of their collected recipes were precious. Only she and Persephone knew what lay hidden beneath the piles of bay leaves, oregano, and thyme, that down under the sun-dried tomato flecks and the basil there were dark little chiles from the Louisiana bayou and West African peppers.
“The seeds for these angry little peppers were brought here three hundred years ago in the intestines of slaves,” Persephone would explain. “It’s how they kept warm in the holds of those ships.”
Beneath these peppers were still other secrets: long, tender shreds of aromatic lemon grass and a pint and a half of pungent nuóc mám nhi, the ultimate Vietnamese fish sauce. Mai had mixed it and fermented it herself in a small wine barrel on the back porch. She would always smile as she mixed these spices. There was a little nook near the rear door of the house that smelled of her beloved homeland.
She shoved a small stepladder closer to the stove, stood precariously on the top rung, and using her delicate fingers, began to divide the wondrous spices between the two pots of simmering sauce. She put a small bouquet of lemon grass in her pocket for good luck. Using a huge wooden ladle, she stirred both pots, scraping the bottoms to keep the thick liquid from building up and burning. As she descended the ladder, she adjusted the flames beneath the pots.
“Won’t be long now,” she cooed in a raised voice filled with joy and anticipation. Her gaze fell onto the shiny new Sub-Zero refrigerator that had been delivered just two days ago.
“Không cólâu dâu.
Won’t be long now.” It had become one of her favorite English sentences, almost a prayer. “Tomorrow they’ll deliver that beautiful eight-burner Wolf stove and that three-horsepower range hood and then we can really start cooking! No more of this part-time stuff.”