Second Life. Paul Griner

issue of Mortuary Gazette. Buddy picked it up and waved it, saying, I read in here how down in New Orleans they found a man with his hands bound behind him and two gunshot wounds to the back of his skull, and they still called it a suicide. But you know what? He tossed the journal aside, making McDonald’s file flop open; her, during her autopsy. He closed it. We don’t live in Louisiana. And I don’t want to end up the subject of some expose.

      That was a great fear, and one I understood all too well, having been the subject of one myself. Yet it hadn’t deterred me from being hired, had perhaps even spurred it. I’d been dealing with bodies for fifteen years when Buddy beat out his only challenger for the job of Danville coroner, a female doctor, the sheriff’s cousin. Buddy, Danville born and bred, had easily beaten the outsider. And I’d been out of work for three weeks when he started the job.

      Buddy was a popular realtor before his election—everyone in town knew him—and he still kept up with real estate at work; the MLS site on the computer, flyers about open houses, etc. On really slow days he’d have me watch the place while he went out to show houses. He’d run for the coroner’s job on a bet, he told me, had been surprised by winning, and had returned from his week-long training course, required of all non-MD coroners by the state, to one of the worst cases I’d ever seen, Danville’s biggest disaster in decades. Nothing in his lectures and quizzes had prepared him for it, he told me over the phone, and he hoped to God that I could help him out.

      An illegal fireworks factory had blown up downtown, destroying six buildings and killing nine people. Windows shattered five miles away. The day I interviewed was the morning before the explosion; I’d left thinking I didn’t have a chance, but the next morning he called me at seven AM. If I could get to work within two hours, I had a job. I was there in seventy-five minutes.

      We recovered one hand two miles from the blast, still in its yellow work glove and holding a manila envelope, though we never did locate the arm that went with it. Limbs and torsos had been blown everywhere, one headless body cut clean in half, blue intestines curling from the gaping hole, while two blackened heads rested in a bush, face to face as if they were kissing. Buddy threw up twice at the site, several more times back at the morgue.

      The sheriff, still angry about his sister losing, had made things miserable for Buddy—A fucking realtor as coroner, he said—but I’d helped Buddy through it, instructing him to see the body parts as puzzle clues, as impersonal as the bags of gunpowder. Wires from a chest meant a pacemaker, metal rods in a leg indicated surgery. We started piecing people together from their medical histories and, when the sheriff ragged us for taking so long, I told him it wouldn’t ever have happened if he’d been doing his job: the factory had been in a boarded-up building five blocks from city hall. He backed off and bit by bit we stitched the bodies back together as best we could, nine bodies from thirty-seven body parts, having to guess on only a few.

      Nothing else was ever as gruesome, not the occasional floaters from the Kentucky River, not the decomposing old folks who’d baked when their AC cut out during heat waves and the electrical outages that followed thunderstorms, ripening as no one had checked on them for days, and after we were all done Buddy repaid me by never once indicating he thought less of me for what I’d been involved in. Once, though, after reading a newspaper report about yet another budget cut for the coroner’s office, he’d asked me how the body parts market worked. I’d filled him in, but the next day he’d told me to forget he asked, and I had, though I’d never been able to forgive myself for having polluted him. My work as a diener at University Hospital had introduced me to the trade, and, after college—where my communications degree hadn’t produced any job offers—I realized body brokering was more lucrative, and, as simple as that, I’d disappeared down the rabbit hole. Part of me was probably wishing Buddy would do the same thing—the guilt of others might lessen my own—but most of me was glad he hadn’t.

      All morning after his announcement about McDonald’s, I went about my chores quietly, chafing at what we were being asked to do, vexed that I couldn’t get away to track down Lia. Lunch, I told myself. At lunch I’d ask Buddy for the afternoon off, and in the meantime I kept quiet, helping Buddy as I could.

      He worked on the new guy without speaking, a bad sign, and leaving off the music of Arvo Pärt, a worse one. Every time he played him, it meant Buddy was happy.

      I took photos of the corpse fully clothed, and then photos of him nude and unwashed. Before we washed him and took the last set of whole-body photos, Buddy turned on country music, music that made him angry, so I knew he’d made up his mind: McDonald’s was going to be reclassified. The music was a kind of scourge, to punish himself for caving.

      Putting the bodies back together years before had been hard, awful work over long days and longer nights, and the toll on Buddy had been ferocious. Bags grew under his once luminous brown eyes, filled with fluid, grew darker, turned blue and then black, as if they’d been tattooed, as if they were paved. They’d never disappeared and he seemed to have aged a decade a day. But if it was shocking, it was also why I had a job now and why I knew what was coming, my stomach growing heavier throughout the morning, filling with clay at the thought of it, with dread. I was going to be the one to reclassify McDonald’s.

      It would be his signature on the report—it had to be, to be official—but I’d do the actual typing, about which he was superstitious. If you wrote it, it was yours, the actions, the meanings, the morals. He’d been protective of McDonald’s from the start, and one night, still going over the files as I left, he sat bent over the desk, not looking up from paperwork so white in the pool of light it glowed. As I reached the door, he said, When my sister died, she was around this age. We never found out why.

      For all of his loquaciousness it was one of the few personal things he’d ever told me, though it took me a moment to realize it. So I would type in the changes, hating to do it to McDonald’s but telling myself that of course she’d never know. I wouldn’t be hurting her, not in a way that would matter to her, at least, and I’d be doing it for Buddy and, more selfishly, for me. Who knew when having him owe me again would come in handy?

      I wanted to slice my palm with a scalpel for thinking that way, but I knew that wouldn’t stop me. Finding Lia was too important to allow time for nobler sentiments. After all, I’d been the one who put all those things in motion years before, my fault, my fault, my fault, something I believed and told myself so often it had become my mantra, something I hummed in the shower or while chopping vegetables for yet another homemade soup—I didn’t go out much anymore—or sitting bored at a stoplight, waiting for it to change. And often, peculiarly, the chanting was in Lia’s voice.

      Buddy rallied when checking the new body for distinguishing marks. Vietnam, he said, running his hands over the man’s puckered left thigh. His wallet had revealed him to be a veteran, but it was the scars Buddy was looking at, glossy, raspberry-colored, wrinkled indentations on both thighs, trailing down the left shin like an archipelago.

      Land mine. Exactly how I got my scar, Buddy said, referring to his thigh. I’d seen it only once, when he came directly from a pool party to collect and autopsy a cadaver found in the woods.

      It was May, and we’d driven out to Dreaming Creek to fetch the body. Buddy had told me to bring water. As we made our way down through the wooded hills toward the burbling creek on an old game trace and I started coughing, I knew why: a strong wind moving through the leaves with a sound like rain, blowing a mist of lime-green pollen from the trees, which clogged my nose and throat.

      Sycamore and oak, Buddy said, waiting in the dappled light as I drank. They like creek beds.

      I tried to talk but my throat was too sore, so I took in the landscape instead, the thickly treed hills dotted with pink and white dogwoods still blossoming though the canopy overhead had begun to leaf in, the rarer but more spectacular red-buds, with their masses of black raspberry–colored