Such Sheltered Lives

The Coroner

So much life left to live, people might say. Taken too soon.

Absently, he fingers his phone in his jacket pocket, wondering when it might ring again. It’s cool inside the morgue, but his palms are sweating. It’s hard work, conducting an autopsy: sawing open a body, lifting the organs one by one.

He finds it easier to think of his subjects as bodies than people.

Some might consider him insensitive or cold, but he thinks it’s simply fair this way.

He treats each patient exactly the same, no matter their background.

After all, they say death is the great equalizer, coming to the rich and poor alike.

He brushes the body’s hair away from its face.

He cleans beneath its fingernails, bitten to the quick.

Perhaps this may begin happening more often, given the goings-on at the nearby recovery center.

This being finding younger bodies on his table, troubled people meeting an untimely end.

People don’t go to a place like that because they’re healthy.

They don’t go there because the rest of the world has been a safe place.

The center, the coronor knows, promises its guests the utmost discretion, but he and his neighbors will certainly be able to find out which Wall Street scion or Hollywood celebrity is taking up residence at any given time.

His daughter works on the ferry, saving for her college fund, so he knows the island’s arrivals and departures better than most.

He thinks it’s fitting that the center is on Shelter Island, where his family has lived for multiple generations.

He’s always found the island’s name comforting, conjuring images of a port against the storm, barricades against invaders, safety when the earth tilts off its axis, isolation from the noise and madness of the outside world.

He understands why so many millionaires have chosen this small stretch of land for their lavish vacation homes.

Many locals resent the summer people who take over the island each year, but as far as the coroner is concerned, the occasional crowds are a small price to pay for living in paradise.

He eyes the bluish cast around the body’s fingertips. All the money in the world can’t protect the wealthy from their own bodies, as vulnerable to the elements as anyone else’s.

The coroner estimates the time of death to a narrow window—one hour, perhaps two.

It will be a week before he receives the results of the tox screen, but he can suggest a cause of death without it.

There are so many ways for even a young, healthy body to die: blunt force trauma, overdose, accident, hypothermia.

There’s even such a thing as death by misadventure.

He looks at the body’s blue knuckles and writes one word on his form: exposure.

Now, he must prepare the body for its journey home, shut tight in a casket for the flight.

The family might hire another examiner—some expensive city type, no doubt—to verify his findings.

Should someone else come to a different conclusion, the coroner might be questioned, but he won’t be blamed.

He’s small-town, after all, accustomed to preparing bodies for burial, not investigation.

No elite practitioner, charging, he imagines, more for one examination than the coroner makes in a year, would question his incompetence.

It would merely confirm the wealthy’s confidence in their wealth.

Someone else might get into trouble, but not him.

The coroner is not a religious man, but he finds himself offering up a small prayer, wishing the body more comfort in death than it, apparently, found in life.