Fabulous Bodies

Dead Weight

I’m here for the body.”

The kid doesn’t look up, but a slight huff of annoyance shoots from his nostrils. His bad attitude is not about my specific request; it’s because my word choice is a reminder of just how different our sensibilities are.

Funeral directors, morgue attendants, medical examiners, and organ donation coordinators: all part of the same ecosystem, but not without friction.

You’ll rarely hear someone at a funeral home say body, or corpse, or cadaver.

With them, it’s always the departed, the deceased, or more likely, just the first name of whomever kicked the bucket—any title that stresses humanity.

Insert eyeroll emoji.

Medical examiners are more clinical. They usually go with the subject, or just boil things down to a case number.

I, however, am here for the body. It’s a carcass, for fuck’s sake, bone and blood and meat, now woefully void of the previous electrical current that once helped it wiggle around.

The funeral industry is a world that most people find unsettling, even frightening.

It’s an uncomfortable reminder of their own inevitable end.

Most folks would rather just pretend we go on living forever, doing anything they can to ignore the crushing existential truth that one day—a day not too far off, in the grand scheme of things—we’ll all end up on the slab.

And when we’re finally crushed under the wheels of a twenty-five-thousand-pound semitruck, or crumpled on the floor of our own bathroom with a ruptured cerebral vein and a skull filling with blood, someone will have to clean up that mess—often figuratively, almost always literally.

This is where I come in.

“Eye for a Guy Organ Donation,” I state confidently, catching sight of my own face in the reflection of a massive, glass-framed photograph.

The image hanging behind the young funeral home attendant is bright and colorful, a desert sunset in purples, pinks, and oranges meant to evoke feelings of a heavenly transition to some other place that I know, in the depths of my soul, does not exist. Others probably find it very comforting.

I’m not looking at the photograph, though.

I’m looking at my own stoic face, devoid of any makeup and slightly shaded by the brim of my fitted black baseball cap.

I’m wearing a set of thick-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses that I don’t need, their simple design chosen by a saleswoman who was instructed to find the most unremarkable pair in stock.

My auburn hair, which usually tumbles down around my shoulders in soft waves, is tucked away under a short brown wig.

I’ve draped my body in an oversized Eddie Michaels hoodie, a reprint of the poster from his free 1979 show in Central Park emblazoned across the back, and while this little pop of flair is probably not the best choice in a practical sense, Eddie’s worth it.

This hoodie always gets stored in a bin marked WORK CLOTHES and otherwise restricted from the light of day. I do miss it sometimes, but I’ve got a whole other rack of Eddie Michaels gear to look cute in.

Outfit separation is key. God forbid a girl photographed leaving the crime scene is wearing the same vintage Alexander McQueen pumps as a notable social media starlet three towns over.

Regardless of the care I’ve taken to blend in, I still wield an incredible power.

This kid behind the counter will inevitably bend over backward for me, not just because I’m particularly skilled at what I do (and I am skilled at what I do), but because I also employ a mighty force of nature that has tempted heroes and toppled empires, a power that will reign over brains or brawn for centuries to come.

Even in this humbled state, tucked away under all this cover, I still look fucking amazing.

What am I supposed to do? Lie about it?

In my own internal monologue?

I assure you, I think this with no self-congratulation at all.

It was luck that brought me here, not skill, and if I ever meet my biological parents I’ll be forced to hand over this best-in-show trophy to their phenomenal genes.

A body is just a body, and my body happens to be one that people enjoy.

As if to confirm my hypothesis, the kid finally glances up from his phone, halting awkwardly when our eyes meet. There’s a split-second pause as oxytocin surges through his veins. His demeanor shifts.

He swivels in his chair, rolling over to an ancient desktop computer and opening up a new window. “Who are you here for?”

“Tyler Fleming,” I confidently reply.

He types this into his keyboard and slaps Enter, the computer crackling like it’s about to pop open in a flash of sparks and a puff of smoke.

Everything about this moment is wildly outdated, a decades-old PC struggling to keep up with some obsolete program and a long-forgotten operating system, but that’s shockingly normal in this industry.

Every funeral home has its own unique requirements for checking bodies in and out, many of them still functioning on paper catalogs, rusty filing cabinets, and the occasional Rolodex.

It’s not that they don’t care. In fact, the depth of their caring often works in my favor. These people spend their days grappling with issues that are much more existential than the logistical development of a standardized federal body-tracking system.

A new screen loads and the young funeral assistant furrows his brow, reading over some notes. “We don’t have anything here about a harvesting service for Mr. Fleming.”

Again, the difference in language is stark. According to him, I’m not in the organ-donation industry, I’m in the organ-harvesting industry—a butcher, albeit an aesthetically pleasing one.

It’s not that funeral directors don’t believe in organ donation as a concept.

Most of them are compassionate enough to be donors themselves.

The issue here is that people like me, or people like the woman I’m pretending to be, can be reckless with their work.

Time is usually an issue when it comes to organ donation, which means the cadaver is sometimes returned for a funeral in, well, less than stellar shape.

Typically, donation services don’t even spring for a fresh new body bag, dropping off a sloppy, blood-splattered cocoon of plastic that some poor mortician is then forced to make presentable.

And thus, an epic rivalry was born.

“You know, sometimes if you don’t actually save the column before adding a new body it’ll erase the notes,” I explain.

“Really?” he asks, swiveling back to his computer and giving it a try.

I’m right.

“How did you know that?” the kid probes.

“We’ve worked with you before.” I lean over his desk, slowing down my voice a bit and dropping the volume. “You’ve always treated us very well.”

This little move could come off as comically overdramatic, like a seductive femme-fatale caricature in the office of a private eye, but I manage to sell it. Selling sex to teenage boys is so easy that I probably could’ve just grunted.

I’m also telling the truth. I have been here before—different wig, same Poppy Stringer. It’s been two years since I hit the Yucca Valley Farewell Tributes and Cremation Center, but it’s nice to know they still haven’t updated their computer system.

“I called this one in myself. Must’ve been before your shift,” I continue. “The woman I talked to was really helpful. Jenny Fountain, I think?”

This is the kid’s boss. I didn’t talk to her, but just throwing out her name adds to the credibility of what I’m saying.

Anyone could’ve pulled Jenny Fountain from the funeral home’s website.

Small details absolutely do not constitute any sort of concrete proof of who I am or what my business is—on their own or stacked up by the dozens—but what I’ve learned is that doesn’t actually matter.

The truth is overrated. A feeling of truth is what matters.

“I should probably call her,” the kid says. “Just to confirm. What’s your name?”

I recall the name on tonight’s fake ID. “Madison.”

The kid picks up a phone on his desk.

“It’s almost midnight, you know,” I quip, despite the fact it’s not even eleven yet. “If there’s one thing I know about Jenny, it’s this … you might be on call for her twenty-four seven, but she’s not always on call for you.”

Another detail that means absolutely nothing, but feels deeply authentic.

Surprise! Your boss doesn’t like to be bothered at home.

Psychics use this technique a lot when they do “cold readings”—when they fake talking to the dead without any preparation.

“Hot readings,” on the other hand, involve a little research, looking up the death records of a target’s family or learning various facts about their life to create the illusion of supernatural knowledge.

I’m getting a message from beyond. They’re saying not to think so much about money.

Everyone thinks about money.

I sense something important happened in your childhood. There was an accident.

Name a person who hasn’t had an accident.

The kid behind the counter pauses, then hangs up the phone and grins knowingly. He chuckles to himself. “Yeah, that sounds like Jenny.”

I motion back over my shoulder, out through the door of the kid’s office and through the lobby of the funeral home.

Our sight line continues all the way to the dimly lit parking lot beyond.

From here, he can see my refrigerated truck, the vehicle still running for dramatic effect.

My headlights shine out into the darkness, emphasizing that our time is limited.

“Listen, there’s a four-year-old over in Barstow who will be blind by morning if I don’t get her those corneas,” I press in a steady, matter-of-fact tone. “If you wanna be the guy who holds this up, that’s on you.”

The kid hesitates, still not entirely sure what his move is.

I lean in again, a tonal whiplash as I lower my voice for a second time. “What’s your name?”

“Robin,” he replies.