“But the guitar solo,” he says.
“You can wake up to C.C. Deville,” I say. I pull the blanket to his chest and resist the impulse to kiss his forehead. He barely looks like the person I knew even a few months ago—his pale skin now latticed by veins. His sister’s money has bought him more time than most. He’s had three swine organ transplants and survived five drug trials. “I’ll send in your sister. Dream of being a rock god.”
Outside, Orli is seated again, erratically flipping through an old issue of National Geographic. She looks up at me, invites me to take the seat beside her.
“He really wants this—donating his body,” she says. “I know I might seem selfish. I’m just not sure I understand. But he’ll do anything you say. He really likes you.”
“He’s a friend to me, too,” I say.
“I never really understood him, you know,” Orli says. “Our parents were hard on us—study, be perfect, honor the family name. But Laird did his own thing. Peace Corps, leading Duck Tours in Wisconsin, helping locals build seawalls in impoverished island nations.”
“The final say has to come from the both of you. We’re not in the business of fighting families,” I explain. As I say this, I’m forced to consider how I might succinctly describe my business to her. Before the pandemic, I helped solve murders. There was an order to things. We either found evidence or we didn’t. There was always another case. But nothing about this virus makes sense. After nearly six years it seems like the research is running in circles. I don’t know if anything I do will help save the world, but working with Laird makes me want to believe that it can. “Why don’t you come to the lab tomorrow, if you’d like? I can show you the kind of work we do.”
“I’d like that,” she says.
By the time I get home, Tatsu is brushing his teeth and readying himself for bed. When we first moved in together, we’d have these endless conversations about our marriage being based on the shared goal of saving the world through the land of the living and the dead. We talked shop in the evenings, attended each other’s work parties, surprised each other for lunch. But at some point, perhaps even before the plague, our jobs began to define us, so in recent years we decided on a new rule in an effort to save our marriage: No bringing work home with you.
“How’s your guy?” Tatsu asks as I change into my pajamas.
“Same,” I say. “Worse.”
“There’s spaghetti and meatballs in the fridge, if you’re hungry,” he says. “I have to be up in a few hours or else I’d stay up with you for a bit. Another EMT’s kid is sick. Rejected a transplant. Taking their shift.”
“Oh,” I say. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
I go downstairs and eat Tatsu’s spaghetti. He clearly bought it from the gas station minimart on the corner. I listen to more Patti Smith. I marathon a season of The Twilight Zone, lie on the couch, cover myself with a throw blanket, and wait for sleep.
The following day, I’m standing with Orli behind a fence crowned with barbed wire. Nearly a dozen cadavers wait on the other side—some are sprawled beneath cages to prevent the coyotes from feeding on them; others lie scattered, picked apart by starving wildlife. At the bottom of an artificial pond, a young woman sits peacefully. She’s held down by ankle weights, her arms raised toward the sky as if in deep prayer. The water is dark enough that Orli can’t see her body. I’ve nicknamed her Alice, and she’ll stay there for another month so our forensic students can inspect her rate of decay in water. Not all our cadavers are plague cases, though. We still serve law enforcement. But Alice is one of the first adult victims of the second wave. I imagine the virus floating around her in the pond like flakes in a snow globe. Orli covers her nose. Out here, the smell digs into your pores. Two showers, three. I’ve never gotten used to it.
“We treat each body with care,” I explain. “Every single one is here to help us find the answer to a question.”
“Laird has this idea that you’ll write him letters after he’s gone and send them to me,” Orli says. “So it’ll be like he’s still alive, and you’d be telling him, telling me what’s happening to his body. He said it might help me say goodbye.”
“I’m not sure if you want to know the details of what’ll happen to your brother,” I say.
“Maybe, probably,” she says. “You can dress it up a bit. I don’t need to know everything. He considers you a good friend. He didn’t have many of those.”