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 saybody, orcorpse, orcadaver. With them, it’s alwaysthe departed,the deceased, or more likely, just the first name of whomever kicked the bucket—any title that stresseshumanity.
Insert eyeroll emoji.
Medical examiners are more clinical. They usually go withthe subject, or just boil things down to a case number.
I, however, am here forthebody. 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,someonewill 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 slightlyshaded 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 markedWORK CLOTHESand otherwise restricted from the light of day. Idomiss 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 Iamskilled 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, thedepthof their caring often works in my favor. These people spend their days grappling with issues that are much more existentialthan 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-harvestingindustry—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’mpretendingto 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.
