Dead bodies smell like maple syrup. I suppose there are worse odors but for some reason, I cannot think of them. It was a Tuesday when I started my job as a janitor in the city's morgue. In this economy, I couldn't be picky and there was something magnetic about being in here with all these decedents. I had nothing to offer them except my penchant for voyeurism and perhaps a teaspoon of sympathy, but they were ice cold and probably none the wiser.
A young man in his early twenties, Dwight Kern, trained me that morning. He told me where the mops go and where the ammonia should be stored and implored me to adhere to every detail he was outlining. It was hard to focus with what seemed like an infinite tower of drawers behind him. I felt like I was stuck in The Hudsucker Proxy and that Howard Roark had come in here and built a limitless steel facade for the storing of all these people we were talking to just yesterday.
"You're not to go in there, do you understand?" Dwight asked of me.
"Yes," I said. "What is that?" I asked him as I pointed up at the drawers.
"Those are the stacks. The recent ones. None of your business in there," he barked.
The stacks. What a name for a turret full of little file cabinets. This was all so sad that these people's lives ended here in this artificially icy room, blanketed in neon light, and shoved into a tiny compartment assigned only to them upon arrival. There was nothing manifest about this destiny of theirs and it was heartbreaking to me.
It looked like a giant card catalog from libraries gone by, but it wasn't. Card catalogs were lined with the inestimable cognizance of the Dewey Decimal System. They held corridors of stories and novels and the passages of lives lived and yet to be lived. They were full of promise. But not these drawers. These were file cabinets of fatalities. I was going to be sick.
"Could you excuse me for a moment?" I asked Dwight while holding my stomach and signaling the worst.
"You're going to have to have thicker skin than this, my man," he said as he motioned for me to use the lavatory. "Don't come back here when you're done."
And I didn't. That room was a delta for death, a tributary of all the lives cut short in this city. And even though I knew that mortality was inevitable, for me, for all of us. Even though I knew that one day that day would be upon me, I also knew---
That day is not today.
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