Photo by Mario Moreno
The black bag rested on the cold table, bathed in the soft glow of the full moon shining through the small, barred window. Dr. Werner stood in the hall for a few moments before entering the morgue, filling the small white room with a nearly-blinding light as he flipped the switch on the wall. He hung his raincoat up on a hook on the wall, whistling a tune that echoed around the empty room, and then he put on his long white doctor’s coat and his blue felt mask and hat. He grabbed a pair of latex gloves from a box on the desk, and poked through the file for tonight’s body. Female, car accident, early twenties, brain-dead: the only part Dr. Werner really noticed was that the body was marked for organ harvest. He walked over to the table and unzipped the body bag, taking care to cover the face of the body before he got a good look at it. He had developed that habit when he first started this job, as he feared seeing the faces during the procedure. Now it was only out of habit, though.
He took a scalpel and started the first incision at the sternum, slicing a pattern similar to an upside-down “y” into the chest, before lifting the fair-colored skin up to reveal the interior of the body. Dr. Werner looked at the clock. All he had to do was go in and get the liver, the kidneys, and the left lung; he figured if he hurried, he could finish and be home before midnight. He glanced at the electrocardiograph, making sure that the body was functioning healthily, and went and got the organ-preservation containers from the freezer at the end of the room and placed them under the operating table. He then began the process of opening the ribcage, unflinching as the ribs cracked and snapped as he winched them open. He found out long ago that the key to this job was that the body that he was working on was no longer a person; it was just a collection of chemicals and atoms, not very different from a table or a pair of shoes. After the ribcage was open, he turned off the ventilator and the ECG monitor and waited for the heart to stop beating.
The full moon shone through the window as Dr. Werner worked, bathing him in its glow as he cut out the heart and lungs and put the required organs into the preservation containers; and the moon watched him as he submerged the left lung into the preservation fluid in the container and took the container to the freezer. He went back and moved on to the liver, fishing through the tissues and organs and blood as he carefully disemboweled the body, taking the liver and placing it into its container and putting it in the freezer. Then he went back and took the kidneys, cutting them from the abdomen and storing it in the freezer, and the full moon watched. Dr. Werner finished up, admiring his work as he hastily stitched the body up. The form said that the family had decided on cremation, which meant that the body didn’t have to look pretty, which made his job easier.
After Dr. Werner finished cleaning up and stored the depleted corpse into the freezer, he put on his coat and left the morgue, signaling to the lady at the desk down the empty hall to send in the nurses to take the organs to wherever they needed to go. As he walked across the parking lot and under the forced light of the streetlamps, he wondered whether or not any of those organs would go on and save someone’s life, and whether or not those people would know where it came from. Probably not, he thought. He didn’t even remember that girl’s name; it was something along the lines of Maria or Marion. He shrugged it off. As far as he was concerned, the things he worked with no longer had any names. He began whistling the same tune again, and as he walked to his car he wondered if he would make it home in time for the Tonight Show, ignoring the full moon as it slowly darkened, hiding behind gray and black storm clouds
I enjoyed the moon as a unifying presence, and the various details (“Tonight Show,” “signaling,” “whistling the same tune again,” “poked through the file,” and, of course, “developed the habit”) that added to the banality of the process so elegantly described. I occasionally think about the oddness of checking “yes” to be an organ donor on my license–I mean, the body is still technically alive when the organs are taken, so where will “I” be if I’m ever used as part of a harvest? Perhaps that’s just egotism, but the story dredged up those feelings again, so it was quite effective for me.