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Authors: John MacLachlan Gray
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bo Cuailgne , the warrior Queen Maeve led her army to victory, drowning the opposing army in a flood of urine and menstrual blood. You, the women of Ireland, were removed to these shores by Almighty God for one purpose—to lead the New American Revolution. That is the meaning of your suffering. That is your task.
My associate, Lieutenant O’Reilly, and his able young assistants, will now pass among you. Think upon your homeland and what she has suffered, and give as your heart, your courage, and your patriotism dictate …
CHAPTER NINE
----
Baltimore
W ho among us has not felt out of accord with the universe? By the same token, who has not felt as though the Almighty Himself were at one’s service?
I say this in another attempt to evoke the feeling of ease that surrounded our perilous project like an aura. From one moment to the next it seemed as though every move had been acceded to by some higher power, that we had only to put one foot in front of the other and doors would open of their own accord.
(Does Satan provide an equivalent sense of ease and delight to his children? How is one to know what power is at one’s service, and to what end?)
Back in the morgue, the gaslights had been turned down to a mere flicker and the mortician had long gone home for supper, if he ever returned from luncheon. For silence there was nothing to equal it. The cadavers spread along the walls had the presence not of patients but of ruined, discarded overcoats, with no trace of the wearer but bulges and wrinkles in the cloth.
I avoided looking at the sheeted lump containing the toothless young woman. A man can take only so much at one time. Mean-while, Eddie peered down at the bearded young cadaver with a hole in the chest, assessing its suitability.
Physically, the transfer was clumsy but manageable. By placing an empty table next to the cadaver we were able to roll it onto a stretcher; it was surprisingly light due to dehydration. Grasping the poles at opposite ends, we carried the stretcher up the ramp to the first floor—unconcerned with discovery, for if we encountered anyone it would have been two other men with a cadaver on a pair of sticks.
Nor, thanks to the nature of the institution, did there exist any great danger that someone might take note of our man’s absencefrom the morgue. As an unaudited clearing-ground for the unnamed dead, there was no way to determine whether an empty table meant that the remains had left for the medical school, or had returned to the hospital for forensic diagnosis, or had been claimed by a member of the public.
As we packed the corpse into the wing for the Agitated Insane, I noted that the surrounding babble had if anything increased, though the patients were supposedly asleep. (Often a patient will undergo greater agitation asleep than awake—another instance of the freed imagination doing its worst.)
As we deposited the body of the young suicide on the cot, our neighbor waxed no less eloquent: “Twin-devil and specter of crazed and doomed mortals of earth and perdition! …”
His monologue seemed to require no pause for rest or breath, and when I hear him in my mind I still experience the discomfiting sense that he was cheering us on, as we rolled the cadaver onto the bed and assessed its potential as a substitute.
The cadaver must have been ten years younger than Eddie—not an insurmountable problem, for death has an aging effect, even on small children. A well-bred young man, to judge by the haircut and the quality of the suit. The coat of fine worsted remained untouched by blood or powder burn, though of course the shirt and vest were ruined.
Every suicide is a poet , sublime in its melancholy . So wrote the Frenchman Balzac in a virtual advertisement for the practice— perhaps an inspiration for the poor devil before us. Or perhaps he fell victim to a poem by Edgar Allan Poe.
Bones of the dead the skull the skull in Connamorrah! …
“Willie, please find something to
My associate, Lieutenant O’Reilly, and his able young assistants, will now pass among you. Think upon your homeland and what she has suffered, and give as your heart, your courage, and your patriotism dictate …
CHAPTER NINE
----
Baltimore
W ho among us has not felt out of accord with the universe? By the same token, who has not felt as though the Almighty Himself were at one’s service?
I say this in another attempt to evoke the feeling of ease that surrounded our perilous project like an aura. From one moment to the next it seemed as though every move had been acceded to by some higher power, that we had only to put one foot in front of the other and doors would open of their own accord.
(Does Satan provide an equivalent sense of ease and delight to his children? How is one to know what power is at one’s service, and to what end?)
Back in the morgue, the gaslights had been turned down to a mere flicker and the mortician had long gone home for supper, if he ever returned from luncheon. For silence there was nothing to equal it. The cadavers spread along the walls had the presence not of patients but of ruined, discarded overcoats, with no trace of the wearer but bulges and wrinkles in the cloth.
I avoided looking at the sheeted lump containing the toothless young woman. A man can take only so much at one time. Mean-while, Eddie peered down at the bearded young cadaver with a hole in the chest, assessing its suitability.
Physically, the transfer was clumsy but manageable. By placing an empty table next to the cadaver we were able to roll it onto a stretcher; it was surprisingly light due to dehydration. Grasping the poles at opposite ends, we carried the stretcher up the ramp to the first floor—unconcerned with discovery, for if we encountered anyone it would have been two other men with a cadaver on a pair of sticks.
Nor, thanks to the nature of the institution, did there exist any great danger that someone might take note of our man’s absencefrom the morgue. As an unaudited clearing-ground for the unnamed dead, there was no way to determine whether an empty table meant that the remains had left for the medical school, or had returned to the hospital for forensic diagnosis, or had been claimed by a member of the public.
As we packed the corpse into the wing for the Agitated Insane, I noted that the surrounding babble had if anything increased, though the patients were supposedly asleep. (Often a patient will undergo greater agitation asleep than awake—another instance of the freed imagination doing its worst.)
As we deposited the body of the young suicide on the cot, our neighbor waxed no less eloquent: “Twin-devil and specter of crazed and doomed mortals of earth and perdition! …”
His monologue seemed to require no pause for rest or breath, and when I hear him in my mind I still experience the discomfiting sense that he was cheering us on, as we rolled the cadaver onto the bed and assessed its potential as a substitute.
The cadaver must have been ten years younger than Eddie—not an insurmountable problem, for death has an aging effect, even on small children. A well-bred young man, to judge by the haircut and the quality of the suit. The coat of fine worsted remained untouched by blood or powder burn, though of course the shirt and vest were ruined.
Every suicide is a poet , sublime in its melancholy . So wrote the Frenchman Balzac in a virtual advertisement for the practice— perhaps an inspiration for the poor devil before us. Or perhaps he fell victim to a poem by Edgar Allan Poe.
Bones of the dead the skull the skull in Connamorrah! …
“Willie, please find something to
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