The Bully from School Ended Up on My Autopsy Table

Those of us who work surrounded by the dead drag around a sinister reputation, or we would drag one around if our society, busy with its luminous daily distractions, bothered to think about us. It’s the old stigma of the executioner, the gravedigger, the one who carries the weight of death on his shoulders so that others can keep living in their comfortable ignorance.

I have to admit it’s an unfair reputation. The forensic doctors, funeral-home employees, and embalmers I’ve known throughout my career are as kind and discreet as anyone, if not a little more so. People of a gentle stoicism, with careful manners, with a tact that isn’t a facade but a reflection of something clean they carry inside.

I, of course, am the exception that proves the rule.

Maybe it’s my fault, maybe it isn’t. I don’t know whether my inclinations were born of some twisted experience or a simple error of nature, and the truth is I’d like to know. Maybe one day we’ll learn to cut out evil by excising a region of the brain, and along the way we’ll also erase the pernicious ideas of those artists who make life so uncomfortable for people who prefer an orderly world.

All I know for certain is that from childhood I was a difficult kid. I struggled to understand the invisible rules the rest of my classmates seemed to handle effortlessly. I solved everything with punches, which at first earned me a certain respect and later turned against me, when whispering replaced the beatings and I found out that on my own I couldn’t take on the whole world.

In high school I changed tactics, with equally disastrous results. Terrified of ending up alone forever, I became a people-pleaser, willing to let anyone walk all over me. But my social awkwardness made me the perfect target for those who enjoy humiliating others. And of all those miserable bastards, none was worse than her.

Lorena was hot and she knew it. Half the class ate out of her hand, and a few from the upper years ate out of other places. She was a brunette who wore impossible leggings to show off her hips and chose necklines that the teachers would criticize after looking at them closely. She always had a cutting comeback, words she drove home with that shrill voice she used. She hurt no one as much as she hurt me.

She started picking on me the day I answered correctly a question she had missed. I don’t remember the subject, who cares. What I do remember are the rumors: that my parents hit me every day, that I’d been kicked out of another school for groping a classmate, that I lifted skirts and pawed asses in the hallways. Every time I opened my mouth, she made sure to add some humiliating coda. Maybe that’s why I spoke less and less.

From freshman year until I finished high school, no group wanted me among them, no girl looked at me twice, and whenever anyone mentioned me it was with laughter, contempt, or pity. I took refuge in books and in my B-movies, in internet forums where I argued about Gothic novels and gruesome scenes. I became an expert in Poe, in Cortázar, in Cronenberg’s sickest films, in anything that would let me escape the mediocre torment I lived in.

Loneliness had at least one useful consequence. I developed a ferocious critical sense — it’s easy to criticize the world when you’re not part of it — and, above all, I became an outstanding student. I won a scholarship to study Medicine far from my hometown, to the relief of a family that preferred to keep its black sheep at a distance. Lorena, by then old enough that almost all bullies had matured, gave me one last rumor: that I had chosen that degree solely because of my obsession with corpses.

Who would have said how close to the truth she’d come without meaning to.

***

I swear I decided to become a doctor because of the chance to help people, to earn the applause life had denied me. But I was also curious to know whether, after so much fictional gore, I’d be able to face real death. The night before our first practice with actual bodies, I didn’t sleep a wink.

There are several possible reactions to a corpse. Most people, especially the women, showed respect, reverence, and badly concealed revulsion. Others joked in a pathetic attempt not to think about their own mortality, but they did it while trembling. In all my years at medical school I only met three people capable of true indifference toward the dead. Were they psychopaths? I don’t know.

And then there was me.

I didn’t feel nervous as I approached those inert fellow beings — fellow beings, yes, because we’ll all end up resembling them when flesh deserts us — but quite the opposite. Unlike the living, they didn’t pick on me, they didn’t make me jealous with their trips and their partners, my parents didn’t compare me to them to make me feel small. There they were, there I was. And, as still as they were, I could imagine whatever I wanted.

I remember the first body that stirred something in me. Almost all of them were elderly or badly damaged, but she wasn’t. She must have been around thirty and was an exquisite woman, with wide hips and full lips that gave me sensations I struggled to deny. I stood there, transfixed, staring at her, and the mocking started soon enough. I don’t want to be the freak, I kept telling myself. I don’t want to be that loner everybody runs from. I wanted to wrap myself in a veneer of respectable normality.

That didn’t work out for me either. At university I tried to attach myself to one group after another, tried to seduce some girl, tried alcohol, confessed impossible secrets when I was drunk. I failed at everything. Only the dead accepted me without asking anything in return. And so, while I looked on social media at the lives of my old classmates, I specialized in forensic medicine.

I ended up in the Forensic Anatomy Service of a city I’m not going to name, where I became a tireless worker and, to everyone’s surprise, a good colleague. My performance during the pandemic, when we turned the morgue into storage for the deceased, earned me a commendation from the regional government. The best thing about this job is that it’s solitary and quiet, and that whether I stay depends on my performance and not on the liking I inspire in any boss.

Several years of relative calm passed. I still didn’t appeal to women, still carried the same traumas. I tried prostitution and it didn’t do it for me: they moved too much. In the end I settled for abstinence and looking at bodies from a distance, enraptured and cowardly. To pass the time I took up bland hobbies like photography and fishing.

Until she arrived.

***

It was a Saturday night. Just another routine shift: a corpse came in. We were short-staffed that shift, but my superiors knew I alone was enough for the usual workload. I took it as just another formality, an ordinary day: a woman, pretty enough, dead of a pill overdose. A shame. Then I read the tag with her name.

Lorena Mansilla Vega. It was her.

I held back the rush of emotion, a guilty emotion but a real one. I was glad that the woman who had made my life impossible, who had known how to stunt my growth as a person, was lying there in front of me. Having achieved nothing, taken out like some poor junkie, there was the insufferable bully, with the same full breasts as always, the silky hair and the perfect face, now with the brown skin dimmed by death’s pallor. Lorena had always been hot and knew it, but she had never been this hot.

I put her in the chamber after the proper formalities and walked around the entire building with a stony expression, lying to myself, telling myself I was only dealing with a blow from the past. Lies. What I was doing was probing the wound: thinking about the full life that woman must have surely had, the friends, the parties, everything I had never had because of her. I made sure no one was still awake, with a macabre idea already lodged in my head.

Back in the morgue, I locked it with my key. I knew it could raise suspicions, that I’d be risking my job if someone came to claim the body. But we were far from her town, and if her friends had shared the drug that killed her, they’d let her parents collect her. Besides, I wasn’t thinking with my head anymore.

I took her out of the chamber as if taking clothes from a drawer. Not much time had passed and the body was still firm, appetizing, with that unsettling quality that made me smile like an idiot. I don’t know how long I stared at her. What would your parents say if they saw you? You’re risking your job. You’re disgusting. But inside me there throbbed a pulse I had never learned to recognize until that night. I looked into those empty eyes and extended my hand toward her chest. I brought my fingers closer with a slowness that almost made me faint.

I grabbed that cold breast, and I was surprised that no lightning bolt came down from the sky. Then, mouth open, I spent minutes kneading one breast and then the other. For the first time there was no one telling me time was up, not to squeeze so hard, not to pinch the nipple. I let out a teenage gasp, beside myself with the soft, icy touch of those two monuments to lust.

—No wonder you were so popular —I whispered to her—. But that’s over now. Death makes us all equal, Lorena. And some more than others.

I rested my face on her belly and kissed every centimeter of that cold skin. I knew the risks of touching a body like that and wanted to be careful, but every now and then I couldn’t help biting. I went back to her nipples and took them into my mouth. Then I spat on her eyes, which received my contempt without flinching, just as I had received her humiliations years before.

—You’re the most pathetic thing I’ve ever known —I told her in the ear, in a tone almost tender that made my own skin crawl—. And now you’re nothing. You were always picking on me. Look who’s still breathing.

I put on my gloves carefully. I had taken the reckless step of touching her with bare skin, but what came next carried more danger. And, drunk on that feeling of power, I already knew I’d do it again if I wasn’t discovered.

***

I slipped my fingers in without the delicacy one usually has with a living body. Her inert face seemed to give me a silent welcome, and I took advantage of it. With my other hand I stroked her legs, a fine pair of legs that reminded me of all the times that woman had made me feel guilty for wanting her. Now I was in control. Now I was the dominant one, and the pleasure building inside me would not be humiliating, but glorious.

I lost patience almost at once. I took off my gloves, washed my hands, and stroked myself over my trousers. I freed my sex, savoring that graveyard rigidity that had taken hold of it. I took a condom from my wallet that I’d never had a chance to use with any woman and put it on clumsily, never taking my eyes off those breasts. I slid the gurney, stroked her hair, pulled at it, and positioned myself over her like a conqueror.

It hurt going in.

Of course, I thought, ashamed of my own stupidity. There was no lubrication. I spat without pulling out, possessed by an enthusiasm that made me ignore the pain. The vein in my neck stood out, I became a beast. I fucked her with her legs raised, surprised by the effort it takes to hold a body like that up. But it was worth it. When I felt those tight walls closing around me, I forgot everything: morality, law, sanity. At that moment only she and I existed, and all the humiliations I was collecting with interest.

—Think of your parents —I whispered, looking into her face, and I’d swear something in her expression changed—. Think about how much they’ll cry over a junkie daughter. Imagine how much they’d suffer if they saw what I’m doing to you.

I kept thrusting with a vigor inversely proportional to the vitality of my partner, my eyes fixed on hers like a hunter’s. I ran my hand from her thigh to her neck and squeezed, pretending to strangle her. I wish it had been me, I thought, my sex hard as stone. I hit her with a brutality that almost toppled the stretcher.

The orgasm came abundant and violent, so much so that I had to bite my lips so my groan wouldn’t be heard all over the building. I collapsed on those breasts that would never feed anyone again and stuck out my tongue to taste their icy flavor.

—You failed as a woman and as a person —I murmured.

***

After that animal coupling I took off the condom and, like a drunk waking with a hangover, I felt a shiver as I understood the magnitude of what I had done. I looked at the body and no longer saw her, but a set of organs and tissues. I almost vomited. I swore to myself I would never do it again.

Liar.

In the bathroom I realized that, when I left, I hadn’t locked the morgue. I steadied myself, pale as death, and felt desire rise again. It was a boxer’s nerves, that adrenaline that drives you to repeat the offense. The thrill of possibly being caught made me walk slowly down the corridors. I went to my office for the backpack, without crossing paths with anyone, and came back at a brisk pace, convinced I’d find half the staff waiting for me with handcuffs ready.

When I went back in, everything was still as I’d left it.

I approached the corpse with the camera in my hand. Seen like this, stripped of all the dignity that the ritual of death confers — the black suits, the expensive woods, the solemn silences — she was portrayed as what she had always been to me, and that was how I wanted to immortalize her. I photographed her from every angle with an old analog camera that spat out the images instantly. I looked at them the way one looks at the memory of a girlfriend. With my groin tense once more, I weighed starting over.

No. Don’t risk it. You can do it again later, and you’ve got the photos as a keepsake.

Reluctantly, I tidied her up as best I could. I cleaned the remains from her face and returned her to the refrigerator chamber with a butcher’s smile, imagining I was condemning her to the last circle of Hell, that lake of ice where the fallen angel pays for all eternity. I checked the room a hundred times, putting everything back exactly as it had been, and waited for the night shift to end.

Her parents arrived a few hours later. They recognized me, but they were too devastated to notice the coincidence. I spoke with them with exemplary professionalism, handling the formalities as if nothing had happened. In my pocket I carried the photographs of their daughter. It’s the first time in my life I was grateful to have a modest-sized cock: thanks to that, no one noticed a thing.

When I finished the shift and got home, instead of resting I locked myself in the bathroom. I thought about the tears of that mother who would have to bury her daughter, about the silent justice Death had handed down through me, about how that body had accepted everything without protest. He who laughs last laughs best. And that day I laughed like a madman, so much so that my neighbors almost called the police.

And now what? Well, nothing, I’m still the same as ever, immersed in my vices and consumed by my appetites. I’ve accepted it. I know I’ll never be like the others, and I wouldn’t trade for anything the freedom I felt when I discovered it. Now and then, on lazy nights, I spend a while with some especially beautiful body. I always carry the camera in case the occasion arises, and I must confess I keep a lovely collection in one of my rooms. Yes, it’ll be my undoing the day they catch me. But one has to live. And, as I know only too well from my work, I’m going to end up dead all the same.

Sometimes, when I touch myself with my gaze fixed on all those lovers who don’t even know they are lovers, I look for her among the photos. Then I laugh again, and come again as if I were fifteen years old. The first times, my friends, the first times are always special.