What Awoke in the Morgue Should Never Have Awakened

I know it is an indecent act. I know it as well as I know the way they would point at me, the words they would spit over me, everything they would think if they ever found out. I do not expect anyone to understand it. Sometimes I think I do not even understand it myself, and I could not explain it even if they begged me on their knees. But I do not regret it. Not a thing from that night.

No one knows the kind of loneliness that wraps around me on every shift. The dead are not good company, no matter what people imagine. Examining them, opening them, washing them, and preparing them so others can bury them does not bring the peace or contemplation these rooms are supposed to offer. They are long nights among cold organs, clean bones, and faces stripped of every expression.

I spend hours imagining what crossed the minds of those who pass across my steel table. What they dreamed of, what debts they left unpaid, whom they wanted to say something to and could no longer. I have seen so many bodies that I got used to death before life. There are dawns when I feel more extinguished than they are, more hollow than those still gazes, and then I find myself wishing that it is they who study me, that they wonder about my broken dreams.

That is why no one could understand what I felt the night they brought him in.

He was an adult man, a little over thirty years old, deceased from a sudden cardiac arrest after accidental poisoning. That was what the chart said. I received him near midnight, when the rest of the building was already silent and only the hum of the fluorescent tubes above my head remained. I slid him from the gurney onto the slab with my usual routine, without looking at him too much, already counting the minutes I had left to finish.

When I finally looked at his face, I thought what I always do: death discriminates against no one. It comes without warning, without concessions, and sometimes it picks on the one who least expects it. A healthy man, in the middle of his life, and yet there he was, as motionless as the old men I go to retrieve from the refrigerator. He had a firm jaw, a broad neck, large, hard-working hands. The kind of body that, in another life, would have made me turn to look at him in the street.

I silently scolded myself for the thought and got to work.

I cannot explain what came after, no matter how much I try every night since then. I set the scalpel against his sternum and began the first line of the Y-incision, that cut I have made a thousand times without my hand ever trembling. And then I noticed it: a shudder beneath the blade, slight, like the sigh of something refusing to go out entirely.

It’s my mind playing tricks on me. I’ve been awake too many hours.

That is what I told myself. I set the instrument aside, blinked, rubbed my eyes with the back of my glove. I looked at the body again and there was nothing strange. The pale skin, the still chest, the absolute calm of death. I sighed in relief, almost ashamed of my own imagination, and lowered my eyes to resume the cut.

That was when I saw it.

Between his legs, where only surrender should have been, his sex stood up with a force that seemed impossible for a lifeless body. Erect, taut, proud, completely indifferent to the stillness of the rest of him. I went rigid, as rigid as the dead man himself, the scalpel suspended in the air and my breath caught halfway in my chest. I knew perfectly well what it was: a capricious rigor mortis, a final reflex of the body that science explains with dry words. But that explanation did not reach me. The only thing I felt was my pulse hammering in my temples.

Something woke in me at that instant. I do not know how to name it. A tremor rising from my feet, a heat that ran up my back and settled between my thighs without asking permission. Suddenly I felt the life that almost never accompanies me in these rooms, a furious, hungry life that knew nothing of decorum or judgment. I set the scalpel on the metal tray with a sharp clatter that echoed through the silence.

My hands approached him cautiously at first, like someone nearing something that might vanish. I barely touched him, and that hardness was still there, so present, so inexplicably real. My fingers played first with the tip, with slow movements, almost disbelieving. Then my fist closed firmly and I began to slide it up and down, slowly, feeling how it responded to my hand even though its owner no longer responded to anything.

The rest of his body remained serene, almost tender under the white light. And I burned. I could feel my own skin lit up beneath my uniform, my pulse racing, a wetness growing between my legs and driving me onward. A dark will, one I did not recognize as my own, had taken command of every gesture I made.

***

I felt free as never before. Free of protocols, of other people’s eyes, of the proper, gray woman I am under daylight. I was alone, completely alone in the middle of another eternal night, and no one would ever know what was about to happen within those four tiled walls.

I took off my gloves one by one and let them fall to the floor. Then I went for my coat, for my blouse, for everything that covered me, until my skin was exposed to the room’s cold air. I felt every pore open, drinking in that dense atmosphere, charged with something I would not know how to call anything other than desire. I leaned over him and breathed along his neck, seeking a heat that did not exist and that my body, nonetheless, insisted on inventing.

I had to do it. It was not a choice, it was a necessity growing inside me like a tide. I climbed onto the slab carefully, one knee on each side of his hips, feeling the icy steel against my legs and the contrast with the fire consuming me. The absence of life beneath me did not matter at all. In that moment only that existed, that hardness that seemed to be waiting for me.

I took him in one hand and guided him, sliding him first against me, up and down, until a shiver arched my back. Then I accepted him all at once, slowly, letting myself sink down centimeter by centimeter until I felt him completely inside me. I let out a moan that bounced off the bare walls, the first human sound that room had heard in hours.

I began to move. Slowly at first, measuring each sway, discovering the exact angle that made me close my eyes. Then faster, with my hands holding my breasts, my head thrown back and my hair falling over my sweaty back. I rode him as if there were nothing else in the world but that body and mine, that metal and that dawn. And there surely was nothing else.

I felt possessed, overflowing, beyond any limit I had ever set for myself. Each thrust tore a new sound from me, each descent drove a stab of pleasure into me that brushed against pain. I came once, hard, without warning, and before I could recover I was already rising again. I had never had orgasms so close together, so brutal, so near to one another that I could barely tell where one ended and the next began.

I spilled over him again and again, trembling all over, clinging to his cold shoulders like someone holding on so as not to fall into the void. The pleasure was forbidden, secret, impossible to confess, and precisely for that reason it filled me in a way no ordinary night ever had. I saw stars behind my eyelids, colors that did not exist, a sweet vertigo holding me aloft. For the first time in a long while, life was overflowing me instead of being absent from me.

When I could take no more, when my legs were shaking and a sob of pure satiety was rising in my eyes, I pulled away from him. And just as inexplicably as it had awakened, his sex began to soften, to return to stillness, to go out like a spent candle. I watched it lose that impossible tension and had the strange sensation that it knew what it had done. That it understood how much bliss it had given me, and that if it had stayed that way it would have been the beginning of madness I do not even dare imagine.

***

I got down from the slab awkwardly, my knees marked by the cold steel, my body still coursing with the last echoes of pleasure. I gathered my clothes from the floor and dressed slowly, buttoning myself up with fingers that still did not quite obey me. And as I did, I felt the world gradually regain its usual shape, its boring weight, its implacable logic.

The room once again felt empty and frozen, just like every night. The hum of the tubes, the distant drip of a badly closed tap, the smell of disinfectant. His face remained serene, but already distant, resigned to leaving this world. I stood there for a while simply looking at him, not knowing whether I was waiting for a miracle that would not happen again or deciding to resume my task, that work that suddenly seemed absurd and, at the same time, the greatest intimacy possible.

I finished my shift as best I could. I put the scalpel back where I had left it, completed the incision, wrote the report in my usual steady hand, as if nothing had happened between the first line and the last. I stored the body in its refrigerated drawer and turned off the lights one by one.

Many nights have passed since then. I still come to this room, still open bodies and write causes of death with the coldness expected of me. No one suspects a thing. I am the same discreet professional as always, the one who arrives on time and leaves in silence. But something changed forever inside me that dawn.

Sometimes, on the longest nights, when loneliness weighs on me more than I can carry, I find myself staring at the empty slab and wishing, against all reason, against everything I am, that death will make a mistake with me one more time.