What Awoke in the Morgue Should Never Have Awoken

I know it’s an indecent act. I know it as well as I know the way they would point at me, the words they would spit at me, everything they would think if they ever found out. I don’t expect anyone to understand. Sometimes I think I don’t even understand it myself, and I couldn’t explain it even if they begged me on their knees. But I don’t regret it. None of that night.

No one knows the kind of loneliness that wraps around me on every shift. The dead are not good company, however much people imagine otherwise. Examining them, opening them, washing them and preparing them so others can bury them provides neither the peace nor the reflection these rooms are supposed to offer. They are long nights among cold organs, clean bones, and faces stripped of every trace of expression.

I spend hours imagining what crossed the minds of those who come through my steel table. What they dreamed of, what debts they left unpaid, whom they wanted to say something to and no longer could. I’ve seen so many bodies that I grew used to death before life. There are dawns when I feel more extinguished than they do, more hollow than those fixed gazes, and then I catch myself wishing it were they who studied me, wondering about my broken dreams.

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

He was an adult man, a little over thirty, who died of a sudden cardiac arrest after an accidental poisoning. That’s what the file said. I received him near midnight, when the rest of the building was already silent and only the hum of the fluorescent tubes remained above my head. I slid him from the gurney to the table with my usual routine, without looking too closely at him, already counting the minutes until I was done.

When I finally looked at his face, I thought what I always thought: death does not discriminate. It comes without warning, without concessions, and sometimes it has a cruel streak with those who least expect it. A healthy man, in the middle of his life, and yet there he was, as motionless as the old men I go to fetch from the refrigerator. He had a firm jaw, a broad neck, large, work-hardened 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 can’t explain what came next, no matter how hard 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’ve made a thousand times without a tremor in my hand. And then I felt it: a shiver beneath the blade, slight, like the sigh of something refusing to go out completely.

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

That’s what I told myself. I pulled the instrument away, blinked, rubbed my eyes with the back of my glove. I looked at the body again and there was nothing strange. Pale skin, a still chest, the absolute calm of death. I breathed out in relief, almost embarrassed by my own imagination, and lowered my gaze to resume the cut.

That was when I saw it.

Between his legs, where only abandonment should have been, his sex rose 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 as rigid as the dead man himself, with 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 never reached me. All I felt was the pounding in my temples.

Something woke in me at that instant. I don’t know how to name it. A tremor that rose from my feet, a heat that ran up my back and settled between my thighs without asking permission. Suddenly I felt the life that so rarely 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 clack that echoed in the silence.

My hands approached him with some reserve at first, like someone nearing something that might vanish. I barely brushed him, and that hardness was still there, so present, so inexplicably real. My fingers first played with the tip, with slow, almost disbelieving movements. 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 was burning. I could feel my own skin blazing beneath my uniform, my pulse racing, a wetness growing between my legs and driving me onward. A dark will, which I did not recognize as my own, had taken command of every one of my gestures.

***

I felt freer than ever. Free of the protocols, of other people’s eyes, of the proper, gray woman I am in daylight. I was alone, completely alone in the middle of another eternal night, and no one would ever know what was about to happen between those four tiled walls.

I took off my gloves one by one and let them fall to the floor. Then I went for my gown, my blouse, everything that covered me, until my skin was exposed to the room’s cold air. I felt every pore opening, drinking in that dense atmosphere, charged with something I would know no other way to call than desire. I bent over him and breathed beside his neck, searching for a heat that did not exist and that, nonetheless, my body insisted on inventing.

I had to do it. It was not a choice, it was a need growing inside me like a tide. I climbed onto the table carefully, one knee on either side of his hips, feeling the icy steel against my legs and the contrast with the fire consuming me. I didn’t care about the absence of life beneath me. In that instant only that existed, that hardness that seemed to have been waiting for me.

I took him in one hand and guided him, first sliding him against me, up and down, until a shiver arched my back. Then I leaned in, rubbing against him with my belly, and let the tip press against the wet, warm entrance to my cunt. The first contact tore a broken gasp from me, low and animal. I pushed against myself again, slowly, feeling the flesh yield to the pressure, feeling my body begging for more with unbearable urgency.

I slid my free hand between my legs and shamelessly sought myself out, parting myself wider to soak better, to make room. I was slippery, throbbing, hungry. I lowered myself onto him centimeter by centimeter, teeth clenched and eyes half-lidded, until I felt him sink in completely, until he filled me in such a brutal way it drew a fractured moan from me. The sensation was too intense, too indecent: the rough friction, the stubborn pressure, my own interior clenching around him as if it wanted to swallow him whole.

I let out a moan that rebounded off the bare walls, the first human sound that room had heard in hours. My hands gripped the edge of the table, then my breasts, heavy and sensitive in the cold air. My nipples had hardened so much they hurt, and when I pinched them a little I felt pleasure rise in waves, straight to my throat. I bit my lip and started to move.

I began slowly, settling myself onto that impossible rigidity, marking the rhythm with my broken breathing. I rose just a little, lowered myself again, and each descent opened me more, rubbed inside me with savage precision. Then I went faster. Rougher. The steel creaked beneath my knees; my hips struck his with a wet, dull, obscene sound. I felt the pressure on my clit with every sway, my cunt flesh rubbing, demanding more, demanding a friction that drove me mad.

I clutched his cold shoulders as if he were a living man who could answer me, and I arched my back until I was almost breaking. The air scraped my throat. Everything in me became need: my trembling chest, my tense legs, my tight abdomen, my pelvis dropping again and again onto that hard shaft that pierced me with cruel exactness. If he could have heard me from inside, he would have thought I was coming apart; in truth I was being dismantled by pleasure.

“Look at me,” I murmured, not knowing whether I was saying it to him or to the void. “Look at me, you motherfucker.”

The words came out broken, filthy, desperate. No one answered, but I kept going, more and more lost in that rocking motion. There was no room left for shame. There was nothing left but the impact of my body against his, the wetness sticking to skin, the sound of my quickened breathing, and the echo of my own muffled moans.

I leaned forward again, sliding a hand between our hips to touch myself the way I wanted, with two fingers pressing the exact point where pleasure gathered and exploded. The contact made stars flash behind my eyelids. I came for the first time with such a powerful spasm that it folded me forward, my fingers digging into the metal. The orgasm ripped through me from my belly to the tips of my toes, leaving me breathless, trembling, my mouth open in a moan that sounded almost like a sob.

But I did not stop. On the contrary. That first release only made me hungrier. I kept riding him with slow fury, shoving my sex against him until I could feel him striking me deep inside with every downward stroke. Sweat slid over my breasts and neck; a drop fell onto his motionless chest and I shuddered to see it shining in the white light. I was soaked, disheveled, panting like a bitch in heat, and the more he gave me, the more I wanted. Deeper. Harder. More.

“That’s it,” I whispered, my voice shattered. “Hold me like this. Give me more.”

There was no answer, of course, but in my head that rigidity still obeyed me with absurd fidelity. I squeezed my eyes shut and quickened the pace until I lost all measure. My hips slammed down with more violence, my breasts bounced against my chest, my thighs burned from the effort. I felt another surge rise, thick and overwhelming, and I let it come without resisting, my whole body convulsing over that beautiful, motionless corpse.

The second time was deeper, longer, dirtier. It tore a choked cry from me, made me shake from head to toe, and left my fingers numb, pressed into his cold skin. Even after I came, I kept rubbing myself a little more, stretching the delicious agony until pleasure began to hurt. Then, only then, I let myself fall forward and rested my forehead on his chest, breathing in gasps, my cunt still throbbing around that hardness that had emptied and filled me at the same time.

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 climbing again. I had never had orgasms so close together, so brutal, so near one another that I could barely tell where one ended and the next began.

I spilled over him again and again, trembling all over, clutching his cold shoulders like someone holding on to avoid falling 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 failing me.

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

***

I climbed down from the table 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 with fingers that still did not quite obey. And as I did, I felt the world gradually regain its usual shape, its boring weight, its ruthless logic.

The room once again felt empty and freezing, 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 whether I was deciding to resume my task, that labor 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 up the report in my usual steady hand, as if nothing had happened between the first line and the last. I placed the body in its refrigerated drawer and switched 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 inside me forever that dawn.

Sometimes, on the longest nights, when loneliness weighs more heavily than I can bear, I find myself staring at the empty table and wishing, against all reason, against everything I am, that death will make the mistake of coming back for me once more.