Diane Klein

Description

I’m just a writer. But, many years ago, when I became discouraged and gave up teaching in the Chicago Public Schools, I thought maybe I could be a doctor or a cop and do someone some good. I hadn’t been able to do much of that as a teacher, despite how much I had liked working with the kids. But, after I started a microbiology class at a junior college, a professor who was not too much older than I was, told me when I could go to the bathroom. I promptly decided that I wasn’t going to make it through all that additional schooling after all, and I dropped the class and applied to the Chicago Police Department. I was called in for an initial exam and I passed it. But, by the time they got around to notifying me that they wanted me to come in for the next step, I had already left Chicago for my next adventures, and the idea of becoming a cop disappeared from my plans. Good thing, too, I thought that afternoon, when I found myself standing in a morgue next to a table bearing a forty-three year old homicide victim. I found myself looking into the blank, staring eyes of a body that was void of any life force. The body was caked with dried streams of blood from a multitude of stab wounds to the chest, but that was the easy part. The man’s face still bore the kitchen knife that his enraged lover had plunged into him just above his cheekbone. They were not going to remove it or wash the blood until the autopsy. And, this was being delayed while it was determined if the victim, whose body parts they had to remove, examine and weigh, was HIV positive or not. It turned out that he was HIV positive. There was no autopsy done on that body. Then I was shown a refrigerated room for preserving these inanimate pieces of meat on metal rolling tables, in body bags or under white sheets, sometimes for days or even as long as months. The smell wasn’t too bad, mostly chemical rather than the stench of gases that I learned is released by opening up decaying flesh. It was a holiday, Memorial Day, and no autopsies were being performed until the next day. We were there for over an hour, and I was surprised that I didn’t have more of a reaction to the sights I had just seen. But they were so completely out of the realm of my usual observations, and they were so violent and final, that I felt almost numb to alarm or discomfort. That is, until about a half an hour later, when Detective Morris dropped me off at my hotel. As I walked down the hallway to my room, I was shaking somewhere deep inside my own body. Jangled, I told Nick later. I felt so damn jangled. My insides were trembling while my outside appeared still and calm. In my mind, I can still see the blood encrusted face of that man, his eyes open, but, unseeing, with the white plastic handle of a large kitchen knife jutting out from just under his right eye. There were streaks of blackened dried blood, like streams of dark tears down his cheeks. And, his face seemed to be turned towards me in a frozen mask of death.

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