An Incident of the Mind (First Report)

I first caught the rumor incidentally on Monday, overhearing the hushed and hurried words of a few colleagues in an otherwise vacant meeting room. At first I was tempted to saunter in, asking loudly how their roleplaying was, well, playing itself out, but they betrayed no excitement. Frowns and vacant stares and the very finicky, if expected movements of people who knew something and wished that it was not knowledge at all, and instead merely a jest or playful run of the imagination.

Hearing only singular words of the conversation which did not impress upon me any particular direction, “deep”, “behind” and “white”, I kept mental note of the exchange and decided that, once I was done licking my fingers clean of the very sumptuous donuts I had eaten, I would investigate. And by investigate, of course, I mean to say that I would do absolutely nothing and utterly ignore the talk. I was not particularly thrilled to be in this dumpy little section of a firm, and the thought that these people were worried about anything more immediate than gas prices was both amusing and sad. I made many renditions of the talk in my head.

“Yeah, I am so worried. He put it deep in her behind, and he’s white.”
“I don’t know how deep we are, but if we’re behind anything farther, we’ll be in the white.”

And so on and so on, extrapolations that explored and combined the humorous and macabre, the dense and the dolorous. I rarely find myself without expression, but the boredom at this place was phenomenal. My old high-school drool contests were put to shame by eight hours of plodding, menial work that I was spending most of the day not doing. I would finish seven hours early and spend the rest of my day a zombie, shuffling idly, knocking over unsecured baubles on desks and brushing tactically against attractive women. It was a running gag of sorts, one that I had kept amusing and charming through new venues of attack, but in truth I did not particularly like these people and wondered if continual effort and exposure was making me into something of a sociopath.

But that was merely the fear from a long and tiresome day. I would nap, wake for dinner, and suddenly feel wonderful. I take care to sleep lightly and nap heavily – in addition to exciting dreams which I do not seem to remember during regular slumber, I feel more refreshed after a nap. Later I learned this to be a pitiless and horrible habit, but that is later.
The next few days involved, as my bored and wandering mind conjured in rhyme, the “spread of dread”. Day by day more and more would come in, puce sickles holding eyes in place, jittery and nervous and fully convinced that whatever troubled them in thought would soon trouble them in manifest. I made jokes and tried to figure out this oddity myself, and to no avail. Perhaps they thought I was in on it – no! – perhaps I was the horrible thing stalking their pudgy and insecure fears. This wonderful thought occupied the rest of the day and provided for good Godzilla impressions.

On Friday I arrived to find that I was without a job. I yawned. Was this the cause? We’ll be laid off? I had been laid off, fired, and an almost seasonal quitter for ten years running. This was nothing more than a step on the stairway of life. I told myself these things because I was too lazy to actually think about them, or I wasn’t and I was repressing some very important feelings. Regardless, I had never been particularly unhappy and so continued by finding another area of employment the next day, on the down-low as an assistant mortician. Cash only, and a good amount at that.

This job left a very curious tinge that required almost twenty minutes of showering for every body I had to deal with. Though the women I procured never seemed to notice, I was continually smelling this stench as if I had left a particularly odorous pair of jeans on a bed-side stand. It did not bother me and instead left me in a state of contemplation regarding psychological facets of the human mind and what, exactly, the mind is doing by making me think that the smell is still somewhere around, somewhere intimately and unnervingly close.

Most of the bodies were, as my very genial boss-person pointed out, ones he had already seen before in some fashion. He claimed to have seen every death, supposedly, on the percentage chart, all the way down to lightning strikes and shark bites. I nodded and did not inquire further, assuming (and rightly I think) that whatever compelled this man to keep this job for such a length was surely fulfilling some sort of fantasy that I wanted absolutely nothing of. He still gave a wry and eerie smile when gave his frequent recollections, a mannerism that struck me so keenly as to force me to interrupt him and ask him about whatever else could come to mind. At one point I believe I interrupted a gruesome tale of dismemberment and rot to ask about the composition of joints in action figures. He took it well enough.

A week into this job and the first curiosity arose – one of the coworkers from that rough-grain soul-rub of a job was suddenly before me, naked and twisted in a way that I had not seen before. I made the usual shrugs and waited for the senior comment. There was none to be had. He stared at the body, clinically, detachedly, no doubt referencing every fetish and remembered fornication to think of what this death came from. He looked at me, my expectant face, and smiled warily.
“It’s probably an electrocution.” I shrugged again, preferring to feign ignorance rather than inquire about his curious mood and the heavily disfigured body.
The next day he did not come in. I was head mortician, which was a very dubious task for someone who has categorically ignored education on the subject and knew only how to move bodies (the best tip I recall was not to drop them, or otherwise “slip things into them”. Thankfully I did not hear the rest of the old man’s words). Bodies came in and I did what seemed best at the time – cover them in a plastic sheet and wait for my good buddy to come by. Only two had slunked in by the time a competent replacement arrived, a younger woman who made no comment on my improvised command and took care of almost everything for the rest of the day.

She was there the next day as well, during which two of the office folk, a man and a woman, arrived in the same mangled manner. I would be inclined to call their figures “ghastly”, but I am not one to make judgment calls on pretzeled people, so I will instead say that they were very curiously proportioned. The man was shrunk in spots and his arms tied up around his head – the bones seem to have melted in place, and we were forced to cut a good number of them in order to get the body into a more acceptable resting form. The woman was literally fused together at her hands, the skin utterly smooth between the wall of bone that I had seen apart before, opening doorknobs and emoting stupidly. The rest of her body can only be described as backwards fetal, with the interior ligaments fine and without any appearance of violent change. The new and nameless mortician made no comment and would not answer questions regarding the subject. She was perfectly receptive to my come-ons (categorically denying them), however, which made me question the situation further.

But only for the extended period in which I was near her and compelled by context to think of it. As soon as I returned home it was out of sight and out of mind, another curious complexity in a world I had resigned to as being terribly ornate and less humorous than I preferred. Midway through a session with one of the better women I’ve had, the phone rang and the very commanding, feminine voice of the new head mortician bellowed in my ear. There was something to attend to. She needed help. I ushered the woman out as kindly as a could, saying only that “Someone died. I gotta do clean up.” This was technically correct and proved worthwhile for her imagination, and within three minutes my apartment was vacated and I was in the subway awaiting the 3 line.

I arrived to find a good deal of the office there. Some of them were even fused together. I didn’t want to say much, as I found it very entertaining. Instead of seeing this as a horrible mesh of mutilated flesh, a physical manifestation of hellspawn, I was instead amused by the idea of these personalities combining and trying to navigate the streets of New York. I thought it would be a wonderful low-brow sketch. I made a mental note to write the ideas down, but this was interrupted when another under-the-table worker asked me a question.

“Did you know these people?”
“Yep.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“I never said I liked them.” I smiled. He frowned. Did he think I kept a massive, magic arc-welder in the furnace room of my apartment complex? “I mean, they were good people, they were just kind of, I don’t know, not fun.”
“Hey man, don’t speak of the dead like that.”
“Why not?”
“It’s just not cool.” I imagined billboards with images of punkish fellows pissing on coffins, “It’s just not cool” pasted in bold above. Or maybe a supermarket ploy, free bites that look like coffins, but with needles inside, a curt and honest reminder of how this kind desecration was, well, “just not cool”. I calmly continued.
“If you say so. You know what happened to them?”
“Nah, man. I think the CSI is guna be here.”
“CSI?”
“Shit, how long have you been here? Crime scene investigation. You think some people just dove into eachother and came out like this?” He pointed at the curious corpses. I imagined this in my head and managed to repress a giggle. The nameless woman approached. She was wearing a badge. Suddenly I realized that this job just wasn’t for me anymore, that it was time to move to greener pastures or whatever the equivalent might be in an urban jungle. I must have revealed my immediate plans for egress.

“Hey, we need all the help we can get. We’ll take care of you later, but as you can see, there’s something happening. These aren’t the only cases, you know.” I nodded. With my usual verbosity I managed the only appropriate response, which I kept to myself. Fuck.

For the next hour I moved around bodies. The large multi-person mushed things were astonishingly heavy in addition to being cumbersome, sometimes taking three or four people to move. I never got to see inside or see a report or anything, though. The hour went by and a suited coterie, mostly men, ushered us out, the woman police officer included. I had no idea why she was there, no idea why I was still there, and promptly made for the nearest corner to escape whatever was going on. I’m a tall fellow but my haircut is not very unique and my slouch is very subtle: I was back in my apartment within half an hour, curious for once about what was happening at the morgue but more focused on what kind of job I would get the next day.
After a restless sleep in which I conceded to being at least somewhat concerned about the melded-body issue, I awoke to a phone call from the police woman. It was cellular so I wasn’t particularly concerned about her knowing my whereabouts, but she seemed unconcerned with that.

“You’re a… persistent fellow – want to know more about what’s going on?”
“First, if you’re going to say annoying, by all means, get it over with. Secondly, if it involves what I consider to be considerable risk, I’ll gladly ignore it. I’d rather just get away from this.”
“All you have to do is talk to a person.”
“… who’s in a security complex which I’ll sweet-talk my way through, while competing in a chessmatch over radio and spinning plates.” Always with the details.
“Oh come on, it’s not that bad.”
“Yes, it is. I can tell.” I tried to sound indignant. She replied in a much softer tone.
“Do you know what my favorite restaurant is?” I guess I was easy to read.
“… who do I need to talk to?”
“Just go out to the nearest corner from your apartment.” I cursed and hung up the phone.

She was waiting alongside a cab, her demeanor neither expectant nor rushed. She smiled when I got closer, and I blushed. I must admit, I am easily inclined toward such things. I took a seat with her in the cab and hoped for some details, but she merely applied makeup while I fidgeted. I was well aware that if she wasn’t going to tell me anything, I wasn’t going to have much luck on this farce of an expected date. In fact, I had made peace riding the elevator down, admitting that if I was going down there, it would be for the sake of resolving these peculiar incidents. A date with her was in all likelihood going to be a drain. Then I raised an eyebrow. Maybe she’ll pay for it. Suddenly I was back in business.

“So, wh-“ She lifted her hand and pressed her index finger firmly against my lips. In a rare form of better judgment, I opted against sucking on it.
“You’ll see.”

We pulled into a grungy little street, the litter ripe and the lights nodding off in broken intervals. It was very atmospheric. I was almost compelled to stop for a few moments but she dragged me along, her attire far outdoing mine and making me feel inadequate on several levels. I didn’t catch the name of the place, the inside was dull and almost foggy, and the menus betrayed nothing save overpriced sustenance. The only words uttered were in ordering the food. A man came by, seemingly from the restroom, and sat down at our table. I spoke first.

“Are you here to play some motherfucking Yahtzee? You had better damn well be.” Strangely, the police woman was not perturbed and the man merely went about his business unbuttoning his suit and pulling out a few scruffy pieces of paper. I looked down at the paper, disgusted.
“You’ve never played before, have you?” No response.
“Pathetic.” He looked up and raised an eyebrow as if to say, “I am very busy trying to take a shit in this chair, would you please, please take whatever else you have to say and kindly deliver it into a nozzle to which I am sure you can already guess. And not mine, preferably.” At least, that was my guess. Maybe he was just annoyed. That might’ve been it. She spoke without warning, and the man looked over at her.

“Thank you. I told you, he’s a bit off but absolutely brilliant.” He looked back at me.
“Kanga-fucking-roos.” He stood and promptly left. She giggled.
“You’re so easy. If you don’t have control, you get so annngrrryyy. I could tell when you were trying, poorly, to hit on me.”
“Excellent. What did you get?”
“Tickets to get out of here.”
“Out? Um, from what?”
“Look, I’m glad you could be of help, and maybe I’ll explain it later, but we need to leave. This is our ticket out.” I blinked a few times, then squinted for effect.
“Our ticket?”
“I thought you wanted to go on a date with me.”
“Look, I’m not denying the date, but seriously, what the hell?” She grinned. I was angry. I was tired of these grins and these little looks, like I was supposed to know about whatever the hell this was. Before I could ask, she got up from the table, and as soon as she took a step towards the door, I followed suit. She left nothing for the bill, probably knew that I wasn’t going to pay it, and acted as if it wasn’t going to matter anyway.

The off-service cab took us to a massive warehouse. We entered in on the side, immediately descending through a tunnel lined by chipped and twisted rock to what my mind kept calling a lair. In truth in was a massive underground storage space with a rail-line poking through it. We needed a ticket, apparently, for a super-secret rail-line that made no sense. None of this made sense. Did the woman actually like me, or what, exactly, was the reason for my being here? I’ll be honest – I’m not the most useful fellow on the planet, despite my attempts. I like making things sound overly dramatic, and I like to act as if continually detached. But this, this was finally thrumming in my head, each pulse of realization uttering my name like some siren in the deep of the earth.

She gently took my hand and we walked to the line. She then looked at her watch, breathed a sigh of relaxation, and said something that I did not hear. Almost immediately a train darted to us, sleek and looking a lot like a polished aluminum bullet or some retro-futuristic concept train. It had no marks. In we went, sitting down on lush leather recliners with ornate wooden desks and what appeared to be liquor at every one. When I finally mustered up the courage to speak to her in this empty passenger car, that would save us, that apparently needed tickets (and why wasn’t anyone else here?), she was asleep. I stood up instead and walked around the cars. Beautiful, and lush, and empty. Fresh magazines were lain upon the reclining chairs, their subtle stink rising above the false cherry scent about the place. Moving between cars was soundless and easy, the door mechanisms feeling light and smooth. There were no lights outside of the train, and only the very slightest sense that we were in transit. The interior lights were calm and colored like diluted puke.

I couldn’t reach any kind of conductor area, then made my way back only to find a similar doorless stretch of mahogany at the other end. I sat down, tossed the complimentary magazine aside, and tried to sleep or relax or just shut my eyes. I could not. My eyelids drooped but kept my eyes at half-moon, my state of trance for once being used in thought rather than utter boredom. I thought of useless things, of course, what sort of things might or might not be happening regarding this journey, and within an hour I was teetering on sleep, drifting in and out of ideas that would solidify in dreams then dissipate as I wiped the drool off my face and blinked.
This went on for a while, and I awoke as she was walking, halfway down the car, utterly placid. She looked at me without smiling, without doing anything really. I raised an eyebrow, still coming off the drowsiness and more than a little ambivalent about speaking. She walked up and sat down next to me, neatly placing her magazine on the desk in front of her. I leaned over, took the one I had tossed on the ground, and did the same. Looking at her and hoping for a response, I realized that something had changed. I spoke first.

“So?”
“So.”
“That’s not very helpful.”
“Nor are you.”
“It took you quite a while for that one, miss.”
“We thought you were someone else.”
“And who would I be mistaken for?”
“Don’t bother talking anymore.”

A dull blue glow appeared outside the windows. Outside was a fantastic and unbelievable sight, some sort of gimmick, I thought, made by someone with far too much time at the helm of this project. We were inside a glacier. An Antarctic glacier, I guessed. Skirting around one of the mountains that sit below the vast ice sheets. Where the hell had we gone? How fast were we moving? I cursed my nap and considered the three options: I slept for a long time, or, I was drugged, or, I still have a good sense of time and this train was exceeding the speed of sound by a very large margin. I was incredulous at my own suppositions.

“My explanation,” she said, “is not going to explain much. But you can still help, at least. Maybe you won’t turn.”
“Turn?”
“You seem a little to stubborn to have visited anything like that.”
“Anything like what? Seriously, give me something, anything. Where we’re going, when I get back, anything at all.”
“No. Do you think you’re worth it? I don’t.”

Her condescension got to me. I was frustrated to the point of anger, my admittedly useless life now in jeopardy by someone who refused to explain even the basics of the situation to me. I rotated my abdomen and punched her solidly in the throat, then pulled her to the ground and straddled her, my hands bound around her neck in a manner that was constricting but not immediately life-threatening.

“Look,” I said, my face appearing only calmly annoyed despite the sweat and blushed cheeks, “I think it’s within your best interest to tell me. I mean, the way it sounds, it wouldn’t matter if I killed you right here, you being a rather useless tease otherwise.” I felt terrible but I wanted some direction, so the façade stayed. She merely stared at me, tilting her head a little to the side as if a mosquito had landed somewhere on my face.
“How was your nap?”
“What?”
“The one that you probably thought only lasted a few hours. Oh, nevermind.”

I felt a little prick in my left calf and kicked away, but not before something went in. I was immediately disoriented. I tried to tighten my grip, and for a few seconds, who knows, maybe I succeeded. But her face began to slip and mesh, and every attempt at looking away from her made me so nauseated that I could barely move. I felt another prick, the sensation distant and telling, like the echo of a scream. I knew what was happening and sighed. I might’ve cursed. The world closed its doors and I was in a dark and dreamless sleep, one so heavy that by the time I awoke I felt as if only moments had passed.

It was my apartment, and nothing had changed. I grabbed at the sheets, and only after I realized that this was akin to grabbing grass in a tornado did I finally get myself and check. No sign of a prick anywhere along my left calf. I looked in the mirror. It was me, the same me, the same stubble and look of discontent and little puce sickles that cupped the eyes. The world outside clicked and whirred, hummed and bubbled, did all its paces in a terribly usual way. I paced and reviewed my memories, trying to find some sort of breach in reality where this could be passed off as an unusually vivid and coherent dream, and there were none. The kitchen table still had the cash I placed on it after working a solid day at the mortuary. I dressed, left the apartment with a dark and pensive look, and came to the first newsstand.

A year had gone by. I can’t tell you the thoughts that went through my head, the various pulses of anger and fear and confusion and intellectualization. My face did not change, however. I stared at it and read through the paper like I was going through my paces in a boring, unhappy fashion. Unlike the general insanity, the desperate filing through newspapers, I accepted this and found myself determined to continue existing, for it was all I could do.

Of course, not all things are a mystery, and my dazed and accepting state failed to recognize that this was a typo, that it was in truth the same year and the same day, in fact, that all of this seemed to have occurred. I realized this as I looked over another newspaper and asked to make sure it was the right date. He made a joke of some sort regarding the other newspaper, but I simply nodded and walked away.

There were certain facts that needed to be checked, and the first, really the only place was the mortuary. I walked in to find the old man having returned, expectant but calm. He spoke first.
“How you doing today?”
“Um, fine. Why were you gone that last week?” I took of my coat and grabbed at the rail on the side of one of the tables. It popped off rather easily. I held it kind of awkwardly and let him continue.
“Oh, that? I just felt a little strange is all.”
“Strange? What about the bodies?”
“I don’t know, and I don’t want to talk about it. You don’t either.” I rolled my eyes.
“Why the hell not? People I used to work with, fairly normal people for better or for worse, suddenly went paranoid and practically crazy. I switch jobs and they’re showing up looking like freshly-baked funnel cakes. Then you leave and this woman comes in, and shit just got stranger from there.”
He looked toward one of the tables. I heard the clack of instruments as soon as I turned, only to see the woman there. She walked up, very calm but much more lively than before.
“Hi.” Her tone was bright, every cheery. My reply was more than a little sour.
“Hi.”
“What’s wrong?”
“This is how you’re going to be like?”
“Be like what?” She smiled. I turned to the old man.
“What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done?”
“Well-“ I whirled around, the length of circular metal alloy gripped like a baseball bat, and hit the woman in the head. A thudding crunch told me that I probably had no need to swing again, but I did anyway. When I was done, the anger clear on my face, there was little left to call a head. I turned to the old man. His face had the hue of the corpses we handled.
“I assume you want no part in figuring this out?” His head wobbled very slightly, the only outcome of what was surely some epic mental battle between his id and superego. That, or he was simply aghast. I then realized that he was looking at the very recent corpse rather than me. I looked down and realized that her remains were not normal, not normal by any stretch of the imagination. Various tendrils, which looked much like images of parasitic infection that I had seen in high-school biology slides, were writhing uselessly amidst the remains of the skull. I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t hallucinating.
“You see those, yeah?” He nodded. “And you’ve never seen them before, yeah?”
“Well, those other bodies, when I… yes, that was when I first saw them.”

I pointed the length of rail I had in my end, one end covered in blood and tiny bits of viscera. For a moment I wanted to joke about this being the most horrible tampon to have ever existed, but I decided that the old man would consider the situation a little inappropriate for the jest. I conjured up every image I could think of with the woman, an imaginary childhood, the tragedies that led to her infuriating personality and bad case of worms, but I didn’t feel much different. Coldness? Desensitized? The sense of justification? I had always considered myself a humanitarian up to this point.

“Here’s what I want you to do, with all your expertise on this. Prepare the most incredible report you’ve ever made. Put her body in the deep freeze, so we can keep those things fresh. This needs to be put to paper, released, understood. Something is at play, but I don’t know what.” I told him what had happened while he was gone. He blinked a few times. I shrugged.

“Actually, um, well, if the worm thingies aren’t much different in those other corpses, I say we just dispose of her.” He was a timid fellow but I wanted to be on his positive side. I was prepared to implicate him as an accessory to murder in case he thought about flaking, or just outright killing him, before I realized that I was already more than dabbling into sociopathic insanity and probably needed a break to think things over. I helped it cleaning up and promised to return; I had to think of a plan. I was, in the words of old hard-case detectives, going to blow this thing wide open.

I was once again pacing around the very elaborate 24’x36’ box I called home. I will send off all the documentations and various tests done by others to whoever I could, but first, and foremost, I will post anything I could make onto the internet. I am returning right now – look for anything you can, on these parasites, on the Kings County Medical Center, on a no-longer existent woman by the name of Myla Jdaiest (pronounced Juh-die-esst), a curious entrance to a warehouse, anything relevant. Take what you find, and tell whoever you can. I’ll continue this when I get the chance.