Dead Inside

by Chandler Morrison

  Though, this cannibalism thing is certainly interesting.

  Her breasts are perfect; full and round, but not too large, with nipple placement that’s about as symmetrical as a guy could hope for. Her stomach is flat and toned, complemented by a butterfly navel piercing that clashes with the stern and professional demeanor I’d observed on the security feed, and it also brings to mind a potent memory that makes me feel kind of . . . I don’t know, nostalgic, I guess.

  There’s a tattoo on her hip of a flustered-looking rabbit holding a pocket watch in one hand, and a teacup in the other. My eyes crawl over her shapely legs, folded beneath her Indian-style, and I imagine them stiff with rigor. My cock twitches at the thought.

  She’s sitting on a white linen bed sheet, now smeared with bits of gore, her hands and mouth stained an ugly blackish-red. Drops of blood run down her chest, between her breasts. She holds the baby as one would hold an overly large hamburger. Its stomach is gnawed open, and its face has been chewed off.

  “Why are you naked,” I ask again, looking at her neatly-folded clothes on the floor, a few yards away. I can see the terror in her face, even small sparks of genuine fright in her eyes; she knows I could destroy her with this, that she’s been caught doing whatever the fuck this is. She’ll lose her job and her license, naturally, probably do some jail time, and forever be shunned by those around her.

  She opens her mouth, presumably to speak, but is only able to emit an unpleasant moaning noise, akin to a low-quality recording of a braying mule with the volume turned down. Her lips tremble. Her teeth are red.

  I look her over once again, taking in her nakedness and the half-devoured infant in her hands. “I’m not going to tell anyone,” I tell her. I try to make my voice sound reassuring, but my tone comes out as dull and lifeless as ever. “You don’t have anything to worry about. In that respect.”

  Regarding me with doleful, unblinking eyes, she licks her lips and runs her tongue over her meat-speckled teeth. There’s something sexy about it. I imagine striking her over the head with my flashlight, hard enough to induce instant death, and then engaging in a passionate kiss with her corpse, my own tongue lapping up the bits of flesh remaining in her mouth. Cannibalism really isn’t my thing, but there’s nothing wrong with getting a little kinky now and again.

  “This . . . this isn’t what it looks like,” Helen says, her eyes flicking from me to the dead baby.

  “I don’t know what else it could be,” I say, and then repeat, “I’m not going to tell anyone.”

  There’s a long pause. Our eyes are locked, but hers are so devoid of life that I have to wonder if she’s even seeing me.

  “I’m a messy eater,” she says, finally breaking eye contact and looking at the floor, like an ashamed child admitting she’s wet the bed. “That’s why I’m naked. I don’t want to get it on my clothes.”

  I nod slowly. “That makes sense,” I reply. “Is this a . . . regular thing for you.”

  There’s another uncomfortable silence before she says, “Not like this. Usually I . . . Jesus, I can’t be telling you this. I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe I’ve finally been caught.” She speaks softly, slowly, with a kind of unnaturally syncopated rhythm.

  I don’t say anything, just stand there with blank expectance, waiting for her to continue.

  She shudders, though I suspect it’s not from the cold. Sighing, she says, “This is the first time I’ve done it here. At the hospital, I mean. Usually, I break into abortion clinics at night. But this one . . . it’s the one from last night. The parents had no close relatives to arrange a burial, so it was just going to be incinerated.”

  “What happens when they notice it’s missing.”

  “There are three guys who work down here during the day, but they each have different shifts,” she explains. “They’ll all assume one of the others took care of it.” There’s a little less fear in her voice now, and her speech flows more freely; she’s confident in her method here. I am impressed.

  “Is it always babies.”

  “Yes,” she says gravely. “Only babies.”

  “Why.”

  “That’s how it’s always been. It’s all I want. It’s what I crave.”

  There’s something beautiful about those three sentences. Maybe it’s the way she says it—dreamy and distant, like she’s not speaking to me but to herself, lost in a moment of introspection. It’s as if she’s searching her own words for meaning or justification. From what I can see, though, based on my assessment of this strangely selective form of cannibalism, I don’t think there’s any need for justification. The meaning of it is irrelevant, in the same way the meaning of my aberrant fetish is irrelevant. We are who we are, just as anyone else is. How we got that way isn’t anyone’s business, least of all our own.

  She sets the half-eaten baby on the sheet and looks up at me. The emptiness in her eyes is tantalizing. “You’re awfully calm,” she says. “Your reaction to a naked woman eating a baby isn’t exactly—”

  “Normal.”

  “Yeah. Normal. Why aren’t you . . . freaking out?”

  I shrug. I’m starting to feel uncomfortable with the length of this conversation. This is why I avoid talking to people. Lighting a cigarette, I say, “I guess I’m not normal.”

  “What are you, then?”

  I let a rush of smoke out of my nostrils and stare at her though the gray haze. “Misplaced,” I say.

  “But aren’t you—”

  “You should get dressed,” I say. “Clean all this up. I have to . . . check the monitors.”

  I don’t really have to check the monitors.

  I can see her muscles tense up and her brow crease with fear. Her eyes remain the same. “Wait . . . just . . . do you swear you—”

  “I have to check the monitors,” I say again. When tears well up in her blank eyes, I say, “Listen, I swear. It’s fine.”

  “But I—”

  “Clean all this up. I have to go check the monitors.”

  ***

  She’s all I can think about on the drive home. Lying in bed, she’s still all I can think about.

  Cannibalism.

  Dead babies.

  Nakedness.

  How long has she been at the hospital? How long has this been going on? Why am I so fascinated by her? The deadness in her eyes, perhaps, or her bizarre idea of fun, maybe. Probably both. Definitely both. Shit, I’m not the only psycho at Preston Druse. Maybe there are more. Maybe everyone there is some sort of freak and I’m, gawd forbid, another commonplace cog in a system of which I never wanted any part. Maybe the system is a little different than I thought, and I really am nobody extraordinary.

  Nah.

  I think, with mounting certainty, that I have merely stumbled across another individual whose hobbies exist outside of societal norms. We’re the organic entities operating independently of the machine. The machine is the enemy. The machine is death. And not the good kind, either.

  All those gears and moving parts would just tear up my dick. No thanks, I want no part of it. I will be no part of it.

  And, apparently, neither will Helen Winchester.

  I want to know more about her.

  For the first time in my life, a living being has piqued my interest.

  ***

  I’m already getting up to open the security office door before Helen even knocks. I’ve been watching her again, studying her, trying to figure out how she could be so alluringly similar to me, whilst being so disappointingly different, so I knew when she was coming my way.

  As soon as the door is open, without bothering with a superfluous greeting, she asks, “Are you busy?”

  I raise my eyebrows. I don’t even know what that word means. “Swamped,” I say, though sarcasm has never been a strong suit of mine, so I’m not sure if she’s going to catch it.

  She does, apparently, because she brushes past me and collapses into the extra chair propped against the wall. I sit back down i
n my own seat and look at her, waiting for her to speak.

  “I’m extremely distressed,” she says, not meeting my gaze. “Before you . . . caught me, I was able to, more or less, suppress the disgust I have for myself, but now it’s all bubbling up to the surface.”

  This is all very disarming. Last night, I was just the guy who caught her naked in the morgue, eating a baby, and now it appears I’m someone she can talk to about the disgust she feels for herself. Maybe I struck her as a good listener.

  “I’m . . . sorry,” I say, thinking such a response would be the most human way to approach the conversation.

  “I had a dream last night,” she goes on, ignoring my halfhearted apology, probably because she recognizes it as exactly that. “About a toilet baby.”

  I blink. “A toilet baby,” I repeat. Now we’re talking about toilet babies. She hasn’t even bothered to formally introduce herself.

  “I walked into a stall on the second-floor restroom, and there it was,” she says, still not making eye contact. “There was some blood on the toilet seat, and a few drops on the floor, but the water was clear. The umbilical cord was wrapped around its neck, and its face was blue. Then, I got on my knees and I scooped it out of the toilet, and I started eating it. I didn’t hesitate. I devoured it. But then it started to taste funny—”

  Started to taste funny.

  “—and I looked down at my hands, and they were covered in shit. Then I spat, and this big wet glob of shit came out, so I ran to the mirror, and my whole face was covered in it . . . huge streaks of dark brown shit all over my lips and cheeks and running down my neck. I woke up screaming. I could taste it in my mouth—the shit, I mean. I puked all over my bed.”

  I nod slowly, but I can’t think of anything to say.

  “So?” she says, finally raising her eyes to lock with mine. “What do you think it means?”

  “I’m a security guard,” I tell her. “I don’t specialize in dream interpretation.” After a brief but purposeful pause, I say, “Listen, um . . . Dr. Winchester, I don’t even know you.”

  She takes a deep breath and sighs through her teeth. “Right,” she says, “I’m sorry. I’m just . . . I don’t know.” She drums her lacquer-nailed fingers on her thigh and then takes a brown pill bottle from her pocket, shaking five big white tablets onto her palm. I hand her my Diet Coke, and she tosses her head back and swallows them.

  “What are those,” I ask.

  She looks at me for a moment, and I can tell she’s considering whether or not she should lie. “Vicodin,” she says. “I get chronic migraines.” Then, almost as an afterthought, “They’re prescribed to me.”

  I believe they’re Vicodin, and she probably does get migraines, but the bottle had been plain and unmarked, without the traditional white label sticker. Furthermore, I don’t know much about drugs, but I don’t think any self-respecting doctor would prescribe five opiate pills of that size for a headache.

  It suddenly makes sense, though—her eyes. She’s stoned. Her eyes look glassy and dead because she’s getting high on pain medication.

  Substance abuse has never been my thing. Alcohol makes me dizzy and sick. The first, and only, time I got drunk resulted in a hangover so obscene that I have since stayed true to that morning’s solemnly-sworn Porcelain Pledge. I smoked pot once in high school, with a foreign exchange student from Uganda (whose English vocabulary was humorously limited to phrases he picked up on while binging on American internet porn), but it just made me feel nervous and jittery. It didn’t help that, every time he passed the joint to me, he would say things like, “Come on my titties”, or “Lick my asshole, you fuck”. I don’t think he knew what he was saying, but it nevertheless made an already uncomfortable experience even more awkward. Since then, I’ve seen no reason to give drugs another go.

  That being said, I find myself unbothered by Helen’s apparent addiction to pharmaceuticals. For one, it’s certainly more respectable than guzzling Bud Light out of a beer bong, or smoking joints on her lunch break—the latter being something I’m certain the day guard does quite frequently, judging from the security footage I found of him locking himself in storage rooms, and the lingering skunky smells I’ve noticed within them. I could report him, but that would require more fucks than I have to give.

  “I’m not a junkie, or anything like that,” Helen says, nervously fidgeting at her fingernails.

  “I know,” I say. Of course, I don’t know, but what does anyone really know, anyway.

  “I don’t want you to think I’m some sort of drug addict.”

  “Why do you care what I think.”

  She shrugs and looks down at her worrying hands. “I guess I just . . . you saw me. You saw me doing what I do, and you weren’t even fazed. You could have turned me in, but you didn’t. I think just about anyone else would have.”

  “I’m not seeing your point.”

  “I want to know why. I want to know what you want with me. Are you planning on blackmailing me?”

  “No.”

  She sighs again, a sound that, from her, is strangely erotic despite the fact that any form of respiration should be a complete turnoff to me. “Then what do you want?” she asks, her voice exasperated and pleading.

  “I don’t want anything. I just don’t think there’s anything wrong with what you do.”

  She takes off her glasses and folds them neatly in her lap, blinking her dead eyes at me with her head cocked and her lips pursed. “I eat dead babies,” she says. “What do you mean you don’t see anything wrong with it? If that’s true, you must have a really fucked-up sense of right and wrong.”

  “Hey,” I say, “I have sex with dead girls.”

  I immediately regret saying it, but after a few moments of silence passes between us, it begins to feel almost cathartic. I have now bound myself to this woman, the same way my knowledge of her secret binds her to me, and there’s something thrilling about the reckless danger of it all.

  She bites her lip, looking like she’s trying to figure out if I’m fucking with her or not. “Dead girls?” she asks. “You . . . have sex with them? As in, corpses?”

  She sounds intrigued instead of appalled, so I continue and say, “Yes, I fuck corpses. In the morgue. At least three or four times a month. Sometimes more.”

  She blinks at me as her lips quiver into a small, dopey smile. “That’s . . . remarkable.”

  I raise my eyebrows again. “I. Have. Sex. With. Dead girls.” I glance awkwardly at the security monitors as if there would actually be anything of note on them, and even if there was, I’m too distracted to be able to notice it. “What do you mean, ‘remarkable.’”

  Her smile widens. “I mean, it’s even stranger than what I do.”

  I blink at her, take off my glasses, and rub my eyes. “I wouldn’t go that far,” I say evenly. “You eat babies.”

  The smile vanishes from her face and her cheeks flush. “Yes, well, right. I wasn’t being judgmental. It’s ironic, is all. This whole thing. It’s all very . . . ironic.”

  “That’s a cute word for it.”

  “Do you have a better one?”

  “‘Coincidental’, maybe. That’s not really what ‘irony’ means. Plus, I think that Alanis Morissette song would have been a lot less popular if it had had references to cannibalism and necrophilia.”

  The corners of her mouth twitch into an almost-smirk. “You don’t strike me as the kind of person who listens to Alanis Morissette,” she says.

  “I’m not.”

  She tilts her head to the side a little and studies me. “What kind of person are you, then?”

  “I’m not any kind of person.” I consider this for a moment before amending, “I’m the kind of person who has sex with dead girls.”

  “I’d imagine that probably falls somewhere on the scale between ‘tortured emo artist’ and ‘heavy metal burnout’,” she says. Her eyes twinkle a little, which repulses me; I wish they’d stay dead-looking. She should take some more p
ills. “You probably listen to music like Hawthorne Heights and, I don’t know, As I Lay Dying, right?”

  “No,” I say with a grimace, and then, “Don’t try to psychoanalyze me.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  “Listen, you should go. I’m sorry you had a bad dream, and I’m sorry I can’t help you interpret it. Google it, or something.”

  She looks flustered by my brusqueness, but stands up and primly smooths out the creases in the front of her white coat. “All right,” she says with a curt nod, “I’m sorry to have disturbed you.” She starts to leave but stops and gestures to the book lying open on my desk, a weathered paperback copy of The Pleasures of the Damned. “If you like Bukowski, read some Will Self. Start with My Idea of Fun.”

  An unexpected plot twist—she reads, and apparently with good taste. She must notice something from my reaction, because she smiles. “If you like that one,” she says, “I’ll tell you where to go from there. You know where to find me.”

  And then she’s gone, with a fluid rapidity that calls into question whether she’d been there at all. Blink once, blink twice. Her absence carries more weight than did her presence. If this were a movie, I’d go after her. Real life isn’t as dramatic.

  Color me boring.

  And no, I really don’t listen to Hawthorne Heights.

  ***

  I can’t seem to get rid of her, nor can I seem to find myself appropriately troubled by this.

  She comes to my office every night. Sometimes, when she’s really high, she just sits there with her head lolling, watching me read. At first, it made me nervous. Now, I am unbothered, and I don’t know why.

  Usually, though, she’s coherent enough to talk to me, and I just listen, for the most part. She keeps telling me about her fucked-up dreams, about her constant car problems, about the lazy and incompetent nurses. Sometimes, I offer halfhearted input. I tell her to fire the nurses. I tell her to get a new car. She always shrugs and keeps on talking.