by Greg Herren
After Faye had photographed the little lizard boy, she had driven back to Fresno, heading to the morgue to photograph the bodies of children waiting for autopsy. According to the coroner, seven children between the ages of two and eleven lay on trays in the morgue, all allegedly dead from the cancers caused by the pesticides. Their bodies could not be released to the families until the investigation was over. And that could take weeks.
It was late—after nine p.m.—when Faye arrived at the morgue. The coroner had agreed to meet Faye at nine, and as she grabbed her bag and cameras out of the car, she was suddenly aware that it was nearly fully dark and that the parking lot was empty of all but a handful of cars. Faye wasn’t one for foreboding, but she didn’t want to stay. She didn’t like this place, and she hadn’t even gone inside.
There was no security at the door and Faye just walked through, following the black signs with arrows sending her in the proper direction. It wasn’t a large building and the heat of the day hung in the halls. Faye had been so aware of the heat on this trip. The blazing sun, the lack of shade anywhere due to the omnipresent fields of this or that crop. Fresno was a small city and towns around it were hamlets with nothing but convenience shops and beer outlets and dollar stores here and there. The poverty was like the heat—oppressive and endless, rolling over everything.
The morgue building was the hottest place Faye had been that day. Hotter even than the little house with the corpse in the dining room. As hot as the dusty yard where the boy with no arms or legs had slithered in the dirt. She had hoped for the chill of institutional air-conditioning, but there appeared to be none. She felt like heaving.
The building smelled like most morgues Faye had been in—a heavy layer of formaldehyde covered everything, but underneath you could still smell the semi-sweet acid stink of rotting bodies. She knew that smell. Decomposition. It had been with her since childhood. Since the mice at the door of her grandparents’ basement. Since the basement itself, that one time she had gone down and found all those things, right before she’d been sent off to St. Cecelia’s for school.
As Faye got closer to the autopsy room, she began to gag. The rotting smell had overtaken everything. She wasn’t sure she could stay. She couldn’t imagine how anyone could work here.
The double doors in front of her opened, and a middle-aged man with graying hair and glasses greeted her. Classical music—Brahms, perhaps—played at a moderate volume, though not loudly enough to drown out the sound of the refrigeration unit that banked almost the entire wall across from where Faye and the coroner stood.
The room was that institutional yellow—the color of a faded manilla envelope, meant at some point to be cheery, no doubt, but in the glare of the fluorescent lights, with the black squares of night-dark windows set up above the sight-line, it just looked raw and ugly.
It was a surprisingly large room, yet still only a third of the size of the morgue in New York, but then there would be fewer bodies here. A scale like you’d see at the produce market hung from the ceiling in the corner next to a blue-cushioned examining table of the sort in doctor’s offices. Faye wondered what live person was being examined here. On the white paper sheet sat an open book and a cup of coffee. Perhaps it was for the living after all.
The other wall held an array of sinks and cabinets, and in one there were jars like the ones that had been at St. Cecelia’s, only these held organs that she recognized right away. Organs for dissection. Organs to explain what should be inside each body splayed open in the Y-shaped wound that exposed it all. Organs that held nothing but knowledge—no hidden message, like those jars at St. Cecelia’s.
The coroner introduced himself and led Faye to the opposite corner where there stood a series of stainless steel tables with sheets covering what lay beneath. Flies buzzed in the room and occasionally sizzled in the blue light of the bug zapper that hung in a far corner. Too far away from the bodies, Faye thought.
It was time to start taking pictures. She started to put down her bag when the coroner grabbed her arm and shook his head violently. “Don’t do that!” he exclaimed, grabbing her bag before it touched the floor. Faye looked at him quizzically and he pointed down at the floor. As she looked, the floor, a dull yellow-gray linoleum, appear to move. Everywhere there were maggots—so many, that Faye wondered how she hadn’t heard the squish as she stepped on them, walking through the room. The music and the refrigeration unit had drowned out the sound, but now as she stepped back, involuntarily, she heard it, and it made her feel nauseous.
The coroner led her outside the double doors to a bank of chairs eerily reminiscent of those outside Mother Superior’s office. He took her bag and placed it on one of the chairs. He explained that the excessive June heat had caused a worse outbreak than usual of maggots.
“I had to leak the story to the news,” he told her. “They’re everywhere. They’re in the walls, inside the tiles on the ceiling. It’s better now, at night, but during the day they drop on us from up there while we’re working. They’re infesting new bodies, there’s so many larvae. It’s interfering with autopsies, time of death, that kind of thing. We don’t know whose maggots are whose.”
Faye had turned to look at him and saw a small white worm inching across the collar of his lab coat. She reached out and flicked it off with her finger without thinking.
“There’s probably more inside,” he said, his face unsmiling. “I don’t even look anymore because I feel them crawling on me all the time, whether they’re there or not. Should we go back in? I think you should leave your bag here.”
Faye stood, took out the camera she wanted, and zipped the bag closed. She checked it for maggots. Nothing. They went back in through the double doors. She began taking pictures of the floor, then the far wall, which was alive with maggots. She looked up, but couldn’t see any on the ceiling. “They tend to withdraw at night,” the coroner told her. “I never see them on the ceiling then—just on the floor and the walls.”
They went back over to the tables and he drew the sheets back as Faye took shot after shot.
Every small body was crawling with maggots. On the smallest, a girl of twenty-eight months who had died of neuroblastoma, maggots crawled in the incision in her skull and all along the Y-shaped cut in her chest. Faye could tell they were eating the flesh because the areas near the stitching were raw and macerated and pulling away from the thread, showing bits of bone beneath.
A little boy of about five had maggots coming out from under his eyelids and, as Faye photographed him, maggots crawled out of his nostrils. The coroner stifled a sound and Faye turned to look at him. He told her, “It wasn’t this bad earlier. They start with the softest flesh, the maggots do. So the eyes and the mucosa go first.”
Faye turned back to the tables. The oldest child, an eleven-year-old girl who had died of kidney cancer, was the only one of the children with hair. Maggots crawled along the black ringlets and came out from inside her mouth. The coroner moved to pull the sheet down further, but Faye stopped him. “We know what’s happening down there, I think,” she said, and continued to take shot after shot of the children on the remaining tables.
The coroner re-covered each body, then took Faye over to the corner of the room, where a cabinet filled with more jars stood.
“These are the organs of the victims,” he told her, as he opened the cabinet. “We had to preserve these to keep the maggots away. We’ll need them if there’s a lawsuit, and I’m sure there will be. But you can see the effects of the cancers. These are the organs of old people, not children. These are monstrous. It shouldn’t be like this here—” and he had waved his arm out toward the tables with the sheets. Faye saw a maggot moving along his belt, under his white lab coat when he raised his arm.
Faye had stopped shooting for a moment when he had said that—monstrous—and had looked at him for a second before she resumed photographing the oddly shaped and discolored organs in the jars. Monstrous.
When she was finished, Faye th
anked him for his time, and for showing her the organs as well as the bodies. She added, as a courtesy, that she hoped an exterminator could kill the maggots.
“You know what we say here,” he told her as she was leaving, “the worms crawl in, but they don’t crawl out.” Faye thought of the childhood rhyme. She couldn’t smile, though. She just needed to leave.
She said good-bye and strode to the car. In the bushes next to where she’d parked, she vomited several times. She stomped her feet on the ground to loosen any maggots that might have traveled onto her shoes or the cuff of her pants, then wiped her feet hard on the grass, getting as much of the squashed maggots off as she could.
6.
As she worked on the story, there were more children—dead and alive—one almost dead. Too many. In the end, Faye put together a disturbing tale told in a montage of photographs about more than twenty sick, maimed, and dead children. She had juxtaposed them with the beautiful flowers, lush fruits, and pristine bolls of cotton that were the other side of the pesticides. She had a jar with maggots in the center, the white worms crawling over the side, moving toward the food and flowers. Perfection always came at a cost, she wrote in her copy. Because there is always collateral damage in any war and this one, the war on bugs and fungi, was killing kids.
Faye had spent nearly five weeks on that story. After it was complete—or as complete as it could be, since it was a story with no ending—Faye had driven up to San Francisco before she flew back to New York. She needed to get away from those lush but deadly fields and from the oppressive heat.
Her editor had told her to take a week, “Get some R and R, you need it after this. A tough one, I know.”
But he hadn’t known. He’d had no idea.
7.
It was night and the house was quiet when Faye left her bed and went downstairs to the darkroom. She had a little flashlight that she kept under her pillow so she could read under the covers after she was supposed to be asleep. She almost never fell asleep without reading. And she often woke from bad dreams, dreams about her parents’ accident, dreams in which her grandfather’s photographs were moving on the thin clothesline, dreams in which the clothesline itself was drenched in blood and the black fan was on fire and the darkroom filled with smoke the way she imagined her parents’ car had done when it crashed, down near the river on New Year’s Eve, and then caught fire. Faye would try to scream in the dreams, but no sound would come out.
Faye opened the door and turned on the red light. Photos hung from every part of the clothesline. She knew they were dry because the little fan was going and it had been hours since her grandfather had been in there while she did her homework at the kitchen table and he had done all the work alone, without her, and her grandmother had been down the street, at church, playing bingo.
Faye went over to the photos and shined her flashlight on them, one by one. The photos were all black and white—her grandfather hadn’t gotten to the color part yet. But as she looked at them, she wasn’t sure if or how he would color them.
The first photo was of a woman with half a face. It was what Faye’s grandfather called a portrait shot: Just the woman’s head and shoulders. Or part of her head. It wasn’t the kind of half-face Faye saw when she looked over her grandfather’s shoulder as he brought the magnifying glass up to the still-wet photos, or the bits and pieces she saw when the paper was beginning to become a picture in the tray of developer. In this photo the woman only had half her face. Her forehead and eyes were normal—smooth and with sleek eyebrows and eyes that looked like they might be blue or maybe green, like Faye’s were. The lashes were long. Her hair wasn’t light, but wasn’t dark, either. Faye thought it was probably light brown or maybe a darker red color.
The rest of her face wasn’t face anymore. There was a big hole where her nose should have been and then her teeth were half there and half missing, like when you saw a skeleton in a book. Around where her mouth should have been was a lot of muscle-y flesh. It looked raw and open, like it had just been sliced, like meat. It looked like the lamb’s heads that hung in the Italian Market at Easter when they went down to get the roast. If the photo hadn’t been black and white, it would have been red like that meat, Faye was sure, but there was no blood, just the raw, wounded, cut-open parts.
The next photo was the same woman, but this time her eyes were closed and Faye could see that there were cuts over her eyes on the eyelids and there were streaks there, like blood, and the one socket looked hollow underneath, like her eyes had come out, too, like the bottom of her face was gone. The other eye socket looked squishy somehow, like the eye had been rubbed out and little bits of it had pushed out and been left on the eyelashes, which looked thick and matted on that side.
The photograph after that was different—the eyes were also closed and flat and in this one both had been squeezed out and there were more pieces littering the eyelashes. The flesh of the face was all there in this one, but the mouth was open, wide, like the woman had been singing, or maybe screaming. And the tongue was out, but in pieces, like a snake tongue—cut down the middle so that it went in two different directions.
The next few photos were of different women, all with their eyes closed and all with cuts on their faces and pieces taken off—a nose, lips, a section of cheek. One had slices all up and down the face with sections of flesh taken out, kind of like bread from a loaf. All the faces looked raw and meaty, like the first woman, but there wasn’t blood running in the photos. It just all looked dark, like when Faye would open the white pots of paint and it looked like thick blood in the pot.
Faye didn’t know why these faces were like this, and they scared her, but she couldn’t stop looking at them.
The last six photos were of more women. The first one had her eyes open and her mouth was open, too, like she was surprised. She was standing outside somewhere—on a street, but not really near anything. There weren’t any stores around, just a big long brick wall with writing on it that didn’t say anything and then the sidewalk and it looked like it was night, but it was really bright where she was standing.
The woman was wearing a really tight dress and had her hair up on her head and she had big white earrings on and really high heels and a little funny short jacket. She looked frightened and she was half-turned, like she was going to run away.
In the next photo, it was the same woman, but in this one she was against the brick wall and she looked like she was crying. She had her hand up to her face the way people in movies sometimes do, with the back of her hand against her mouth and her palm out toward the camera, like the way women scream sometimes. This picture was more of a head shot, but you could see down to her breasts. In this picture you could see her dress was torn a little in the front and one of her earrings was gone, and her ear looked bloody where the earring should have been. It looked like it had a little rip in it, like the skin was torn.
In the next photo, the woman had a big cut on her face, like some of the other women, and her one eye was closed and looked darker than the other one. She wasn’t on the street anymore, but was in a room somewhere, and she was sitting on a small bed. She was still wearing the short dress, but there was a rope tied around her ankles and her hands were in her lap and she had rope around her wrists. She was sitting really still and her mouth was closed because there was something tied over it and there was also a big cut on the front of her dress where her left breast was. It was dark in the spot there—her dress was a light color—and it was flat, not like the other side. There was something round and dark on the bed next to her. It looked like it might be her breast, just there on the bed, instead of on her chest.
Now the photographs really scared Faye and she wanted to stop looking at them. They were like pictures out of a scary movie and she wasn’t usually allowed to watch those, because she had the bad dreams and her grandmother said they reminded her of the trauma, but she wasn’t exactly sure what the trauma was, just that it had something to do with her parents dying and h
er coming to live with her grandparents in the little house with the darkroom and the sign out front about the photographs.
Faye didn’t want to see the other pictures, and she thought she should go back upstairs to bed, but now it was like she was reading a story and she wanted to know how it ended. But after she had looked at all of them, after she saw everything that was there, and all the bits and pieces and all the dark spots and all the things that were lined up on the bed like when you fold the laundry and put it away in your drawers only this wasn’t anything like laundry, Faye wished she hadn’t looked. She felt funny—scared and sick and like she might throw up. She went to the door and turned out the red light. She closed the door behind her and turned off her little flashlight. She went into the kitchen in the dark and got a glass of water. She drank all of it and it sloshed around in her stomach and she thought she was going to throw up. She stood over the sink and made a little choking sound, but she didn’t vomit.
When she turned to go back upstairs to bed, she saw her grandfather standing in the doorway, in the dark. She stopped and stood still and waited.
“It feels that way at first,” he said, his voice soft and low, because it was night and dark and Faye’s grandmother was sleeping. “Sickening. But then it feels different. So different. And when you sit here”—and he pointed to the kitchen table—“when you start the painting, it seems good. It seems really good. And you feel proud of the work you are doing. Because it is, you know, art. And art is always beautiful and important, no matter what the subject. No matter—” He stopped speaking for a moment and stared at her, then he said, “One day you’ll understand, even if you don’t right now.”
