Empties

by George Zebrowski

  Benek lowered himself into the wooden chair. It creaked under him.

  The coroner asked, “How long have you been with homicide?”

  “Three years.”

  “And before?”

  “I was a sergeant.”

  “Married?”

  “No.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  Benek didn’t answer. He had always been suspicious of the game between the sexes, whatever that meant. Men were the predators, sex an invasive physical act, pleasure the reward for the mere attempt to reproduce, with no guarantees. About as much fun as picking flowers. The players had no choice about playing the game, whose rewards shone in the short term, and the difficulties were revealed when it was too late to back out. Good looks made men and women mad and stupid, ill with each other, as Aristotle put it, and to see through the game left you with nothing to see in your wise unhappiness.

  “If you were married, or had a girlfriend, you wouldn’t worry about things like this. You’d do your job and go home, eat, and get laid. Must have taken you at least half an hour to get down here. Think of the crooks you might have stopped in that time.”

  “I’m on my lunch hour,” Benek said, then leaned forward and asked, “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”

  The coroner sighed even more impatiently and replied, “No, I haven’t, ever—but so what? Have you?”

  “Then how was the skull emptied without being opened?”

  “You don’t read very well,” the coroner said with a wave of his hand. “I didn’t say it wasn’t opened.”

  Benek sat back. The wooden chair creaked now as if it were going to break. The man was obviously a fan of fine, oracular distinctions. “You didn’t say anything,” Benek said. “Or rather, you didn’t write anything down about it.”

  The coroner gazed at him sternly. “The brain could have been sucked out through the nostrils, like raw eggs through a small hole in the shell. The ancient Egyptians had a way of doing it as part of

  their embalming process. It’s nothing new.”

  “But was there any sign of that kind of... emptying?”

  “No.”

  “So what do you conclude?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “The procedure might not have left marks. A fluid might have been injected into the head to ease the extraction. Or they might have used another method entirely.”

  “Did you test for foreign fluids?” Benek demanded.

  “I won’t waste city money on a hoax. It wasn’t a homicide. No signs of violence anywhere on the body. Can’t tell what actually killed him, before the brain was removed.”

  “But it doesn’t make sense,” Benek said. “Was it a murder?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then what?”

  “You have my sympathy for being so curious,” the coroner replied, “but don’t ask me to speculate. How it was done would probably turn out to be foolishly obvious. I have no idea and I don’t care. And you shouldn’t care. For all I know, you’re pulling a gag on me and plan to sell the story to some junky rag to supplement your pay.”

  Benek smiled at him. “Now you don’t really think I would be doing that?”

  The coroner glanced at him. “No, I suppose not. But you seem ready to suppose much too much.”

  “Did you examine the body yourself?” Benek asked.

  “Briefly. Johansen and his assistant did the actual autopsy.”

  “Were they surprised?”

  The coroner shrugged. “I really don’t know.” He sat back and looked bored. “Each case barely gets the attention it seems to deserve and no more. We’re too busy to look beyond what it seems to be unless it reaches out and bites us.”

  “And this has no... bite?”

  “None.”

  Benek said, “I want to see the findings for myself.”

  “Some coffee?” the coroner asked, taking out a fat thermos from his desk drawer. “Maybe it’ll make you less persistent. Funny, you don’t seem the overly nervous type.”

  “No.” Benek stared as the man poured, not knowing what else to say. “They dragged me out too early when they found the body. Made me feel I owed him something.”

  “Okay, Detective,” the coroner said after taking a sip. “Because you’re a fine human being we’ll go look at the stiff together, and I’ll bet you a closer look will show us how it was done. The skull was probably opened and crazy-glued back shut. Don’t laugh. I once did that with a deep flesh cut on my thumb. Worked fine, with no stitches to remove. Went to a dress-up dinner without even a Band-Aid.” He shook his head and took another sip. “I’ll grant you, who would have expected an empty skull?” He smiled. “What about fingerprints?”

  “Not on file,” Benek said.

  “And no one’s missing a body?”

  “Not yet. We’re checking addresses and phone numbers from his clothes.”

  The coroner emptied his cup. “Has to be med students, so you’ll never find out the details. File the paperwork and forget it is my best advice.”

  Benek felt foolish. “You’re probably right.”

  The coroner put away his thermos and smiled again, then put his hand out across the desk. “I’m Frank Gibney.”

  Benek reached out and said, “William Benek.”

  “Is it Bill?”

  “Sure, why not.” There hadn’t been anyone around for a long time who wanted to use his first name. His co-workers were not the kind of people who would call anyone William, and he had never encouraged the use of his nickname, so everyone just used his last name.

  Gibney stood up to his less than average height. “Let’s go look before we eat lunch. Better to risk killing your appetite now instead of losing your lunch later.”

  “I’m not... overly squeamish.” Benek got up, retrieved the autopsy file from the desk, and followed the coroner out the door and down the long, green-tiled hallway to cold storage.

  “You know,” Gibney said as he fell back and walked next to him, “you’re a pretty good dresser compared to the dicks out your way,” and Benek remembered how his mother had always yelled at him to be neat. “Even got a tie.”

  “My dead mother’s idea,” Benek said, wondering at his admission to a vague credential.

  Gibney turned left through an open door into a small room and stopped before a desk. “There should be an attendant here,” he said.

  “What’s the file say?”

  Benek looked inside hastily. “Drawer 104.”

  Gibney went past the desk and pushed through a swinging door. Benek followed him into a large, brightly lit room, and they crossed the white floor tiles to the far wall. Gibney located 104 at waist level, and pulled it out. “Ready?” he asked without looking up at Benek.

  “Go ahead,” Benek said, and Gibney unzipped the bag. The head was taped shut. Slowly, Gibney removed the adhesive strip

  and lifted the cutaway portion of the skull. Benek, feeling slightly queasy, peered into the bloody hollow, then flipped through the autopsy report.

  “What now?” Gibney asked.

  Benek found the notation. “Says here the skull was filled with blood when opened.”

  Gibney scowled and looked surprised. “I didn’t record every detail myself.” He took the report and checked the entry. “That just can’t be. A medical cadaver’s head just wouldn’t be filled with blood. It had to have been pumped in later—but why, even for a gag?”

  “Maybe to confuse us,” Benek said.

  Gibney nodded. “Bet you it was watered blood, maybe even red dye. I’ll check our samples. If it’s blood I’ll bet you there’s two types. That would indicate it’s part of some gag.” Then he shook his head. “Still a waste of time, ours and their effort. File the paperwork and get back to cases you can solve. It’s just plain stupid to chase after something like this. All you’ll find is a lot of ingenuity. No crime has been committed.”

  “Then you rule out murder?”r />
  “Murder! There’s not one sign that he was anything but dead from natural causes, long before someone sat him down on that bench.”

  “But you can’t say when he died.”

  “No,” Gibney said, “but that’s not strange with a body that’s been on ice for a while, and brainless. I don’t know. It’s the damnedest thing. All I can say is that the evidence of what killed this man, or how long he’s been dead, is too old to trust, so unless we find out who he was, we’ll just never know. And, as I said, what we would find out, if we could and did, wouldn’t be worth the work. You’d have better luck staking out bicycle thieves.”

  “That’s been done, successfully, on occasion.”

  “Yeah, and my dog almost said a recognizable word to me, once, a long time ago.”

  As Benek watched Gibney zip up the bag and slide the drawer shut, it occurred to him that the hoax might easily have been set up right here, with Gibney in on it all the way, including everything he had just said.

  “I know, I know,” Gibney said, “but I assure you we had nothing to do with this. Consider for a moment that maybe our autopsy destroyed the signs of a previous brain removal. Johansen had not been instructed to be especially careful about the signs, after all. There was nothing exceptional about the body.”

  “Sounds plausible,” Benek said as they left the area. “Then why was an autopsy done at all?”

  “Johansen’s new at it. He needed the practice.”

  “That’s all?” Benek asked.

  “That’s it,” Gibney said. “We should have left well enough alone.”

  “Lucky we didn’t,” Benek said.

  “You like to be confused?”

  Benek told himself that finding questions that were not easily answered was good practice.

  In the hallway Gibney said, “When you think of all the human dead, with so many standing behind all of us alive today, you’d think that one of them might have risen from the dead, come back as... a statistical fluctuation of some kind and told us what it was all about.” He smiled. “Have some coffee before you leave?”

  “No, thanks,” Benek said.

  “I’ll check the blood type,” Gibney said. “Bet you it’s two different types.”

  Benek wanted to say that different types would make it too easy, too good to be true, and found himself wishing for the impossible to invade his life.

  3

  Gibney had to be right, Benek told himself at week’s end. The brainless body was a hoax, whose careful method had left no easy evidence. It turned out that there was only one type of blood in the body. Gibney had expected red dye.

  There was no way to continue the investigation. Brainless, it was difficult to judge time of death accurately. The corpse might have been in cold storage a long time in preparation for the prank.

  Gibney had continued to be convincingly skeptical rather than irritated, despite losing his bet on the blood types and red dye, as he leaned forward over his old brown wooden desk, which he claimed to have liberated from the South Bronx High School, where he had once been a student before they tore down the building. Sentimental even when he did not seem to be. “You know, son,” he had said, “it troubles me that you want to pursue this case. Are you in so bad with your captain that you need to solve it? You won’t, you know.”

  “I’m not exactly the star of the precinct,” Benek had said, feeling slightly sorry for himself.

  “Do you screw up much?”

  “No, just a lot of unsolved cases,” Benek said, and wondered why he would tell Gibney anything about himself. He didn’t have to and didn’t much want to, but it was a pleasant change to have someone ask about him. “Not more than most, but I guess I just don’t seem to fit in,” he continued. “I’m the only detective who dresses up, for one thing. The others wear casual clothes and make jokes about my neatness.”

  “I’ve noticed. Why do you dress up?” Gibney had asked, smiling. “I mean that you dress well, of course.”

  “I guess it makes me feel in control of myself,” Benek had said, wanting to tell him.

  Gibney had given him a sharp-eyed look. “Control is good, but it costs you in tension, and you enjoy that much less of life. Gives you an unconscious belief that you can control pretty much everything in the way of accidents and the unexpected. It unnerves you when you’re proven wrong even once. What do you like to do? Got any hobbies?”

  Benek had not answered. He’d never had enough leisure to find out what he might like to do. Besides, there was no such thing as free time; every bit of it cost something.

  Gibney’s manner, more than his personal questions, had made him think. Nothing immediate depended on answering them. He had learned to set his personal feelings aside long ago, since they never seemed to interfere with anything practical in his job. The case was much more irritating than his errant emotional weather, however dead-end the case seemed to be.

  Who would set up such an elaborate hoax? There had been no mocking letters or phone calls bragging about it. The hospitals had not reported any missing cadavers. It made no sense except as a stunt that had gone wrong in some way.

  But how would it have gone right? What was there to have succeeded?

  Exactly as it did was the only answer.

  But who was satisfied? The point seemed to be to have it on the police record, that it had been done, and then years later maybe write something about it, citing records that would take it out of the realm of an urban myth. Maybe it was not a hoax, but something left over from some other action, perhaps abandoned.

  The case nagged at him, even pushing aside the uneasiness and doubt that had been creeping into him lately, as he sank deeper into himself, encountering odd bits and pieces of someone unknown to him, a person he might not be able to keep under control.

  A long time ago he had accepted the way it was with him, and the way it would always be—orderly. He filled his days with work, went home, ate, watched television, and got a good night’s sleep. He went to the movies whenever possible, well aware that it was to keep from thinking too much about himself. The big screen freed him, but work was still the best escape. Without his routines, he might stumble and fall into inherited depths and never climb out.

  He rarely listened this closely to his differing self. He was afraid of what lurked there and in other peoples’ disapproval, in their waiting hatred, whose power to hurt was endless. He had seen it in his father. Never a kind word, never a hint of approval, as if the son had stolen something from the father. And Benek had discovered early that the stolen power was self-control. Some people called it restraint, or even good manners. How quaint it sounded. He still had it and his father had none. He had a future; his father had only had the past, but remembered having a future and losing it and not being able to get it back, and had come to hate himself when the road had run out ahead of him.

  So Benek had resolved to practice self-control in his appearance, in his schoolwork, even in the way he had handled his father—by letting the old man wear himself out, never arguing with him; and the drunkard had resented it, as if his son might have lent him some self-control but was holding it back. He had tried to protect his mother, by staying close whenever his father was near her and conscious.

  “A woman can drive you mad,” his father had said, “by keeping you from doing what you have to do to... to get away. You have to do that, you know. She wants you to be in control of yourself all the time, to see everything, to keep the world from getting close. She wants you to be her idea of you, all the time. But that’s more than anyone can do.”

  “But do you have to be drunk all the time?”

  “It’s the only way to go far away, to have a respite.”

  “But where does it take you?”

  “Far, far into yourself, where you can’t be judged.”

  “You don’t make any sense.”

  “I know exactly what I mean. Women want to change what can’t be changed. Once you start doing what they want, they�
��re your private police. You’re never your own again. You’re being remade. They’re remaking you whenever their eyes catch you. And when you fail to become what they want to make of you because you can’t help but resist, as you always do, they make you suffer. You’re never yourself again, or what they wanted you to be. They own something that’s in between, what’s left of you. You’re just... leftovers!”

  “But it’s not fair to Mom.”

  “She had years of fair. There’s no more left to get out of me. She got you out of me, and that quieted her needs.”

  “Didn’t you need me, Pop?”

  “No. And she didn’t, either. She just needed something to be born out of her, by anyone at all!”

  “I don’t know what you’re saying.” There had been no point in trying to understand his complaints, except that he felt them, true or false. Mostly false.

  Benek knew that his father had given him his shyness of women; but it was nothing to fear, because he would simply overcome it when he met someone he liked enough. She would be a revelation, and help him rediscover himself. Of that he was certain. She would bring him peace and be content to share his orderly life, in her own orderly way. He would ask that much.

  Benek was sure that he understood himself. He had gotten to the bottom of himself and there was no more to know. Only the chaos within other people was a mystery, waiting to destroy his personal order and hurl him into the same free fall that had ended his father’s ugly life.

  One day Benek had come home from school and found his parents embracing and passed out together in the basement room; his mother had gotten drunk with his father in order to share his stupor, to silence her pain and disappointment at the loss of what they had once meant to each other. Benek’s self-control had slipped as he was forced to admit that something of her still loved the old man. She had made no sound when she awoke hours later to find him dead beside her of a cerebral hemorrhage.

  Helped by his mother’s silence, Benek had pushed back the feelings that had choked his reason, and had vowed that it would never happen again.

  Was there something about this silly case that was really about himself? Was that what Gibney was getting at? Was he losing his discipline and pursuing a perverse event as if it meant something, as if it had to mean something? He might just as well expect a pattern of cracks in the ceiling to become a map of all reality.