“What about my stuff? My clothes and posters?”
“I’m sure you’ll come across some more clothes and posters before long,” Wiggins said as the elevator doors opened on the morgue. Overhead speakers softly floated the idea of an instrumental version of “Do the Hustle.” The walls, floor, and ceiling were painted a painfully bright white. There was a reception area where a thick woman murmured into a headset. A vase of lilies. Wiggins clipped a visitor’s badge to Woo-jin’s collar and offered him a clipboard filled with legalese. “Just sign here,” he said. Woo-jin did as instructed. Through double doors they entered the stainless steel sanctum of corpses, an echoing hallway the size of an underground bus station, walls of cabinet doors behind which rested bodies in various stages of investigation. A gloved, balding, middle-aged guy with a Muppet Babies tie poking out from under his lab coat met them and nodded a quiet hello.
Wiggins said, “This is Dr. Farmer, our forensics director. Dr. Farmer, I’d like you to meet Woo-jin Kan.”
Dr. Farmer’s hand, covered in latex, squished and squealed as Woo-jin shook it.
“This is the fellow who happened upon the deceased?” Dr. Farmer asked.
“Indeed,” said Wiggins.
Dr. Farmer directed them to a portion of the wall. He took hold of a handle and pulled out the slab. Woo-jin steadied himself against the wall as the coroner lifted the sheet. The young woman’s clothes had been removed and thank God there were no more face bugs. Still Woo-jin reeled. Wiggins steadied him and Dr. Farmer began talking a string of words that Woo-jin knew nothing about. Anterior, posterior, medial, cranial. Woo-jin looked for the cameras to see if he was in fact on a highly rated medical drama. No dice. He was really here, in a morgue.
“Now,” Dr. Farmer said, “here’s where we come to the curious part of the case.” He pulled out another slab and yanked back the sheet. It was the second body, identical to the first. “Our tests indicate these are not twins. Their profiles are 100 percent identical. By all appearances, these two bodies are exactly the same person.”
“They’re not clones?” Wiggins said.
“They don’t bear the watermarks of clones,” Dr. Farmer said. “And their profiles are unregistered. I considered the possibility that they were born off the grid but that wouldn’t explain the precise similarities in scarring. See here above the lip—tiny identical scars. And here on the left ring finger—you can still see the markings of three stitches from a cut she once received. Identical abrasions above the left knee, on the right buttock, and here, just a couple centimeters from the clavicle. Remarkable. In addition, the contents of their stomachs were identical. And the cherry on top, so to speak, are the identical stab wounds to the heart, made with an identical instrument—likely a flat-head screwdriver—to precisely the same depth. I’ve never seen anything like this in thirty years of forensic science.”
“And the state of decay?” Wiggins said.
“Even though they were discovered a day apart, tissues indicate both bodies expired three days ago.”
“And the only link between the two that we’re aware of is that this guy happened to discover them,” Wiggins said.
“I’m not a murderer,” Woo-jin said. “I’m a dishwasher.”
“We know,” Wiggins said. “We’re just trying to find out how someone managed to kill the same woman twice and leave two bodies.”
“We’ve got our theories,” Dr. Farmer said.
“But unfortunately our theories are lousy,” Wiggins said.
“Something something qputers, something something time,” Dr. Farmer might as well have said.
“What?” Woo-jin said.
Wiggins spoke slower. “We think,” he said, “that her selfhood has gone into superposition.”
“Can I be excused?” Woo-jin asked.
“I suppose so,” Wiggins said.
“I was about ready to head out,” Dr. Farmer said. “You need a lift?”
Woo-jin nodded. “I would appreciate a ride back to my foundation.”
Wiggins gave Woo-jin a business card and a pat on the back. “Don’t worry about your sister, Woo-jin. She’s going to be a-okay.”
In a parking garage that smelled of desperate cigarettes, Woo-jin got into Dr. Farmer’s black sedan then spiraled up and out onto the street.
“You’re a doctor, right?” Woo-jin said.
“That’s correct.”
“Maybe you can tell me what’s wrong with my brain?”
Dr. Farmer nodded. “I have some passing, layman’s familiarity with your condition but I’m a doctor of dead bodies, not live brains.”
“If I was dead, would you be able to tell what was wrong with me?”
“Certainly, but I don’t advise that you die just to find out.”
“I keep having ennui attacks.”
“That’s the layman’s term for it. Though ennui really means ‘boredom.’ From what I understand your attacks are related to the part of your brain that manages your empathetic response. Are you familiar with Abraham Lincoln?”
“The guy from the penny.”
“A great American president. He grew up in Illinois, very poor. His family had nothing and lived in a little log house. But young Abe learned to read and taught himself about literature and law and became one of the greatest leaders the world has ever known. One day when Abe was a boy he was walking down a dirt road and passed a turtle that had rolled over onto its back and was helpless. It troubled him to see the creature suffering but he walked on anyway. The farther he walked, though, the more troubled he became, until the thought of that turtle lying helpless was more than he could bear. So he walked back nearly two miles just to flip the turtle over.”
“Lucky turtle,” Woo-jin said.
“I’m telling you this because Abe Lincoln was born with a cognitive tendency similar to your own, an abundance of empathy. And this tendency to feel the suffering of others was one of the reasons he became such a great leader.”
“I’m not a leader. Just an official delegate.”
At this they arrived at the lot of Woo-jin’s former home, now nothing but a ring of cinder blocks. Dr. Farmer yanked the parking brake and leaned over. “Say, I couldn’t trouble you to suck my wiener, could I?”
“That would trouble me a lot,” Woo-jin said.
Dr. Farmer shrugged. “To each his own.”
With Woo-jin deposited at the dusty trailer site, the coroner departed in a cloud of sedan-generated dust. Woo-jin walked to the place where the front door used to be and stepped over a cinder block. Here’s where the living room would have been, overflowing with Patsy screaming for takeout. The TV would have been over here, broadcasting competitive defecation championships. Woo-jin turned in a circle and imagined what used to be in his line of vision, the bric-a-brac that had ascended to the heavens. Around this time he would have typically gone to sleep, pulling down the shades and curling fetally in his hammock. But there were no shades to pull or hammock to swing from so Woo-jin found the place where his hammock would have been and lay down in the dirt next to a newspaper advertisement that had blown under the double-wide long ago.
The ad was for women’s hosiery, specifically the kinds that reduce varicose veins and provide a more shapely figure. An old ad, from when people used to care about those kinds of things. All the models pictured were probably dead now, maybe even in Dr. Farmer’s morgue, waiting for someone to slice them open and formulate an opinion about them. Look at them, yearning to be thought attractive. The gutters of Woo-jin’s eyelids filled with tears. Oh, so this was going to be the trigger. He bit down on his mouth guard and closed his eyes, letting the attack fuck him over. He twitched on the bare ground like a fish about to get clubbed. The steady drumbeat. It smelled like mushrooms and old socks down here, dryer lint and cobwebs. The ground took on the appearance of being illuminated by the moon. He turned over and got blasted with the vibrant rippling flames of the campfire. It was the mesa again, the high windy desolation. The ring of objects around the flame: a refrigerator, a tire, three stuffed animals, a pile of books, a full-length mirror. Woo-jin pulled himself up on his elbows. The wood smoke burned his eyes and may not have been wood smoke at all; it smelled of petroleum and dead creatures. He rose and looked around. The world below the mesa was nothing but bluish desert darkness in every direction. In the distance he made out something constructed, a gigantic letter T formed from white rocks lying on the desert floor. He approached the mirror and held out his hand, which appeared to be his own, and in the mirror confirmed the dumb reality of his own face. Next he considered the refrigerator. It was a model with a combo ice and water dispenser, one door for the freezer, the other for the fridge. He pulled open the fridge door and found it fully stocked with food. It hummed a bit as the fan got going. He located a pile of wrapped sandwiches, an apple, a bag of cookies, some bottled water, and took these over to the tire, where he sat and began to eat. Was that refrigerator even plugged in? It didn’t appear to be. The power cord snaked behind it like a tail.