two

The medical examiner had been doing this work for twenty-three years. She had seen bodies pulled from rivers and scraped from pavement and folded into closets by men who claimed to have loved them. She had seen what fire does and what water does and what time does when no one finds you for a while. She thought she had seen everything and then they called her to the building by the river and she understood that she had not.

She arrived at six in the morning. August and already hot. The light coming orange through the haze that hung over the city. They walked her through corridors that smelled of disinfectant and something under the disinfectant that never came out. The men who walked with her were federal and they did not make small talk. They did not make any talk at all.

The body was still in the cell. This was irregular. This was not how it was done. She asked why it had not been moved and no one answered and so she stopped asking.

She looked at him for a long time before she touched him.

-----

The guard’s name was Tomas and he had worked at the facility for nine years. He had seen men come and go. The famous ones and the ones nobody remembered. He had learned to not think about what they’d done. To see them only as bodies that needed feeding and watching and counting. It was easier that way.

The night before he had been at his desk. He had not been sleeping. He would say he was sleeping because that is what he was told to say but he had been awake and reading a magazine and drinking coffee that had gone cold hours ago. Then the man had come. The man in the suit with credentials he flashed too quickly to read. There was something needed at the other end of the unit. Something about the intake logs. It would only take twenty minutes.

Tomas had gone. He did not know why he had gone. Later he would try to remember the man’s face and find that he could not. Only the suit. Only the voice that expected to be obeyed.

When he came back the corridor was different. The air was different. There were men standing near the cell and they were not the men who worked there. They looked at him and one of them shook his head slightly and Tomas understood that he was to go back to his desk and sit down and wait.

In the morning they brought him papers and he signed them. He did not read them closely. He had learned in nine years that there were questions you did not ask if you wanted to keep working. If you wanted to keep breathing.

-----

The prisoner three cells down was named Carver. He had been inside for eleven years on charges that didn’t matter anymore. He knew the rhythms of night. The coughing. The weeping that men tried to hide. The guards walking their rounds with keys that jangled in a particular pattern he could read like music.

That night the pattern broke.

He was awake because he was always awake. Sleep was a thing that came and went and mostly went. He lay on his bunk and listened to the dark.

Footsteps. But wrong. Too soft. No keys. No jangle. No flashlight making its sweep across the floor.

A door opened somewhere close. The electronic lock that should have buzzed did not buzz. It simply opened. Like it had been waiting.

Then voices. Low. Words he couldn’t make out. The murmur of men conducting business.

Then nothing.

The nothing was the worst part. It was the nothing of completion. Of a thing finished that could not be unfinished. He lay in the dark and did not breathe and waited for the nothing to end but it went on and on until the morning came gray through the window and the whole unit locked down and no one would say why.

He knew why.

He would never say it but he knew.

-----

The medical examiner took her photographs. She made her notes. The body told her things that did not match the story she’d been given and she wrote them down in her careful handwriting and she knew as she wrote that these notes would disappear. That her report would be revised. That someone would call her in the coming days and explain how things needed to be.

The hyoid bone was fractured. This happens in hangings. But not like this. Not with these fractures in these places. She had seen this pattern before. She had seen it in bodies where hands had been involved.

She looked at the sheet. Thin. Paper almost. She looked at the bunk. Low. Too low.

The men in suits watched her from the doorway. They did not speak but their silence had a weight.

She closed her bag. She would file her report. She would note the inconsistencies in language clinical enough to be ignored. And then she would go home and pour herself a drink and sit in her kitchen in the dark and wonder what she had become a part of.

The body lay where it had been found. Soon they would move it. Soon the cell would be cleaned and the paperwork filed and the story told so many times it would become true.

But the body knew. The bones knew.

They would go on knowing long after everyone agreed to forget.