One day morticians in the Morgue
of Popes, off
Gramlin and Trayhurst,
in the swill-gray center of Dead City
began to notice--those lumps of meat in the shapes of
ghosts coming off the street
began to look less different from each other.
A few drawn from their frozen drawers
in storage looked even more identical. Each
to each,
one man one woman, a kind of
postmortem Adam and Eve. Black male,
aged roughly early thirties,
high cheekbones;
the female a white brunette, thin lips
and a beauty mark just left off center of her chin.
When they pulled the charts
of all bodies on hand, they
were amazed. Age and race, height and weight
had been cannibalized almost overnight
into an archetype, in the
flesh. As fresh bodies
rolled through the double doors, they tracked them.
It took, according to their lights, no matter how dim
three days to a week for their native features to melt away
and reveal the Jane or John Doe lying beneath.
One man and lady killed after the fact, repeatedly.
In a day or two it took to the news
as a leak,
so the police provided sketches
of the two in their original state, borne off the faces
of two dozen too many. The result? Some families
requested the exhumation of spouses and children;
and when, like secret potatoes, the coffins
were unburied, the air struck them
as a fact drawing all its strength from a rumor. There
their son or daughter, brother or mother
lay, in various nudes of decomposition,
changed beyond the resemblances that made them.
Newly ruined, the bodies
turned
face-up to the lights
by car wreck or heart attack or overdose,
changed with the slow-motion wooziness of smoke:
a nose growing lean, lips
swelling fuller, eyes
migrating a half inch farther apart. When
the bereaved came to the ward to identify them
it was even less than useless. The form
of the problem they loved
had vanished completely. Had
migrated to the dumb calm of the generic,
one man and woman for everyone. It went
much that way for weeks
until, a month later, the news caught something
even more terrifying by the toe
and held on tightly enough to tag it. A man
in New Poland, on the Northwest Side
had been seen walking out of a Kroger's,
followed by one or two
witnesses of the eye,
then tracked by half the neighborhood
to a brownstone on Fuller. When the police
arrived, he was exactly what they'd found:
a living specimen. John
Doe, a flawless clone
or maybe the original
psychopomp of all those copies. The
look from his eyes was terror. It
swam through his body like water. The cops
cut the crowd and took him into custody.
Not a day later a woman in Collin Heights
was pulled off the Blue Line, her dress
and coat torn off her like wrapping paper,
naked and
begging, carried
by a dozen hands
to the nearest station. Within a half hour
they had an exact match
for the woman who had been taking
so many of their wives' and mothers'
faces. During
interrogation both ur-corpses
expressed nauseous bewilderment, paranoia
of their own skin. What had they
done to assume the forms of so many? What
were those vanishing likenesses
telling them, that death could remodel
their features to resemble them?
By decree of the state, they were
thrown on trial,
put to beg for absolution by a jury.
A verdict came back like an echo
from a resentment on borrowed ears:
to their own faces
we sentence them. Execution by
lethal mirror. A month later their bodies
went limp on the gurney. And almost
immediately, a postmortem miracle.
In the morgues and newfound graves
of Dead City
a hundred wayward corpses
were born again.
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