The Good Nurse by Charles Graeber

Author:Charles Graeber [Graeber, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd

Mambo was fastidious and professional. He wasted little movement as he changed gloves and moved back to the recorder, describing the body as he found it: The exhumed and embalmed remains of a 69-inch, 155-pound, well-nourished and slightly thin white male, appearance consistent with the stated age of sixty-eight.

The man’s scalp was bald, and his forehead was unremarkable. The conjunctivae of the eyeballs and eyelids were pale, the irises were light gray, the pupils equal, round, and of intermediate size. His face was undamaged by the excavation. A light green mold covered Gall’s lower nose and most of the cheeks. Nothing was coming out of the body’s ears.

Mambo removed the religious garments, finding a tracheostomy opening filled with gel. Three roughly sutured incisions on the right upper chest were covered in thick glops of white granular gel—the result of the embalming, as were the white plastic trocar buttons dotting his abdomen. Moving down the chest he found more mold, greenish-gray to black. No mold on the arms, plenty on the fingers, thick furry colonies between the webbing, black, then green, ending at the knees like furry short pants. The molds on the shins were yellowish, the feet were covered in mold as thick as slippers. The name tag on the toe was marked Somerville Medical Center. Mambo wrote it down, and prepared to go inside.

Following the Y-shaped thoracoabdominal incision, Mambo worked along the trachea into the lungs—dark red, firm, and filled with a granular embalming gel. The reverend’s heart weighed out at 660 grams and showed signs of wear and repair. Mambo then set to work collecting samples for the toxicologist. He scooped gel from the right neck, gauze from a bedsore on the sacrum, and mold from the body, placing each sample carefully in a small labeled tube. He clipped samples from the nails of each hand and removed the whole nail from the left big toe, siphoned up fluid from the abdomen and spleen, clipped body hair and small sections of the lungs and kidneys, the liver and small bowel, both testes, a rib, the diaphragm, the spleen, brain, spine, and heart. Mambo bagged the contents of the reverend’s stomach, pulled a syringe of viscous fluid from Gall’s eye, and, dust to dust, filled a small tube with soil from the grave itself.3 Mambo’s night was over. But over in Somerset, the night shift was just getting started.

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