Any critique is welcome as to the elements of the story.  I’m especially interested in whether or not the ending satisfies. 

RESIDENCE REMOVAL

By Mitch Komro (A.K.A. Bud Budderly)

Death has this consolation: it frees us from the thought of death -Jules Renard

The Murman Funeral Home with its severely sloping roof lines and gargoyle spouts stood in sharp contrast to the horizontal, one-story bungalows that dominated the North side Chicago neighborhood. Within, Gina Loci had become lost in the maze of hallways as she tried to find Red Murman, the funeral director. She encountered a number of doors, all judiciously locked and noticed that the carpet was the color of port wine and exceptionally spongy. She wondered if this were intentional, with floors and walls designed in such a way as to suck away the sound before it could intrude upon the silence.

Finally she came upon an unlocked door, one that was wider than the rest with the letters ‘ER’ embossed in fancy script. Gina knocked but the door was hard and made no sound. As she opened it she found it quite heavy. The room was dark but the light from the hallway allowed her a glimpse of pale flesh on stainless steel.

"Can I help you?" came from behind making her jump.

"God!"

"No, just the mortician," a large man laughed, "and proprietor. I’m Randall Murman, but most just call me Red."

Murman thrust out a fleshy hand and Gina grabbed it instinctively, shocked more by its warmth than its size. She always imagined a mortician’s hands would be frigid, but ‘Red’ Murman was not in this or any other way what she had expected. He was huge, at least six-foot eight, Gina guessed and she thought he looked a little silly in his suit, not unlike a polar bear stuffed into a neat, gray flannel. His head was also sizable with big salmon-colored jowls and if it weren’t for his unusual physical proportions, she thought he might blend in easily at any insurance seminar.

"You must be…"

"Gina…"

"Loci, right," Red smiled, revealing a set of yellow teeth that seemed strangely neglected for a man so otherwise spruce in appearance, "you’re early, that’s a good thing."

"Yes, uh," Gina felt awkward, running her fingers across the raised letters on the door, "Is this your office?"

"No," he said, "E.R. stands for embalming room."

She recoiled, pulling her hand away from the door. Murman seemed amused by the reaction. After a moment of silence, the man turned, motioning with an arm for Gina to follow.

"We’ll have to do this interview on the fly I’m afraid…oops, hang on a sec.” Murman went back and opened the ER door just far enough to poke his head into the dark room but not enough for Gina to see inside. “Dennis, how’s it going with Mr. Cafarelli?”

Gina thought she heard a faint reply but she couldn’t be sure.

“Did you do the arterial injection yet?” Murman queried. “Good man. How about the abdomen and thorax?”

Murman paused seeming to wait for an answer. “Use a high index cavity fluid, OK?” Pause. “And put some goggles on for God’s sake,” he ordered. “He won’t put the goggles on,” Murman said as he closed the door. “I glanced at your resume and noticed you have some medical background or something,” he said leading Gina down the hall, around a corner and into a garage area.

“Well not exactly but I will be starting medical school at Loyola in a few weeks.”

“Hey good for you,” Murman said opening the passenger door of a hearse for Gina. “But why do you want to work here then…aren’t you going to be a little busy?”

“Yes but I was hoping to find a quiet job with some flexible hours, evenings perhaps.”

“What about studying?”

“I was hoping I could do some of that at work during downtimes,” she said.

“When are you planning to sleep?”

“I don’t know, I guess I haven’t thought all of this through yet,” Gina said, sensing she wasn’t exactly acing the job interview. She had sat down in a hearse without realizing it and as Murman got in the driver’s side she noticed a mildewy smell that seemed out of place in the vehicle’s plush interior. “Are we going somewhere?” she asked.

“You didn’t really answer my original question.”

“What was that again?” she asked.

“Why do you want to work for me? Aside from the money of course, I assume you need the cash.”

“To be honest, I’m a little nervous about medical school, and anatomy class in particular.”

A smile of recognition washed over Murman’s face. “Ah, so you think working in a funeral home will, shall we say, desensitize you to the dead?”

“I suppose you could say that, it’s just that I’ve never been in close contact with a cadaver…”

Murman winced at Gina’s use of that term. “Well as it happens, I was looking for someone to help me evenings and perhaps a night or two on the weekend.”

“Would those be night shifts?”

“The nights would be akin to an on-call shift, something you’ll need to get used to if you want to be a doctor. The evening shifts would involve minimal contact with the deceased,” Murman explained, “you’d just be helping me facilitate the viewings, directing traffic, keeping the coffeepot full, that sort of thing. Think you could handle that?”

“I think so but what about those nights? What happens if I get called in?” Gina asked.

“The on-call component of the job would involve wearing a beeper at home, nights would be business as usual for you, unless I need you to come in and do a removal.”

“What is a removal?”

“That’s what we’re doing right now,” he said. “going to remove the deceased from a location.”

Gina’s heart started to beat irregularly and her breath quickened. “I don’t think I can…”

“Sure you can, ” he said, laughing. “Listen, do you want to get through gross anatomy class? Or do you want to be one of those students who runs screaming from the lab and quits medical school the first day?”

“No but…”

“If you got a call, all you would be responsible for is transporting the person from the nursing home, the hospital morgue, the residence or wherever back to the funeral home. You would do just a little of the initial prep work for me, just enough to keep them fresh until morning when I come in. This way I can get some sleep.”

Gina mulled things over as the black vessel cut a wake of mixed reactions through the populated, urban neighborhood. She studied the responses of pedestrians as they drove past. One kid pointed and tugged on her mother’s sleeve as her mother frowned at the sight of the hearse. Then there was a group of teenage boys with pants three sizes too big that looked as if they might fall down around their ankles at any moment. They paid the hearse no notice. Invincible, death was the last thing on their minds. There were also many elderly, babushka-covered Polish women who all seemed very concerned with crossing the busy street without becoming a hood ornament. If they noticed the hearse, they didn’t show it. Murman noticed Gina staring out the window.

“As you can see, this neighborhood has a fairly high percentage of older adults,” he said, as if he had read her mind. “So business is very good—too good in fact for me to do alone. I’m just exhausted.”

“Yeah I live just a few blocks from here,” she said. “It’s where I grew up.”

“Perfect! You could walk to work then,” he said.

Gina seemed lost in space. Everything was happening so fast.

“I’ll pay you seventeen dollars an hour, including your time at home on call of course,” he said. “Are you interested?”

Her mouth dropped. “Uh yeah, I guess I am,” she said, accepting his offer without a second thought.

“Excellent!” Murman extended a paw, “Welcome aboard.”

He pulled to the rear of one of the ubiquitous nursing homes in the neighborhood. “A little discretion and common sense go a long way in this job,” he said as they exited the hearse and began the long walk around the building to the front entrance. “Always make a professional appearance, and park in back if at all possible."

“I guess it would be bad form then to just bust through the front door with a gurney and ask them where to find the stiff?” Gina said, a bit giddy after being quickly hired at such an attractive wage.

Murman didn’t laugh as Gina had expected. “A sense of humor is a good thing in this line of work, it keeps the job from getting to you but there is a time and a place for it. Don’t make me second guess my decision to hire you.”

“I’m sorry,” Gina said. “I thought a little levity…”

“Don’t worry about it — now just isn’t the time or place. Have you ever lost a loved one?” Murman asked seeming to move on.

“Yes actually, I lost both of my parents,” she said, brushing aside her windblown, black hair revealing a face with deep brown eyes and thin, long yet attractive features.

“Oh, my sympathies,” he said turning solemn. “Has it been long?”

“About a year now,” Gina paused, looking away from her new boss. “They were on their way back from the Wisconsin Dells one night and a drunk driver passed out and crossed the median I guess. He hit them head on.”

“How terrible, do you have any other family?”

“No I’m an only child, I have an uncle but he lives in California,” she said. “My parents had the house paid off so I don’t have to worry about rent but tuition, food, bills and stuff, well it all adds up…”

“So no big inheritance I take it?”

“No my parents were working class people just trying to pay for my college and make a better life for me than what they had known.”

“You must have been devastated,” he said.

“Well, you know…” Gina’s eyes began to well up. She stopped to take a moment to collect herself as Murman walked ahead a bit to give her the space she needed.

When they entered the nursing home Gina looked around the day room as Red exchanged papers with someone at the nurse’s station. The residents were placed about the day room like wheelchair-bound gargoyles Gina thought. Nothing seemed to move but their eyes, and all eyes were on her it seemed.

As they entered Mrs. Rubicuski’s room, Red quickly went about the business of removing the dead. Gina focused on Murman’s technique, trying to avoid looking at the woman’s face. Murman worked like a machine as he wrapped her body in her bed sheet; there was simply no wasted motion. He sent Gina back to the hearse with instructions to bring a cot through the rear entrance. When Gina returned, Mrs. Rubicuski was wrapped as tight as a fish in newspaper and ready for transfer to the cot.

Gina nervously awaited the moment Murman would ask for her help in lifting the body but that did not happen. Instead, he lifted the body himself effortlessly and transferred it to the cot. She figured Mrs. Rubicuski must be unusually light because certainly Murman couldn’t be that strong.

“Once they’re on the cot,” he said, “make sure to prop the head up with a pillow to prevent a purge.”

“What’s a purge?” she whispered.

“It’s a nasty mess, for now I’ll spare you the details,” he said.

Murman told Gina to push the cot back out through the back door to the hearse then he disappeared out of the room mumbling something about a form he forgot to get signed. Gina, only weighing 102 pounds herself, soon realized that the cot was heavy and difficult to maneuver. As she became preoccupied with keeping the conveyance from bumping into the corridor walls, she didn’t realize it when she missed the turnoff to the rear exit. Instead she pushed Mrs. Rubicuski down the long main hall and halfway through the crowded day room before it occurred to her that she went the wrong way. One old man who appeared especially glum shuffled over to Gina who froze in her tracks like a deer in headlights. The man put a hand on the deceased woman, somewhere in the vicinity of her shoulder.

“Goodbye Emma,” he said as Gina noticed a single tear streak down his wrinkled cheek like a shooting star. The man tried to wipe it away but it was already gone.

Murman, who was standing by the desk noticed Gina stranded in the middle of the day room. Gina felt like a piece of flotsam in a sea of frightened nursing home residents. Red motioned with his arm and pointed giving her a look that seemed to say, “the damage is already done, just wheel her out the front door, quickly.” As Gina resumed her motion, the old man latched onto her wrist, halting her in her tracks.

“When you come for me,” the man said, “when it’s my time and you come to take me back to the funeral parlor. Will you promise to leave the lights on?”

Gina looked to Murman for help but he was already out the front door.

“Yeah sure,” she said. Gina would have said anything to get the man to release his vice-like grip. “Why do you want the lights on?” She had to know.

“I’m afraid of the dark.”

* * *

“Sorry about that,” Gina said as they drove back to the funeral home.

“Don’t lose sleep over it,” Murman said. “I’m confident it’s a mistake you’ll only make once. I’d like you to begin your new employee orientation tonight, if that fits with your schedule of course.”

“Sure that would be no problem,” she said sensing in Murman’s tone that she might be on thin ice after the nursing home fiasco.

“Good. Tonight you’re going to learn the nuances of a residence removal,” he said.

“OK so we’re going to pick up a body from a residence,” Gina intuited.

“Yes, from your residence.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, rubbing her wrist. It was still sore from the grip of that sad old man.

“You said you live alone?”

“Yes, but…”

“Good. Do you have any nosy neighbors?”

“No, not really but I’m a little confused,” she said. “Whose body are we going to remove from my residence?”

“Yours.” Murman drove in silence, staring expressionless at the road ahead.

“Could you explain please?” she asked, her voice cracking.

Murman didn’t answer initially. Gina thought he seemed to be carefully weighing his response.

“You want to be a doctor eventually, correct?” he said finally.

“Yes.”

“And for the time being, you also want to be a mortician’s assistant, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Can you ever remember in your experience as a patient, meeting a doctor you didn’t like?” he asked.

“Sure, quite a few actually,” she said, wondering where he was going with this.

“What kind of people were they? The ones you didn’t like that is. What one word would you use to describe them?”

Gina thought about that for a minute. “Insensitive,” she said. “They didn’t seem to care about me as a human being. I was just a diagnosis, a body to them.”

“And how would you describe that one particular doctor you liked? If there was one.”

“Sure, uh my pediatrician, Dr. Lorenc was really nice,” she said. “He never rushed our appointments. He always took the time to ask me how I was doing in school, how things were at home. He really cared.”

“So you might say he was fairly empathetic?”

“Oh sure, I mean he seemed totally interested in me as a whole person, not just the scientific, medical aspect,” she said. “God, he’s the reason I decided to go into medicine. So yes I would say he was very empathetic.”

“And so it is with a good mortician.”

“Well of course,” she said. “I’m sure we have to try to understand what the families are going through…”

“Well,” Murman cut her off. “Empathy with the bereaved is a prerequisite, a given. If I didn’t think you already possessed that quality, you wouldn’t be sitting here Gina, but the really enlightened morticians display that same level of understanding and respect with the dead, not just with their families. That’s what I intend to teach you tonight.”

“How’s that?” she asked.

“By helping you to get a feel for what it’s like from the perspective of the dead.”

Gina laughed nervously.

“You see what we have to remember is that the body is not just some slab of meat we’re working with but there is a soul as well.”

“But doesn’t the soul pass after the physical body dies?” she asked.

“No, not immediately no,” he explained. “There is the first death, the physical death of the body which is what you’re thinking of but there is also the second death. The second death occurs only when the body is properly embalmed or cremated. Until then, the soul stays within reach of the living.”

“I wasn’t aware of that. So you’re saying I should treat the body as if the person, that is, the soul which inhabited that body were still present?”

Murman beamed. “Yes exactly! Assume they are right there with you because they are! You see it’s not just mortuary science for us just like it’s not just medical science for the good doctor. There’s an artistic, mystical side as well which you can learn working for me. These are skills that will transfer well to your medical career making you the kind of doctor you want to be—another Dr. Lorenc.”

“I never would have imagined,” she said, “and here I always thought morticians were a pretty cold bunch, no offense or pun intended.”

“None taken,” he said. “You’ll begin to understand my point even better tonight when I come to pick up your body.”

“My body. OK now let me get this straight. You want me to pretend to be dead to understand what it’s like from that perspective. Is that right?”

“Now you’re catching on,” he said. “I’ll pick you up sometime after 2:00 AM so leave your porch-lights off and your back door unlocked.”

“OK I understand, you don’t want to freak out the neighbors,” she said. “Not a problem.”

“And don’t wait up, I want you in bed when I arrive,” he said further.

“OK, so I died in my sleep then,” she played along.

“Yes, precisely,” he said. “I want you to really get into the role.”

* * *

Gina stared at her digital alarm clock display glowing red in the darkness of her bedroom. 2:46 AM. This is slow torture she thought and sleep was an increasingly remote possibility for her. “Get into the role,” she remembered Murman saying so she folded her arms across her chest and held her breath for twenty seconds, then forty.

“This is crazy,” she said aloud expelling stale air. She needed this job however. Where else could she sleep the night away with a beeper on her nightstand and get paid well for it? Murman made a cogent point; perhaps this job would teach her something about sensitivity and respect for her patients. What doctor couldn’t use a little more of that?

She thought about her parent’s funeral. She had attended only part of it, mainly the church service. The wake simply would have been too painful, open caskets and all. She heard the mortician had done a marvelous job with facial reconstruction after the accident but she had to take people’s word for it.

She had been racing along a country road with the top down during the interment. Seeing her parent’s caskets being lowered into the ground would have been too excruciating; too final. She would have been an emotional, whimpering mess at the sight of that and Gina Loci doesn’t whimper. Gina is always in control and she would stay that way now.

Yes, she needed the job and if she couldn’t handle the death of her parents, how could she function as a doctor where death would be a day to day reality? This could turn out to be a debilitating weakness. Would she have the strength to go into that private room at the hospital? This being the same room where she had learned from a young doctor that her parents, despite heroic efforts by the medical staff, hadn’t survived their injuries?

She imagined herself going into this same room herself, only this time she would be wearing the white lab coat. Could she tell the parents huddled together on the couch that their daughter, in whom they had invested 18 years of their love was dead? Could she tell them that her perfect face had been rendered unrecognizable by its impact with a windshield? Could she tell them that their honor student’s brain had been turned to mush? Gina’s eyes became moist as this scenario and its images flashed through her mind. She knew in her heart that the answer to all of these questions might be “no.”

Gina was jarred back to reality by the swooshing sound of her back door opening. Moments later, she saw the lumbering dark outline of an ursine figure duck under the doorway to her bedroom. It had to be Red Murman.

“You’re here,” she said. “What took so long?”

There was no response. She heard the rumbling, metallic sound of a cot being wheeled over the hardwood floor through the darkness. She looked at her clock which now read 3:15 AM. “I thought you would be here earlier, you’re la…”

A cold hand touched her lips preventing her from finishing her sentence. Gina smelled latex. Murman’s white gloves seemed to glow in the dark as he used his free hand to firmly push her back into the prone position. He yanked her comforter off the bed then quickly wrapped her in her own bed sheets just as he had done with Mrs. Rubicuski at the nursing home earlier that day. The darkened room now was black and she felt like a tightly wound mummy as her body was whisked onto the cot as if Murman were moving a five-foot piece of balsa wood. Gina forced herself not to panic as she felt him fasten a strap snuggly across her chest then her legs. She was secured to the cot but she could barely breathe.

“Mr. Murman, could you loosen that strap a little?” she asked but there was no response. Apparently, he was just getting into the role as well she reassured herself.

They moved and for a while the air became cooler as they glided through the night. She felt the regular bumps of the cot on the sidewalk running from her back door to the rear alley and other than the hooting of an owl in the distance, the night was unusually quiet. She felt her body shake as Murman shoved her into something. The familiar, smell of mildew told her that it was the hearse and the sound of the rear door closing seemed to add a sense of finality to her situation.

Gina was getting angry. She thought this was carrying the role-playing thing too far. The least Murman could do was talk to her—if she was supposed to learn something from this she didn’t know what it could be. She felt movement again as the hearse glided slowly through the back alley.

“Let me out goddamn it!” Gina yelled but her voice was muffled in the hearse in the same way that sounds were silenced by the architectural structures of the Murman funeral home. Her voice simply didn’t reverberate in the back of the black transport and she suspected that the glass that separated her from Murman was soundproof.

“Son of a bitch, let me up,” she said, with fear rapidly replacing her anger. In the darkness of her own bedroom, Gina’s night vision had allowed her to see shapes but in here in this rolling sarcophagus and enveloped in her own sheets, it was blacker than black. She had never been claustrophobic in the past but Gina’s respirations and heartbeat had nearly doubled. Beads of moisture collected on her hot face as if she were shoveling snow with a ski mask pulled down over her face. She thought when all of this was over, she would never again take her senses or her freedom to move about for granted. If that was the lesson Murman was trying to teach her, she didn’t like his methodology.

The next thing she felt was her body shake again as Murman removed it from the hearse.

“Let me up!” Gina’s voiced echoed off walls telling her she was probably in the garage of the funeral home.

There was no response.

Just the sound of the cot as it rolled across the concrete floor. That sound ceased as the wheels met the padded carpet of the building’s interior hallway.

“What are you trying to prove? What’s your goddamn point?” she screamed as she was rolled through a door off the carpet and onto a smooth tile floor. The cot came to a halt and Gina could hear the sound of Murman’s heavy footsteps first away and then back again pushing another cart of some kind. As she heard the sound of metal instruments clinking on the cart next to her she experienced a shortness of breath which took away her ability to speak. Her heart wasn’t so much pounding as it was spasmodic, like a red balloon, writhing with worms.

With the straps still digging into her skin, Murman undid the portion of the sheet that covered her head. The bright florescent lights blinded her for a moment but when her vision returned, she saw Murman’s puffy, smiling face looking down upon her. His yellow, plaque-encrusted teeth and his hair-sprouting nostrils were nothing compared to his eyes which were blacker than the night. What she saw in those eyes suggested something beyond confusion and chaos, his eyes reflected—an evil sadness.

Then it came to her. Death was only a preparation for life. The scalpel that Murman held in his hand above her, like the Reaper’s scythe, could only reap her world of apparent reality. His weapon of death held no power over her because this was a world of perishable illusions. Realizing this, she began to smile.

“Go ahead, do it,” she said calmly.

“Do it!” she repeated.

There was no response.

Only the sound of Murman gently replacing the scalpel upon the stainless steel tray.