Blogagaard Posts Slice of His Thesis Novel, The Cobalt Legacy

Chapter Six

The cop drove me to Duluth’s morgue, which was in the basement of a hospital. I expected a chilled room with stainless steel tables, a faintly antiseptic smell, and rows of body drawers. Instead the cop took me to a small, overheated room with two metal folding chairs in it and a large television mounted on the wall. He asked me to sit in one of the chairs.

“I thought I was supposed to I.D. their bodies.”

“You will.”

“What do you want me to do? Sit around, watch TV, and wait?”

The cop took his phone of his belt and hit a button.

“Hal, you ready?”

The cop’s phone beeped back at him.

“Sure,” Hal replied. “Start’er up.”

The cop walked over to the TV. His finger paused over the power button, and then he looked back at me.

“We don’t take anyone into the actual morgue anymore,” he said. “We use a live video feed so you don’t have to go in there. They think it’s less traumatic that way. You tell Hal where you want the camera to pan, and he’ll pan it for you.”

I blinked and looked around the room again, wondering if I’d missed something the first time.

“You mean I won’t get to even see my parents?”

“You’ll see enough,” the cop said. “Don’t worry.”

He pushed the power button and sat down next to me in the other metal chair. The picture came in to focus on a woman’s pale, sleeping face. Her lips were purple, as if she’d fallen asleep in a blizzard. I stood up and walked over to the TV, so that my eyes became level with hers. The cop shifted in his chair.

“That’s her,” I said, knocking on the TV’s glass with my knuckles. “That’s my mom.”

“Your mother, Jane Cobalt? Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure.”

I sat back down as the cop talked into his phone, telling Hal to move on to the next body. The overheated room didn’t have enough air. I couldn’t breathe. The cop turned the TV off again, and when Hal gave the go-ahead the cop turned it back on.

This time it was a man’s pale, sleeping face. You noticed the dark rings around his eyes first, and then how thin and sunken his face had become. It took a few seconds to register the gaping hole in the left side of his head. Maybe it was because he facing straight ahead, or you simply didn’t expect someone to be missing so much of their skull, but when you finally did notice the wound, it was hard to look at anything else. You imagined what it had felt like as the bullet ripped through one side of his head and out the other, if all the noise in his mind had stopped instantly, like a bird slamming into a glass door. It made you touch the side of your own head and make sure it was still all there: hair, skin, and bone.

“Do you need the camera to pan, Alex?”

“What?”

“Do you need another view? A better angle?”

What had gone on in that wounded mind? What if I had crawled into that man’s brain before the bullet entered it, vaporizing all the good and bad? What would I have found?

“No,” I said. “I can tell. I can tell it’s him.”

“Stanley Cobalt. Your father.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s him.”

The cop stood up and turned off the TV.

“That’s it, Hal,” he said into his phone. Hal said okay and then we were alone again in the stifling room. The cop sat back down beside me and looked straight ahead, as if the TV were still on.

“You got some friends you can stay with tonight?”

I shook my head. “No. Not really. All my friends left town when I did.”

“You could stay at my place,” the cop said. “I was going to grill ribs tonight.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But I think I’ll get a hotel room. I don’t really feel like being around people right now.”

The cop leaned forward and rubbed his face in his hands.

“I can understand that.”