6-21-15: Beyond the Sea

I'm riding a scooter to Grandma's house (I think) and I figure out that if I move my hips in a particular fashion, I can maintain a high speed without having to push myself forward with my foot. On my way there I end up scootering through a store. While I'm looking for an exit, I end up in a loading area or warehouse-y back room where people come to drop off their garbage and dead bodies, Salvation-Army-style. There's garbage and several bodies lying on the floor of the warehouse and employees are making their way around the drop-offs, going through the unwanted things and examining the dead bodies, often by autopsy. (Again, these are polo-shirt-wearing store employees in a K-mart-like store.)

I stop to talk to this employee about dropping off a dead body that I apparently need to get rid of and casually, inwardly observe that the bodies that I can see on the ground and the ones already in the light-blue shrouds that the employees are using to contain them are mostly of a cinnamon-brown skin tone, which seems strange to me. The employee that I'm talking to (a black man) suddenly accuses me of being racist, which is startling because I have said nothing out loud nor was I aware that I was giving any sort of indication of disapproval or condescension. Defensively, I tell him that I was trying to ask him about body drop-off because I have a dead body of my own to bring in, thank you very much. A dead white body, because white people are not too good for the dead body warehouse place.

Anyway, while I'm hanging around in the warehouse this lady employee is doing a seriously invasive autopsy on a dead body - she has removed all of the skin from the front of his body, even from his face. I can see his ribs and lungs and the muscles in his face and the way that his nose is white cartilage. I notice that his lungs are red. All of sudden, the dead man takes a breath and starts speaking - asking questions, like "Where am I? What's going on?"

The employee stares at him, shocked and obviously totally unequipped for the sudden revival of one

of the bodies mid-autopsy. I'm thinking fast - if by some slim chance this guy is going to stay alive and not die before our eyes, he will have to stay calm. But he obviously has no idea that he's skinned and lying on the floor of a dead body warehouse and there is no good way to tell him that without creating a panic - what can anyone possibly say to distract him from the current predicament long enough for someone to sedate him and call an ambulance? He reaches up and touches his nose, obviously aware that something is wrong. All I know is that the employee will tell him the truth and he'll freak out and die again and I can't let that happen. I run over to where the alive-again guy is lying on one of those light blue shrouds and the employee is scrambling around and I watch his lungs inflate and deflate faster as he begins to panic.

All of a sudden, somebody starts to sing.

Somewhere... beyond the sea,
somewhere waiting for me...

I realize that I'm the one who's singing. I must have just started singing the first song that I thought of, which for some reason was "Beyond the Sea."

The weird thing is, it works. The formerly-dead guy puts his arm back down at his side and looks up at me. My instinct is to put a hand on his shoulder or cheek or something, but he has no skin so I just kneel down next to him and maintain eye contact and keep singing. He knows the song, too; I can see his mouth moving and hear his voice - barely more than a whisper - singing along with me. He has blue eyes. I keep my eyes locked on his so that he can't look away and see what's going on around us. I imagine us slow-dancing in a gazebo on the beach, our arms around each other, both of us smiling serenely and gazing into each others' eyes. (This is a variant of something that I do at work when handling an unhappy critter - I imagine that my serenity is a pool of water and it's slowly rippling outwards and spreading to the kitty cat in my arms. Sometimes it seems like it works, but I might just be imagining it.)

As EMTs come scrambling in with a stretcher, the not-dead guy closes his eyes slowly and they take him away.

Since I woke up this morning, "Beyond the Sea" has been stuck in my head.