The Coroner Isn't Finished

Prologue

The Coroner sat in his chair quietly contemplating his last creation. He sat for a while. Then he sat for a while longer. He waited. Then he waited for a while longer.

Sometimes the man would get up. He would look out the window. He would breathe softly on the glass and write obscene words in its fog. He would get up, this man. He would grab a drink and down it quickly, then poor himself another, and then another. Perhaps it was whiskey. It is no matter.

He drank enough until he could drown a small sea. Sometimes, he threw the glass in the fire, causing shadows to flirt with the wood of the floor.

Other times, he wandered slowly through the room, pulling his jacket tight around his shoulders despite the warmth of the fire. The man would pace, walking back and forth until he forgot himself. He would casually slump back into his arm chair, his fingers finding a small gold pendent left on the side table. He held it to the light, looked up unto the heavens, and muttered a prayer.

I.

On Wynfellow’s bedside table there was a small pile of scattered books. Among them, were a worn copy of Winnie the Pooh, given in childhood, a faded blue antique facsimile of At the Back of the Northwind, half obscured by a muddling of old ink and split coffee, and beneath those the recently released A Brief History of Death, which, all things considered, he probably should not have had. But he was never one for the unnecessary creeds of traditionalism. To his mind, traditionalism’s promised futures became crumbling bones; its hopes became empty tombs; assurances became wastelands, or otherwise inconvenienced and tarrying guests. The past was the prophet proved false. The past was the cough that started the plague.

Now, that is not to say he was a despiser of the all the great achievements of history, no. The scaffolding of the past invented the future, and for many it was a future filled with light. Humanity had snuck past the sword and the fire, and plucked a piece of fruit from the tree of life, forgetting what knowledge they purchased in gaining such a gift. Of course, there were deaths––the car accident, the falling accident, the child-eaten-by-jackals-while-mother-wasn’t-looking accident. But accidents all the same. For the rest, there were very few who saw the need for death. Content, they lived, while Wynfellow was one of the few who wanted to die.

Was he alone? Not in his interest in death. Some kept their secret like a hidden disease. They were called The Coroners, those who rehearsed for death. Suicide was impossible in those days, though some still tried. But there are other ways to die than suicides and accidents. And while death was no longer an inevitability, she still beckoned occasional lovers.

After a long search, Wynfellow finally secured a meeting with a Coroner who lay injured on one of the remaining few hospital beds. He masked his visit under the pretense that he was finishing a piece for a newspaper, but his own curiosity was his true motivation.

The man’s frail frame made a ghastly figure upon the hospital-white of the sheets and the slow effort of his exhales was offset by the pallid flickering of the broken light hanging above. . It looked like he’d been in some sort of accident, but he admitted it wasn’t going to kill him. No one knew who he was, nor did they know anything about him. Nurses would guess where he was from, or what he had done in his life, but no one knew. Dead men tell tales, they said, and his corpse was still breathing.

When Wynfellow arrived on a cold winter’s eve, they sat in silence a long time before the diaphanous pinks and golds of the sunset invited the sable ceiling of the night. After one of the nurses had started a fire and brought the guest and host tea, the silence of the room was finally broken.

“Do you think the nurse is listening by the door?” the Coroner pondered.

“I’m not sure I can say. Do your nurses have the habits of thieves?”

“Oh, no doubt, and far worse I imagine. Let us wait just a moment to make sure she’s left.”

And so they waited and waited and waited. Wynfellow had assumed that their brief prolepsis would last a minute or two as the steam from their tea disappeared, but the Corner was a patient man, so they waited until one couldn’t count the seconds anymore.

“Un ange est passe,” he finally spoke, looking at Wynfellow, but said as if no one was listening.

“I’m not sure what that means, I’m sorry.”

“It means ‘an angel has passed.’ When silence steals conversation, one says it to explain the quiet. Either an angel has passed, and thus why the chatter descends into silence, or an angel has come to smooth the silence over.”

“It’s a beautiful saying; I may use it.”

I.

“Do you know why I let you come?” the Coroner began.

Wynfellow thought for a moment and casually glanced at the dancing hearth.

“Because I want to learn to die.”

“Yes, that’s probably it. Or that I want you to kill me,” he grinned. “I don’t know, and that’s truly the reason I asked. Usually, someone knows something I don’t, or at least I imagine they do, so they will be more interesting than they actually are.”

An exhale escaped Wynfellow’s nose as his lips tightened in a held chuckle, “You read my letter then?”

Upon asking this question, the patient briefly descended into a coughing fit involving blood and a long string of ejected expletives. Hearing the elaborate concatenation of dirty flourishes, the nurse, who had still been at the door as it happens, could not help but enter and attempt to quell the disorder by sitting the good sir straight up in bed and pouring him another glass of bourbon. As she left, the Coroner, with a glow in his eyes, placed his finger over his lips to signify another direction of silence. They both stayed quiet, allowing their eyes to wander as if playing a silent game of I-spy until the former’s suspicion was propitiated.

“As I was saying, what do you wish to know? About dying, that is. I haven’t yet died, so I don’t know with what breath of experience I can speak of.” He trailed off as his sonorous tone became even more obviously coated with a delicate and feigned humility.

“Well, I don’t know a better place to start than to ask why you want to die?” In a hushed whisper he added, “I’m trying to decide myself.”

“Ask a different question.”

Although he didn’t explain his refusal, the Coroner gestured to the space above him, appearing as if he was looking for a reason.

Wynfellow thought for a moment, eying the bourbon with a certain jealousy only the uncertain know.

“Have you ever been in love?”

The Coroner looked more disappointed than before.

“Why that?”

“Well, doesn’t love matter in life?”

He nodded slowly, “Perhaps. But love and death are the same in the end.”

“Judging by that, I’m sure you’ve been in love.”

He laughed, “In the sense that I found something I wanted to kill me, yes.”

“What happened?”

“Let me tell you this, and remember it. There are worse things than lies. Some have lied so deeply beyond dreams, and breath, and bone that they have not only begun to believe the lie, but to believe they have never lied at all. I wanted to drag love out of her pretty face. I loved her like the sea in a storm, like a reckless tempest, like a helpless rage. And she convinced herself she loved me too.”

He paused violently, his words cutting off before the breath following them escaped. Wynfellow didn’t believe an apology appropriate.

“You no longer love her then.”

“It’s worse than that. I love her with such ferocity that I hate her equally. I hate her with all the hatred in my soul.

“In the sprawling catacombs of my heart,” the Coroner continued, “There is a little room built of stone, encircled by metal bars. She is in there. That is where I have held her all these years. Every once in a while, I will go and visit her and walk past the rusty bars and the gelid stone and look at her. I’ve imprisoned her there but I should really let her go. I try, you know, to liberate her. But I keep her there so I can hate her. Sometimes I think that maybe it isn’t her behind the bars but me. And I don’t know what to do about that. If I free her – forgive her that is – I am sure I will find that I have freed myself with her, but then what would become of me? Who would I be after all? What would my heart be if I did not hold her there?”

“You would be happy.”

Ignoring that, the Coroner looked Wynfellow in the eye.

“Have you been in love?”

“No.”

“Then you know nothing of happiness and you know nothing of tragedy. Those who live forever know nothing. We’re all ghost towns in the end. We’re each haunted by those we love. And anything would be better than haunting eternity with love lost. That’s why I became a Coroner. A happy dead man is better than a sorrowful ghost.”

“Should your thoughts on death continue to be as bleak as this, I don’t know if I want to hear them.”

“You came to learn to die and I am telling you. We must talk of love. We must talk of gods. We must talk of ghosts. We must talk of everything.”

“Sometimes talking of everything is talking of nothing,” Wynfellow retorted,

After thinking for another moment, he asked, “Can you even teach me to die?”

“I think you’re beginning to understand.”

“There’s only one reason you’d want another interested in death to come visit you. You want me to kill you. I could never do that and I hate you for asking that of me.”

“Calm down, calm down. I don’t want you to kill me. Yes, the thought crossed my mind as one solution, but it is one I refuse to let you bear. All I ask is for you to hold my hand as I die. Is that okay?”

Wynfellow sighed, crippled by the fear that he would never find out how if he should die. He thought for a long while, looking only at the Coroner with frustration and pity. They said nothing more as their hands clasped, clumsily at first, like schoolchildren. Finally, their fingers interlocked and they held each other tightly. The color bled out of everything.

As the sun rose, Wynfellow untangled himself and left the room with a dozen different thoughts pouring from his mind. After he exited, the room felt like a beating heart even though nothing still living was in it. An angel must have passed.

It wasn’t until long afterwards that Wynfellow remembered the cold touch of something metal as he clasped the Coroner’s hands. It wasn’t until long after that he remembered what happens when the hearts each were given touch others’ flesh. It wasn’t for far too long that Wynfellow realized what he’d done. The guilt had tripped him like a noose. The shame in being tricked held him like lover without love: close and cold. They say only two stories are ever told: someone leaves home or a stranger comes to town. They are wrong. There is only one story: someone loses something.