Pornography

The medical examiner had a long day and needed a drink. Rightly so, he was exhausted from an afternoon of investigating various causes of death, he smelled of formaldehyde and latex, and all he wanted was a tall glass of scotch and just a little bit of love.

The medical examiner's downtown loft was empty when he arrived. It was half-past nine. Where was his wife? Her coat and hat were hung-up on the coat-rack, the television was on, and Marvin Gaye was playing on his vintage record player.

There was a note in the kitchen.

“Dad called, he’s sick, won’t be home till late. Food is in the refrigerator.”

The medical examiner did not believe the note. Marriage counseling, Viagra, all of the works; his wife was not with her father, she was out on the town, it took no private eye inference to figure that one out. But the medical examiner did not fret—he was used to it all. He bypassed the refrigerated plate of spaghetti and meatballs, poured a tall and stiff scotch, walked up the stairs and entered his bedroom.

The medical examiner undressed. He felt like a replicated photograph of a once vibrant scene, but had become weathered from habituation, monotony. The medical examiner considered his life to be a once-classic hit that had been played on the record player too many times. He had lost his vitality, and was succumbed to the banal up-and-down-and-back-and-forth tedium of life.

Wearing nothing except his trousers, he drew-open the window curtain. While sitting cross-legged on his bed, he took a moment to gaze out into the hustle and bustle of the downtown cityscape. The medical examiner always liked to watch the countless citizens from his window. They interested him. He would fictionalize their life stories, he’d give them names, objectives; he would conjure plots that were always similar to the pulp magazines that he read as a child—the medical examiner had always wanted to be a detective.

The medical examiner noticed a woman alone in her apartment across the street. Well, he at least thought she was alone. He found the woman very attractive. She was dressed in a fine black summer dress, had long black hair, and was smoking a cigarette with her back turned towards him. The medical examiner did not choose to give this woman a name. He moved a little closer to the window and continued to watch the woman. She began to undress. First she removed her high-heels, then her earrings, then the exquisite pearl necklace that was draped around her neck. The medical examiner noticed that the woman did not wear a wedding ring.

Then the medical examiner closed his eyes.

The woman was even more beautiful up-close than she was from across the road. The medical examiner, still in his trousers, sat on the red floral cover of the woman’s bed. Her clothes were lying on the floor, and she was now staring out of the window, wearing only her lingerie, taking long and sensuous drags from her cigarette. The medical examiner wondered what the woman would look like on the table, and he dreamed what her cause of death would be. Asphyxiation, poisoning, cancer, hemorrhage, a bullet in the temple, maybe. This pondering was nothing out of the ordinary for the medical examiner, for he was a professional in the art of death and erotic prophecy.

The medical examiner was aroused. His trousers were getting in the way. He felt alive again, he felt like a twenty year old undergraduate with a good buzz and a fistful of confidence. So he did the next logical thing—he removed his trousers. Bare-assed and cross-legged like a sexually frustrated Hindu deity, he watched the woman turn away from the window. She unclasped her strapless white brassiere, and sat on the bed next to the medical examiner. His heart rate was beating with the exigency of an anxious thoroughbred horse that had been waiting in the gates for much too long. Now was the time, he could feel it approaching, finally, after so many long, dull, blind, and tepid days he was finally utilizing that sexual prowess he took too much for granted as a young man. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen; Venus, Helen of Troy, the woman with the power to set sail to one thousand ships.

The medical examiner straightened out his legs and fell back on the bed. There is nothing in the world better than this, he thought, to completely lose oneself in the caprice of a beautiful woman. He wanted to be the one to cut the woman open when her day of reckoning came, he wanted every intricacy of her flesh, and nothing more—nothing of the soul, nothing of the spirit, for the intangible spiritual self to the medical examiner was a fabrication by the hierarchal powers at hand to make the hell on earth (the hell that he witnessed at his job on the daily) much more tolerable. She would make a picturesque corpse, the definitive corpse, the one-and-the-only fathomable body of flesh.

The medical examiner, in a frenetic dash towards climax, sprinted for the summit. His legs jolted in the air, his breathing was heavy, and then, from what he would later consider a terrible coincidence, the bedroom door was flung open.

The medical examiner opened his eyes. His spine instantaneously sprung upright, the window of the woman’s apartment across the street was still open, yet she stood there in the warm embrace of another man.

His wife stood in the doorway, half-drunk with a maudlin disposition in her knees from a failed night out on the town, and saw her husband—the one whom she thought was impotent beyond repair—sitting naked in bed, with a hard-on.