The Spot: Stories

If anyone had to confront the issue at hand it was the coroner, Samuel Kelman, because Bay City seemed to produce a disproportionate number of accidental body piercings: boys fell onto implements, impaled themselves through playful jousting, and were samuraied through the gut with a frequency outside the bounds of normalcy. The coroner took care to avoid an inclination he had to find pleasure in the absurd deaths of those who lay on the slabs for examination. These stunts were generally pulled during the night. Attempts were made to defy physical law. Stupidity was like dust, or the earth itself. He drove home that evening — after the examination of the boy’s body, making note of the spike holes, the gash along the mouth, the stress fractures in the wrists; making note of the fact that the boy had died at approximately three in the morning. Driving home, listening to Schubert on the car stereo, he considered the bloodless silence of the boy’s open eyes (which he shut), fixed upward, and the paradigmatic (was that the word?) palm holes. The boy’s body — slightly glistening, with dimples of fat along the waist — seemed to hold a gentle repose, as if giving in to gravity. (Most of the time a body, during the first hours after death, lifted away from the surface of the table, as if barely tethered. A soul-empty body seemed as light as a seedpod, the brittle shell of a cicada.) Of course, he was seeing what he wanted to see in those eyes, pale and sad, somewhat elegiac, dark gray with a bit of blue around the senseless dilation of the pupils. On the way home — glancing over at the dreary waters of the Saginaw River — his thoughts ranged from puncture wounds to tetanus and then landed naturally upon the one time he had himself been impaled. This was in a town called Branford, near New Haven, Connecticut, goofing around with his buddies, walking barefoot along a breakwater of cemented boulders, enjoying the sense of being sure-footed against the wind gusts, which were coming hard off Long Island Sound that morning, when he felt something impinge upon his foot. A strange tingling sensation; nothing painful until he looked down and saw the point protruding near his toes. Then he became aware of a numb pain, remote and far off. He began running in panic, the board flopping like a wooden clog while his friends laughed and taunted him until it became clear to them what exactly was going on: He had gone into that realm few kids entered but all thought about. He had stepped on the proverbial nail. (In the car he tried to make sense of the physics of the accident, calculating the amount of force it would take to send a nail all the way through his foot, adding to the formula the fact that he had been stepping hard on the rocks at the time, doing a jaunty balancing act for his friends, until the nail sank in near the forefoot, up far enough to allow it to slide between the metatarsals.) What he could remember more than anything was the odd sense of reorientation the nail had given him, a Polaris of pain, until one kid yanked it out while another held his foot, and he, in turn, unleashed a high seagull scream that sent real gulls sweeping up off the beach and into the sky.