Thirty-seven, Qing Yuan thought when a cleaner wheeled the corpse of a woman into the morgue. The woman’s husband, a scrawny man in a shabby work uniform, smelling of sewage, drooped behind the gurney. The cleaner pushed a form to Qing Yuan and fled. He glanced at it: Dystocia with stillborn boy.
The morgue was windowless, with just two low-wattage bulbs on the ceiling. The air lay heavy with antiseptic, cigarette smoke, rotting flesh, and blood. He looked at his watch—5:30 a.m. Another thirty minutes, he thought, and he’d be in the sun, breathing the morning air.
The husband stood numbly by, watching Qing Yuan complete the form, then shuffled out to squat against the wall to smoke. After a time Qing Yuan called him back and asked for his signature. The man scribbled what looked to Qing Yuan like a chicken’s clawprint in the sand.
He filled a bowl with water and placed it on a bench near the gurney. The woman was naked under her bloody sheet. Her hair was tucked behind her ears. Her purplish hands remained clenched on her chest. She could have still been cradling her baby, Qing Yuan thought. Her pale face with its vague smile expressed neither suffering nor struggle. But as he drew back her sheet, he was sure he heard her whisper. I have tried. I have tried so hard.
The husband paced about, perplexed as he studied the numbered cabinets. Qing Yuan knew what the man was looking for—names. He would find none, of course, in this morgue or any other. These cabinets held nothing but nameless rotting bodies.
Qing Yuan started to clean the corpse. “Does she have any clothes?” he said.
The man fumbled in his tote, then laid a rumpled shirt, some pants, and a pair of cloth shoes on the foot of the gurney.
“Your first child?” Qing Yuan said. The man retreated to his place near the cabinets and stood there smoothing his wrinkled tote. “If you want to smoke, feel free,” Qing Yuan said, and fastened a final button on the corpse’s shirt.
The man glanced at the “No Smoking” sign on the wall and then at Qing Yuan. He took a cigarette from his pocket. “Want one?” he said.
Qing Yuan shook his head. He ran his fingers over the bump on the woman’s belly and had the strange impression that he could sense the baby turning beneath its mother’s cold skin. He wondered if a doctor or nurse had handed the baby to its mother, if she had been able to hold her baby even for a moment.
“Were you able to meet your child?” he said as he pulled the socks over the woman’s swollen feet. Holes had been worn through the socks. The holes had been darned. More holes had been worn through the holes that had been darned. With a pair of dirty scissors Qin Yuan snipped the loose thread where one of the woman’s toes stuck out.
“My child,” the man said.
“It was a boy, yes?”
“Boy, girl, it’s dead.”
Government regulations stipulated that dead babies be categorized as “pathological waste” and disposed of, like garbage, in the hospital’s trash bins. Qing Yuan had seen many of these tiny corpses, pinkish, yellowish, tin-gray, curled up, always seemingly asleep, tossed by janitors into fires outside the building. The scandalized Lao Jia, the oldest morgue keeper in the hospital and Qing Yuan’s one true friend—they had shared a bunk bed in a dormitory for several years—referred to the terrible act as “human incineration.”
“A dead baby isn’t considered a sentient being,” he often complained, knowing that most of the high-ranking officials, and likely even the Supreme Leader himself, ate placenta stew, believing, ludicrously, that it would increase their masculine vitality, “and yet they reckon a placenta is worth killing for.”
It was almost 6 a.m. when Qing Yuan slid the corpse into its cabinet. He left the morgue, drenched with sweat, followed by the husband, unable to make sense, Qing Yuan knew from repeated experience, of this new reality. He waved to the man as he made toward the toilet. The man stood there, his face wreathed in smoke from the cigarette between his lips.
The toilet was a narrow room, not much larger than a storage closet, lit by a sliver of light from a high tiny window. Beneath a tap connected to a rusty pipe, a concrete trough jutted from the wall, and, in the far corner, a cracked ceramic squatting pan, half-full of waste, sat on the concrete floor.
Qing Yuan opened the tap, gripped the edge of the trough, and ducked his head under the water. He stood there a long time, running his fingers through his hair, and listened to the choir of whispered sorrows that came to him every night after he had cleaned his last body. He still had to clean the morgue, he knew.
He swept the cigarette butts and ashes, the scorched matches, the dirt, the tattered bits of cloth. He paused by the mound of bloody sheets behind the door. Thirty-seven, he thought, in just eight hours, plus the child he had never seen. Thirty-eight.
He was required to clean the cabinets when needed, but he cleaned them every day just the same. He passed his rag along the doors. Now and then he paused to press his brow to a cabinet, hoping to commune with the soul inside that had refused to leave. Most of the time I want to forget my days. Surely you all know that. Only when he heard the echo of his voice did it strike him he’d been speaking aloud.
The air was clammy and stifling. It was always clammy and stifling. He could feel the sweat dripping from his face again. Like every day, he couldn’t wait to shower. He knew he’d never be clean, of course, he’d always reek of blood and antiseptic, but every day he did his best to wash himself of these things. More than anything, he wanted to be rid of the “smack of doom” that Sister Wang, Gugu’s neighbor, had said he’d stunk so foully of.
She had been a Taoist nun and, secretly, a physiognomist. Once, his aunt had invited Sister Wang to tell Qing Yuan’s fortune. As Gugu sat by, Qing Yuan was told that an imbalance in his yin and yang had created too much yin qi in him. Then, to both his and Gugu’s surprise, in an almost vicious undertone, Sister Wang added, “And I can see the smack of doom on your face, as well. It’s everywhere,” she said, and without warning, ran her cold hands from Qing Yuan’s brow to chin.
He swung open the locker door and glanced at his face in the small mirror Lao Jia had glued there. A gaunt pale man with gray stubble looked at him with tragic eyes. The face appalled him. That this face was his appalled him more. A shadow passed across the mirror. Someone else was with him.
There on the bare table sat Sister Wang, naked, like a crone from a tale.
“Will you clean and dress me after I die?” she said.
“I will,” he said, and sat on the table. His legs dangled next to hers. She reeked of incense, as if she had just left a shrine.
“Will you dress me in your mother’s silk qipao?” she said. “I’ve never dressed like a real woman, not one day in all my life.”
“I’ll have to get them from Gugu,” he said, recalling his mother’s wardrobe, filled with silk qipao in every possible color and shade. His aunt had saved it all.
“I knew you in your other life,” Sister Wang said, “when you were a pleasant young man who saw the sky as always blue and the sun as always warm.”
“You know that man is dead.”
“I want to have children with you,” Sister Wang cried, “but you are late—you’re twenty years too late!” She pulled his hands to her breasts. The two huddled on the table, shivering as if stranded in a barren field. She groped at him like a succubus.
“Do you not still yearn?” she said.
“No one can yearn for the unattainable.”
“I’ll marry you in my next life,” she said, and gripped him harder yet. Her lupine eyes pleaded with him. She wanted him, he knew, even as he knew there was nothing beside him to give himself to.
He had been weeping, he realized, as he pushed himself off the table. His groin ached as if Sister Wang had been clutching him for years.
He went to the workstation, a rough cubicle at the end of the hall. A makeshift desk and two bamboo folding chairs took much of the space, though there was room enough, also, for a cabinet and a small iron stove. Three men shared this cubicle—Qing Yuan during the night shift, Qi Chu the morning, and Lao Jia the afternoon. They worked in relays, around the clock, every day of the year.
Lao Jia had started in the morgue when the new government appropriated the hospital in 1949. As for Qi Chu, he’d been a city drifter until he was released from a homeless shelter in 1950 and forced to work as a morgue keeper. He married a peasant woman a few years later. Qing Yuan had been conscripted to the morgue, too, just before Qi Chu, in 1950, after his father had been executed and his mother had died of grief.
Qing Yuan sat at the desk, his eyes shifting from the clock on the wall to the watch his father had gifted him when he graduated from high school.
“The first piece of jewelry a man should own is a good watch,” his father had said.
Qing Yuan held the watch to his ear and listened both to the tick of it and the clock and felt himself passing simultaneously through different dimensions, worlds of memories and of ghosts, yesterday’s and today’s, the life he’d had and the so-called life he now had. The rotten stench of this place, he thought, the countless corpses he had tended, the hours and days and months that had mounted across the sixteen years he’d been here every night—he had made nothing of his time, he thought, he had salvaged nothing, either, absolutely nothing.
Father! he thought. This watch has conned me of my time. It’s never been about carrying on but of giving in.
There was no life left that wasn’t loveless, anymore, Qing Yuan thought. Death was everywhere. Smoke enveloped the city. The ashes from the crematorium chimney covered the streets, sooted the rain, dirtied the snow, damaged the crops, infected every body. It wasn’t even ash from coal, he thought, it wasn’t even simple dust. It was the remnants of the flesh and bones from every corpse he had cleaned across the years.
Where is your watch, Father? It’s your watch I want, yours!
Thirty-seven, he thought again, thirty-seven. He felt almost blessed to have forgotten how each of the corpses had looked or what their cabinet numbers were, but then he remembered them all, the women and the men, the young and the old. They smelled the same, yet somehow each was unique in its way. It was as if the odor of each body told the manner of its death. Then he remembered the baby, too, and pictured it twisted into some nearby trash bin, waiting to be burned.
It was 6:40, and still Qi Chu had not shown. He held two jobs, one cleaning the train station at night, his other the day shift at the morgue. He had three children but no home in the city. He slept a few hours each afternoon in the home of a friend, while his wife and their children waited for him in the countryside. He saw them every few months for a day or two at most.
“The peasants have nothing,” he had once told Qing Yuan. “They toil in the fields year after year, yet still they starve.”
Qing Yuan seldom complained about Qi Chu’s tardiness, but this morning his patience had grown thin. He had felt his rage mounting across the night. He would have fought anyone this very moment, for no reason at all. He shifted a little and fumbled for a cigarette. Truly, he thought, it’s terrible to be yourself.
It was almost seven when Qi Chu scuttled in with a lunch bag sewn from an old towel. He neither glanced at Qing Yuan nor apologized for being late. He tossed the bag onto the desk and went to the morgue for his smock. Their work uniform consisted of nothing more than this, a navy-blue smock of heavy fabric, replaced every two years.
Nevertheless, Qi Chu had used the same smock since his first day at the morgue and worn it down to little more than shreds. Each time the old smocks were replaced, he’d send his new one home for his wife to make clothes for their children. Once, Qing Yuan had donated his old smock to Qi Chu’s wife. She had used part of it to make three pairs of tiny shoes.
“How many?” Qi Chu said, yawning.
Qing Yuan paused as he went out. “Thirty-seven.”
“Busy night.”
Death was rarely mentioned in the morgue. Neither he nor Qi Chu nor Lao Jia called the dead by their names but by the number on the cabinet they’d been stored in—3, 17, 31, 12, 19—every corpse turned into a number. Always it was the same, How many?
“Only numbers matter,” Lao Jia had once said. “We’ll all be numbers before we’re ashes.”
Qing Yuan made his way to the shower, thinking again of the woman who had died of dystocia, her boy stillborn, dead. He had died without ever having lived, he thought. He would never receive a name, much less a number. Soon, Qing Yuan thought, he’d be incinerated as though he were garbage. Thirty-eight, he thought. Thirty-eight.
__________________________________
Excerpted from The Morgue Keeper by Ruyan Meng. Used with permission of the publisher, 7.13 Books. Copyright 2025 Ruyan Meng.