The happy place

The morgue under our hospital looks just like a morgue.

The long hallway smells of wet dog like it's supposed to. A quorum of aproned antisocial types with knives stand around like chefs. Jars and plastic buckets full of pieces of humans neatly line the walls like barrels in a candy store. In the corner, a table with a camera rig and lights is set up for photographing specimens against an ugly blue background like on a porno set. Dull metal autopsy tables with cutting boards straight out of Martha Stewart's kitchen take up most of the space, separated by stretches of nasty green tile like in grandma's bathroom. A light box for radiology films hangs on one wall with an old stereo from 1986 on top of it (dual tape deck, one with auto-reverse, the other not so lucky) with an actual tape inside, also like in grandma's bathroom. And in the corner, also like in grandma's bathroom, a toilet.

I know, for that is what I also thought. But nay. It was a toilet.

This was not your grandma's toilet. I walked over to it for a closer look and no, it wasn't a sink or a basin, it was just a toilet. But something didn't look right. I looked at it for a while and went down the list of essential criteria for toiletness. There was a toilet plunger. There was a toilet flush lever thing. The piping looked appropriate to me. At its heart was a bowl with toilet water. The rim was there, though I wouldn't want to touch it. In the bottom of the bowl was the sine qua non of toiletude: the drain of oblivion.

Still, something was off. So I imagined myself going through the motions of using this toilet to discover what was missing and promptly ended the imagination when I got totally wet and cold and grossed out. This toilet was way too big for humans.

My colleague was standing next to me and noticed that I was staring at the toilet busy with my calculations. She leaned over and whispered, 'This looks like a good place to shoot Saw 4.' That's grim.

On the other hand, the morgue is actually the least grim place in the hospital since nobody actually dies here. In the tape deck: 'Bhangra mix 94.' Who cares what the toilet is for? Party in the basement, yar.