Volume 4 Ghost Street Chapter 7, The Morgue Watchman
I am a medical school student who did an internship at a county hospital half a year before graduation.
The hospital has no spare housing other than patient rooms. I couldn't afford to rent a house, so the dean had to arrange for me to temporarily live in the single dormitory of Lao Li, a handyman.
Lao Li is in his fifties this year, and it is said that he was married once when he was in Wenge, and his wife thought he was poor and ran away to Guangdong with others, and he did not see anyone alive or dead. Lao Li never remarried, and he explained that his job in the hospital was to clean the morgue and tidy up the dead people, and no woman dared to touch him.
Lao Li is fond of tobacco and alcohol, and the room is full of cigarette butts and wine bottles. Cigarettes are low-quality cigarettes for one yuan and one pack, and wine is grain wine for one yuan and two pounds. After working for most of his life, the most extravagant thing in the house was an 18-inch Panda color TV, which he had brought back from the thrift market for two hundred yuan.
When I first arrived, I always had to say something. That night, I bought a pack of Hongtashan, two bottles of Erguotou, and served a few meat dishes from the canteen to honor Lao Li. The two singles swallowed the clouds and spit out the fog cups, and they were so drunk that they were in a mess. After drinking and spitting out the truth, Lao Li told me about his sad past. He told me that his father had served as a puppet county magistrate before liberation, and that he committed suicide by jumping off a building while he was in the middle of the country. He did well in secondary school and lost the opportunity to further his education. Later, for the sake of livelihood, he was forced to do the dirtiest and most painful errand of cleaning corpses in the hospital morgue for more than 30 years.
You know, he said, when he first started doing this kind of thing, the corpses of people who died normally were bearable. The most unbearable are those corpses that have committed suicide lying on the rails or have been torn apart by grenades in a fight. In order to overcome the fear in my heart, and even more so to prevent the precious rice in my stomach from vomiting in vain, I had to use alcohol to anesthetize myself. Wine, wine, you're such a good thing.
He stuck out his tongue and licked the last drop of wine at the bottom of the glass, and said with a smile, "Little brother, tell me about your sadness."
I've never drunk so much alcohol before, and I'm squirting out like a whale squirting water. Looking at the vomit in my stomach on the floor, I felt all the grievances of my life rushing in. I began to scold women, scolding Wang Linna, my first love who was seduced and abandoned me by a large amount of money on the eve of graduation.
Women are not a good thing, little brother, good scolding! Speaking of women, Lao Li gritted his teeth and showed a fierce look, the last time I passed by at the door of the hotel, I met a bitch soliciting customers, I asked her how much money to do once, she scolded me for being poor and told me to get out of here. Exercise! What is Lao Tzu less than other men? Isn't it a little less money? That slut, I don't know how many times I've fucked corrupt officials and corrupt officials, I don't want money, I still think she's dirty......
That night, perhaps because I had drunk too much, I tossed and turned in bed for a long time before falling asleep, and suddenly a thunderbolt woke me up in the middle of the night. It's raining heavily.
I got up, closed the window, turned on the light, and I found that Lao Li was gone. Where would he go when it was so late and raining? Will it go to the toilet? It just so happened that I was suffocated by a soak of urine, so I opened the door and walked to the toilet.
The toilet is at the end of the corridor, passing through the morgue on the way. Although I studied medicine and have personally dissected corpses, walking alone through the morgue in the dead of night still feels a little creepy. I tried to slow down as much as I could, lest I wake up the dead. As I reached the middle of the two wooden doors of the morgue, I heard the sound of a person breathing through the crack in the door!
At that moment, my soul was so shocked that my scalp was numb, could it be that the dead were resurrected?! I remembered that the phenomenon of "fake death" was recorded in a medical book, could it be that I encountered it today?
Tomorrow I'll be the number one news person in the hospital! Curiosity overcame fear, and I peered through the crack in the door as I prepared to flee.
There were no lights in the morgue, it was eeriely dark, and I didn't see anything.
But the mysterious wheezing sound grew clearer and more rhythmic. Just as I was wondering whether to break down the door or call someone, a powerful flash of lightning rang out from the sky, and the bright light illuminated the entire morgue through the air windows in the wall.
At that moment, I saw a picture that was enough for me to remember for the rest of my life: the naked Lao Li was lying on the body of a female corpse who was also naked, and was doing things for men and women. And what really shocked me was the black hair of the female corpse, which swayed in the wind with the ups and downs of Lao Li's body, like a living person.
The next day, I made an excuse to do an internship at another hospital. After graduating, I was assigned to a township hospital as a doctor. Compared to the county hospital, there is everything here, except for the mortuary.