Later that night, when they were riding down Riverside Avenue in a yellow cab, John looked out at the dark stretch of river below them. Beyond, the lights of New Jersey sparkled on the opposite shore. Sherlock was talking loudly and enthusiastically about the cadavers that they had seen at the medical school. He had his theories about each one of them and, like Molly Hooper, he had the remarkable ability to keep each body straight in his head.
"…it was quite possible, don't you think, that number 27 died of asphyxiation? What do you think it was? Carbon monoxide poisoning?"
"I said it before and I'll say it again, Sherlock, I don't know why you didn't just look at the cause-of-death on their records."
"Where's the fun in that?"
"That was the whole point of going there, Sherlock."
Sherlock patted his chest. "I know their family histories. I have the rest of the records here. I'll look through them later."
"Where did you get the records?" Sherlock shut his eyes wearily.
"Dr. Berthiaume."
"You stole them, didn't you?"
Sherlock looked down his nose at John.
"They were computer print-outs."
"You stole them," John accused.
"Wrong," Sherlock said smugly, opening his coat to bring out a folded stack of papers. "Berthiaume gave them to me just as we were leaving. You had left for the loo by then. You know, John, occasionally people do give me things without my asking for them. Or stealing them."
"Sorry," John muttered. "It's just – remember, that first night, 'Welcome to London!' You had Lestrade's ID, after all. Not to mention what you do with Mycroft's."
"Just because I am an accomplished pickpocket, doesn't mean that I'll steal things when a polite word works just as well. And in this case, the doctor was practically begging me to take the records home and examine them. He had a few suspicions about numbers 27 and 43. Coroner's reports said suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning; he thinks otherwise."
"Any reason why you didn't mention this earlier?"
"As I said, you were in the loo."
"I wasn't in there that long."
"Long enough for Dr. Berthiaume to ask me how we had met."
"I caught that part of the conversation," John reminded him.
The wing of the hospital that housed the morgue was dedicated to research and, as such, was fairly deserted when they had arrived there in the early evening. John was curious to see what kind of hospital was hosted by one of the famed Ivy League universities, but the facilities were not much different from what he had come to expect from the NHS: drab paint, linoleum floors, and filing cabinets that looked like they had been installed forty years earlier.
Dr. Berthiaume had greeted them at the corner of 168th Street and Fort Washington; he was a tall, bearish man with a black beard, grey hair, and tired brown eyes. John had shaken his hand, introducing himself and Sherlock, whom he described as his "work partner."
"My brother told me about you," Dr. Berthiaume said in response. "You solve crimes, right?"
"Yes," Sherlock said. "And you are a pathologist, I assume? Military?"
The older doctor laughed deeply. "Third generation navy doctor. Former navy, I should say. I got out after the Gulf Wars. My brother stayed in." Dr. Berthiaume led them across the street to the Irving Building. "But then you knew that already, didn't you, Mr. Holmes?"
"Yes. You teach Gross Anatomy to the first-year medical students. Perfected your skills as a pathologist on the battle field; now you sift through the bodies of the aged and infirm and teach young students how to make spinal incisions and peel back dermal tissue and—"
"Did he go to medical school?" Dr. Berthiaume asked John.
"No," John responded. "He's just very—" he coughed. "—well read."
"My university studies were primarily in organic chemistry," Sherlock clarified. "Which, as you know, requires some understanding of biology if it is to be put to practical purposes."
"And Dr. Watson says that you're an expert in poisons?"
"Just so. Poisons, anaesthesia, and pharmacology."
"Is that common, in the British course in chemistry?"
Sherlock glanced over at the American. "Common?" He raised an eyebrow. "Hardly."
"I thought as much," Dr. Berthiaume muttered. "Come on, you two odd ducks. You'll like what we have here." He swiped a plastic card at the side of the building's entrance, then led John and Sherlock on a serpentine path to the dissection laboratory.
The room was as large as a gymnasium and nearly as high as one; in contrast to the rest of the building, it was well-illuminated from above and the acoustics were impeccable; John could hear the brush of Sherlock's pants as he strode ahead of the other two, intently examining a row of tables spread out before them.
"How many are there?" Sherlock asked loudly, turning around with his hands folded behind his back.
"Sixty tables and sixty cadavers," Dr. Berthiaume said, spreading his hands out and gesturing towards the tables where the body bags lay.
"How much time do we have?" Sherlock asked. He pulled something out of his pocket—the gold watch that John had given him—and looked at its face.
"Two hours," the pathologist said.
Sherlock glanced up at John. "We had better get started," he said.
"We?" John asked, cocking his head. "What do you want me to do?"
"Wait, wait, wait," Dr. Berthiaume interrupted. "A few ground rules, first. Number one: gloves and scrubs are over there." He pointed to a row of closets on the far wall. "Two: you can open the body bags, but you can't turn the bodies over. Some of them weigh close to two hundred pounds—"
"That's about fourteen stone to you," Sherlock said to John. John whistled.
"And they are very delicate. I don't want any damage to the bodies before the students get to them."
"Agreed," Sherlock said curtly. "Now, if there are two hundred bodies, and we have only two hours, we have to make some choices. Dr. Berthiaume, I presume that you have a list of their causes of death?" The American nodded. "Good. I shall require the numbers of those who died by violent means. Homicide, suicide."
"Any accidents you want to see?" Dr. Berthiaume asked. "We have a few of those, too."
"Are they badly dismembered?"
"They wouldn't be here if they were. Minimal trauma to the head, that kind of thing. Lethal but not disfiguring."
"Good." Sherlock nodded. "I don't want to look at any vascular deaths, nothing pulmonary or to the internal organs. No cancers, no wasting diseases. Nothing we can't see from a simple exterior inspection."
"Anything else that I can find for you?" Dr. Berthiaume narrowed his eyes and grinned slyly at Sherlock.
"A murder would be excellent," Sherlock said, grinning back at the man. "A good old-fashioned murder."
"I'll see what I can pull up. In the meanwhile, gentlemen, I suggest you change into your scrubs in the locker room over there, and when you're ready I'll point you in the right direction. The bags are numbered."
As Sherlock turned towards the locker room, John followed Dr. Berthiaume over to the row of computers at the opposite side of the room.
"I'm sorry about his—uh, his attitude, for lack of a better term for it."
"Quite used to that in this line of work," the pathologist assured him. "Gallows humour, you know. Keeps us sane doing what we do."
"Yeah," John agreed. "I don't know you do it, honestly. Working with dead bodies all day."
Dr. Berthiaume let out a loud laugh. "I'd say the same to you. I'd take the dead over the living any day. The dead can't harm us, as my father used to say."
"Indeed."
"Now, let me check through these records, find those deaths he was looking for. Might be a bit tricky. Not many homicides are intact. And suicides – not the types to donate their bodies to science, in most cases, unless the decision was made long before their lives took a tailspin."
"How, uh," John began, wondering how to phrase his question. "How do you get the bodies?"
"Donation." The American looked at him sharply. "How did you think we got them?"
"One hears stories," John said, laughing grimly.
"Of Chinese villagers and desperate Indian peasants? Please." He laughed. "We're not in the business of organ donation here. You'll see. These folks are definitely American; you can tell by their size and their tattoos." He smiled. "Most of them are old. Most died from natural causes. And most are unhealthy—smokers and alcoholics—otherwise they would have had their organs harvested for transplant. In other words: intact, sick, old American bodies. Sixty of them."
"Sixty bodies and one Sherlock Holmes," John said. "I wouldn't be surprised if he finds a few things you didn't know about."
"He wouldn't be the first," the pathologist admitted. "We get 'unintentional deaths" here all the time; family members are, unsurprisingly, reluctant to admit to others—much less to themselves—that a loved one has taken her own life."
"So what do you do if you learn that a death was a suicide and not an accident?"
"Nothing. The coroner's report has already been filed. We'll provide the families with a record of the findings of the dissection, if they ever request it." He chewed on his lower lip. "In the decade since I started teaching this course, we've only had four requests for those records."
"Better to let the dead lie sleeping, eh?" John asked.
"That's what most people believe," Dr. Berthiaume confirmed. "Dead and gone, dead to the world, dead and buried, passed away, passed on. They want to forget. Hell, everyone wants to forget death. But, as the poet said, even if we cannot stop for Death, Death will kindly stop for us. Eventually."
"Do you ever forget about death?" John asked. He had always been curious about the kinds of people who were drawn to pathology. Some surely went into the field because of their fear of interacting with—and perhaps harming—the living. Others—and Molly Hooper was likely among them—because they couldn't stand the pain of watching patients suffer. If you can't stand pain, an instructor at St. Bart's had once told him, then get your arse on over to Pathology. John, thinking that he was being clever, had asked the instructor if anaesthesiology weren't a better field for people who hated pain. "If you're an anaesthesiologist," the instructor had replied, "then your patients are nearly always in pain. And then those painkillers might start to look pretty damn tasty to you, too. If you don't drink yourself to death, first."
John missed, in his practice at the clinic, the way that it felt to work in a large hospital, on or off the battlefield, where there were specialists and teams and types, for gods sake, of doctors. The surgeons were one type, the psychiatrists another, and he missed the old game of guessing which subspecialty a colleague belonged to, or which school had trained her.
It was pleasant to stand there laughing at Dr. Berthiaume's dark humour, and remember how he had once dissected a body, too, in his student days at St. Bart's, and how he and his mates had learned to greet death with laughter, to unsettle Thanatos with their frankness and joviality. John had never laughed as much, or drank as much, or had as much sex, as he had the term he studied anatomy.
Heading over to the locker room, where Sherlock had recently emerged, John thought about Sherlock's obvious penchant for death. When did it begin?, he wondered. With the first death, the boy in the swimming pool? Or did it begin even earlier, at that moment when he realized, as all of us must, that even his blazing mind would go out like a candle, some day? John thought of another epithet for death, death as the Great Leveller, and he laughed to think that, for Sherlock, anything that put him on the same plane as the rest of humankind would necessarily be viewed by him with derision and contempt.
He had never asked Sherlock about religion, or about the afterlife, not even to see if Sherlock believed in such things. John had presumed that a man as rational as Sherlock could only be agnostic, or perhaps, like Pascal, hedging his bets so that, in the most important wager of all, he came down on the right side. John had accompanied Sherlock to the morgue at St. Bart's any number of times; he had discovered heads and toes and various corporal ephemera in their refrigerator; and he had stood by, frustrated and hurt, when Sherlock had mourned Irene's death—a death which was, John now knew, only another slight of hand in that woman's game. John had been with Sherlock in the presence of death many times before, and yet it was not until he was in the anatomy laboratory at Columbia Presbyterian, surrounded by body bags and cadavers, about to pull on a pair of green scrubs, that John was struck by how carefully they had both avoided the topic.
They both knew that they could die, in their line of work. The threat of death had the effect, like a strong stimulant, of clarifying one's vision. Life became very meaningful and very beautiful, all awash in colours and baubles and sensations, when one was about to lose it.
There was the night when John had shot the cabbie, thinking that Sherlock was about to take the wrong pill. And then, not long after, another night, when he was tied to a chair and a sick woman with a sick mind was prepared to shoot an arrow through his heart. He could not overlook the Golem, either, and the way the beastly man had thrown Sherlock to the ground like a china doll, as the lights from the planetarium flickered overhead like a deathly disco. Then there was Jim Moriarty, the semtex vest, and the same pool where Sherlock had first learned about death.
Four deaths—or almost-deaths—in as many months. Four occasions when gratitude transformed his life, and then there was a fifth, when Sherlock had solved the riddle of the safe and the American's gun had pulled away from its heavy place on his neck and left him free again. That time, as with every time his life had almost been lost, the resultant freedom was sweet and arousing. But there was a difference, that afternoon in Irene's house. John knew, from the fear on Sherlock's face and the desperation in the detective's voice, that if the other man pulled the trigger, than more than John's life would be lost.
By then, John had fallen in love with Sherlock, with the man who could bring him to the edge of danger and pluck him out of it just as surely and swiftly. And he thought that Sherlock might love him back, just for an instant he had that hope, when he smelled the fear on Sherlock, heard him cry their secret words—"Vatican cameos!"—and then they were rolling over and ducking bullets and grabbing weapons and shooting, and John thought that Sherlock might be in it with him.
But then he was running upstairs after Sherlock and Irene followed them, still wearing Sherlock's coat, ridiculously oversized on her, and—John did not want to remember it, now. He did not want to remember how Sherlock had writhed on Irene's floor, but unbidden the image came to him, of Irene retreating with her riding crop, her words a warning: Make sure he doesn't choke on his own vomit; it makes for a very unattractive corpse. There had been a corpse like that, in Dr. Berthiaume's laboratory, an old man who had died in exactly that way. And others with similarly gruesome and familiar deaths.
John reflected on all of this, and more, as the cab cut a brisk path down the west side of Manhattan. Sherlock nestled against the side of the other door, silent and contemplative as he observed the ornate mansions along Riverside Drive. John looked west, at the lights over the river, and thought of Charon, and poor Eurydice, and Orpheus who went after her with song and lyre sweet enough to steal her away from the underworld.
Music had also been Sherlock's protection against death, his call to life. But what would happen if music failed him, as it might, one day? Would there be any incantation strong enough to pull Sherlock back from the land of the dreaming, that halfway point to death? Would John's hands know how to mend and resurrect a man who didn't want to be saved, for whom oblivion might best cruel wakefulness?
It wasn't Sherlock who choked. It wasn't Sherlock who overdosed. It wasn't Sherlock who fell, John repeated to himself. He reached out to clasp Sherlock's hand—Sherlock's living hand, he reminded himself—but the detective squirmed out of John's reach, distracted. His fingers beat the Chaconne onto the leather seats of the cab while John, opposite and isolate, shook with silent sobs.