On my other side, a woman in her sixties who had been discovered in a dirty, rarely used passage in Montparnasse, her neck bruised black from strangulation. Dents in the fingers of both hands where once there were rings. Hers was an unusual scenario in that she had been well dressed and well fed, unlikely to be without relations in Paris. But as yet, three days on the slab, no one had come to claim her. The bruising on her neck had spread like a storm cloud, rolling up into her jowls and down across her shoulders. Her skin was waxy and grey, and her lips drawn back to reveal several missing teeth. Her head was tilted back and slightly to the side, as if she were trying to detect the notes of distant, familiar music.

The coat in which she was discovered, a cornflower blue, was decorated at the collar and cuffs with a fine embroidery in white thread, the pattern so delicate you wouldn’t notice the stitching unless it had been pointed out to you. The coat hung behind her, a loyal sentry.

Next to them, I looked like a pretty doll in the window of a grand magasin.

My muscles, my bones. My hair, skin, fingers, heart, kidneys, spleen. My lungs. My airless lungs. My cartilage, tendons, bowels, liver, my traumatized uterus, fallopian tubes, labia, clitoris. The small black mole between my breasts, once kissed by Axelle. My lips, my nipples, my eyelashes. The hairs in my nose, the cilia in my inner ears, my trachea, my tongue, appendix, intestines, anus, stomach, teeth. My blood and my water. My water. This body was either bound for the anatomist’s scalpel, or this body would be buried and all its parts devoured and digested and liquefied by a billion living things until there were only bones.

A heavy green curtain dressed the glass that stood between the dead and the people who came to view the dead. This was pulled back perhaps minutes after I was deposited on the slab and my clothing hung up behind me, and very soon they came. They pressed their warm noses to the glass, and their eyes were wet with pity or revulsion or both. Not one of us lying there had died peacefully, and we each were the last word of a story that must have been gruesome or, at least, sensational. They came for free theatre but what they got was posthumous physiology. Missing limbs. Exposed bones. Bodies marbled white and wine-black because the blood had stopped circulating, then pooled and coagulated. What they saw were fingers the same as their own fingers that once struggled with a buckle or held a pen or scraped a spot of dirt from a mirror.

One visitor, a woman exquisitely dressed, stood stricken and pale with her hand to her neck, as if reassuring herself of her own pulse. She took no notice of the grubby boy who pushed in front of her, mingling his filth with her skirts, or of the errand girls standing next to her who gaped at the male genitals, or of the flâneur positioned just behind her, a regular to the morgue, who was getting hot in the pants. Every constituent of Paris was represented and there wasn’t a moment the viewing salon was not packed. A child was held aloft to be given a better vantage point. A man in clay-smeared corduroy munched on a slab of cake he’d bought from a vendor just before coming in. He hadn’t even planned on visiting that day; had stopped in on a whim, on his way home from work.