Yet this nameless man, UNIDENTIFIED MALE printed with an inked number on his toe tag, was mangled, incomplete, grotesque, like a botched crucifixion, a mass of cuts and crude sutures so widely spaced they were like the stitches on a rag doll, the swollen edges of skin and flesh a child’s learning-how-to-sew project, a blob of laced-up guts.

Only the man’s face was whole, and though it had bristly unshaven cheeks, the blue lips slightly parted showed excellent teeth, even and of an unlikely whiteness, the face itself unmarked—thin, slight, indignant creases around the eyes, an expression of affront, of being wronged—the suddenness, the unfairness of death. The man was not old or ugly, as Sharkey had expected. He was perhaps in his early sixties, and there was a suggestion of athleticism in his sinewy legs, gone gray now but retaining their shape. His hair was long but neatly arranged—Stickney’s doing; he looked tidy and compact, taking up a narrow length of space on the shelf of the morgue drawer.

The face was mutely accusatory, and Sharkey saw I am here because of you in its eyes and its crumpled form: I belong to you. I am your responsibility. It is your duty to lug me into the light. And so Sharkey felt burdened and afraid and helpless, and he sorrowed for the man and for himself, encumbered by having to drag this dead nameless corpse along wherever he went from now on.

He saw himself lying there—he’d come near enough to death so many times it was easy for him to project his own body into the drawer. But what shocked him was that the man looked so small and lonely, naked and discolored and bloodless, unrecognized, friendless, the best of him—the miracle of life—gone. Not obscurely leaked away but taken from him, his life knocked out of him. And he looked unloved.

But turning away from the corpse, Sharkey felt an uprush of energy, joy bordering on rapture, a feeling of miraculous survival, and needed to calm himself from his exaltation. But I’m alive!

“I’m going to take some pictures,” Olive said, raising her phone.

“Can take. But cannot publish without family permission,” Stickney said.

“Which family?”

Stickney reacted, jumping a little as though teased. “Good question, sister!”

Stickney went on talking to Olive, skidding his thick fingertips on the papers on his clipboard, his jowly face full of life—his presence made it for Sharkey a study in contrast, the dead man looking deader, more futile, like a scabby log tossed by a wave to the beach among the broken shells and splintered driftwood and webs of dried sea froth, the corpse twisted into that same mass of sea-washed flotsam in a tangle at the tidemark.

“So you can’t tell us anything about him?” Olive was saying.