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You look down you look down at a body and you think what's it like.You look down: they look back. The eyelids slackened, their jaw loose. They don't look so much at peace as they look lost - like those kids on Geraldo, the Willowbrook kids. Punctured, deflated, empty. The eye - your own eye - expects some faint movement, and, perhaps in primal fear of stillness - like the dark - supplies its own, briefly. There is a hope, but the hope is only in the mind, and not the slowly stiffening stillness in the bed, on the sofa, sprawled in a doorway, against a park bench, in broad daylight. Insulting the hurried feet and murmurs of the world of real, living people with things to do, whose neurons do not sputter haltingly at death and stand, hum-drum, hands-in-pockets, over the meat of the thing.There is nothing can be done. Not worth, Craig thinks, it to bend the back and sprain a shoulder doing compressions on a rack of beef been drooling its own foam and fluid for hours. No one seen them go, the unwitnessed, unattended, untended.Just last week: they walked into a rest home and found a flock of men in khakis and women in pert hats thumping away on a body already in full rigor, the legs jumping up and down like a doll's. Once it's started you keep it going, once it's started you gotta go, and they took the pinioned piece to Rampart and Brackett did not even cross the threshold before he called it and they could hear, disgust on the back of his tongue like a tonsil stone, why did you bring me this.This thing.The hospital is for the living, however barely, however by the cuticles they are clinging to purgatory's last chasm. Enough time goes by and the county closes its books and ships them off to a place in the hills, he has seen that place, which Jack Hawley had called the cabbage patch and which Lou Preston, who is both superstitious and funny, nicknamed Romero General Hospital for the zombies that shuffled on the 5th and 6th floors, day and night, because they had no sense of it anymore. Their eyes, too, open. Their mouths slack.What is it like.Maybe there is a peace, in it. Or maybe it is hell. He hopes that when you are dead you do not remember what living was, else it would be too much, else perhaps the gates of heaven and the chains of hell would clamor down and loose each stranded soul back to the plain and weary earth. How dare you, say the eyes - dark, unblinking, collecting the fine dust that filters in from smoke-stained windows - how dare you stand there breathing, how dare you try to bring us back, how dare you break into the world of the dead demanding that we live, as if you have a right.Maybe there is peace and maybe they should stay there.Craig made the mistake, at their rounds with the docs, of saying this in front of Asa Baldwin, who had seen war, and yet his eyes were gentle and very nearly did they water when he said no, no don't say that.Lou Preston, who went to church with his wife and even sat right in the middle pews like an ordinary person and not a man who knew the smell of blood, had nodded cautiously and said something about God, with a capital "G" god. Said that God (a proper noun and not an abstraction) called people home when He felt it was right to do.Jack Bailey (who had seen war, and did not quite know what to do with himself without it) asked, arms folded, if that meant they should just leave 'em all for god (a concept) to sort out and make their bills on toe pain the rest of their lives.Cautiously, Craig had said well, medicine is always advancing. (He did not say anything about god in any case, capital or lower).Nurse McCall who comes to rounds sometimes has her hands shoved in her pockets as she does when she is deep in thought and considerate. She respects them too much to hold her tongue and Craig respects her for it even when he does not know how to articulate that. He is aware that he has insulted her on many occasions, when what he had meant to say was thank you. He wants her opinion now, if not her arbitration. She has seen god defied: both the soft-bodied child and the frail, contractured damned. The drunk and the sober. The drowned and the dried-up. She has seen them: filthy knees and elbows deep. He would keep her to his shoulder like a rifle, but he does not know how to say this, so instead he does things like only take exactly what he needs from the supply cabinet and never more.Jack Bailey (who prefers to decide who ends his wars) said to Lou Preston: you think we're defying god to save these people?Because Lou believes that God is real and good, he is offended, and Craig feels that is unkind to him. He can believe in his God, that is not at all at odds with the advancement of science."I think," he had said. "If I am correct, Preston, that medical advances would be god's will, as such, and we should take advantage?"Lou had said back in something not quite resembling shock and Nurse McCall's brows had risen."Well," Lou said. "Well, yeah, I suppose that is so, I mean if you believe in God.""I don't."Bob had heaved a sigh beside him that said: that is my partner. Craig understood this. He did not mean to insult Lou Preston and he wanted him to understand that but he, and god, had not been on speaking terms for some long time."I think," Nurse McCall had interjected at that point, "I think what we all want is what's best for our patients, and sometimes, doing everything, isn't in their best interests."They had all nodded at that: the paramedics, the doctors, the nurse. It was Doctor Early, that time, which had been good because mostly he had the sense to only nudge their discussions one way or another, and stay out of their spats and territorial disputes. Brackett held his ground, to his detriment, and Morton liked to lock horns with them in a way that showed he respected their judgement.That nod had changed the subject. Another patient. The winds shifted, and their unease abated, and Jack Bailey had a new war to start, and Lou Preston could believe in a kind and loving god who does not idly let his children suffer, and Asa Baldwin could tuck his grief back into his shirt pocket.One day years later Asa Baldwin's grief will bleed through in ways they will claim they could not see coming but the truth is they did, but they did not know how to stop it, powerless as if they stood dead-center of a long, long tunnel and did not know which light was the barreling train, but knew it did no longer mattered.And one day - years later - Jack Bailey will finish his wars in silence, in a bottle. He will leave a form from the hospital, notarized, that says not to take extraordinary measures, and he will leave a note that says you fuckers touch me I will haunt you all your days.Lou Preston's faith will be tested. One day. And another. And another, and another. And he will always find it good and holy.Not a one of them in that room knows what one day will bring. His partner, a shoulder beside him, a voice in the dark. The black of a gunbarrel or the blade of a knife. A choir of shining faces, the soft blessing of a callused hand on a hardened face. One day will bring a dance on the devil's tail, a death defied, or numbed footfalls on a moldering carpet to the side of a forgotten old woman. You look down and there she is: her body and the remnants of her life, worthy, looking back at you.