After-Hours Anatomy

Russ Payne was twenty-four and mostly good at his job. Mostly. He could run a donor reception for two hundred cardiologists without breaking a sweat. What he could not do, apparently, was leave a building with all his belongings.

He discovered this in the parking lot, at nine forty on a Thursday night, standing beside his Honda with his laptop bag open and his charger missing. The Calder Institute for Neurobiological Research glowed behind him. All that glass, all those dark offices.

"Come on," he told the bag. The bag said nothing.

He thought about just driving home. He had a spare charger in a drawer. But it was the good charger, the fast one, and tomorrow was a twelve-hour day with a budget meeting. So he turned around and badge-swiped back through the front door before security could finish their rounds.

The building after hours was a different animal. The air still smelled like champagne and floor polish from the reception. Somebody had left a stack of folded tablecloths on a cart by the elevators. His own fault, that. He'd promised Martina Landry, the senior lab manager, that cleanup would be done by eight. It was done by eight. Mostly.

His charger was not in the reception hall. Not at the coat check. Not under any of the sixty chairs he'd personally straightened.

Then he remembered. The basement. He'd set it down on a counter in the anatomy suite around five, when he was doing a last walkthrough and the battery had died mid-call with the florist.

The basement was a problem. The basement was where the night janitor locked the wing at nine thirty, and it was nearly eleven.

He took the stairs two at a time anyway. The door to the anatomy suite was still open. Small mercies. He slipped in, and the heavy click of the door settling behind him sounded a lot like a lock engaging.

Great. Trapped in the basement of his own workplace. His mother would have thoughts about this. Well. She'd have questions, anyway.

* * *

The anatomy suite ran on emergency lighting at night. Everything sat in a wash of dim blue, the specimen cabinets turned into slabs of shadow. It should have been creepy. It was, a little.

Russ found his charger on the second counter he checked, right where he'd left it, coiled next to a tray of labeled forceps. He pocketed it, turned to leave, and saw the woman.

She stood at the big wall-mounted brain model near the teaching station, one hand raised, fingertip hovering over the temporal lobe. Lab coat. Hair pinned up with what looked like a pencil. And here was the thing, the thing his brain refused to file properly: he could see the cabinet behind her. Through her. She was translucent, faintly glowing, lit from some source that had nothing to do with the emergency lights.

Russ did not scream. He would later maintain he did not scream. What he did was make a short strangled noise and back into a stool, which clattered, which made him flinch again.

The woman turned her head. She looked mildly apologetic, the way people look when they've startled a waiter.

"Oh. Sorry. Sorry," she said. "You startled me, actually, if that helps. Nobody comes down here after nine."

"You're," Russ said. His mouth took a second to reboot. "You're floating."

"I'm standing. It looks like floating because of the floor."

He looked at the floor. The floor was solid and so was she, more or less, except for the entire cabinet visible through her ribcage.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. So I've had more champagne than I thought, apparently."

"You had exactly two glasses at the reception. I watched you carry the tray around all night. You only ever took the rejects." She said it kindly. "I'm Lindsay. Lindsay Dempsey. I'm a ghost. Well. I was a postdoc in neuroanatomy, and now I'm a ghost. The order of events matters to me."

Russ gripped the stool. Twenty-four years old, and this was the strangest ninety seconds of his life, and that included the time a donor's ex-wife had shown up at a gala uninvited with a bullhorn.

"Russ," he managed. "Russ Payne. Events. I do events here. Part-time, while I try to get a real job in the field."

"I know. I've watched a lot of receptions." She drifted a step closer, which did nothing for his nerves. "You seem competent. That's why I'm going to ask."

"Ask what?"

She gestured at the workstations along the far wall, the monitors dark, the drives humming faintly in their cages. "I died a year ago. Right in this lab. Aneurysm, thirty seconds, no warning. I was twenty-six." Her voice stayed level but her hands didn't; they folded and unfolded against the lab coat. "I was eight weeks from submitting my final paper. Nine months of imaging data on glial cell response, all of it organized, all of it written up in my head. And I'm bound here until it's submitted. The paper, I mean. Nobody's bound to a conference poster."

"Bound," Russ said. "Like, magically."

"Like however it is. I've had a year to theorize and I still don't know. What I do know is I can't do it alone. I can type, barely, if I concentrate. But the formatting. The journal template. The citation software that got updated the month after I died. I've been staring at it like a raccoon staring at a Rubik's cube."

Despite everything, Russ laughed. Then he felt bad about laughing, then he felt bad about feeling bad, and by then Lindsay was smiling anyway.

"So here's the offer," she said. "You help me get this paper finished and submitted. In exchange, I tutor you."

"Tutor me."

"In anatomy. Actual anatomy, from someone who taught first-year med students and terrified them. You want out of events, you said. A working knowledge of what this institute actually studies wouldn't hurt you in an interview. And I've been alone down here for a year. Martina talks to me sometimes, when she stays late, but she can't stay late forever. She's got a life. Thirty years old and she actually uses her vacation days, the maniac."

Russ thought about it. This was, objectively, insane. A ghost was offering him a barter arrangement in a basement. His charger was in his pocket and the door was locked and it was Thursday.

On the other hand. A postdoc-level anatomy tutor, free, on demand? He'd been half-assing his way through networking events for a year, nodding at slides he didn't understand. A connection to this place that was more than tablecloths and seating charts might be the difference between a career and a string of gigs.

"Okay," he said. "Deal. When do we start?"

"Right now, ideally. I'm dead, I don't sleep, and you're already locked in."

"About that. The door."

"Oh, it unlocks when the janitor does his two a.m. sweep. You're fine. Sit down." She moved toward the workstation, passing cleanly through the edge of a counter without breaking stride, and Russ decided not to comment on it. Some things you file away for later.

The monitor woke to a login screen. Lindsay frowned at it.

"The password is on a sticky note under the keyboard," she said. "Martina's. She doesn't know I know. Or, well, she knows I know everything in this room, but it feels rude to say."

Russ lifted the keyboard. Sticky note. 'GliaRulez84.' He typed it in, glancing at her.

"Martina picked that?"

"We were grad students and it was a joke that got out of hand. Now it's infrastructure." Lindsay settled beside him, translucent hands hovering over the desk, not quite touching it. "Okay. The draft lives in the folder that says FINAL, which is a lie, it's the third FINAL. Open that one."

He opened it. Hundreds of pages, maybe. Figures, tables, a table of contents that had given up on itself.

"So," Russ said, cracking his knuckles. "What's first?"

"Margins," Lindsay said, with the weariness of a soldier. "Always margins."

* * *

They worked until one in the morning. Somewhere around midnight Russ stopped flinching when she drifted through furniture. Somewhere around one he realized the tutoring part of the deal had already started, because she'd spent forty minutes explaining her data to him and he'd understood most of it, and he'd never understood most of anything a researcher told him before.

"Not bad," she said, watching him fix a broken figure reference. "You learn fast for someone who arranges chairs for a living."

"For someone who's going to arrange chairs forever, you mean."

"Give it a year," Lindsay said. "Talk to me in a year."

He couldn't know then how much she meant by that. He pulled his laptop toward him, plugged in the charger, and got back to the margins.

By two a.m. the basement door clicked open somewhere down the hall, and Russ packed up like a man escaping a crime scene. He said goodbye to the empty room, because it felt rude not to, and got a nod from nobody in return.

His Honda was cold and smelled like old coffee. He sat in the parking lot for a minute, staring at the dark building.

A ghost. He'd shaken hands with a ghost. Sort of. She'd held out her hand, he'd taken it, and it had felt like holding his wrist under a cold faucet. He kept flexing his fingers on the drive home as if to confirm they still worked.

Thursday came around again. He made excuses to himself all week. Career networking. Professional development. Nobody had to know the professional development was dead.

He waited until the reception wound down at eight, said his goodnights to the catering crew, and took the elevator down with his heart doing something unprofessional.

She was at the workstation. Of course she was. She didn't have anywhere else to be, which was the whole sad point.

"You came back," Lindsay said.

"You doubted me?"

"I hoped. Doubted's a strong word for a woman with no other applicants." She turned in the chair, or appeared to. Her feet didn't quite touch the floor, which was one of those details he was trying not to catalog. "Lesson one, then. Since you're here."

"Tonight? I figured we'd do more margins."

"Margins can wait. I need to know if you're teachable before I invest." She stood and drifted closer. "Cranial nerves. Twelve of them. The most common thing first-years botch, and the thing I made my students recite until they hated me."

"From memory?"

"From being taught properly. Sit."

He sat on the lab stool. She moved behind him, and he felt the temperature drop a degree or two, like standing near an open freezer.

"May I?" she said. "I need to show you where the nerves exit the skull. It works better with a head attached to the lesson."

"Go ahead."

Her fingers settled on his scalp. Cold, yes, but not dead cold. Cold like a spoon from the freezer. She traced a line from his temple back toward his ear.

"Trigeminal nerve. Five. Sensation in your face, chewing. You feel where I'm drawing?"

"Yeah," Russ said. His voice came out lower than planned.

"Oculomotor. Three. Moves the eye, lifts the eyelid." Her fingertip moved up over his brow. "Facial. Seven." A line down behind his ear. "Taste on the front two-thirds of the tongue, and every expression you've ever made. Smile, frown, raise an eyebrow."

"Like this?" He raised an eyebrow.

"Cute. Vestibulocochlear. Eight. Hearing and balance. Runs right about here." Her fingertip pressed lightly near his ear, and his whole scalp prickled. Goosebumps ran down his arms. She must have seen them.

"You're shivering," she said.

"It's cold down here."

"It's sixty-eight degrees. Martina keeps it at sixty-eight because she read one paper about data integrity in 2019 and made it a religion." There was a grin in her voice. "It's me. I have that effect."

"Is that a ghost brag?"

"It's a tutor noting a physical response. Very scientific." Her fingers moved to the back of his skull. "Glossopharyngeal. Nine. Vagus. Ten. The vagus is the big one, it wanders everywhere, hence the name. Heart, lungs, gut. Your body's whole idle setting."

"My heart's doing fine, thanks."

"Is it." She didn't say it like a question. She said it like a woman taking notes. "Hypoglossal. Twelve. Tongue movement. Say 'lah lah lah.'"

"Lah lah lah."

"Terrible. Say 'la,' tongue only, jaw still."

He managed it on the third try and she pronounced him marginally less hopeless than a first-year med student, which he decided was a compliment.

They ran the list twice more. By the end his scalp felt scraped clean in a pleasant way, like the memory of a barber's clippers. She pulled her hands back and the cold left with them, and he noticed he missed it. He filed that away too.

"One week," she said. "Same time. Bring questions."

"Can I bring dinner? You can't eat it but I feel weird chewing alone in a locked basement."

"Bring two forks. For realism."

* * *

The next Thursday, the reception was smaller. Fifty pharmacologists. Russ was getting good at guessing headcounts, which was not the skill he'd imagined building at this job.

He came down at nine with a bag of Thai food and his laptop. The emergency lighting made the hallway amber, and the anatomy suite glowed at the end of it like the last lit house on a street.

"You brought noodles," Lindsay said from the dark.

"You could smell them?"

"I can't smell anything. I saw the bag. But I remember the smell of that place on Gilman Street, and now I'm bitter about it, so thanks."

They set up at the second monitor, the one with the microscope feed. Martina had digitized most of the lab's slides, which meant Lindsay could walk Russ through her own imaging data at full resolution.