Taken from the archives of This American Life. I heard this on NPR this past weekend and wanted to read it. Thought some of you might enjoy it too. WARNING: It's pretty gross. But funny, particularly if you like the David Sedaris brand of humor. :-)

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Act Four. Graveyard Shift.

Ira Glass

This actually brings us to act four, where we're going to learn a few more things to avoid. Act Four, Graveyard Shift. You know, the ghosts, and skeletons, and monsters who rise from the grave on Halloween are a kind of fake, children's story version of death. But one Halloween a couple years ago, David Sedaris decided that he was going to go for the real thing on Halloween. He was going for the real thing, the medical examiner's office-- the morgue, basically, the morgue, a place filled with actual dead people. He read his account of what happened there in front of a live audience at the Orpheum Theater in Minneapolis.

David Sedaris

The thing about dead people is that they look really dead, fake almost, like models made of wax. This I learned at a medical examiner's office I visited in the fall of 1997. While the bodies seemed unreal, the tools used to pick them apart were disturbingly familiar. It might be different in places with better funding. But here they used hedge clippers to snip through rib cages. Chest cavities were emptied of blood with cheap metal soup ladles, the kind they use in cafeterias. And the autopsy tables were lubricated with whatever dish detergent happened to be on sale. Also familiar were the songs-- oldies mainly-- that issued from the blood-spattered clock radio and formed a kind of soundtrack.

When I was young, I associated Three Dog Night with my seventh grade shop teacher, who proudly identified himself as the group's biggest fan. Now, though, whenever I hear "Joy to the World," I think of a fibroid tumor positioned upon a Styrofoam plate. Funny how that happens. While at the medical examiner's office, I dressed in a protective suit, complete with a bonnet and a pair of Tyvek booties. Citizens were disemboweled, one right after another. And on the surface, I'm sure I seemed fine with it. Then at night, I'd return to my hotel, double lock the door, and stand under the shower until all the soap and shampoo was used up.

The people in the next room must have wondered what was going on. An hour of running water and then this blubbery voice, "I do believe in spooks. I do believe in spooks. I do. I do. I do. I do. I do."

It's not like I'd walked into this completely unprepared. Even as a child I was fascinated by death, not in a spiritual sense but in an aesthetic one. A hamster or guinea pig would pass away. And after burying the body, I'd dig it back up, over and over, until all that remained was a shoddy pelt. That earned me a certain reputation, especially when I moved on to other people's pets.

Igor, they called me. Wicked. Spooky. But I think my interest was actually fairly common, at least amongst adolescent boys. At that age, death is something that happens only to animals and grandparents. And studying it is like a science project, the good kind that doesn't involve homework. Most kids grow out of it. But the passing of time only heightened my curiosity.

As a teenager, I saved up my babysitting money and bought a $75 copy of Medicolegal Investigations of Death, a sort of bible for forensic pathologists. It shows what you might look like if you bit an extension cord while standing in a shallow pool of water, if you were crushed by a tractor, struck by lightning, strangled with a spiral or non-spiral telephone cord, hit with a claw hammer, burned, shot, drowned, stabbed, or feasted upon by wild or domestic animals.

The captions read like really great poem titles, my favorite being, "Extensive Mildew on the Face of a Recluse." I stared at that picture for hours on end, hoping it might inspire me. But I know nothing about poetry. And the best I came up with was pretty lame.

Behold the recluse, looking pensive. Mildew, though, is quite extensive. On his head-- both aft and fore-- he maybe should have got out more.

I know nothing about biology either. The pathologist tried to educate me. But I was too distracted by the grotesque. My discovery, for instance, that if you jump from a tall building and land on your back, your eyes will pop out of your head and hang by bloody cables. "Like those joke glasses," I said to the chief medical examiner.

The man was nothing if not professional. And his response to my observations was always the same. "Well," he'd sigh, "not really."

After a week in the autopsy suite, I still couldn't open a Denny's menu without wanting to throw up. At night, I'd close my eyes and see the buckets of withered hands stored in the morgue's secondary cooler. They had brains too, a whole wall of them shelved like preserves in a general store. Then there were the bits and pieces, a forsaken torso, a pretty blond scalp, a pair of eyes floating in a baby food jar. Put them all together and you had an incredibly bright secretary who could type like the wind but never answer the telephone.

I'd lie awake thinking of things like this. But then my mind would return to the freshly dead who were most often whole or at least whole-ish. Most of them were delivered naked, zipped up in identical body bags. Family members were not allowed inside the building. And so the corpses had no context. Unconnected to the living, they were like these strange creatures, related only to one another.

A police report would explain that Mrs. Daniels had been killed when a truck lost control and drove through the front window of a hamburger stand. She had been a customer waiting in line. In cases like hers, I needed more than a standard report. There had to be a reason this woman was run down. As without one, the same thing might happen to me.

Three men are shot to death while attending a child's christening. And you tell yourself, sure, they were hanging out with the wrong crowd. But buying a hamburger-- I buy hamburgers. Or I used to anyway.

This medical examiner's office was in the western United States in a city where guns are readily available and drivers are known to shoot each other over parking spaces. The building was low-slung and mean looking, set on the far edge of the downtown area, between the railroad tracks and a rubber stamp manufacturer. In the lobby was a potted plant and a receptionist who kept a can of Mountain Glen air freshener in her desk drawer. "For decomps," she explained, meaning those who had died alone and rotted a while before being found.

We had such a case on Halloween, an elderly man who had tumbled from a ladder while replacing a light bulb. Four and 1/2 days on the floor of his un-air-conditioned home. And as the bag was unzipped, the room filled with what the attending pathologist termed, "the smell of job security."

The autopsy took place in the morning and was the best argument for the buddy system I had ever seen. Never live alone, I told myself. Before you change a light bulb, call someone from the other room and have them watch until you're finished.

By this point in my stay, my list of don'ts covered three pages and included such reminders as never fall asleep in a dumpster, never drive a convertible behind a flatbed truck, never get drunk near a train, never get old.

I hadn't timed my visit to coincide with Halloween, but that's the way it worked out. You'd think that most of the casualties would involve trick-or-treaters hit by cars or done in by tainted candy. But actually, the day was just like any other. In the morning, we had our decomposed senior. And after lunch I accompanied a female pathologist to a murder trial. She had performed the victim's autopsy and was testifying on behalf of the prosecution.

There were plenty of things that should have concerned me-- the blood-spatter evidence, the trajectory of the bullets. But all I could concentrate on was the defendant's mother, who had come to court wearing cutoff jeans and a Ghostbusters T-shirt. It couldn't have been easy for her. But still you had to wonder, what would she consider a dress-up occasion?

After the trial, I watched as another female pathologist collected maggots from a spinal column found in the desert. There was a decomposed head too. And before leaving work, she planned to simmer it and study the exposed cranium for contusions. I was asked to pass this information along to the chief medical examiner. And looking back, I perhaps should have chosen my words more carefully. "Fire up the kettle," I told him. "Old-fashioned skull boil at 5:00 PM."

It was, of course, the fear talking, that and a pathetic desire to appear casual, one of the gang. That evening, instead of returning to my hotel, I sat around with the transporters, one of whom had recently been ticketed for using the carpool lane and had argued, unsuccessfully, that the dead body he was carrying in the back constituted a second passenger.

It was just the four of us until around midnight, when a tipsy man in a Daytona Beach sweatshirt came to the front gate and asked for a tour. When told no, he gestured toward an idling car and got his girlfriend to ask. The young woman was lovely and flirtatious. And as she pressed herself against the bars, I imagined her lying upon an autopsy table, her organs piled in a glistening heap beside her. I now looked at everyone this way. And it worried me that I'd never be able to stop. This was the consequence of seeing too much and understanding the horrible truth. No one is safe. The world is not manageable. The trick-or-treater may not be struck down on Halloween, but sooner or later he is going to get it, as am I, and everyone I have ever cared about.

It goes without saying that for the next few weeks I was not much fun to live with. In early November, I returned home and repelled every single person I came into contact with. Gradually though, my gloominess wore off. By Thanksgiving, I was imagining people naked rather than dead and naked. And this was an improvement.

A week later, I was back to smoking in bed. And just as I thought that I had put it all behind me, I went to my neighborhood grocery store and saw an elderly woman slip on a grape. She fell hard. And after running to her side, I took her by the arm. "You really have to watch yourself in this produce aisle."

"I know it," she said. "I could have broken my leg."

"Actually," I told her, "you could have been killed."

The woman attempted to stand but I wouldn't let her. "I'm serious," I told her. "People die this way. I've seen it."

Her expression changed then and became fearful rather than merely pained. It was the look you get when facing some sudden and insurmountable danger-- the errant truck, the shaky ladder, the crazy person who holds you too tight and insists with ever-increasing urgency that everything you know and love can be undone by a grape.