An Interrogation of Karl’s Authority

“Karl, what exactly do you do here?”

He sat at his office desk, scattered about with a deluge of papers as if a happy dog had been honored with the gift of wrapping paper and shredded it all on his desk. If you needed to write a quick note, you’d have to dig through layers upon layers of debris to find a notepad, and no one – I do mean NO ONE, no patients – could find anything thereon.

One time, Karl had requested a certain woman to grab a set of keys from off his desk. Could she find it? No. Did she flip his desk upside-down, frantically dividing the sea of papers? Yes, all to no avail. You wouldn’t be-leaf the extent she went to – a metal detector to go off at the sense of a singular penny; an infinity-lumen flashlight that could let you see right through a wall (no, not with the employment of a window), hoping the photoelectric effect would cast a light so bright, it would alert government officials of extraterrestrial activity in the vicinity, but we all know there’s no such thing as aliens…

“I run the morgue, ensuring all my equipment is up-to-date with the latest software and all the patients get their deserved service – timely, orderly, respectfully.”

Arlo voiced his thoughts, privately, about the matter. “Everyone who has a brain here knows that I take care of all the technological bits.” He rolled his eyes. “Who takes care of the old computer every time someone makes the screen go black or inverts its orientation? I do. Who identifies the most feasible solutions for equipment repairs and upgrades? I do. That man over there? He just looks it over and throws paperwork into his filing cabinet. I wouldn’t call that much if you asked me.”

“Karl hardly ever casts his presence out here, so what does he actually mean patients get served?” Haslia asked. “He’s such a coward because of all the dead bodies around here, and he’s too much of a chum bucket to build relationships with his patients. They only regularly come back because of us, the people.”

“Don’t look at me,” Terri said. “All I do is unload the packages and get them into the cooler.”

Dolly had other thoughts on the question. “With hindsight, I should have left years ago, knowing what a crook that man Karl is, if I can even call him one! Like, where do all these bodies come from? Why is he regularly getting shipments of them? What the heck is our purpose in this place? Why a sandwich shop for patients when they really have no business here? Their loved ones are already dead. If they need comforting, a sandwich will only soothe their stomach, but the weight of death will burden them into the grave.”

No one could supply any answers about the man’s managership, and some employees had no idea he even existed because he wouldn’t talk to them. But the man stood his ground in the morgue, walking around with his hands in his pockets, observing. Watching. Waiting. But most importantly, walking…