The dead woman of Wednesday night got to me a little. It's silly, really, since I've seen a few dead folk before. I've seen at least enough dead people that if I gave a poetry reading and as many living people showed up as I've seen dead, I would call it a great success.

But it's been a while since I was so acquainted with corpses, and this one kind of kept sneaking back into my life. It wasn't such a big deal, just a little nagging noise in the background, or a stone in my shoe that I just didn't have the time to remove. It was the ache of a muscle, long unused, again bearing the weight of my body. I just kept seeing the dead woman curled protectively around herself, absolutely still, the skin color faded like an old photograph. Us there with nothing to do but wait amidst a dead person's possessions.

After being out of the office all day Thursday, I came back to find an irritated message from a client, who called to gripe about a project that has run past its deadline. It was like he was calling to complain in the moment that I stood in the apartment of the dead woman and waited helplessly. His voice in the quiet apartment being absorbed by the pale flesh of the recently dead. His voice chasing her on toward wherever she was going. I looked down the short hallway at the body and let the phone fall. He was right, but all I wanted to do was call back and tell him his fucking project was among the least of the world's worries right now. A relative of the dead woman was calling the family and asking them to come. He was rambling to us about the cemetary plot because all the phone calls were made and he teared up when he stopped talking.

Everything I knew from the rest of my life felt like a thin skin stretched over the skeleton of moments like this. I could put my hand right through what I do during the daytime for money, and it would split apart and expose this beneath.

For perspective, I remember that in my past as an EMT I've forced the flailing hearts of the nearly dead to keep squeezing dutifully with my own bare hands, and when the doctor said to call it, I stopped and walked away and had lunch. I've gripped the fiercely spurting wrists of would-be suicides and kept their leaping blood safely within them. I held still a ruined man in the wreckage of his car as the firefighters tore the groaning vehicle apart around us. My life did not falter under the weight of those moments. One dead woman on the floor of her apartment should be nothing. Nothing in the curved back, the hands held quietly to the chest. Nothing there to take away. A few minutes of feeling useless -- like an awkward moment when someone drops something and you're too flustered to pick it up for them -- and then we are supposed to move on, untouched. I'm a ghost in the lives of the people who met me that night. The vestiges of the material world should move right through me.

For additional perspective, I remember that telling a client his job is meaningless because it doesn't involve the immediate threat of death could be considered a poor business move. It's not very affirming to his needs. It suggests that his interests don't have my undivided attention. That I'm listening to the slam of a thickening heartbeat, like a blunt and blundering insect trapped in an airless jar, instead of his messages.

Late that night I tried to find my old friend Marsha, with whom I worked on the ambulance years ago, on the Net. It seemed like it would mean everything if I could just email her and say that this one had got to me. That I was sure I'd be all right, because there would be another and another and another until my muscles recovered and I remembered how to do this, but this one was hanging on to me and I couldn't quite shake it.