by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

A chubby young man lies naked on a table under a bright light in a windowless room in the East End. He's circled by professionals in lab coats. His skin is charred. They roll him over on his side and his arm flaps limply over the side of the gurney.

He was brought to the room via the Fullum entrance of the heavily guarded steel-and-glass provincial police tower in the shadow of the Jacques-Cartier Bridge. The van enters past a checkpoint manned 24/7 in a gate on a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.

For every delivery - and about six a day come through here - the stretcher is placed on an industrial scale, weighed, and wheeled down the hall.

It's a local ritual that's been acted day in and day out for years, but since May 4, authorities have vowed to reduce the volume of visits. And those involved won't be consulted, since, like the burned man, they're already dead.

The city morgue is undergoing renovations, asbestos is being pulled out of walls. Ceilings are down, and wires and pipes sit naked overhead.

What remains is a series of small rooms lined with seven doors on each side. The refrigerated lockers are like those you see in brasseries: brushed metal with buckle-style door handles. Inside, corpses on stretchers are covered in white plastic. A shelf under the stretcher holds a garbage bag stuffed with the person's final clothing.

The bodies are passing through. Some are being checked for cause of death, others are waiting for somebody to claim them.

They're being identified, either by face, fingerprints, DNA or, like the man with the burns, through dental records. Others are in transit to a formal autopsy, conducted elsewhere. Then there's the unclaimed bodies that tend to pile up.

Every year, up to 120 bodies hang around unclaimed in fridges for up to 60 days. The staff tries to contact relatives, but often none can be found.

Other times families are entirely unreceptive. "I hope this won't surprise you but sometimes the deceased person might've been an alcoholic, or somebody who abused or left his family. Often relatives will tell us, ‘We don't give a damn, take the body and do what you want with it,'" says Dr. Jean Brochu, general manager of the morgue.

Brochu, who previously worked as a coroner in Granby, says he's not bothered by seeing dead bodies, but will never get used to the smell of rotting flesh. "Others who work down there all day say they stop smelling it, but I can't get used to it."

Eventually the unclaimed bodies become property of the Minister of Health.

The morgue had a closer look at the legal fine print of the 1986 law governing their duties and realized they're not explicitly mandated to do all that they're doing.

"It's a judicial void, we keep doing what we were doing, bringing the bodies here and warehousing them at the morgue, but there have been budget cutbacks so we've started looking at alternatives," says Brochu.

The morgue has a new protocol that aims to have private undertakers hold onto unclaimed corpses. "We discussed it with the funeral homes and they said they wouldn't touch it, but then another raised its hand and said, ‘We'll do it,'" says Brochu. "They're just taking the chance that, ‘Well, if somebody claims the body, we'll do business together.'"

Nowadays, 55,000 people die each year in the province, a number that will grow with the ageing of the population. Part of Brochu's job is to limit unnatural deaths, such as the spate of older gentlemen who fell off their roofs while shovelling snow over the last few years. Roughly 640 Quebecers die a year in car accidents, a quarter of the total of the early 1970s. Suicide victims are too-regular clients, says Brochu, typically males between 35 and 45, often despondent due to drugs or family issues.

The worst seems to be when nobody knows or cares about your death. Says Brochu, "It's a sad thing, people dying alone - a sad thing."

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