The laboratory director, my father’s friend, had generously taken me on as what would now be called an intern. Located directly next door to the autopsy room, our lab was involved in a study of porphyria, a blood disease. But when the doctors and dieners (the term, from the German word for “servant,” for the assistants who do the manual labor of the autopsies) were overwhelmed, a heart or brain or liver would be sent to us, to be weighed on scales like a butcher’s. I began the summer washing glassware and was soon promoted, assigned to conduct an experiment (test tubes, hemoglobin) that I imagine was invented mostly to please my father.

Both my parents were doctors. It was their great hope that I would become one too, that I would outgrow my obsession with books, that my desire to write (at that point, mainly ghost stories) would fade along with the other wishful fantasies of childhood. They blamed my teachers for the boredom I felt and the bad grades I received in math and science. All I needed was the right milieu, two months among dedicated scientists, to discover the thrill of discovery, the electric excitement of the scientific process.

That was not what happened.

Many people who worked at the morgue had been there for a long time, and a unique and (to me) fascinating culture had evolved: the creaky manual elevator, the pathologist with the Boris Karloff laugh, the macabre practical jokes. At the time, the medical examiner’s office, which handles forensic cases and now occupies its own building, had not been separated out from the morgue that deals with less spectacular deaths. At the morgue I met people who knew the stories of every suicide and murder that had happened in the city over the last decades.

At lunch, the dieners, secretaries and lab assistants pulled up chairs in unused offices and quiet hallways and ate their lunches from paper bags. Perhaps because I was young and curious and would only be there for the summer, they told me stories they had probably stopped telling one another: the mobster’s mistress in the trunk of a car; the gang victims, crime bosses, models, bums, people killed by random psychos and in family fights.

I began to love my job. The only problem was that eventually lunch ended and I had to go back to the sterile lab, where bodily fluids dripped through glass tubes and people measured and noted down infinitesimal changes. Lurid stories or test tubes — which would I choose?