The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015

by Adam Johnson

  Over a year ago, back when he was “fully fleshed” (as they say), this donor was placed out in the field under a two-foot-high cage and exposed to the elements, his steady decomposition religiously photographed and recorded for science. Across the property are dozens of cadavers in various stages of rot and mummification, each with its purpose, each with its expanding file of data: the inevitable changes to the body that the rest of us willfully ignore are here obsessively documented. For the past six years, FACTS has been collecting data on human “decomp” while steadily amassing a contemporary skeletal collection (about 150 individuals now) to update our understanding of human anatomy. More specifically, for the forensic sciences, FACTS works to improve methods of determining time since death, as well as the environmental impact on a corpse—particularly in the harsh Texan climate. Texas Rangers consult with them, and law enforcement officers from around the state come to train here each summer, much like this collection of nineteen- and twenty-year-olds.

  While her students continue brushing dirt from bone, Kate offers to take me on a walking tour of the cages. Or, as she gently puts it: “I’ll show you some things.”

  As we wander down the grassy path in the late spring heat, the first thing I encounter is the smell. “Is that nature or human?” I ask.

  “Oh, I can’t smell anything right now—sometimes it depends on what direction the wind is blowing. But probably human.”

  The smell of rotting human corpses is unique and uniquely efficient. You need never have experienced the scent before, but the moment you do, you recognize it: the stench of something gone horribly wrong. It reeks of rotten milk and wet leather.

  As I struggle to adjust to the odor, I see, from a distance, the rows of cages, staggered on either side of a rough path in a grassy, overgrown field. As we approach, the bodies begin to come into focus, each with the wet, tan look of wax paper. As we come closer still—and though I’d like to slow down, I keep pace with Kate—I also see how they’re deflated now: the viscera have collapsed into the cavities, and the limbs have withered.

  “You can see a theme here,” Kate says with professional calm. “They’re a dark, leathery color: it’s a type of mummification.” This climate mummifies, and what’s most shocking is how this warps each body’s skin into a puckered, leathery casing, raised up just enough you can imagine peeling it off in one go. Then there’s the shriveling, the wasting away. Kate points out one man who was four hundred pounds when he came in. He’s now emaciated, drained into the earth, browning the grasses beneath him. “He took a long time to reach that state.” A shock of short hair still clings to his skull. Sometimes the scalp remains fastened indefinitely, and sometimes “it just melts right off with the skin.” Another body, a woman’s, has a chest that’s puffed up like a massive balloon but almost no stomach left. In spite of the cage, built to prevent scavenging by animals and birds, she has patches of tissue damage by foxes—maybe a small one managed to slip through the wire. “I don’t know how they do it,” Kate says.

  After enough time has passed (often a year), the students dismantle the remains with medical scissors, place the thoroughly decayed parts in bright red biohazard bags, and take them into the lab to be “processed.” Then the bones, finally clean, are labeled and boxed and added to the collection.

  The odor is strong as I walk among the cages, the air redolent with the heavy, sour-wet scent of these bodies letting go of their bile, staining the grasses all around them. I look at the sprawl, each individual in its strange shelter, shriveled and shocked-looking; each with more or less of its flesh and insides; each, in its post-person state, given a new name: a number. They died quietly, in an old-age home; they died painfully, of cancer; they died suddenly, in some violent accident; they died deliberately, a suicide. In spite of how little they had in common in life, they now lie exposed alongside one another, their very own enzymes propelling them toward the same final state. Here, in death, unintentionally, they have formed a community of equals.

  An Army brat, born in the Philippines in 1932, Patty Robinson grew up all over the world, wherever her father was stationed—a life she briefly replicated with her husband, moving to Berlin when he was posted there early in their marriage. Even as a teenager, she knew she wanted more than to be defined by a domestic life. “Mother undertook my training to be a wife and mother,” she wrote in another letter to her daughter, Mary. “I was NOT interested.” She managed to graduate from high school early and head to college at Louisiana State University—to the dismay of her conservative father, who had plans for her to marry as soon as possible. “Her father came to LSU to drag her out!” Mary says—to no avail.

  Patty met DJ when her father was transferred to a base on Long Island. DJ was the duty officer the night she arrived and, unlike her father, he had a sense of humor and seemed attracted to her independent streak and creative mind.

  Patty gave birth to five children in seven years—a feat that every one of them mentions when I talk to them. Today, Jim, the oldest, works in tech management in San Francisco; Mary, the only daughter, teaches special-needs kids at an elementary school in Connecticut; and Carl, John, and Ted all live in Austin and work as arborists for electrical companies. But back in the ’60s, after an Army stint in Berlin, where the first two boys were born, the family settled in Westfield, New Jersey, and Patty was expected to oversee the entire brood single-handedly. “If they’d invented the phrase ‘free-range parenting’ then,” Jim says, “that would have been what to call her style.” Theirs was the house other parents on the block might be scared to let their children play at—“because we were the ones climbing curtains and bookshelves,” says Ted.

  She was just as instinctive and free-form with their education: when she saw how bored Jim was with his classes, she gave him an encyclopedia set, and would let him take apart and reassemble any gadgets in the house. And when Ted was unusually slow learning how to read in school, Patty refused to make a fuss: she saw how easily he read the cookbooks when he was at home with her, helping in the kitchen. In this way, learning at home was just as important as anything that might happen in a classroom. Mary remembers how, when she was five, her mother woke the kids so they could watch the moon landing; and again when their cat Thomas had kittens, using the occasion to explain how animals give birth. In a way the kids were her great project: creating a clan of clever, progressive, fearless little people. “She loved us unreservedly, I never doubted that,” says Carl. “She wanted us to grow up to be her friends, to get to a point where we could talk like adults with each other. She told me on a few occasions that she never felt she had a lot of peers, people she could talk to about things—and that’s where the kids came in.”

  Although she converted to Catholicism as an adult, Patty’s spin on the religion was unorthodox. She was staunchly pro-birth control—in her later years, she kept Plan B stocked in her guest bathroom, in case any woman in the neighborhood might need it—and, says Jim, she was very much against the “punitive, go-to-hell parts” of the church. “Patty’s belief in religion was ‘God is love’ and ‘Be nice,’” Carl says. She took the kids to services when they were very young—a lover of gospel music, she sang in the choir of every church she attended—but, in the late ’60s, mass was informal, often led by a young priest with an acoustic guitar. Once the kids started to put up resistance, she simply attended on her own: no big deal. And so it came as a surprise that, when Patty knew the marriage had soured for her (by then her oldest was twelve), she chose not to file for divorce from DJ: instead, embracing her technically Catholic status, she had the marriage annulled. Mary says their staunchly atheist father “had a field day. It was ‘Okay, you’re all bastards now!’”

  One might assume it would be difficult to annul a marriage that produced five kids, but Mary says her mother reasoned their father had “tricked” her. “When she met him she thought, ‘Oh my God, I’ve met my intellectual equal, and he’s fun!’ And then they got married, and before they even h
ad the first baby he had towels made up that said boss and slave—and he thought that was hilarious. But she thought, ‘Oh no, no, that’s not funny.’” Or, as Jim puts it, “Mom thought, ‘I’m getting away from my stifling family, and we’re going to do things the way we want to’—and then he was like, ‘Well, I worked all day, and you can take care of everything.’”

  Meanwhile, Patty, though very proud of her children, was aching to go back to work herself. She filled the free time she didn’t have with constant volunteering: for community theater, for public-television pledge drives. “She felt like her brain was turning into a marshmallow when she was staying at home,” Mary says—she wanted to make as much use of herself as she could. And so when Ted, the youngest, went off to kindergarten, she found a job, becoming one of the first generation of women to work for Xerox. Not long afterward, the marriage ended.

  In spite of the loaded logistics of rotating five kids through the separate homes of two estranged adults, Patty was finally free of an unsatisfying relationship, and the newly single working mom decided to grant herself a whim: after one too many snowstorms in New Jersey, she pulled out a map, drew a line, and announced to the kids “I will live north of this latitude no more!” She convinced Xerox to transfer her, and she moved her little crew out of a New Jersey suburb and into a life by the beach in Corpus Christi, Texas. And all the while, Patty continued singing in choirs, and amassing a library of titles she let the local kids borrow—from Agatha Christie mysteries to science fiction by Harlan Ellison. She had stage-managed for local opera productions in Princeton, New Jersey, and now she worked with an amateur theater group in Texas. “Theater was her sanity,” Mary says: her own social sphere and a way of holding onto her sense of humor. Not long after the split, she donated her wedding dress to be dyed and used as a costume.

  The first thing Elaine Johnson tells me about her fiancé, Bill, is that he is intensely private. “He flat-out doesn’t trust anybody.” She has a habit of using the present tense when talking about Bill, though they took him off life support two months ago.

  Now fifty-six, Elaine grew up in San Marcos—her father taught biology at the university for decades—while Bill grew up in Fort Lauderdale and rural Missouri. (He was fifty-two when he died.) A career Army man, Bill spent twenty-six years in the service, including work as a technician for Hawk air and missile defense systems and a tour in Iraq as a truck driver, training others to avoid land mines while transporting supplies.

  She and Bill knew each other for four years before he died. They’d met on a biker dating website in the fall of 2009: he’d been riding motorcycles “forever,” while she’d started just the year before—the only good habit to come out of a short-lived affair. A devoted Harley rider, Bill was often in Harley tees and owned mugs and caps in Arabic, from their dealership in Kuwait. He wore a long ponytail and a series of black do-rags, sometimes sporting a POW MIA patch or one that read Live to Ride, and Ride to Live. He rode an Ultra Classic and a Heritage Softail, and under his watch Elaine graduated from a Honda Shadow to her own Fat Boy, with a comfy custom seat for the thirteen-hour days Bill liked to pull on the road. Out of character for Elaine, Bill loved to take off on a trip at a moment’s notice. “To be more spontaneous, I bought myself a little bitty bag I put overnight stuff in, so anytime he wanted to hop on the bike and ride down to Corpus I’d be ready,” she says. “I didn’t even get to use it.”

  Bill retired as a sergeant first class a few years before Elaine met him. After that, he was hired to do IT work at the Guantanamo base for a year and a half, and then for the military hospital in San Antonio. He was on VA disability for various health issues, including knee and neck problems, but the deepest damage was psychological: his endemic lack of trust, his fight-first instincts, the nightmares that redeployed him to Iraq whenever he fell asleep. Sometimes the dreams were particularly bad: “He’d be shaking real hard with his fists tight, like he was having convulsions. I couldn’t touch him because he would think he needed to fight, but I would call his name until he would calm down.” Sometimes Bill would prod Elaine and ask if she’d heard something, maybe people talking outside the house, and she’d say, “No, I didn’t hear anything, honey.” Other times he’d need to sleep on the sofa in order to keep his back against a wall, like his cot in Iraq, and she’d be awakened by the sound of Bill shouting her name from the living room, making sure she was there. He kept loaded guns in every room of the house.

  He was often on edge, and often combative. Elaine’s nickname for Bill was “Central Texas Weather,” because his moods were always changing: you never knew what you were going to get. “He was extremely direct in an in-your-face kind of way. You never had to guess what was on his mind: he’d come right out and say it, no matter how non-diplomatic it was. He and I were totally different: he’s not worried about hurting feelings, and I don’t like hurting feelings. And he was always ready for a fight.” In his dating profile, he’d posted (to women hoping for a wealthier man, Elaine guesses) “You think you’re too good for a simple guy?” Unimpressed by his presumptuousness, she’d blasted right back: “Every woman who doesn’t want to go out with you doesn’t think they’re ‘too good.’ Maybe you’re not their type!” Bill had been waiting for someone to challenge him, it seems, because he asked her out right away.

  As untrusting of the world as he was, once he partnered with Elaine, that was it: he was with her completely. Once Elaine told him, during his night panics, that there was no danger, he could fall back asleep: some primal, half-asleep part of him thought that if she said so, it must be true. Estranged from much of his family, while working at Guantanamo he gave Elaine power of attorney so she could handle all his affairs back home—including the house he’d bought. And when he realized he wanted someone to leave his possessions to, he drew up a will and named Elaine his sole beneficiary. “He did everything to make sure that if anything ever happened to him, I’d be taken care of.” They moved in together on his property, a six-acre, 1940s military house that had been relocated out to Guadalupe County. Within two months of Bill’s death, Elaine was able to make the last mortgage payment.

  He was generous in other ways as well, quietly. While working at a mental hospital in San Antonio, he’d take clothes to the teenagers who were inpatients there. And, never having had a father figure himself, he always made an effort with Elaine’s father, nearing eighty and a little overwhelmed by the work needed on his land. Whenever he and Elaine planned to visit, Bill would tell him, “You have a project planned and we’re gonna do it. Be waiting for me in the driveway with your tool belt on.”

  “Bill is such a contradiction,” Elaine says (again in the present tense). “He’s serious a lot, pissy and pissed off. He calls himself an asshole, which he can be. So when he does something funny, it totally catches the guys by surprise.” She shows me photos: Bill striking a pose outside Disney World with a woman done up as Snow White; Bill and his best buddy, Joe, a motorcycle mechanic, standing in their helmets in a cotton field, a grinning Bill holding a jumbo cotton puff over Joe’s head; Bill in wire-rimmed glasses and salt-and-pepper beard, his eyes soft and smiling as he grips a black cat to his chest a little too tightly. “He says he doesn’t like animals, but he really does,” Elaine says. “You don’t think he likes anything when you talk to him, besides riding, cutting wood, and mowing grass—but you just have to watch him.”

  Doing just that, his friends quickly saw a change after he met Elaine: Bill was happier and more stable than he’d ever been. Plus, she was okay with managing his anger—though sometimes, she says, “it sapped my energy.” While he never got into a fistfight in front of her, twice—at a gas station, and at an electronics store—Elaine had to talk Bill down from a confrontation “because if he would’ve started, he wouldn’t have been able to quit before someone was really hurt. The vein would be popping out of his neck and he would be fuming—you could see it in his eyes. He was a real all-or-nothing kind of guy. His mind was his own worst enemy.
I just told him, ‘It’s not worth it. It’s not worth it, man, let’s go.’” He’d think of that phrase, he told her, whenever he felt himself on the verge of losing his temper.

  Elaine says she stayed with Bill through these episodes, and the difficult nights, because “you could see he was worth it, the person in there. It was hard, but he was doing a lot of things to show me he really cared—and I don’t mean buying me shit, because I can buy my own stuff. Even being the hardass that he was, he was trying.”

  Nearby on Freeman Ranch, Kate takes me into the processing lab, a room with the white-tiled walls and easy-mop floor of a high school cafeteria kitchen—as well as some of the very same equipment. Industrial-size pots are stacked on the floor, and two large aluminum kettles stand against the wall, the kind used for bulk food prep. These are “where we do the de-fleshing,” says Kate, “where we put whole bodies,” once they’ve been brought in from the field. She lifts the lid of one kettle, which should be clean, and finds some dark brown sediment at its bottom. “Sometimes the decomp just settles down there.” This, she explains, is mummified tissue that’s been sloughed off. “Like when you boil a pot of soup with meat in it or something.”

  I ask about the crock pots on an adjacent shelf, each decorated with a friendly floral design: these are for smaller animals, “or if you’ve just got a hand.” There’s also an incubator, where particularly delicate remains are placed for a slow hot-water bath so they won’t damage while being de-fleshed. “We had a stillborn come in—” She stops, anticipating a reaction. “I know. I can’t believe it: somebody donated their infant. Which is great.”

  She points out the red plastic bags on the floor: they may look like garbage bags tied to be taken out, but these are remains recently brought inside, now ready to be processed. In other words, these are fleshy bones in a pile. At just this moment, a kind of fly lands on my left cheek, and for the first time I notice: large black insects are touching down on surfaces throughout the room.