by Gil Reavill
“I am fucked, fucked, fucked!” Green screamed to his partner. Blood streaming down his leg, he ran out to the street. A third tech had taken the Aftermath truck for a soda run, so Green ran mindlessly down the block.
“I didn’t know where I was going,” Green said later. “I was hoping the truck would be there, or maybe a hospital would suddenly materialize right in the middle of Orland Park.”
His partner eventually got Green to a clinic, and as it proved out, he suffered no infection. After blood tests, he received a course of tetanus shots, and that was the extent of his treatment. But the incident affected Green and the other Aftermath techs.
“The thing is, I was being extra-careful, because I knew the guy was a degenerate drug user, and I still got stabbed,” Green said. “This is a dangerous job.”
As intimidating as infection with HIV can be, another danger lurks on Aftermath jobs that could be more lethal still. The viral glycoprotein that causes AIDS cannot survive outside the human body. Exposure to oxygen destroys the virus. Researchers have estimated the risk of being infected with HIV from a single prick with a needle that has been used on an HIV infected person at 1 in 150. In other words, even if the nail that drove itself into Robby Green’s thigh had been contaminated with HIV, it still would not have meant an automatic infection. The threat to techs from HIV, while real, is not the main worry going into a job.
HCV is. The hepatitis C virus cannot be destroyed by exposure to air, and is among the most durable and rugged of blood-borne pathogens. Researchers have demonstrated instances where HCV has lain dormant on a surface for a full year, only to become activated and infectious upon exposure to water. HBV can also be communicated through blood-borne contact, but there exists a vaccine against it. HCV cannot be vaccinated against, and there is no cure.
In the “Scuba Doobie-Do” episode on the second season of CSI, Gil Grissom and Sara Sidle entered a freak show of an apartment, its walls and furnishings completely spattered with blood. The scene of a mass murder? Something more ordinary: nose-bleeds. It turned out the resident of the apartment had a grudge against the landlord. A hepatitis C sufferer with weakened nasal capillaries, he could spray blood from his nostrils at will, and did so all over his apartment as a way to make cleanup difficult for the owners of his building.
Assault by a virus-infected nasopharynx might not be the most unlikely scenario on a show that regularly features incredible flights of forensic fantasy. But it ranks memorably high. More startling was the fact that the investigators entered the apartment wearing no protection at all, even after hearing the resident’s frank admission of his HCV-positive status. HCV-infected blood can be a deadly hazard. Grissom and Sidle treated it as though it were a weird form of novelty art.
In Stephen King’s apocalyptic novel The Stand, the microscopic agent that almost ended the world was a protean influenza virus that changed form so often there could be no protection against it. HCV represents the real-life version of King’s nightmare. It demonstrates a fiendish changeability. As quickly as the body develops antigens against it, HCV mutates even more rapidly, always staying one step ahead of the immune system’s defenses.
Like HIV, the hepatitis C virus would exhibit a terrible form of beauty, were it not for the inconvenient fact that it kills people. It is a marvel of genetic deviousness, so squirrelly it has never been cultured. Researchers did not even pin down HCV’s existence until 1989, when the vaccine giant Chiron, Inc., teased out portions of its genome. Before that, the best scientists could do was rather clumsily define the condition it caused as “non-A, non-B hepatitis.”
HCV numbers among the lethal mammal-infecting viral gangbangers of the Flaviviridae family, other members of which spread West Nile, dengue, yellow fever, and hog cholera. Dormancy lends an added dimension to its malevolence. Oftentimes carriers have no idea their blood is contaminated.
Aftermath techs play roulette with hep C. They regularly encounter scenes just as contagious as the ones dealt with so cavalierly by Grissom and Sidle. The progress of hepatitis C is unforgiving. After the HCV virus takes up residence in the host’s liver, the organ gamely works overtime trying to expel it. The liver might be “the human body’s most amazing machine,” as anatomist Henry Gray called it, but HCV is easily the match for it. Under HCV assault the tissues of the liver become inflamed. Abnormal nodules form, and the organ turns cirrhotic and fibrous, the condition familiar from the alcoholic’s apothegm, “Hard living leads to a hard liver.”
Hep C and alcohol represent only two of the routes to cirrhosis. Industrial toxins such as yellow phosphorus sometimes trigger it, as do dry-cleaning agents, or overdoses of Tylenol. An instant, ready-made recipe for cirrhosis consists of thirty grams of amatoxin-containing mushrooms, including the death cap and the destroying angel. No one survives the destroying angel. Anyone who partakes is dead within twenty-four hours.
Cirrhosis can eventually make the liver act not in its usual role of a filter, but as a plug. The blockage interferes with the vital free flow of the vascular system, and blood begins to back up like water behind a dam. This in turn increases pressure on the arterial walls, which can rupture suddenly, leading to horrific, spurting hemorrhages known to Aftermath techs, who are often called to clean them up, as “bleed-outs.”
Dave Creager described a bleed-out scene to me: “You could see exactly what happened through how the blood got painted on the walls. The guy was alone in his house at the time, and you could see it started in the upstairs hallway. All of sudden, like midstep, he was choking on blood. After that starts, you have about thirty seconds before you lose consciousness. He walked down the hall, gushing blood, then took the front stairway down, leaving a trail dripping down the stairs behind him. Then, in the downstairs hall, his gusher really came in, and it hit the hallway wall like a spray in the shape of a fan. He staggered into the bathroom off the downstairs hall. All four walls of the bathroom looked like someone had taken a blood hose and turned it on them. And that’s where he collapsed and died.”
There are several medical conditions, apart from hepatitis C, that can lead to massive bleed-outs. What did the techs have to protect them against such horror scenes? More to the selfish point, what did I have to protect me? (Me—hey, what about me? Me, me, me!) What fragments could I shore against my ruin?
The hazmat containment suit itself always served as the first line of defense. Every Aftermath truck carried the suits in three color-coded protection levels: white, blue, and yellow. Each provided a more complete line of defense than the shade before it, but the trade-off was discomfort.
“With a blue suit on, you can stand in a bathtub full of water and not get wet,” Greg Banach told me. I took a suit back to Extended Stay and tried it, and it worked well enough. The problem was that despite the material’s vaunted “breathability,” the blue and yellow suits became fiendishly hot, locking in perspiration as they locked out contaminants.
This happened even with the everyday white hazmat suits we wore. Several times I had seen Ryan O’Shea stumble out of a job site after a particularly strenuous bout of demolition, rip off his suit, and pour out a half cup of sweat from it.
The uglier the job, the more affection I developed for the wonder of Tyvek—actually, more properly, Tyvek™. (The papery miracle material is a proprietary product of DuPont, and the company cherishes every ™ and ® it owns.) Like a lot of great discoveries, Tyvek resulted from a mistake. In 1955 a DuPont researcher named Jim White noticed polyethylene fuzz accumulating on the vent of an experimental lab. DuPont patented Tyvek a year later, technically terming it “strong yarn linear polyethylene.” The secret was high-density fibers, randomly distributed, which made the material difficult to tear but easy to cut.
The company also quickly patented a “flash-spinning” technique to produce the stuff, and it was off to the consumer races. Starting with book covers, tags, and labels, DuPont manufactured massive sheets of Tyvek at its Richmond factory, softening it for drapabilit
y, applying “corona treatment” finishes so that it could be printed upon. Builders wrapped virtually every new home in America in Christo-like swaths of Tyvek, and FedEx adopted the material for its ubiquitous overnight delivery envelopes.
“Did you know that during the early 1980s,” I asked Greg Banach as we geared up one day, “the governments of Haiti and Costa Rica printed their currency on Tyvek?”
“No,” Banach said, sounding peeved. “I didn’t know that, and I didn’t want to know it, and fuck you for knowing it.”
“You ought to stop doing that,” Greg Sundberg said.
“What?”
“That fun fact shit. It only annoys him.”
Banach had probably climbed in and out of a few thousand or more Tyvek hazmat suits than I had, so the thrill was long gone for him. But the material wrapped me on every job I did for Aftermath. The process of suiting up itself became pleasurably ritualized, as though I were putting on a uniform. At one job site in a southern Chicago suburb, a small flock of spectator children called out, “Hey, spaceman! Hey, spaceman!” whenever I waddled down the sidewalk in my Tyvek.
Me and Dick Cheney. The vice president’s support team brings along his level-four chemical-biological Tyvek hazmat containment suit wherever he goes. The suit is never more than a few yards away from him, which ought to make you feel either more secure or more nervous, depending on your feelings toward Mr. Cheney. What might he know that we don’t?
Since HBV, HIV, and HCV pathogens do not readily atomize to become airborne, the breathing apparatus we were fitted with wasn’t for protection so much as odor elimination. The 3M respirator I eventually settled on—an eighty-nine-dollar 6800 model, size medium, with a full clear-acrylic face-piece—wouldn’t shield me from poisonous gases, but it did prevent the sledgehammer odor of decomposed human flesh from slamming into my sinus membranes quite so heavily. It also muffled speech, which meant it had the added benefit of shutting up chatty, job-shadowing crime writers. Sometimes I think the techs stuck one on my face just to prevent me from asking stupid questions.
Most of the techs cheerfully accepted my presence, laughing at my occasional bouts of nausea but solicitously attending to my safety and education. Ryan and Dave, especially, took me on as a pupil. They called me Hollywood in tribute to my screen-writing aspirations.
“Hollywood loves his Tyvek,” Dave said, watching me pull on a second hazmat suit over my first one, just to make sure.
Apart from Tyvek and 3M, other brand names had worked their way into Aftermath culture. Purell hand sanitizer. All the techs drank Red Bull energy drink, although Dave liked Mountain Dew MDX, too, when he could get it.
But the holiest of holies was Axe body spray. Not just any body spray. Had to be Axe. Though not, strictly speaking, a disease-prevention measure, body spray did inoculate against certain cases of social ridicule and ostracism. Axe was as integral to an Aftermath job site as Tyvek or 3M. The easy-grip molding and the matte-black paint job on the container made it fit right in, as though it belonged in any manly man’s tool chest.
“If I could haul a barrel of this stuff in the back of the truck, I would,” Ryan said, liberally dousing himself in Axe Apollo after stripping off his Tyvek. Apollo was the preferred scent among the techs (“Modern and sexy, for the clean-cut, superjock effect. Put down the medicine ball and spray on some of this stuff.”) but I’ve seen Kilo, Voodoo, and Phoenix in play too. I’ve since discovered that Axe enjoys a raging popularity among high-school-aged males everywhere, which helps explain the obsession on the part of the techs. They were, most of them, just out of high school themselves.
The scent began to have a Pavlovian effect on me. I’d smell it, and my mouth would start to water, since application of body spray was always the last step before heading to Thursday’s, Olive Garden, Hooters, or whatever the day’s chain restaurant of choice might be.
“I’m hungry as a hostage,” Dave would say, moving within a cloud of Axe. “Let’s go eat.”
There were down times. What the French call longueurs. Jobs would come in barrages and then abruptly cease altogether. The Naperville Extended Stay became my purgatory.
Hanging around the room got a lot worse after I went to a job at another Extended Stay franchise, this one north of Chicago, in a suburb called Hoffman Estates. A five-day decomp, a lodger who had expired in the bathtub. As soon as we entered the room, I realized I was in trouble.
It was my same room, with the same flecked-green rug, same plum-colored easy chair on gold casters, same locked-down TV remote, same energy-saving light fixtures. I had a surreal sense of disorientation, like maybe I had died in the bathtub of the sad room with the green carpet, and what I was doing now was all some kind of Jacob’s Ladder–style postmortem brain spasm.
Everything was exactly the same as my room in Naperville, with the kitchenette to the left and the bathroom to the right. Only, this bathroom had a collection of dead man’s change on the sink countertop and an ugly crucifix-shaped stain on the bathtub. I could see where the head had rested, and where his arm had flopped over the side of the modular tub, because those areas were traced in black, like the shadow on the shroud of Turin.
When I came back from that job, I couldn’t work up a lot of enthusiasm for Room 112, my home away from home. I avoided its horror at the Steak ’n Shake next door (which, frankly, harbored its own brand of fluorescent, oleaginous horror). Finally, I had no choice. I had to face the green-flecked carpet.
“I’ve been meaning to ask, Mr. Reavill, what is the work you do?” Mahesh, the always-smiling thumbs-up hotel manager, said to me as I trudged through the lobby.
I have always hated telling people I am a writer. It strikes me as pretentious. I told him I was in town on business.
“I see the men come by in the truck all the time,” Mahesh said. “Aftermath? What is that?”
Ryan and Dave had been stopped by the Illinois state patrol for running commercial plates on an unmarked truck. So Chris and Tim ordered all the Aftermath vehicles into a local sign-painting shop for a logo to be applied once again to their front drivers’ doors. Smaller this time than the twelve-inch Day-Glo of Aftermath’s early days. Discreet white block letters on the dark blue paint of the trucks, with the 1-800-TRAGEDY number printed below.
“We clean up crime scenes,” I said.
Mahesh appeared nonplussed. “You clean up crime?”
“After people die, or after they are killed, the coroner takes away the body, but sometimes there’s blood and body fluids left. We clean that up.”
He lost his smile. An expression crossed his face that I have come to call the Universal Yuck. Usually accompanied by head-shaking and sometimes, not always, succeeded by a kind of unwilling, mesmerized-by-the-cobra fascination.
“That must be very upsetting work,” Mahesh said. “I feel for you, my friend.”
His ritual thumbs-up appeared forced after that, and I started to avoid him by slipping into the place via the back door.
During a slow period I took a commuter train into Chicago, to the Museum of Science and Industry, to see the Body Worlds exhibit then enjoying equal parts notoriety and acclaim. A busman’s holiday—a phrase that has unfortunately become out of date, meaning a vacation where one indulges in activities similar to one’s work. A specific part of the exhibit interested me.
Body Worlds was a traveling show of preserved human bodies dissected and displayed for observation, some of them posed in Totentanz postures—a flayed cadaver carrying the sheath of its own skin, for example, one dribbling a basketball, one rearing on a dissected horse. With seventeen million visitors worldwide, Body Worlds has been enormously successful, spawning several imitators. The show has also attracted its share of controversy over the source of the cadavers on display, and the seemliness of displaying them at all.
Aftermath dealt with the human body as a leaky, messy vessel. What I saw at the museum was the quite the opposite: the body drained, preserved, tidied up. Both Aftermath an
d Body Worlds, however, dealt with the body as object. Both were rationalist enterprises, respectful of the dead, but declining to participate in the more extreme forms of sentimentality associated with dying.
Anatomist Gunther von Hagens began plasticizing bodies for exhibition in the mid-1990s, in his post at the Institute for Anatomy at the University of Heidelberg. The first show he mounted—the word was especially fitting—in Japan in 1997, drew 2.5 million visitors, and encouraged him to bring Body Worlds home to Germany. He was unprepared for the ugly reception. Media, church leaders, and ethicists attacked Body Worlds as exploitative and disrespectful. The shadow of the Nazi lampshade fell over the exhibit.
In London, also, there was controversy, but in America von Hagens’s creations were received with the kind of wonder and appreciation I saw all around me at the museum that day. Von Hagens “plastinated” his cadavers, meaning he injected polymers into the cells. The resulting plastinates have long been used as teaching tools in medical schools, but von Hagens was a pioneer in popularizing (he calls it “democratizing”) gross anatomy.
As I passed among the displays, I felt the shock and awe of the other visitors. I particularly liked the bloodred spider work of the vascular studies, which resembled nets in which to catch the human form, or circuitry for the body electric.
I recalled that Herman Webster Mudgett, aka H. H. Holmes, America’s first widely publicized serial killer, was an anatomist who murdered many of his victims in his self-designed “Murder Castle,” just a few blocks west of the Museum of Science and Industry grounds. Active during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition, held lakeside right where the museum was located, Holmes no doubt would have delighted in Body Worlds. As would the mad taxidermist Ed Gein.
