by Alan Emmins
The sadness doesn’t end once the decomposed body has been cleaned up.
“While I was emptying the apartment, this guy knocked on the door and he was like, ‘Can I get the VCR?’ ”
“What did you say?”
“Well, I didn’t say yes. I just put the stuff on the back of the truck and people just took what they wanted; they were like, ‘Well, he doesn’t need it.’ ”
“What? Were they not concerned about catching something? I want to disinfect myself whenever you guys drive past me. I mean, what are they thinking? That’s fucked?”
“Dude, that’s not fucked. That’s life.”
At this point a drunk, but very attractive, black girl approaches Shawn.
“Hey, can I ask you a question?” She smiles.
“Sure,” Shawn replies with a big grin.
“Could you get me a job with Crime Scene Cleaners?”
Shawn and I both laugh.
“No, I’m serious,” she says. “I see the trucks around all the time and I keep meaning to call you guys for a job.”
“What are you doing for a job now?” Shawn asks.
“I’m an actress. But still, I would like to do some Crime Scene Cleaning.”
Shawn gives her a business card. We watch her as she shimmies out of the bar for a cigarette.
“She’s never getting a job with Neal, I can tell you that.” Shawn laughs. “Mind you,” he adds, “I’d be more shocked if she even called him up.”
“Do lots of people ask you if they can get a job?” I ask.
“Yeah, they do, actually. But you rarely actually hear back from them.”
HEPATITIS C YOU LATER
As I approach the door, I see a small bouquet of yellow flowers poking out from a dirty brown glass. There are two other glasses: one holding clear water and another holding a burned-down, extinguished candle. Thrown on the floor next to the door are several feet of the bright yellow crime scene tape, with a plastic-wrapped telephone directory poking out from underneath. It looks terribly lonely, this little shrine.
The closed door looms, appearing bigger than it actually is, appearing to have some kind of energy, as if standing sentinel over a terrible secret. I can’t help but think we shouldn’t open it. Maybe when people die in a room, in an apartment, it should just be sealed off and left. I wish the door had already been open when we arrived.
Inside is an even sadder scene. Even though I caught the smell from outside, with the door closed, I wasn’t prepared for the smell on the inside.
“ Does it smell?” asks Jake as he watches my reaction. Jake, the Crime Scene Cleaners’ technician for this job, has been with the company for about six months. He is already wearing a blue protective suit with the top half pulled down and tied around his waist. He’s about five feet ten, with a blond army-regulation haircut, short around the back and sides and brushed up on top.
“I don’t really smell it much anymore,” he says, pulling on a pair of rubber gloves.
But I can’t answer. The only words I can muster are swimming around in my mind.
Don’t be sick!
Don’t be sick!
Don’t be sick!
My hand is covering my mouth and nose, but to little effect. I know I have to continue, to enter the room properly. This is what I came here to document, after all. But the farther in I go, the worse the smell gets, the thicker it gets. It’s really hard to describe this smell, because to give you a full breakdown I would have to open up my lungs and welcome the odor in.
The apartment is small, with a shared kitchen and living room and lots of black ash furniture. At the opposite end to the front door there is a countertop protruding from the wall on the right-hand side. This serves as a partition between living room and kitchen. The living-room sofa is also along the right-hand wall, with a big-screen TV system opposite. Large stacks of DVDs are piled up all around. There are the obvious guy choices: The Usual Suspects; Fight Club; Seven; Full Metal Jacket; and so on.
As I pass the counter, I notice the flies circling. I also notice the bloodstained kitchen linoleum.
Think shock.
Think gag.
“Can you see the body outline?” asks Jake.
No, I can’t. I see only a smeared, burgundy mess, and I tell him so.
“Well, you got a leg right here,” Jake says, pointing at a blood smear. “A leg there. That is the body right there. That’s the head. That’s the left arm, probably, and that’s the right arm coming down. More than likely, if you can see by the way his head’s turned, if you were to lie like this with your arm up …” Jake is leaning back over the linoleum, waving his arms about as he tries to maintain balance. It looks like any second now, and just to make sure I am crystal clear on the positioning, he’s actually going to lie down in the blood and shape himself to fit the bloodstain. “You usually don’t lie like this, right?” he continues. “So he was lying like this. Does that make sense?”
I have to admit that it is starting to take shape. Now that I have control over my bodily functions, and thanks to Jake’s wonderful assistance, of course, I can in fact see the outline of a body. It’s so clear now that I don’t know how I managed to miss it to begin with.
“And then this is the top of the head, or the mouth, or whatever, where it’s all dribbled out.”
Without any doubt, Jake is really enjoying having somebody to talk to. And when I consider the average day of a crime scene cleaner, it must be a lonely job. You get the odd command shouted down the phone by Neal, the businesslike handshake of a relative, a brief chat with a motel manager, but then you are left alone. It must be a little creepy, too. Not only to find yourself alone in a room where somebody just died, but to be actually scraping them off the walls or floor. I totally understand why Jake has a continual flurry of words leaving his mouth. The energy in a room where somebody recently died has to be less eerie when there are two of you, when there’s chatter.
“Looks like most of the trauma is coming from right here, the very top of the head.”
Jake has to be a big fan of crime drama. I mean a big fan. I am thinking DVD collections, entire seasons watched and re-watched. Just like some of the dramatized crime-busting TV heroes, Jake has a theory, and like those good-looking stylized idols, he is going to pursue it to the very end. Even in the face of doubt, there is simply no stopping the guy.
“My guess would be that, you got a Zig-Zag roller up here on the counter; you see the evidence of marijuana right there? He was probably a dealer. It’s right here in this area, which probably means that you’re standing here to do your deal, right?” Jake stands with his back to the blood, demonstrating how the deceased might have stood in the midst of a narcotics transaction. “You know, here’s the Zig-Zag roller, so he’s probably selling dope….”
I have to suppress a laugh here. It seems a bit of a leap to assume that ownership of a Zig-Zag roller makes you a drug dealer. In fact, for me, it suggests the exact opposite. I’ve seen an Italian girl roll a joint one-handed (she had broken her arm when riding her scooter while smoking). I’ve met marijuana dealers who can roll a joint with willpower alone. In fact, if anything, the Zig-Zag roller better represents somebody who does not deal drugs, who in fact rarely even partakes in drugs. But there’s still no stopping Jake. He is having so much fun, and I don’t see any reason to spoil it by interrupting him with my opinions.
“… Someone came up from behind him here, like this.” Jake now has one of his arms raised, doing an impression of the shadow that fell across the shower curtain in the film Psycho, as he plunges his arm down. “Then he fell forward, tried to put his hand out to stop, and just fell down.”
There’s a pause as we both stand staring at the bloodstain“I mean, that’s my guess,” Jake says a little awkwardly.
Case solved, I think to myself.
This actually seems, even to me, like an easy job. It’s a small floor, maximum twenty square feet. You can see where the blood reached the edge of the
linoleum and seeped underneath, which means that the linoleum has to come up. In fact, there isn’t really any cleaning to be done, just some physical shifting of the oven and the refrigerator and then the removing of the linoleum.
“This is pretty easy, right, Jake?”
“This? Yeah. I mean, even if I wasn’t pulling up the flooring this would be easy. The nice thing about working with blood is that as soon as it hits oxygen it starts to coagulate. Once it’s coagulated, it’s really easy to clean off surfaces like this.”
The smell is really starting to bother me now. It’s worse when I open my mouth and try to talk. I dry retch a couple of times and head outside for some air.
The apartment is in the middle of a complex in a town called Mountain View. We are about thirty-five miles out of San Francisco, in the heart of the Silicon Valley. With its neatly cropped lawns and family housing, it’s a fairly typical Californian suburb. The demographics show that the neighborhood is 51 percent white, 22 percent Asian, 20 percent Hispanic, 3 percent black, and 4 percent other. The lifestyle here at the complex isn’t on the lowest rung of the poverty ladder, but it would take only a small slip to get there. The people coming and going from the apartments or working on the grounds are mostly Hispanic.
“Hi. Do you know what happened to the guy in there?” I ask a man as he unlocks his car. He is short, wearing jeans and a gray T-shirt. He furrows his mustache as he looks me over.
“Who are you?” he quite rightly asks, suspicious, possibly, of sensationalist journalism.
“I’m with Crime Scene Cleaners,” I tell him, half truthfully.
“Oh, you cleaning it up?”
“Yeah.”
“Is it bad? Is there a lot of blood?”
“A fair bit,” I tell him. “What happened here, do you know?”
“He was shot in the head, twice.”
The cold reality of this information staggers me, and I realize it is wrong of me to be asking these questions.
“He seemed like a nice guy, too,” the man continues. “I always see him out here working on his car and shit.” He points to an old white Honda hatchback parked in the lot.
“You heard the shots?” I ask
“My wife heard them. Does it smell?” he asks, a little urgently.
“It’s pretty bad,” I tell him, doing a good job of organizing my expression accordingly.
“Oh, it must be bad if you think it’s bad. You must see a lot of this shit, right? So, does it just smell—or does it, like, really smell?”
Fear and murder have no bearing on my reality. I live in Copenhagen, where for the most part we ride our bicycles from café to café and drink overpriced lattes. I am never (except when riding said bicycle home while drunk) in fear for my safety. But then Denmark is a small country, and I live in a capital city that has a small-town community vibe. I do not live in a city where people are shot and murdered on a regular basis. If somebody gets murdered in Copenhagen, regardless of what else might be going on in the media, it’s a big story. This is a country where murder, even the dullest, most uninventive kind, is still newsworthy. But, of course, that’s not true of the big cities of the United States. In many U. S. cities people live with such fears and concerns continually. There are neighborhoods where people die unnatural deaths on a weekly basis. There are people out there who don’t expect to see their thirtieth birthdays and who quite probably won’t. This neighborhood doesn’t look that bad, but it’s bad enough that a guy who lived in the apartment Jake is cleaning was shot twice in the head. There’s enough to be concerned about there alone. But the man before me here is not concerned with the double whammy to the head, his only concern is having me rank the strength of the odor.
“But, like, on a scale of one to ten, this is what?”
As I walk back to the building, another neighbor stops me.
“Will you be done in there today?” asks the lady holding her little daughter’s hand. She is wearing a fluorescent orange T-shirt tucked into her jeans. Her daughter wears black leggings, a pink and white stripy vest, and jelly sandals.
“Yes, another hour at the most.” I smile. “Do you know what happened?” I jump a little as I ask this question. Mostly because I don’t know why I have asked it. I already have the answer, but the question just pops out before I can stop it. I feel bad for asking about something so horrid in front of her daughter. It was stupid. I wasn’t thinking. “I’m sorry. I …”
“He was stabbed in the chest a bunch a times,” the woman tells me matter-of-factly. “My friend is a friend of his mother’s. It was drug related.”
Hmm. That bloody Zig-Zag again.
Hearing this prompts me to go and ask one of the maintenance guys who is trimming a bush about thirty yards up from the apartment. He stops trimming as I approach. He has no doubt seen me coming and going from the dead guy’s apartment. He realizes that I want something and looks at me cautiously.
“My friend, he live next door, he say he were shot in the chest and the neck,” the maintenance man tells me.
Wow! Shot twice in the head, then stabbed in the chest “a bunch of times,” then shot in the chest and the neck. Sounds like quite an ordeal. It’s no wonder he died.
I become intrigued as I continue walking back to the apartment. How many different people will I have to ask, I wonder, before two corroborating stories emerge?
I go back in and help Jake pull the linoleum from the kitchen floor. He is standing in the kitchen, pulling at it, and I am on the outside edge, levering it off the floor with a kind of shovel. The linoleum is stuck fast. Between us it takes a good ten minutes of toil and sweat to work it loose. The more we work, the more the smell thickens.
“Now it stinks!” Jake says as he carries the linoleum outside and places it in front of the door. “You watch,” he says to me on his way back in. “The neighbors will be complaining about the smell within five minutes.”
Jake starts spraying the kitchen floor with enzyme, making sure that all the areas where the blood leaked through to the floor get an extra dousing. He also sprays the bottom cupboards and the wall to be safe. He scrubs the floor and then starts to mop up the mess with tissue. I absentmindedly pick up an envelope on the counter, which is addressed to Eric Peterson.
“Do you think it’s okay to use the toilet here?” I ask Jake as I slide the envelope back on the kitchen counter.
“I wouldn’t, it’s pretty foul-smelling. You could piss in it.”
I stroll around to the bathroom, pulling at the buttons of my jeans. “Oh, motherfucker!” I scream upon arrival.
Jake is laughing when I come back around the corner.
“I told you!” he says.
“Jake, trust me your description of ‘it’s pretty foul’ definitely falls short of the reality.”
“I don’t ever use the toilet where I’m working!”
Just then there’s a knock at the door; the owner of the complex has stopped by to check on the work.
“Well, it’s really been an easy job.” Jake tells him. “The linoleum was so old and worn that I just pulled it up. Everything has been scrubbed and doused with enzyme.”
Before the complex owner replies, we all turn to face the front door, each of us having sensed a presence in the doorway. It’s a young boy of about ten, twisting his neck at odd angles to see if he can see anything. He says something in Spanish and runs away.
“Well, it looks good to me,” says the complex manager. “When you’re done, drop the keys back at the manager’s office and she’ll sign your paperwork for you. Thanks for coming out so quick—the neighbors were starting to complain. See ya later, fellas.”
“Do you know what happened here?” I manage to get out before he takes a step.
“Oh, it was nothing. He died of natural causes.”
I laugh. I don’t want to fall into Jake’s trap of drug deals and drama, but the bloody body print that was on the linoleum floor suggested anything but natural causes. Any of the three suggest
ions given by the neighbors would in fact be more fitting with the scene.
“Yeah,” the manager goes on. “He had hepatitis C. Apparently he passed out, fell, and cracked his head open on the floor and bled to death. He wasn’t found for ten days.”
I freeze from head to foot. There’s no involuntary laughter sneaking out of me now. I no longer have any dumb-ass questions for the complex manager. Instead, I look at my minidisk recorder sitting on the kitchen counter. I look at my camera bag sitting on the floor just outside the kitchen area. I look at my camera sitting on top of the TV. (I hadn’t actually planned on moving in, honest.) I look at Jake in his all-in-one protective suit and respirator. Then in a mirror I see myself, dumb-ass, wearing jeans, T-shirt, and an expression like my penis has just shriveled up to little more than a sun-dried raisin. I have had the knowledge of hepatitis C for only ten seconds and already I know I am going to die a slow and agonizing death.
I have heard of hepatitis before, of course, but in Denmark it has only started to get mention in the last year, and even then not much is being said. The truth of the matter is that we don’t really know what it is. We have just seen ads depicting scenes of people holidaying abroad, eating and drinking in restaurants and bars. These happy scenes are followed by a warning against hepatitis and, more strongly, about bringing it back to Denmark. So, yes, I know it by name, and get that it is passed by body fluids. If that ad is anything to go by, you can catch hepatitis just by drinking from a glass previously used by somebody with hepatitis. And what is this C strand of hepatitis? Is it a supercharged version?
I find myself, without really having any factual knowledge of what hepatitis is or does, wanting to get out of the apartment fast. I mean, the guy living here had hepatitis, which makes his residence a stronger area of concern than the pretty little café in South America that was shown in the Danish health warning. I mean, who knows where his body fluids have been? I could have put my hands on the counter where last week he sneezed or spat. But the complex manager doesn’t know that I’m a journalist; he has assumed that I am a cleaner. Shouldn’t I be used to this kind of thing if I work with death on a daily basis? I decide that it’s best to maintain my cover. But the complex manager should feel free to leave anytime. Sooner rather than later. I mean, has he not realized I have no further questions?
