by Alan Emmins
If we are alive we always have the opportunity to change; completion comes with death and death alone. But of course, Neal throws questions even at this belief.
I remember one of my first conversations with Neal.
“Oh yeah, looky here, another scumbag bites the dust!”he cried as we entered a suicide scene. “I’m telling you, Alan, this is pretty much what we deal with twenty-four/seven, scumbags. Look at this, eighty-twenty … twenty-four hours, three hundred sixty-five days of the year. There’s no changing them.”
“What’s eighty-twenty?” I asked, a little amazed at his apparent joy with how the day had started.
“Eighty-twenty’s the ratio. Basically 80 percent of all the people we deal with are total fucking scumbags, the dregs of society. This is it right here, baby, and I love it. Death. Look at this shit!” Neal said, flicking his head toward a king-size bed where the sheets, pillow, headboard, and wall behind were all covered in blood. “This job shows you that the average person is a real shit bag. So why should I give a shit about them? I care about me and mine, meaning my family and my kid. Do I care about Johnny Dirtbag? Damn no! He can kill himself every night of the week as far as I’m concerned, just as long as he does it in my area so that I get paid to clean him up. Remember, this is what I do every day, Alan, I get up and I pray for death.”
Remembering this conversation brings me back to Camus’s theory of the absurd man. Regardless of what peace of mind accepting the illogicality of life brings us, it’s not the answer. The answer, even if only in its smallest form, is to push back against acceptance. Because if you accept everything, then questions become redundant, and without questions life is finished. Take questions out of the equation and your life will be complete while you are still alive. And if death fails to bring completion, then it has no purpose, and becomes more meaningless than the most mundane of lives. You will one day come to an end with your few needed answers in place. Life will end and you will continue to drift vacillatingly forward. You will be absurd.
Maybe that’s what ghosts are: just absurd and dead people trying to find a way out. It doesn’t sound like much fun to me, to be punished to an endless existence of ludicrousness, condemned to exist between two parallel worlds. Surely, faced with such a choice, you would choose death in any of its other forms, even if that included Neal Smither. It seems to me that if you wanted proof, in one form or another, that you had been alive and had truly lived, you couldn’t get anything more defining than the sound of Neal singing in the background.
Whether it’s a scabby knee or a hanging head, we don’t care just as long as you’re dead. We’ll clean on our knees happily, just as long as your check clears the bank!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks first of all to Neal Smither, for being a great character and for setting himself up in my mind as one of life’s heroes, and to everyone on the Crime Scene Cleaners team who tolerated my lurking and occasional questioning.
Thanks also to Rachel Whiting for her friendship and hospitality and for potentially saving me from despair.
I would like to thank the following friends whose kindness, patience and guidance all went into this book: Kelly Smith, Scott Dille, Chris Lee Ramsden, Bjarte Eike, Signe Clausen, Christine Østergård (especially for the patience), and my daughter, Selma.
I was lucky enough to work with two wonderful editors on this book. Julia Rochester, from Corvo Books in the UK, who taught me a lot about my job as a writer, and Peter Joseph, of Thomas Dunne Books in the United States, who is responsible for helping me, some five years later, to take this book to a new level, one of which I am very proud.
Special thanks go to Sean Merrigan, not only for his friendship and help regarding this text, but for the splendid drunken evenings we spent together rambling about death in all its many guises.
All transcript quotes or evidence included in the “Man in the Bath” chapters of this book refer to preliminary hearing Court No. 2068440: the People of the State of California vs James McKinnon.
