by Brad Parks
* * *
I was in such a foul mood about Tina, I forgot all about dinner—which would prove to be something of a mistake—and instead talked Kira into leaving five minutes early. It was either that or lure her into making out in Tina’s office. And I figured that would just make things worse.
We got in my Malibu and started driving toward an address just off University Avenue. I half expected she might have changed into after-work garb—Kira seemed to celebrate Halloween roughly a hundred times a year—but she was still in the dark pink sweater set she had worn to work.
“So tell me about this party we’re going to,” I said as I maneuvered out of the parking garage.
“Well, it’s hosted by this guy named Powell.”
“Powell? Is that his first name or his last name?”
“Actually, his name is Paul,” Kira said. “But he prefers people pronounce it Powell. Like he’s foreign. He’s really from Mahwah. I guess he thinks it gives him mystique.”
“Ah, mystique.”
“Yeah, he’s a bit of a character.”
“You don’t say.”
“Wait until you meet him,” she said, lightly tracing the bones of my right hand with her fingers. “He is getting a Ph.D. in what he calls ‘Death Studies.’”
“I didn’t realize Rutgers-Newark offered courses in Death Studies.”
“They didn’t until Powell came along. I’m not sure how he talked them into it. He’s basically just making it up as he goes along. He takes courses from the School of Criminal Justice, the Law School, even the Nursing School.”
“The nursing school has a course on death?”
“Oh, I have no idea. I met him because he was taking a library sciences class at the New Brunswick campus. I think maybe he just likes being a student.”
“I’m sure his parents love that,” I said.
“I think they have enough money that it doesn’t really matter.”
“Mmm,” I said, and left it at that. A guy with my background couldn’t exactly make a wisecrack about the Lucky Sperm Club simply because I didn’t have a trust fund waiting for me.
We drove until I pulled up in front of a five- or six-story industrial-looking building badly in need of a paint job. A hundred years ago it might have been some kind of flourishing factory. But now it was dark and appeared to be abandoned.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s the coolest thing. It’s this loft. I think the lower floors are still being renovated by someone who is going to turn it into condos or something. But they started with the top floor and that’s where Powell lives.”
An artist’s loft. In Newark. Could trendy, overpriced boutiques be far behind?
We rode a creaky elevator up to the top floor, which, sure enough, looked like it had been transplanted from Greenwich Village, with high ceilings, hardwood floors, and exposed brick. There were no lights on, just votive candles set in the broad windowsills. Most of the furnishings—what little I could detect in the dark—were milk crates that had been creatively stacked together. I detected a few life-forms sprawled on pillows and blankets on the floor. It was all very bohemian.
“Welcome,” I heard someone say. It was the voice of a man trying to sound like Vincent Price but failing.
“Hi, Powell!” Kira chirped out.
A young man with perfectly mussed dark brown hair and black eyeliner approached and kissed Kira on the cheek. He was about my height but scrawny and ghostly pale, perhaps with the aid of foundation makeup. He wore skinny black jeans and a tight black T-shirt and also had a variety of piercings on his face and ears. His neck and arms were festooned with tattoos, not that I could discern the significance of any of them. He reached out to shake my hand, and I saw he was wearing black nail polish. It was a look that used to be called goth. Now maybe it’s called emo. My parent’s generation would have just called him a freak.
But I’m open-minded enough to give anyone a try. And, hey, freaks are fun.
“I’m Powell,” he said.
“Powell, this is Carter, he works at the paper with me,” Kira said.
I couldn’t help myself: “Powell. What an unusual name. Spell it for me.”
Kira stuck an elbow in my side as he said, “P-A-U-L.”
“Isn’t that … Paul?” I asked innocently.
“Yes, but it’s pronounced Powell.”
“How exotic,” I said. And I knew—because I was a few years older than him and dressed like one of those squares who didn’t understand his music—he couldn’t tell that I was messing with him.
“Come in,” he said. “Can I offer you something to drink? We have beer and wine or, if you’re not afraid, we also have what the French would call la fée verte—the green fairy.”
If I’m not afraid? I thought. I felt like telling skinny jeans boy that I trafficked in a part of Newark that was far more frightening than anything doled out by some hundred-and-forty-five-pound guy who wore eyeliner. But that might get our relationship off to a bad start. So I just said: “Sure. I’ll try some of your poison.”
“Kira?”
“Of course!” she said.
Paul/Powell led us over to a stack of milk crates that was serving as a bar. From one of the crates, he extracted a bottle of mint green liquid that was either absinthe or mouthwash. From another crate, he removed two glasses, each of which had a bubblelike bulge toward the bottom, which he filled with the liquid. Then he produced a flat utensil that reminded me of a pie cutter—albeit with holes in it—a jar with cubes of sugar, a lighter, and a bottle of Dasani water.
He did this all with great flair—Paul/Powell was clearly one for the dramatic—then, in that Vincent Price voice, announced, “You might want to stand back.”
He positioned the pie cutter over one of the glasses, placed a sugar cube on top of it, then sparked the lighter. The sugar must have been treated with something because it caught fire, much to the delight of Kira, who started clapping. He let it burn for a moment or two, then dumped it into the glass—which also went aflame.
He quickly doused the flame with a shot of Dasani water, then handed it to Kira. “Ladies first,” he said, before performing the same magic trick on my drink.
As he handed me the concoction, he said, “You know, legend has it this is what van Gogh was drinking when he cut off his ear.”
“I’ll try to stay away from sharp objects,” I said, accepting it. “Prost.”
I downed a large gulp. It tasted kind of like burnt licorice. But all things considered, it went down pretty smoothly. So did the second one. Kira and I had joined the party, which included maybe ten other people arrayed on pillows. All of them were younger than me, much more casually dressed, and talked to me like I was their father. In truth, it didn’t bother me because without anything in my stomach, the alcohol in the absinthe had temporarily muddied most of the synapses in my brain.
Sometime during the third drink, I decided that Paul/Powell—for as ridiculous as he looked, talked, and acted—was actually a pretty good guy, full of useful information. He told me, for example, that of all the currently accepted methods of state-sponsored execution, the firing squad was actually considered the most humane. (“They’re dead before they hit the ground,” he said cheerily.)
I wound up telling him about Darius Kipps and how I had my suspicion whether he had really killed himself. At the end of it, he said, “Well, you want to go have a look?”
“A look at what?”
“At this dude.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I have a key,” he said.
“To what?”
“To the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office.”
* * *
As the party died down and the other guests went home, Paul/Powell explained how this had come to be. His “Death Studies” Ph.D. was, technically, in the School of Arts and Sciences, but it was multidisciplinary, looking at death through a variety of lenses, from social t
o financial to spiritual to literary. As such, it involved a lot of external study and cooperative learning experiences—including an internship at the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office.
“It’s a perfect place to study the physical manifestation of the expiratory process at its end stage,” he informed me.
“You mean, it’s a good place to see dead people?” I translated.
“Exactly!” he said, gleefully.
Apparently, Paul/Powell liked hanging out with stiffs so much that he didn’t get enough of it during the day. So he sometimes snuck in late at night to spend time with them. He called it research. I called it creepy. Then again, I wasn’t the guy with “D” “E” “A” “T” and “H” tattooed onto the fingers of my left hand.
He wasn’t supposed to have a key, of course—they don’t just hand those out to interns. He explained that he and a janitor had made a swap: a copy of a key in exchange for some embalming fluid he had swiped from a funeral home. Believe me, this is not something I’ve experienced personally, but apparently when you dip a marijuana cigarette in embalming fluid, it gives it certain psychotic effects.
It also means you’re smoking chemicals that are only put in dead people for a very good reason. But, hey, to each his own.
So Paul/Powell had a key to the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office. It was all very shady and nefarious, and I’m sure had I been remotely sober, I could have come out with dozens of very good reasons why a responsible reporter for the state’s largest newspaper should not take advantage of it.
Except, of course, I had a head full of absinthe; and I had wild-child Kira goading me on, because to her it seemed like a fine adventure; and, well, to be honest, it was actually Paul/Powell who sealed the deal when he taunted, “Yeah, man, we can go see him. Unless you’re, you know, afraid of corpses at night.”
So, really, I had no choice. We waited to shove off until midnight, when the place would be empty. According to Paul/Powell, the midnight to 8:00 A.M. security detail—which he, naturally, referred to as “the graveyard shift”—had been axed in some recent budget cuts. In theory, the Essex County Police were supposed to have added the office to their patrol. But Paul/Powell said he had never seen them.
I drove—yet another stupid decision, but by that point I was actually the least drunk of the three of us. We were laughing the whole way, though for the life of me I can’t remember about what. Though I do seem to recall Kira making an off-hand comment about how she always wanted to have sex in a morgue, and I had to resist the urge to drive faster.
I managed to get us in one piece to the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office, a brick building at the corner of Norfolk Street and South Orange Avenue.
Paul/Powell instructed me to park in the employee lot, which I balked at. Then he explained that’s how he always did it, and I suppose illegal parking was chump change compared with the variety of crimes I was about to commit.
I felt incredibly conspicuous as we spilled out of the Malibu: three stumbling, giggling white kids in a Newark parking lot late at night. We went around to an unlit back door, where Paul/Powell seemed to know what he was doing. He slipped his key in the door in a practiced manner and turned it easily.
“I think if you tried the front one, the alarm would go off,” our tour guide explained. “This one isn’t wired, for whatever reason.”
With Paul/Powell in the lead, we went through a series of antiseptic corridors and then down some stairs until we reached the morgue, which was, appropriately enough, in the basement. He went through the door into a room that felt colder than the others. When he flipped on a light, I saw the bank of large, stainless steel drawers on the far side. They must have been refrigerated. Did each of them have a body inside? Or was there still room at the inn? I didn’t see any neon “No Vacancy” signs.
There were three stations in the middle—did you call them examining tables? chopping blocks? what?—all of which were, of course, empty at this time of day. But I could imagine that in a county like Essex—home to roughly a million people, at least a few of whom died each day under circumstances that required an autopsy—they could get fairly busy.
Paul/Powell had stopped at a clipboard that was hanging from the wall by a chain and he was flipping pages.
“You said his name was Kipps, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, still trying to take everything in.
Kira had hooked her arm in mine and was pressed against me, perhaps to get warm, perhaps because this whole thing was starting to get more than a little spooky. Maybe it was the cold or the brightness of the lights—or, you know, all the dead people—but I was definitely feeling much more sober than I had been just moments earlier. No one was giggling or talking about sex anymore.
Paul/Powell let the clipboard drop and walked calmly over to one of the drawers. Kira and I shuffled after him, both of us acting like we were trying not to touch anything. I’ve heard dead bodies are, in some ways, much more hygienic than live ones—it’s not like they can sneeze on you. But still, I didn’t feel like going around licking stuff.
“You ready?” Paul/Powell asked, his “D-E-A-T-H” fingers on one of the handles.
I nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “Here goes.”
* * *
A photographer buddy of mine who did a lot of work in war zones once gave me some valuable advice when it came to the dead: look at their bodies all you want; just don’t look at the faces. The bodies you can forget. The faces, he said, stay with you forever.
So I tried to keep my eyes fixed on the drawer as the long tray containing Darius Kipps slid toward me. Only when it was fully extended did I let myself glance at him, and even then I looked only at his chest. It had a long, slightly uneven scar running up the middle of it. He had obviously already been autopsied, and whoever stapled him back together hadn’t been tremendously concerned about aesthetics.
Paul/Powell must have noticed me averting my gaze because he began lecturing.
“Death is very natural, you know,” he intoned, again going Vincent Price on us. “In some ways, it’s the most natural thing that can happen to an animal. Yet there remains an irrational fear of death. You can touch him if you want. I really believe the dead like to be touched.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw he was running his hand along the corpse’s jawbone. I wouldn’t have stroked Darius Kipps’s cheek when it was part of a warm, pliant human being. Why the hell would I want to do it now that it was cold and stiff?
“The transformation to death—I call it the change from lucidity to morbidity—is one of the better understood biological processes, something that has been a subject of fascination for humankind throughout recorded history,” Paul/Powell continued. “Still, with fascination has always come fear. A study by Wickstrom and Zhuang out of Berkeley found that—”
It was Kira, who had been silent ever since we entered the building, who interrupted: “Powell, would you shut the hell up?”
“Fine, fine,” he said, returning to his normal voice. “Geez, I’m just talking.”
“I know,” she said. “But you’re freaking me out. This is weird enough. Stop it.”
I guess Kira was starting to come to her senses, too. And I was relieved she did. Paul/Powell was freaking me out, too. Plus, I wanted to get us back on track.
“So why don’t you tell me what you see here?” I said. “I really don’t know how much I want to look. This death thing is your business.”
“Yeah, although this particular part of the death industry isn’t really my area of expertise,” he said. “The people who do these autopsies are full-on MDs. They spend years studying this stuff. I just come to observe. They only called it an internship because my dad is a pretty big donor to the Democratic Party and, of course, the Democrats rule Essex County. So he, uh, you know, made a phone call…”
Ah, yes, politics in New Jersey—the money always comes attached with strings.
“Just do your best,�
�� I instructed.
“Well, okay, you saw somebody already cut this guy open, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So that means they’ve already removed his internal organs. That’s part of the autopsy. They weigh all the organs and then study them to see if they had anything to do with the death. In this guy’s case, the cause of death was pretty obvious, right? But you learn all kinds of interesting things. I observed this one autopsy the other day where the guy died of cirrhosis, but he also had a major blockage in one of the arteries leading to the heart. Basically, if he hadn’t drunk himself to death, he would have—”
“Powell!” Kira interrupted again.
“Sorry, sorry. I’m just into this stuff, you know?”
“Let’s just try to stay focused,” I said.
“Well, okay. He, uh … I’m not sure the perfect phraseology, but the back of his head is a big, bloody mess. You need me to get graphic?”
“No, that’s okay,” I said. “It’s an exit wound. I get the point.”
So Kipps had, in fact, been shot in the head. The only question now was whether it was self-inflicted. But how would I know? I guess if he fired the gun himself, there would be gunshot residue. But was that visible?
“Do you see any powder burns on his hands?” I asked.
“Nope,” he said.
Then again, the story—and no one had contradicted it—was that Kipps was found in a shower stall, with the water running. That might have washed off any powder. I was beginning to run out of ideas when Paul/Powell piped up.
“Well, this is sort of interesting,” he said.
“What?”
“There are ligature marks on both of his wrists,” he said. “Don’t worry. You can take a look. It won’t kill you.”
Paul/Powell held up the arm on the far side of Kipps’s body, and sure enough, the wrist had dark marks on it that were vivid even against his coffee-brown skin. The wrist on my side had similar wounds.
“These look like rope burns to me,” Paul/Powell said. “It’s almost like someone tied him to a post or a chair or something. It’s obviously premortal. That’s always a big distinction with these guys—pre- versus postmortal—because sometimes a body can get roughed up, especially if someone found it in a Dumpster or something. But these definitely happened while your guy was still alive. There was some bleeding and clotting on the parts that got rubbed really raw.”
