Aftermath, Inc.

by Gil Reavill

  “Who saw him die?” asked the English folk song about Cock Robin, answering the question with: “‘I,’ said the fly, ‘With my little eye I saw him die.’”

  Flies sometimes find you even before your heart stops beating, functioning like police Breathalyzers, only in this case as “deathalyzers.” A few molecules of butyric acid, indole, acetone, phenol, methyl disulfide, and other decay chemicals can be enough to alert the flying hordes. In general, members of the animal kingdom detect death much more efficiently than humans. A Tasmanian devil can smell a carcass a mile away. Barge operators towing the wreckage of the World Trade Center away from lower Manhattan for processing at Fresh Kills landfill reported that the flocking of seagulls signaled the presence of human remains in a particular load. Utilizing commercially available cadaverine and putrescine essences, handlers train cadaver-sniffing dogs for “HRD,” or human remains detection.

  By midday on that Saturday in July, insect eggs, laid in the first minutes after death mostly around the natural openings of mouth, nose, eyes, anus, and genitals, had hatched their larvae. Over the next few days, maggots roamed in wolf packs over and into the body, hauling bacteria in their wake, secreting enzymes that further broke down tissue, and also out-and-out tearing at softer tissue with their mouth hooks.

  Autolysis, or self-digestion, also got under way immediately after death, a process in which the unchecked cellular enzymes chew through the walls of the cells. Starved of nourishing oxygen, the body eats itself. It ferments. This happens sooner in such fluid- and enzyme-rich environments as the liver and the brain. Visual cues for autolysis include some sagging or sloughing of large sections of exposed skin, with small skin blisters forming as well.

  There are ten trillion cells in the human body, mystically enough the same as the number of stars in the known universe. During autolysis, the cells of the deceased burst open by the billions. In the heat of the Milwaukee summer, the corpse began to melt like the Wicked Witch of the West.

  When the cells rupture, they leak rich nutrients, which around Independence Day or so helped kick off the next stage of decay, putrefaction. Sulfhemoglobin lent the familiar greenish cast to the skin. Gases such as hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia, sulfur dioxide, and hydrogen built up within the bowels and other parts of the body, products of anaerobic fermentation. Though these gases sometimes cause the skin to rupture, normally they gain exit through the anus, and the death rattle is followed by a series of whistling-teakettle death farts.

  By Monday, July Fourth, putrefactive bacteria and anaerobes, including micrococci, coliforms, diphtheroids, and salmonella, have joined the microbes already in residence. Various fungi, amoebae, pseudomonads, flavobacteria, and gliding bacteria joined in. The gang was all there by the time celebratory fireworks began to go up over Lake Michigan that evening, four blocks to the east.

  “With the exception of micro-organisms living in deep-sea vents,” writes leading forensic scientist Arpad Vass, “every micro-organism known is involved in some aspect of the human decom-positional cycle, from Acetobacter to Zooglea.”

  The smell of putrefaction brought an additional wave of insects, including another one of my favorites, the cheese skipper, somehow a suitable presence in a Wisconsin death. “Cheese skippers,” writes Jessica Snyder Sachs in Corpse, “prefer their bodies, like their dairy products, slightly aged.” When startled, cheese skippers leap a couple feet straight up into the air, hence their name.

  That Independence Day week and the next, predator insects showed up to feed not only on the body but on the maggot masses. Hister, rove, carrion, hide, ham, and carcass beetles arrived. Mites, coffin flies, and moths crowded in. Parasitoid wasps laid their eggs inside the soft bodies of the maggots.

  By Friday, July 15, two weeks after TOD, the bloated body collapsed. The flesh exhibited a characteristic creamy consistency. The exposed skin blackened. The body fluids had drained, but mold grew on the liquescent underparts of the corpse, where it came in contact with the floor. The next week represented a last frenzied feast for the maggots, as the soft tissue of the body was pretty much consumed, leaving only ligaments and dehydrated skin, too tough for the delicate mouth hooks of the fly larvae. The remnants were left to the more powerful jaws of the beetles.

  At this stage the body was discovered, on Tuesday, July 19. Left uninterrupted, the decomposition process would have continued through dry decay, or diagenesis. Given the environmental conditions (overheated interior space, no exposure to moisture), what remained of the deceased would probably have mummified, leaving the proverbial skin and bones (or “leather and stain,” as Elmore Leonard has it). And hair: Apart from its susceptibility to fire, human hair is almost indestructible, resistant to water, rot, and many types of acid.

  Chris and Tim tell of an early job on Warwick Avenue in Chicago that demonstrated what happens when remains are left for an even longer period than three weeks. The Office of the Public Guardian contacted Aftermath with a horrific situation. An elderly man had died two and a half years before. His mentally ill daughter did not report his death, and did not move the body at all. She merely threw a sleeping bag over the corpse and continued to cash her father’s social security checks. Over the years, she put one air freshener after another in the house to mask the smell.

  By the time the Office of the Public Guardian showed up, there were “thousands upon thousands” of air fresheners stuck up all around the premises. The daughter had duct-taped the windows of the room where the old man’s body lay to keep the stench of rot from escaping.

  The measure didn’t work. “When you were outside on the street you could smell it,” Chris Wilson recalled.

  For two and a half years the old man’s body had lain unattended. Its fluids had drained through the bed and onto the floor, eventually, as with the Milwaukee job, working their way through the floorboards to collect in the basement. The rest of the body had thoroughly desiccated, turning itself into a granular “brown earth” powder, a mix of pupal cases, insect excrement, and bone. The “dust to dust” phrase from the Book of Common Prayer was quite literally demonstrated before Chris’s and Tim’s eyes.

  When they arrived to clean up the scene, they noticed a snow shovel propped in the corner of the room. The coroner, it turned out, had tried to use the shovel to scoop up the desiccated body.

  The Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s office removed the body, what was left of it, from the tan clapboard house in Cudahy a week before the Aftermath crew arrived at the scene. Coroners usually operate on a simple rule of thumb: They take whatever is attached. In cases of shotgun suicides, say, this can leave quite a bit of the dearly departed behind. Techs have picked up skull fragments, fingernails, eyeballs, eyelashes, nostrils, teeth with the roots still attached. Even in unattended deaths such as this, some remains always remain after the departure of the coroner (or, more probably, the body collector employed by the coroner).

  At first, I didn’t venture into the house, but observed from my post just inside the door. From where I stood I could see three clocks, one in the hallway still going at 1:10 (the wrong time), and two more, one stopped at 11:51 and one at 7:30. Off to the left, the living room held a small TV, two toasters, and a typewriter, as well as an incredible amount of clutter. Propped against a wall was a sampler spelling out the “Now I lay me down to sleep” prayer. If I die before I wake…

  In a stuffed-full, curtained room to the right of the front door, stacks of old-time silent film videotapes (Peter Pan, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Waxworks, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) teetered next to yellowed Milwaukee Sentinel newspapers jumbled against pillars of blank VHS tapes. Movie posters lined the walls (Little Lord Fauntleroy, Atomic Movie Orgy Sponsored by Schlitz). Another faux-embroidered sampler: “Jesus, Mary and Joseph I give you my heart and soul.” I counted seven tape recorders amid the disorder. A book: You and the Law. An old home-movie screen and a Bogen brand professional tripod.

  I didn’t know the name of the dece
ased. I tried to guess a life from the evidence that surrounded me. A movie projectionist?

  “I’m going to check downstairs,” Ryan said, gesturing me to follow him.

  I stepped carefully into the front hall and around the edges of the stain. We passed through the kitchen. I approached the bombinating, fly-thick windows. Insect carcasses littered the kitchen sink, with tiny wasps picking through and feeding on the remains. The curtain of flies blocked the exterior light, casting the kitchen into shifting, shadow-patterned gloom. This was myiasis, fly infestation. Provided their progeny all lived, two ordinary houseflies could produce five trillion (5,000,000,000,000) offspring in one season.

  Trying to mimic the scientific dispassion of an entomologist, I identified the striking iridescence of green bottle flies, which predominated, along with other blowflies, including blue bottles and attic flies, as well as orange-eyed flesh-flies and common houseflies. The housefly hums in the middle octave, key of F, but the kitchen windows sounded a half-dozen tones, with the deeper thrum of the blowflies the loudest. A fly opera.

  As I followed Ryan down a narrow basement stairway, I passed a door to the outside. I could see a plastic children’s play-set ten feet away in the next yard. I felt queasy. I decided to employ a method I had learned from prime-time television: If you grin, you can’t gag. Physically impossible. CSI’s Sara Sidle (Jorja Fox) once pointed that out. I get all my antiregurgitation strategies from CSI.

  Ryan looked back at me. Behind my face mask, my grin must have resembled a horrible, grimacing rictus. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he asked.

  “I’m okay,” I said. I stopped trying to grin.

  Downstairs, more clutter, stacked to the ceiling with only small aisles left for perambulation. The body fluids had drained from the deceased onto the floorboards upstairs, through the floorboards into the subflooring, then through the subflooring to dribble down the floor joists and drop onto a chest of drawers in the basement. On top of the chest of drawers was a large cardboard box with a red-lettered Lucas-Milhaupt label, after a local machine company (“Your complete source for metal joining products and services”).

  The three-foot-square box was filled with multicolored industrial-strength extension cords, orange, black, yellow, and blue. The cords were partially obscured by a roiling, boiling, yellow-beige “maggot mass” of insect larvae, mostly meaty blowfly young’uns in their third instar of growth. I caught the sharp, distinctive scent of maggot excrement, smelling overwhelmingly of ammonia.

  Maggots are even more gregarious than humans. They like a crowd. One tactic criminal investigators employ to gauge time of death is to thrust a thermometer into the middle of a maggot mass. The resulting measurement indicates how long the mass has been in operation. A maggot mass is capable of chewing through forty pounds of soft tissue in a day.

  Looking into the box after Ryan hauled it down, I vomited a thin, pathetic gruel inside my mask. I knew there were such phenomena as “vomit waves” that infect hospitals, airplanes, and binge-drinking parties. The regurgitation reflex was contagious, a product, evolutionary biologists say, of our primate past. One member of the group hurled from a bad slice of fruit, say, and the whole chimp family, Cheetah to Jane, upchucked too. Like mutual grooming, only of the gut. This communal response was also useful among young partygoers, clearing everyone’s stomachs to make room for more alcohol, a practice called boot and rally in the States, and tactical chundering in the UK.

  Ryan seemed to be immune to the contagion. No vomit wave was going to catch him in the basement of the beige clapboard (“Catch a wave,” sang the Beach Boys, “and you’re sitting on top of the world”). He soberly scoped out the extent of contamination, eyeballing it close up. The spinal fluid from the deceased had rectified into a glaze-brown varnish pooled on the floor.

  “That’s the dangerous stuff,” Ryan said, pointing to the fluid. “That’s what’s most likely to have the hep C virus in it, or HIV, bad stuff like that.”

  Cerebrospinal fluid. Aka CSF. Aka, in medical Latin, liquor cerebrospinalis. The saline solution in which the brain floats.

  I had to back myself into a trash alley for Ryan to pass me on the way back upstairs. I followed him out of the basement.

  “It’s all down there too,” he told Dave. “Maggots. A whole shitload of them.”

  The two techs conferred at the other end of the hallway. A shred of my prefatory research occurred to me. “Did you know a maggot breathes through its asshole?” I asked.

  Ryan and Dave stared over at me. I immediately got the idea they did not need Johnny Britannica spouting fun facts at precisely that moment. But it was true. Most maggot species utilize anal spiracles for respiration, which, considering that they are nature’s Dumpster divers and thus constantly upended, makes a rude sort of sense.

  “Ryan’s going to fog the place with Thermo-55 first,” Dave said. I had forgotten what Thermo-55 was. Disinfectant? I hoped it was the most effective deodorizer known to man, with larvicidal properties, developed by some top-secret arm of the military industrial complex.

  I stripped my plastic booties off and followed Dave outside. Fresh air was a relief, mitigated by the fact that I still smelled the candied stench of decay no matter how far I removed myself from the death house.

  Sense memory dictated I would forever smell what had assaulted my nostrils that morning. Some of my olfactory receptors adopted themselves to the odiferous decay molecules that had been presented to them, so the receptors were effectively locked into place, ready to identify the same stench again later. The problem is, sometimes these custom-tailored receptors get falsely triggered by other molecules, and we wind up smelling something from our past, something that is no longer there, in a phenomenon that olfaction experts call phantosmia.

  It’s true what they say about death. “Once you smell it, you don’t forget it.”

  Olfactory memory is more accurate and long-lasting than visual memory. Furthermore, it is seated in the limbic part of the brain, the same region where emotions are generated. So the odor I smelled that day, and the emotional upheaval generated by it, would be inextricably linked, and with me forever.

  The block’s street urchins still maintained their distance, cowed by the sight of Tyvek spooks in their midst, but an adult who identified herself as “Phyllis, down the street,” approached Dave.

  “I just took my examination for the county police academy,” she said, attempting to establish her bona fides. “I was wondering, what do you do to get into a field like this? Was it bad in there?”

  Until recently, Aftermath always had male techs. “We kept trying to hire women, but they never worked out,” Tim said. But now the East Coast territory has an all-female crew.

  I would have been eager to discuss the job with Phyllis, with anyone. Ever since we had rolled up to the job, I felt the urge to call the Moral Compass and unload on her. But Dave wasn’t forthcoming. As Phyllis peppered him with questions he answered with noncommittal grunts or single-word replies, continuing gathering together bioboxes and supplies for the task ahead.

  Dave told me later, “I could talk with people for an hour, two hours, and they would still have questions. If I did that I’d never get any work done. I used to be a lot more patient when I first started, but now I just blow them off.”

  Phyllis hung in there. She started talking about the deceased. “He had the hoarder’s disease,” she said. “It’s a real illness, you know.”

  She said he was a recluse too. “He didn’t like to answer the door. When he wasn’t around last month, I just thought he was in the hospital again.”

  “I feel terrible for the family,” she said, casting her eyes to the daughter’s house, across the street three houses to the west. “They’ve got a world of trouble.”

  The chatty Phyllis finally retreated. A Good Humor truck tootled down the street toward us, its chimes sounding, to my ears right at that moment, maniacal and unstrung.

  “I don’t get it,” I
said to Dave. “The daughter lives on the same block, but the guy is lying there dead for three weeks before anyone finds him. How did that happen?”

  “They’re real good people,” Dave said. “They’d probably talk to you.”

  “Unless, you know, they were estranged.”

  Unattended death. Maybe the saddest two-word phrase in the language.

  I didn’t stick around to find out. Reeling from the physical and emotional reaction to what I had encountered inside the beige clapboard, I bailed out of the job, out of Wisconsin, and out of my journalistic responsibilities, beating my way back to the Extended Stay to recover the stomach I had lost.

  It took me a while to recuperate, but I eventually went back to the house in the Milwaukee suburbs (“As a dog returneth to his vomit,” the Bible says, “so a fool returneth to his folly”), to see what it was like when the Aftermath job was done.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Father Time

  Alois Felix Dettlaff

  We don’t want to be bothered.

  —Langley Collyer, famous pack rat and recluse, on why he and his brother, Homer, shut themselves off from the world

  Tonight my ambition will be accomplished. I have discovered the secret of life and death.

  —Title card, Edison’s 1910 Frankenstein.

  “Collectionism,” or obsessive hoarding, is just one of a battery of behaviors that make up Diogenes syndrome, a little-understood affliction that causes some elderly people to neglect hygiene and live in reclusion. “Animal hoarding,” familiar in the person of the venerable “cat lady,” can be another aspect of it.

  Social workers report stories of a mummified litter of kittens discovered beneath the layers of trash, of rats chewing through the oxygen lines of elderly victims. The syndrome hits across demographic lines.