Aftermath, Inc.

by Gil Reavill

  By 1900, the Chicago meatpackers represented a monopoly as complete as John D. Rockefeller’s stranglehold on oil. The Union Stock Yards’ 475 acres of holding pens, abattoirs, and rendering plants churned out eighty-two percent of the country’s meat, as well as untold amounts of by-product-based items such as leather, glue, soap, oil, hairbrushes, fertilizer, faux ivory piano keys, oleomargarine, gelatin, shoe polish, buttons, perfume, and violin strings.

  The far-thinking, refrigeration-minded Swift was joined by moguls Philip “King Meat” Armour, Edward Morris, and G. H. Hammond in shipping processed beef and pork not only to New York and the other major metropolitan areas of America, but all over the globe, to London, Tokyo, Spain, Bordeaux, and St. Petersburg. Armour’s motto* was “We Feed the World.”

  On the killing and cutting lines, fifty animals died every minute of every hour, twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. Death took no holidays. Conservatively totaling the numbers involved yields a ballpark figure worthy of U.S. Cellular Field: 2,210,000,000 animals perished over the course of the rough century that the Union Stock Yards were in operation.

  Chicago’s complex relationship with meat can be illustrated with an anecdote from the last Beatles concert tour of America in 1966. At shows around the country, fans pelted the band with jellybeans (a candy that John had once made the mistake of saying they enjoyed) as well as stuffed animals, lingerie, and love letters. But at the International Amphitheater in Chicago, on the site of the Union Stock Yards, a fan winged a frozen slab of sir-loin steak at the stage, nearly beheading Paul McCartney. I can’t be entirely certain, but I would venture to bet Chicago holds the distinction of being the only stop on the tour where meat was thrown.

  Joe guided the white Aftermath truck south off I-55 at California Avenue and past the former site of the yards, now an industrial park. We plunged into a rind of a neighborhood, a quartier perdu that still exhibited its working-class heritage. The pubs and Catholic churches spoke of Poland or Ireland, but some of the stores were Mexican groceries. This was the fabled “Back of the Yards,” formerly thick with Union Stock Yards employee immigrants and their families, a festering sinkhole so tubercular that at the turn of the 1900s, “newborns coughed blood coming out of the womb,” according to reformer Mary McDowell.

  Our destination was a four-story building with a stained, gray-stuccoed exterior. “A retirement home,” Joe said, but of the single-occupant-apartment variety, designed for the not-quite-ready-for-the-wheelchair elderly.

  Joe was nervous about his first body removal job, constantly on the cell to his mentor, Ryan O’Shea, for some hand-holding. He had us gear up extra carefully: yellow heavy-duty hazmat suits over the more normal white ones, duct-taped at the arms and feet, full respirators. I felt fat.

  “You look like a yellow snowman,” I said to Joe, but the respirator dimmed my words, and he only smiled vaguely.

  We waddled inside.

  In a glass case next to the elevator, a computer printout with a pastel, flower-topped casket graphic announced the death of Alvin Kamolinski of Apartment 412. I could tell the graphic had been used before, and that the front office of the retirement home kept it at the ready, just switching the particulars as necessary.

  Several residents quailed visibly as they passed by us waiting for the elevator. I was so caught up in the process of gearing up that I hadn’t considered the effect the sight of us might have, and that those near death’s door might not appreciate being ambushed by apocalyptic figures come to fetch one of their own.

  A lone security guard wearing a blue nylon jacket a couple sizes too large waited for us outside the apartment on the fourth floor.

  “In here,” he called as soon as we left the elevator.

  We were ambushed ourselves as we walked through the door of the apartment. The body lay facedown on the linoleum floor of the kitchen just to left of the entryway. It came as a shock to me (and, judging from a stutter in their movements, to Joe and Kyle too), even though I had known it would be there.

  An in-house physician had already issued a death certificate, but there had been some delay getting the medical examiner’s office to release the body. The postmortem interval, according to the retirement home management, had already been six hours. Which meant algor mortis, or body cooling, was over, and the body was in the midst of the extended seizing up known as rigor.

  “We lift him up,” I said to Joe, “he’s going to be like concrete.”

  Kyle broke open a body bag. Aftermath normally used body bags (more politely called postmortem bags) that were made in China and manufactured out of three-mil polyethylene film, the same black plastic material used for trash bags, with a scrim of reinforcement mesh sandwiched between the double layers. But the company was trying out a newfangled gray thirty-six-by-ninety-inch TCP-CF3 Waffel Bag (“Proudly Made in the USA,” read the packing slip) with an envelope-style #9 zipper for easy access.

  “We get a lot of compliments on our body bags,” Ryan O’Shea told me later. Not from their occupants, of course, but from police and coroner’s personnel. They were a two-for-one deal: The clear polyethylene packaging that the postmortem bags came in was “Adaptable for Holding the Personal Belongings of the Deceased.”

  I knelt beside the deceased, a gaunt, sixtysomething gent with a smooth-shaved head showing a stubble of gray hair. Hair and fingernails do not really keep growing after death, as the common wisdom insists; it’s only that rigor makes the skin recede somewhat at the follicles and cuticles, thus giving the impression of growth.

  Statisically, most of us expire in the bathroom. But the end had come to Alvin Kamolinski while he was in his kitchen in relative undress, bare to the waist, answering the boxers-or-briefs question with the former, wearing brown vinyl slippers and spotless white crew sox. His shanks were reed thin, maculate with liver spotting, but otherwise almost as pale as his hose.

  “Where are the police?” Joe asked Jack, the security guard.

  “They said they couldn’t come right away, be maybe by tomorrow,” Jack said.

  “You’re kidding,” Joe said.

  “They’re busy,” Jack said. “Must be a real busy day, lots of crime or something.”

  “That sucks,” Joe said.

  “Mr. Anders said we have to get the body out,” Jack said, not bothering to explain who Mr. Anders might be. “It’s disturbing the other residents.”

  I stood up and looked across the room divider into the tiny kitchenette apartment. Stacks of magazines, and an unused treadmill hung with laundry. Model-train paraphernalia, much of it still boxed, gestures toward a halfhearted hobby.

  “Mr. Kamolinski always had a nice word,” Jack said. “I never like to see them this way.”

  “We can bag up the body,” Joe said, “but I don’t know if we can transport it without the police.”

  “What do you mean?” Jack said. “I told you, police say they can’t come, and we got to get this out of here right now.”

  “That’s the law,” Joe said. “If we have this body in our truck, we need to have a police escort, one car ahead, one car behind, otherwise we’d be illegal.”

  Different jurisdictions have different rules and different levels of respect for the dead. The Aftermath techs like to tell the legend of Greg Banach’s midnight ride, when he transported a corpse from a job in his own SUV. The body was that of a tall man, and Banach crammed the corpse into the back of his truck, with its bottom half visible through the back window.

  Jack was miffed. “Why’d we call you all, then? You said your company does body removal.”

  “You want us to do what we can do?” Joe said.

  “What, put him in the bag and then just leave it here?” Jack said, shaking his head. I noticed the effortless transformation in his words. Mr. Kamolinski went from “him” to “it” in the space of a few words.

  “I don’t know what else we can do,” Joe said.

  “I got to talk to Mr. Anders,” Jack said.

  He ope
ned the door and stepped into the hallway. We heard the squawk of his two-way. Kyle went with him, and Joe left for the truck to call Chris and Tim about the impasse.

  “Hollywood can stay here,” Joe said. He had picked up my handle from Ryan and Dave. “You don’t mind, do you?”

  I told him that I didn’t mind. I was left alone with the body.

  “How do you do it?”

  That’s a common question bystanders, friends, and perfect strangers put to the Aftermath techs, when the subject of their job comes up. What the question usually means is not “What procedures do you use to clean up crime scenes?”—although people want to know about that, too, down to what kind of chemicals are involved—but “How do you get used to it?”

  It’s a philosophical query, posed by the ninety-one-point-five percent of the population who don’t deal with death on a daily basis to the eight-point-five percent who do. The question implies that continual exposure must somehow transform the techs, render them abnormal, compromise them in some fundamental way. Butchers in Elizabethan England were not allowed to serve on juries because, the reasoning went, their close familiarity with death desensitized them to human suffering.

  With a gloved hand I felt the back of Mr. Kamolinski’s neck. I tried to reposition him to see his face, but rigor had temporarily locked him in its embrace. The blotchy stains of livor mortis mottled his skin. I touched the pressed-wood kitchen cabinet next to his head. Human body and wood cabinet were the same temperature, and gave off the same sense of physical inertness.

  Cool flesh. In Switzerland, banks warm their marble counter-tops to skin temperature, which supposedly makes money easier to pick up. The normal temperature of human skin is 91°F, or 33°C. The ambient temperature that fall day was closer to the mid-seventies, even without air conditioning, so within the last six hours, the body’s skin temperature had dropped by 16°F. Living cells are microscopic furnaces, fueled by sugars, fed by oxygen. Algor mortis is what happens when the furnace goes out. An energy exchange occurs, with the dead body giving up its heat to the surroundings, aligning itself with the ambient state of the universe. From he to it. Becoming a thing.

  How do we do it? How do we become jaded, inured, accustomed to death?

  I had seen Mr. Kamolinski before. Not him exactly, of course, but someone who looked a lot like him and, more important, had shuffled off the coil the same as he had. The first time I laid eyes on a dead body might have been poor, unfortunate Chucky Sipple in Wisconsin, but the first time I ever touched one was in the early 1980s, at a school in the Medical District near the University of Chicago, only a few miles from where Mr. Kamolinski was cooling his heels.

  My girlfriend at that time was studying to become a doctor, and she took me to the medical school’s gross anatomy lab* after hours, when no one was around. Strictly forbidden, of course, and she could have gotten into serious trouble had we been caught, but Tina Fishman had been born a youngest child, and had a classic youngest-child rebellious streak.

  The laboratory was dark when we entered. Tina switched on the banks of fluorescent lights on the ceiling. Two dozen embalmed, partially dissected cadavers lay on stainless steel gurneys in six rows of four. Some of the bodies were covered in white cotton shrouds, but others had been casually left partially exposed.

  I turned my head away and retched.

  “You okay?” Tina said. “Can you handle it?”

  “Sure,” I said, determined to soldier on. Nothing human is foreign to me, nothing human is foreign to me, nothing human is…ugh.

  “We each get our own,” Tina explained. “Here’s mine.”

  She pulled back a sheet to reveal an elderly, beak-nosed Caucasian male with a shaved head. An empty body cavity indicated where his viscera should have been, with the whole surprisingly compact lungs-heart-liver-entrails package removed and set down between his legs. Working in class, Tina had also partially peeled away one side of her specimen’s facial skin.

  “Some people donate their own bodies, but most of them are like homeless guys, destitute. We get them, and if there is any family, it gets, you know, some money to pay a funeral home for a memorial service or something.”

  The balking chemical stench of formaldehyde masked any scent of decay. I bent down and stared at the cadaver’s one good eye, its pupil occluded with a milky haze. I placed my ungloved hand on its forehead. Clammy.

  “Bobby,” Tina said. “That’s what I named him.”

  “Was his head shaved like that or did you do that to him?”

  “I did it with a scalpel,” she said. “He had some wispy stuff, like tufts, you know? But I didn’t like the way it looked, so I cut it off.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You make it sound like you own him.”

  “Well, he is mine.” She petted the head of her cadaver, also with an ungloved hand. “My Bobby,” she said.

  She asked me if I wanted to see where the cadavers at the lab came from and I said that I did. We drove along Harrison Street parallel to the Eisenhower Expressway, to a nondescript brick building on the grounds of Rush University Medical Center.

  Tina knew the young Hispanic caretaker of the place, and introduced me to him as “an undercover reporter.” That meant essentially nothing, but the guard accepted it without question. In the basement of the building was a large swimming pool, formerly used for sports and recreation. Only, this pool was filled with formaldehyde, and a dozen blank-eyed, gray-skinned cadavers floated in it, men and women, black and white, but uniformly aged.

  The chemical smell was overpowering. The guard poked and pushed the corpses beneath the liquid, using a proverbial ten-foot pole of aluminum. “The guy before me,” he said, “had to quit because he got allergic. But it don’t bother me.”

  I couldn’t take it very long. I felt like I was becoming allergic. “What’d you think?” Tina asked, as we exited into the fresh midwestern air.

  I hesitated before answering. “There’s this fear of being just a body, you know? Like we’re just meat,” I said. “Don’t you feel that?”

  That was the mirror that Aftermath held up to me, again and again. The mind-body duality finally resolved, and human life reduced to mere flyspecked meat, to amber fluids and black stains. A lot of people (over ninety percent of the population, it turns out) spend their lives assiduously avoiding looking into that mirror. Religion is all about that avoidance, and romanticism, and hedonism, and probably all the other isms the flesh is heir to. We pin all our hopes on transcendence. Nobody, least of all Mr. Kamolinski, wants to be just a cold slab of meat left alone on the floor of a kitchenette.

  I hunkered down to keep him company.

  Chicago, the city of death, did not give up its dead easily. The Back of the Yards job was an exception. Aftermath, Inc., had yet to crack the Cook County market. The company was largely a suburban, not an urban, concern.

  “We don’t get that many referrals within the city of Chicago,” Tim told me. “It’s all pretty tightly controlled.” Chris was less guarded. “It’s political, it has to be—they always give their cleanup jobs to their own buddies.”

  Before the police-escort impasse, Joe and Kyle had been directed to remove Mr. Kamolinski’s body to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office, near the United Center, where the Chicago Bulls play. Joe got on the phone with Ryan, considering how to transport the body.

  “Do we put it in the back of the truck and just bungee it in place?” Joe asked.

  He listened, then shook his head, repeating what he heard to Kyle. “Ryan says we should put it up front in the cab, just prop it up there between us.”

  “Hey, that’s where I sit,” I said.

  “I think he was kidding,” Joe said.

  It would have been a short trip straight north, but still, none of us relished a journey in the company of a corpse.

  The Medical Examiner’s Office was on Harrison Street near the University of Chicago hospitals, just down the street
from where I first encountered Tina Fishman’s Bobby. A few weeks before the Back of the Yards retirement-home job, I had called the office to request an informational tour. I discovered that journalists were not at all encouraged to investigate conditions at the Cook County morgue.

  “We give tours to police officers, and that’s it,” a morgue functionary told me over the phone. “I’ve never heard of anyone else having access, and I’m the one who sets up the tours.”

  He suggested that I might query the medical examiner of Cook County, Edmund Donoghue, directly. I faxed over my request, and got a call from Donoghue a couple hours later.

  “What you propose just isn’t going to happen,” Donoghue told me. Donoghue was a surgeon’s son, a Chicago boy born and bred. “It’s a conflict of interest,” he said.

  “I don’t really see that,” I said.

  “This Aftermath, it’s a business, and we can’t show any preferences like that.”

  In my faxed letter to Donoghue, I had mentioned that I was making my request “in order to gain a better understanding of the activities of a major urban medical examiner’s office.”

  “If you want to see what a big-city morgue does, you can do it out where you’re from, in New York,” Donoghue said. I caught a tinge of the Second City’s New York phobia in his tone.

  This wasn’t going the way I had hoped. I was running up against either Cook County’s traditional wall of silence or the larger, equally traditional pattern of shame about the mechanics of death. I considered mentioning sunshine laws, transparent government, media access to truth.

  “Well,” I managed, “perhaps you and I could sit down for an interview, without the tour.”

  “This isn’t a negotiation,” Donoghue snapped, “this is a no.”

  “Wow,” I said, unable to help myself. “You really need some media training. I know professionals who can help in that area—”