The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016

by Rachel Kushner

  “Toru?” the voice was saying. It was right in his ear, yet so far away. “Are you there?”

  N. R. KLEINFELD

  The Lonely Death of George Bell

  FROM The New York Times

  THEY FOUND HIM in the living room, crumpled up on the mottled carpet. The police did. Sniffing a fetid odor, a neighbor had called 911. The apartment was in north-central Queens, in an unassertive building on 79th Street in Jackson Heights.

  The apartment belonged to a George Bell. He lived alone. Thus the presumption was that the corpse also belonged to George Bell. It was a plausible supposition, but it remained just that, for the puffy body on the floor was decomposed and unrecognizable. Clearly the man had not died on July 12, the Saturday last year when he was discovered, nor the day before nor the day before that. He had lain there for a while, nothing to announce his departure to the world, while the hyperkinetic city around him hurried on with its business.

  Neighbors had last seen him six days earlier, a Sunday. On Thursday, there was a break in his routine. The car he always kept out front and moved from one side of the street to the other to obey parking rules sat on the wrong side. A ticket was wedged beneath the wiper. The woman next door called Mr. Bell. His phone rang and rang.

  Then the smell of death and the police and the sobering reason that George Bell did not move his car.

  Each year around 50,000 people die in New York, and each year the mortality rate seems to graze a new low, with people living healthier and longer. A great majority of the deceased have relatives and friends who soon learn of their passing and tearfully assemble at their funeral. A reverent death notice appears. Sympathy cards accumulate. When the celebrated die or there is some heart-rending killing of the innocent, the entire city might weep.

  A much tinier number die alone in unwatched struggles. No one collects their bodies. No one mourns the conclusion of a life. They are just a name added to the death tables. In the year 2014, George Bell, age 72, was among those names.

  George Bell—a simple name, two syllables, the minimum. There were no obvious answers as to who he was or what shape his life had taken. What worries weighed on him. Whom he loved and who loved him.

  Like most New Yorkers, he lived in the corners, under the pale light of obscurity.

  Yet death even in such forlorn form can cause a surprising amount of activity, setting off an elaborate, lurching process that involves a hodgepodge of interlocking characters whose livelihoods flow in part or in whole from death.

  With George Bell, the ripples from the process would spill improbably and seemingly by happenstance from the shadows of Queens to upstate New York and Virginia and Florida. Dozens of people who never knew him, all cogs in the city’s complicated machinery of mortality, would find themselves settling the affairs of an ordinary man who left this world without anyone in particular noticing.

  In discovering a death, you find a life story and perhaps meaning. Could anything in the map of George Bell’s existence have explained his lonely end? Possibly not. But it was true that George Bell died carrying some secrets. Secrets about how he lived and secrets about who mattered most to him. Those secrets would bring sorrow. At the same time, they would deliver rewards. Death does that. It closes doors but also opens them.

  Once firefighters had jimmied the door that July afternoon, the police squeezed into a beaten apartment groaning with possessions, a grotesque parody of the “lived-in” condition. Clearly, its occupant had been a hoarder.

  The officers from the 115th Precinct called the medical examiner’s office, which involves itself in suspicious deaths and unidentified bodies, and a medical legal investigator arrived. His task was to rule out foul play and look for evidence that could help locate the next of kin and identify the body. In short order, it was clear that nothing criminal had taken place (no sign of forced entry, bullet wounds, congealed blood).

  A Fire Department paramedic made the obvious pronouncement that the man was dead; even a skeleton must be formally declared no longer living. The body was zipped into a human remains pouch. A transport team from the medical examiner’s office drove it to the morgue at Queens Hospital Center, where it was deposited in one of some 100 refrigerated drawers, cooled to 35 degrees.

  It falls to the police to notify next of kin, but the neighbors did not know of any. Detectives grabbed some names and phone numbers from the apartment, called them and got nothing: The man had no wife, no siblings. The police estimate that they reach kin 85 percent of the time. They struck out with George Bell.

  At the Queens morgue, identification personnel got started. Something like 90 percent of the corpses arriving at city morgues are identified by relatives or friends after they are shown photographs of the body. Most remains depart for burial within a few days. For the rest, it gets complicated.

  The easiest resolution is furnished by fingerprints; otherwise by dental and medical records or, as a last resort, by DNA. The medical examiner can also do a so-called contextual ID; when all elements are considered, none of which by themselves bring certainty, a sort of circumstantial identification can be made.

  Fingerprints were taken, which required days because of the poor condition of the fingers. Enhanced techniques had to be used, such as soaking the fingers in a solution to soften them. The prints were sent to city, state and federal databases. No hits.

  Once nine days had elapsed and no next of kin had come forth, the medical examiner reported the death to the office of the Queens County public administrator, an obscure agency that operates out of the State Supreme Court building in the Jamaica neighborhood. Its austere quarters are adjacent to Surrogate’s Court, familiarly known as widows and orphans court, where wills are probated and battles are often waged over the dead.

  Each county in New York City has a public administrator to manage estates when there is no one else to do so, most commonly when there is no will or no known heirs.

  Public administrators tend to rouse attention only when complaints flare over their competence or their fees or their tendency to oversee dens of political patronage. Or when they run afoul of the law. Last year, a former longtime counsel to the Bronx County public administrator pleaded guilty to grand larceny, while a bookkeeper for the Kings County public administrator was sentenced to a prison term for stealing from the dead.

  Recent audits by the city’s comptroller found disturbing dysfunction at both of those offices, which the occupants said had been overstated. The most recent audit of the Queens office, in 2012, raised no significant issues.

  The Queens unit employs 15 people and processes something like 1,500 deaths a year. Appointed by the Queens surrogate, Lois M. Rosenblatt, a lawyer, has been head of the office for the past 13 years. Most cases arrive from nursing homes, others from the medical examiner, legal guardians, the police, undertakers. While a majority of estates contain assets of less than $500, one had been worth $16 million. Meager estates can move swiftly. Bigger ones routinely extend from 12 to 24 months.

  The office extracts a commission that starts at 5 percent of the first $100,000 of an estate and then slides downward, money that is entered into the city’s general fund. An additional 1 percent goes toward the office’s expenses. The office’s counsel, who for 23 years has been Gerard Sweeney, a private lawyer who mainly does the public administrator’s legal work, customarily gets a sliding legal fee that begins at 6 percent of the estate’s first $750,000.

  “You can die in such anonymity in New York,” he likes to say. “We’ve had instances of people dead for months. No one finds them, no one misses them.”

  The man presumed to be George Bell joined the wash of cases, a fresh arrival that Ms. Rosenblatt viewed as nothing special at all. Meanwhile, the medical examiner needed records—X-rays would do—to confirm the identity of the body. The office took its own chest X-rays but still required earlier ones for comparison.

  The medical examiner’s office had no idea which doctors the man had seen, so in a Hail Mary m
aneuver, personnel began cold-calling hospitals and doctors in the vicinity, in a pattern that radiated outward from the Jackson Heights apartment. Whoever picked up was asked if by chance a George Bell had ever dropped in.

  Three investigators work for the Queens County public administrator. They comb through the residences of the departed, mining their homes for clues as to what was owned, who their relatives were. It’s a peculiar kind of work, seeing what strangers had kept in their closets, what they hung on the walls, what deodorant they liked.

  On July 24, two investigators, Juan Plaza and Ronald Rodriguez, entered the glutted premises of the Bell apartment, clad in billowy hazmat suits and bootees. Investigators work in pairs, to discourage theft.

  Bleak as the place was, they had seen worse. An apartment so swollen with belongings that the tenant, a woman, died standing up, unable to collapse to the floor. Or the place they fled swatting at swarms of fleas.

  Yes, they saw a human existence that few others did.

  Mr. Plaza had been a data entry clerk before joining his macabre field in 1994; Mr. Rodriguez had been a waiter and found his interest piqued in 2002.

  What qualified someone for the job? Ms. Rosenblatt, the head of the office, summed it up: “People willing to go into these disgusting apartments.”

  The two men foraged through the unedited anarchy, 800 square feet, one bedroom. A stench thickened the air. Mr. Plaza dabbed his nostrils with a Vicks vapor stick. Mr. Rodriguez toughed it out. Vicks bothered his nose.

  The only bed was the lumpy foldout couch in the living room. The bedroom and bathroom looked pillaged. The kitchen was splashed with trash and balled-up, decades-old lottery tickets that had failed to deliver. A soiled shopping list read: sea salt, garlic, carrots, broccoli (two packs), TV Guide.

  The faucet didn’t work. The chipped stove had no knobs and could not have been used to cook in a long time.

  The men scavenged for a will, a cemetery deed, financial documents, an address book, computer, cellphone, those sorts of things. Photographs might show relatives—could that be a mom or sis beaming in that picture on the mantel?

  Portable objects of value were to be retrieved. A Vermeer hangs on the wall? Grab it. Once they found $30,000 in cash, another time a Rolex wedged inside a radio. But the bar is not placed nearly that high: In one instance, they lugged back a picture of the deceased in a Knights of Malta outfit.

  In the slanting light they scooped up papers from a table and some drawers in the living room. They found $241 in bills and $187.45 in coins. A silver Relic watch did not look special, but they took it in case.

  Fastened to the walls were a bear’s head, steer horns and some military pictures of planes and warships. Over the couch hung a photo sequence of a parachutist coming in for a landing, with a certificate recording George Bell’s first jump in 1963. Chinese food cartons and pizza boxes were ubiquitous. Shelves were stacked with music tapes and videos: Top Gun, Braveheart, Yule Log.

  A splotched calendar from Lucky Market hung in the bathroom, flipped open to August 2007.

  Hoarding is deemed a mental disorder, poorly understood, that stirs people to incoherent acts; sufferers may buy products simply to have them. Amid the mess were a half-dozen unopened ironing board covers, multiple packages of unused Christmas lights, four new tire-pressure gauges.

  The investigators returned twice more, rounding up more papers, another $95. They found no cellphone, no computer or credit cards.

  Rummaging through the personal effects of the dead, sensing the misery in these rooms, can color your thoughts. The work changes people, and it has changed these men.

  Mr. Rodriguez, 57 and divorced, has a greater sense of urgency. “I try to build a life like it’s the last day,” he said. “You never know when you will die. Before this, I went along like I would live forever.”

  The solitude of so many deaths wears on Mr. Plaza, the fear that someday it will be him splayed on the floor in one of these silent apartments. “This job teaches you a lot,” he said. “You learn whatever material stuff you have you should use it and share it. Share yourself. People die with nobody to talk to. They die and relatives come out of the woodwork. ‘He was my uncle. He was my cousin. Give me what he had.’ Gimme, gimme. Yet when he was alive they never visited, never knew the person. From working in this office, my life changed.”

  He is 52, also divorced, and without children, but he keeps expanding his base of friends. Every day, he sends them motivational Instagram messages: “With each sunrise, may we value every minute”; “Be kind, smile to the world and it will smile back”; “Share your life with loved ones”; “Love, forgive, forget.”

  He said: “When I die, someone will find out the same day or the next day. Since I’ve worked here, my list of friends has gotten longer and longer. I don’t want to die alone.”

  In his Queens cubicle, wearing rubber gloves, Patrick Stressler thumbed through the sheaf of documents retrieved by the two investigators. Mr. Stressler, the caseworker with the public administrator’s office responsible for piecing together George Bell’s estate, is formally a “decedent property agent,” a title he finds useful as a conversation starter at parties. He is 27, and had been a restaurant cashier five years ago when he learned you could be a decedent property agent and became one.

  He began with the pictures. Mr. Stressler mingles in the leavings of people he can never meet and especially likes to ponder the photographs so “you get a sense of a person’s history, not that they just died.”

  The snapshots ranged over the humdrum of life. A child wearing a holster and toy pistols. A man in military dress. Men fishing. A young woman sitting on a chair in a corner. A high school class on a stage, everyone wearing blackface. “Different times,” Mr. Stressler mused. In the end, the photos divulged little of what George Bell had done across his 72 years.

  The thicket of papers yielded a few hazy kernels. An unused passport, issued in 2007 to George Main Bell Jr., showing a thick-necked man with a meaty face ripened by time, born Jan. 15, 1942. Documents establishing that his father—George Bell—died in 1969 at 59, his mother, Davina Bell, in 1981 at 76.

  Some holiday cards. Several from an Elsie Logan in Red Bank, N.J., thanking him for gifts of Godiva chocolates. One, dated 2001, said: “I called Sunday around 2—no answer. Will try again.” A 2007 Thanksgiving Day card read, “I have been trying to call you—but no answer.”

  A 2001 Christmas card signed, “Love always, Eleanore (Puffy),” with the message: “I seldom mention it, but I hope you realize how much it means to have you for a friend. I care a lot for you.”

  Cards from a Thomas Higginbotham, addressed to “Big George” and signed “friend, Tom.”

  A golden find: H&R Block-prepared tax returns, useful for divining assets. The latest showed adjusted gross income of $13,207 from a pension and interest, another $21,311 from Social Security. The bank statements contained the biggest revelation: For what appeared to be a simple life, they showed balances of several hundred thousand dollars. Letters went out to confirm the amounts.

  No evidence of stocks or bonds, but a small life insurance policy, with the beneficiaries his parents. And there was a will, dated 1982. It split his estate evenly among three men and a woman of unknown relation. And specified that George Bell be cremated.

  Using addresses he found online, Mr. Stressler sent out form letters asking the four to contact him. He heard only from a Martin Westbrook, who called from Sprakers, a hamlet in upstate New York, and said he had not spoken with George Bell in some time. The will named him as executor, but he deferred to the public administrator.

  Loose ends began to be tidied up. The car, a silver 2005 Toyota RAV4, was sent to an auctioneer. There was a notice advising that George Bell had not responded to two juror questionnaires and was now subpoenaed to appear before the commissioner of jurors; a letter went out saying he would not be there. He was dead.

  If an apartment's contents have any value, auction companies bid for
them. When they don’t, “cleanout companies” dispose of the belongings. George Bell’s place was deemed a cleanout.

  Among his papers was an honorable military discharge from 1966, following six years in the United States Army Reserve. A request was made to the Department of Veterans Affairs, national cemetery administration, in St. Louis, for burial in one of its national cemeteries, with the government paying the bill.

  St. Louis responded that George Bell did not qualify as a veteran, not having seen active duty or having died while in the Reserves. The public administrator appealed the rebuff. A week later, 16 pages came back from the centralized satellite processing and appeals unit that could be summed up in unambiguous concision: No.

  Another thing the public administrator takes care of is having the post office forward the mail of the deceased. Statements may arrive from brokerage houses. Letters could pinpoint the whereabouts of relatives. When magazines show up, the subscriptions are ended and refunds requested. Could be $6.82 or $12.05, but the puny sums enter the estate, pushing it incrementally upward.

  Not much came for George Bell: bank statements, a notice on the apartment insurance, utility bills, junk mail.

  Every life deserves to come to a final resting place, but they’re not all pretty. Most estates arrive with the public administrator after the body has already been buried by relatives or friends or in accordance with a prepaid plan.

  When someone dies destitute and forsaken, and one of various free burial organizations does not learn of the case, the body ends up joining others in communal oblivion at the potter’s field on Hart Island in the Bronx, the graveyard of last resort.