by Alan Emmins
The truck eases up to ninety miles per hour. Neal has one cell phone held to his left ear and another held to his right. He is taking directions from one and giving them to the other. The dusty landscape blurs past as the truck, minus the aid of hands, barrels along the highway. You would think that if you were going to drive without the employment of either hand you would slow down and stay in lane. But Neal presses the gas pedal down and uses his knees to steer as he cuts into another lane and starts overtaking cars. It could be a skill he developed while playing Atari Space Invaders in the 1980s, where the options were limited to moving only left or right. That’s pretty much how Neal handles things. He ignores the ninety miles per hour of forward motion and simply concentrates on moving left and right whenever the traffic pattern requires it.
We pass a huge silver SUV in the inside lane. There’s a middle-aged woman driving. Sitting next to her in the passenger seat is a girl who must be her teenage daughter. The mother, if that’s what she is, looks over and immediately gasps in horror. In slow motion her mouth forms the words “Oh my God!”, causing her daughter to look over. She also gasps and mouths the words “Oh my God!” She pushes her sunglasses down on her nose and I know what’s coming next. Her mouth forms the words “Crime Scene Cleaners” as she reads the sign on the door. “Homicide, Suicide and—Oh my God!” The two women look so horrified that I wonder how on earth they are going to recover from the spectacle of Neal overtaking them at what is now ninety-five miles per hour without holding on to the steering wheel.
Slowly they fall behind us.
This is not my first experience with Neal’s no-handed kamikaze routine. Having learned something from my first encounter with Neal, I try to sit still. I concentrate on not letting any little gasps escape from my mouth, knowing that for every gasp the speed will increase another two miles per hour. Neal is a master tormentor, so I try to act nonchalant. I slide my right arm up on the door and slouch down in my seat. I fidget nonchalantly with my mobile phone. Then we nearly impact with a car that’s driving as stupidly as we are and I jump out of my skin screaming.
“Aaaarrrh!”
The seat belt garrotes the right side of my neck as, for reasons inexplicable to me, I try to climb through the roof. The truck cuts left at an oblique angle.
“What are you doing?” Neal asks me in a tranquil voice. He is no longer talking on either of the phones and has both hands firmly on the wheel. “You’ve got to do something about that, Alan, jeez. You’re gonna hurt yourself one of these days.”
Just like the first time I met Neal, I fall into a state of regret. Not because of his persona: I am already aware of his shock tactics. It’s just that I don’t want to die, and being in a car with Neal increases my chances of death a thousandfold. If my life insurance broker could see me now (if I had one, that is) he would cancel my policy and give me my money back.
When we arrive at the murder/suicide, Neal is not, as I am, openmouthed by all the theater. There are several squad cars parked up with their lights flashing. Long strips of yellow tape flutter in the light breeze, informing us that this is indeed a crime scene and that we should stay away and mind our own business.
Police officers stand about drinking coffee. Neighbors look out from behind curtains; some stand on the pavement directly outside the house, bugging the police officers for details. How much blood was there? What kind of gun was it? Which rooms are the bodies in? Everybody on the scene wants a little bit of tragedy to take home with them, a bloody tale to save until the right moment presents itself. Like maybe in a bar to a gaggle of drunken strangers whom you want to impress, just like I did in Santa Cruz. I guess for those of us who lead a normal and for the most part uneventful life, stories, especially those that make people around a table sit up and listen, are what we’re defined by. Stories serve an incredible purpose. They fill voids and lighten awkward moments. They bridge gaps between strangers and build status among friends. You don’t need to be a novelist, but if you have enough content and delivery to hold people’s attention for five minutes you will be invited to the next barbecue, because a good story well told makes us, vicariously, more interesting.
Stories of death work well. The majority of people have a strong sense of morbid intrigue running through them. Morbid intrigue produces, among other things, rubberneckers on the highway—those who crane and twist their necks as they cruise past a five-car pileup. Sure, we swear at them when we sit in the ten-mile traffic jam they cause, but do we listen to their stories as they are told around the coffee machine at the next sales meeting, in the bar between plays on the big screen, around the grill while we flip burgers? You betcha!
Feel free to test it. Go into work tomorrow and tell your colleagues that a neighbor shot his wife with a shotgun and then turned it on himself. Tell them about all the flashing lights and hoo-hah, about how nice your neighbors had seemed. I’ll wager the contents of my apartment that it will be one of your most popular mornings in the office. Because the story of dead neighbors is much more interesting than what was on TV last night, or what you had for dinner, or the fact that the monthly sales are down, or up, or wherever they may be.
The people on the street now, badgering the police and trying desperately to get a glimpse of something, will enjoy some popularity for days to come. They’ll go to bed tonight with the story formulating in their minds and wake up tomorrow with it spilling out of their mouths.
Some of the officers, mostly the older ones, are irritated by this crowd, but some seem to enjoy the questions. They, right now, hold the story. The answers. They are inside the circle and enjoy the status it brings them.
“Hey, Crime Scene Cleaners are here!” an officer calls out with a flick of the head and a big grin as Neal and I approach the tape. The officer lifts the tape for us to stoop under. He’s glad to see Neal. “Hey, buddy, I wondered when you’d be along. It’s a messy one,” he says as Neal signs us into the scene. Neal knows most of the officers in the San Francisco Bay Area. What with them chasing death and Neal cleaning up after death, their paths cross regularly.
“What we got?” Neal asks.
“Murder/suicide …” the officer begins.
“Nice.”
“Dude offed his old lady in the living room with a double barrel, then went in the bedroom, reloaded, and put the barrels in his own mouth…. BOOM!”
“Nice.”
“Yep. It’s a pretty sad story, though. She was suffering from some illness. I guess he couldn’t watch it anymore. You can go straight in.”
“Okay, boss! I’ll go suit up.”
Neal walks back to the truck, unlocks a steel box in the back, and removes two blue protective suits, one for each of us. We also put on breathing masks and protective gloves before grabbing a workbox, a twelve-pack of industrial tissue, and a tank of enzyme that has been specially produced for the very job of breaking down blood.
We then head back over to the house, our nylon protective suits rustling as we walk. I feel a little mad dressed like this. We are not chemical experts, but it feels like that.
Clad in the suits and the masks, we get a lot of attention. People look at us as if to say: “Wow, they’re going in.” It feels funny, to be the center of people’s fascination. By wearing the gear, I am, at least from a distance, inside the dark circle. It’s unsettling, feeling the eyes that follow us all the way through the door; I feel a little creeped out.
“Whoops!” Neal shouts through his mask as we enter the bloody bedroom and survey the scene. Very quickly I am brought back to reality, away from the sensation of being slightly interesting to the people outside. I am not, I realize with a startled spine, even close to being inside the dark circle.
I stand stiff-limbed and dry-mouthed as I stare at the walls and ceiling: it looks like they have been spray-painted with blood and brain.
I am aware of Neal moving around the room, checking out how messy the furniture is (deciding whether it should be cleaned or thrown), but at the same tim
e I am not really aware. My brain registers Neal’s movement, but seems incapable of initiating any of my own. I stand inert. This is beyond anything that I saw in my previous trips with Neal. I am becoming short of breath as my eyes flick around in disbelief. My mind is caught up in a rhythmic chanting: No this can’t be. No this can’t be. No this can’t be.
Pieces of brain, I can’t help but notice, are literally clinging to the plaster like pink limpets. Some have left streaks on the bloody wall where they have slid down. Others, having impacted the wall at great speed, are stuck fast.
A piece of skull fragment has positioned itself on the bedside cabinet next to a glass of water. The skull piece looks like it was always there, like a ceramic memento brought back from a holiday in Greece. The glass of water now looks like a strawberry daiquiri. Half a jawbone lies discarded on the floor next to the bed.
The smell actually isn’t all that bad. Shotgun suicides make a lot of noise, which normally means that they are found straightaway, before decomposition sets in. The odor is sweet; you can feel the stickiness as it tries to worm its way down the esophagus.
“Oh yeah, you can see where he did this, right on the bed,” begins Neal, after finishing his examination of the room. “You see the spray on the window and the ceiling? The angle of the spray basically tells you where he was sitting. The stuff all over the wall there, that’s exactly what you think it is—his brains. Well, his brain matter anyway. Oh yeah, this is a funky one.”
I follow Neal as he walks through the hallway, leaving his bloody footprints mingled with those left behind by the police. He enters the dining room, stepping aside as the body bag is carried past him.
“Motherfucker! This is a messy one. I gotta get backup.” Neal unzips his suit and rummages for his cell phone.
“Hey, Steve, guess what … Yeah, sorry, dude, I know it’s your day off. You need to stop off and pick up more supplies…. Yeah, of everything.” Neal gives the address and hangs up.
There is little tomfoolery when Neal starts working. He moves swiftly, aware that the clock is ticking and ahead of him lies protracted toil. Etiquette tells me that I should offer to help. I don’t feel comfortable standing around watching other people work, especially when they are doing a labor-intensive job on their own. But I don’t want this under my fingernails. I am here to document, not to get my hands bloody. I try to blend in with the background.
Neal starts by removing the big blood-contaminated items first. Working from the bedroom, he covers the mattress in a large plastic sheet and tapes it up, being sure not to leave any gaps from which blood can seep out.
“Alan, get the other end of this,” he says, without much of a glance in my direction. I look back incredulously and am about to speak when he cuts me off. “Oh, don’t be a pussy, just grab the other fucking end of the mattress. You don’t even have any of the gore. I’ve got the gore at my end.”
The mattress is several pounds heavier than it ought to be on account of all the blood it has soaked up, which makes me instantly aware of just how sedentary my life as a journalist has been. For a second I forget where I am and what I’m doing and have to question when was the last time I picked up anything heavier than my daughter. But I am brought back to the room by the sight of blood seeping along the plastic from Neal’s end of the mattress to mine. I can actually hear the blood trickling toward me. Sure, it’s inside the plastic wrapping, but it’s still coming my way.
After carrying out the mattress, I go back to the bedroom and take the bloodstained bedclothes, roll them into a ball, and place them in a black garbage bag, which I then throw into the back of the truck. Neal is going through the contents of drawers. Everything is removed cautiously to make sure that nothing picks up any blood on the way. The items are put into thick, heavy-duty trash bags, which are then carried away to an uncontaminated room. Later, relatives will go through the possessions, but right now they are in the way.
A couple of other trucks arrive. They also have the Crime Scene Cleaners logo written on the side, the only difference being that these trucks are white. It seems there’s a similar hierarchy in Crime Scene Cleaners to that of the Star Wars movies. Neal, in his big black truck, moves around like the Dark Lord. His minions are in white.
Some of the guys who have arrived had been working on another suicide thirty minutes away. They are here to help remove the contaminated furniture and take it straight to a biohazard landfill before they return to their own mess. Neal starts issuing commands.
“Okay, you start bringing out all the furniture from the bedroom, load it on this truck. Jake, I’ve tied all this shit on my truck down, it’s all secure, so you can take my truck now, dump it and haul ass back here. Don’t fuck around, I want you back here fast. If you get pulled over for speeding, tell them that you are doing a job for the county sheriff’s department, tell them to get on the radio.”
In no time at all the second truck is half loaded, leaving the bedroom empty and ready for a chemical attack. The only other thing left in the room is the carpet, which is left down while the cleaning continues. This way it can catch all the sediment as it is scraped off the walls and ceiling.
“Hey, Alan, come here. Can you see these dinks in the back house over there? Look at that, the whole fucking family up at the window watching,” Neal says, pointing out the window; and indeed an entire family are craning their necks and pushing one another aside in a bid to get a better view. “Freaky fucks!” Neal shouts. “If only you’d been this interested when they were alive, motherfuckers!”
Neal starts scraping the brain from the wall.
“Brain,” Neal tells me in a didactic tone, “dries quickly, like cement. So it’s real easy to deal with.”
For this job Neal uses a putty knife that gets under sediment easily. Essentially, he wants to get the walls to a state where they are only stained, which also means removing the skull fragments that have been stuck fast in the wall.
“The problem with skull fragment, Alan, is it gets everywhere. You see little pieces like this?” Neal wipes pink matter from a small piece of skull that’s about the size of a baby’s tooth. “This shit gets everywhere. If the door to this room was open when he shot her, or himself, whichever way it was, there’s gonna be pieces of skull out there in the hallway. That shit hits the wall at three hundred feet per second, so the bits that don’t get lodged bounce a long fucking way, dude. You wouldn’t believe some of the places I’ve found skull fragments.”
I decide to test this bounce theory of Neal’s. Not because I don’t believe him, but because I don’t, regardless of how dry it may be, want to scrape brain from the wall. I don’t want to pick pieces of skull from the plaster walls with my rubber-gloved fingers the way Neal does.
“Gotcha … Gotcha … Gotcha …”
I head out to the hallway, where the carpet, which used to be light green, is now heavily soiled with bloody footprints from all the coming and going. Some of the footprints, I realize with a shudder, are mine. I am surprised at the mess. Surprised on one level that so many people have been through here. Surprised on another that it isn’t a restricted area. But then I guess there wasn’t much need to preserve the crime scene. They may run some powder tests on the guy’s clothing to make sure he fired the gun, but from the scene investigation the police have extrapolated that this is a cut-and-dried case. They have no reason to concern themselves with traipsing bloody footprints, reminiscent of something you might expect to see in a horror film, through the house.
There are no obvious skull pieces on the hallway carpet. I crouch down for closer inspection but still I see no proof of Neal’s bounce theory.
“You see any?” Neal calls out.
“Nah.”
“Keep looking!”
I begin to sweep my foot over the carpet. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Ooh, what’s that? Something flicked up, but I’ve lost it again. Nothing. Nothing. There it is. But it’s too white to be skull, there’s no blood on it. It’s probably …
“What about this?” I proudly show Neal my finding as I walk back into the bedroom.
“Tooth! Dude, that’s a fucking white tooth, too. Bitch took care a those.”
Neal’s harshness sends a shudder down my back. What am I doing? Why, in this poignant, melancholy scene, am I playing hide-and-seek with skull fragments and teeth? I am surrounded by exploded head. Blood and gore line every wall. It’s not as if it’s easy to forget where I am or what took place here. How then is it so easy to ignore the tragedy? Neal has had years of exposure to this kind of thing; his job has hardened him, turned off certain sensors. I, on the other hand, have no such justification. This should be an absolute horror to me, not an experience. What incident happened in my life to turn off my sensors? There has been no such episode; I have had no such exposure. Yet, here I stand, and it’s all so familiar. I’ve been here before. All this mess, it’s blood in a can, it’s directed by Quentin Tarantino. The shotgun-perforated head is, after all, one of the most successfully and repeatedly used pillars of the entertainment industry. So, while I may have frozen upon entry, it very quickly became something surreal. Like an out-of-body experience, it all looks so familiar, but at the same time I feel disconnected from it.
Neal, on the other hand, is going about his work as if he were a calm and happy postman enjoying the first days of spring. For a long time he is whistling, but after a while, so overjoyed is he, he breaks into song. The words are unfamiliar to me, I think it may be something he composed himself.
“You are dead … motherfucker
You are dead … motherfucker
You are dead … motherfucker
I am not …”