Precious Blood

by Jonathan Hayes

  Jenner murmured his thanks.

  “Aziz set the body up in the decomp autopsy room—

  you’re safe, the back hall camera doesn’t work. The head’s in the bag.”

  He shook Jenner’s hand again. “Good to see ya, Doc.”

  The techs filed back toward the break room, grinning and bumping elbows with him.

  Her body was on the autopsy table, a black rubber block between the shoulder blades. He moved quickly—there wasn’t much time, and he’d seen most of what he needed to see at the scene.

  He hadn’t noticed the abrasions on the left wrist, but they Precious Blood

  135

  were consistent with the binding he’d documented in the other two cases. This time, Whittaker had been more careful: there was suturing on the hands where the odontologist had cut out the skin with the bite marks.

  The arrows were gone, leaving an ugly cavity the size of his fist. The edges had radial cuts around the periphery, consistent with the bladed hunting heads he’d suspected, rather than the bullet-shaped arrowheads used in target shooting.

  There were no defensive injuries on the arms or legs, and the genitals were undamaged: the killer had had other things on his mind.

  Jenner gently rolled her onto her side, propping her up with blocks against her chest and hip. The text was tiny, barely larger than newsprint, line after line, the tiny burned tracings filling up her back. To document it, he divided the back up into an imaginary grid of eight sections, then photographed it quadrant by quadrant, overlapping the shots to make sure he had it all. He checked the LCD viewfinder and tabbed back through the images to make sure they’d all come out; he could Photoshop them together to form a single detailed image of the entire text.

  He removed the blocks and slowly eased her down onto her front. He pulled the sheet of plastic from his briefcase, then smoothed it carefully onto her back. He took his felt-tip pen and began to trace the patterns.

  It was already past 2:30 a.m.

  After the first few lines, his speed improved as he recognized recurring characters. He concentrated on copying the characters as neatly as he could. He stopped for a break a little before 4:00 a.m., went out to the loading dock and stretched his back. Frank raised the gate, and Jenner saw that the clear skies were gone; it was pouring now, the drops streaking golden rays in the light from the streetlamp in front of the men’s shelter across the street.

  He went back to work. Exhausted, eyes burning, back and hands cramping, he still had a third of the lettering to copy 136

  j o n at h a n h ay e s

  when Frank interrupted him just before 5:00 a.m. The photographs would have to be good enough; he hoped the text would be legible.

  As Frank and Aziz took the body down off the table, Jenner held the plastic sheet in front of the wall-mounted light box used for viewing X-rays. It was insane, just insane.

  Hundreds, probably thousands of characters, tiny, ancient characters, burned into the skin of this poor girl. Why?

  He waved the plastic to dry the ink completely before he put it away. Somewhere in all those hundreds of lines, the key to it all, the answer to all the questions.

  By the time he left the morgue, crouched down in the back of Frank’s old Cadillac with the morgman license plate, the rain was torrential. On 1010 WINS, they were talking about possible flooding on the FDR; in the East Village, some of the intersections were already partly submerged as fast-flowing runoff backed up in the blocked sewers. In the headlights, Jenner could see the sharp splashes of raindrops driving into the surface of the curb-high water.

  Frank dropped him on Houston in front of Himali Restaurant and Goods, a twenty-four-hour Bengali hole-in-the-wall that catered to the cabdrivers refueling and retooling, a vestige of the times when there used to be three service stations at the intersection, now replaced by trendy furniture shops and a glass-sheathed Adidas store. He got a big tin mug of fantastically buttery lentil stew, at that moment the best thing he’d ever tasted. He made small talk with Mr.

  Ansari as he ate, one eye on the rain outside.

  It wasn’t letting up at all. He took off his coat and wrapped his briefcase with it, determined to keep the precious plastic sheet inside dry. With a nod to Mr. Ansari, he set off. He ran most of the way, his feet splashing freezing water, his shirt soaked through in seconds in the pelting rain.

  Precious Blood

  137

  His fingers were cold and numb, and he fumbled with the key, but then he was inside, the glass doors shutting out the rain driving against the roof of the shallow foyer.

  Kimi was asleep in front of his door in one of Jun’s big white leather armchairs, a Game Boy Advance on her lap.

  She wore a navy blue pinafore with white ankle socks and white platform wedges, her hair in pigtails with big blue velvet bows. Across the hall, the door was open and the lights bright in Jun’s loft. Jenner woke her gently, and with a little difficulty.

  She opened her eyes and smiled and murmured something in Japanese. Jenner winked at her, put his finger to his lips,

  “Shhh! ” then softly turned the door handle and went inside.

  He stripped in the bathroom, tossed his wet clothes into the hamper, then showered quickly, feeling the heat soak into his skin. He felt as he had the day he’d come home from the scene of Andie Delore’s murder. It seemed like yesterday, it seemed like ten years ago. Not even a week since the whole thing began!

  He put on a T-shirt and slipped into bed. She was warm and soft, and as he pressed against her, she turned to him and put her arms around him. Eyes closed, she whispered,

  “Hi.”

  He put his arms around her, too. She wriggled a little closer, tucked her head against his chest. He whispered,

  “Hi,” into her hair.

  She breathed out. “You feel good.”

  He smiled. “You do, too. Go back to sleep.”

  He fell asleep holding her, the sound of rain on the roof and beating at his windows. Warm, soft, dry, close.

  He woke at 11:00 a.m., alone.

  Through the big windows, the sky flashed. Then, a few seconds later, thunder. The wind had picked up, blowing the 138

  j o n at h a n h ay e s

  rain hard against the windowpanes. He could hear the spatter of water running off the ledge above.

  He slid his hand to her side of the bed. Still warm.

  Where was she?

  He propped himself up on one elbow. There was soft yellow light coming from the bathroom.

  “Ana?”

  She came out and walked toward him in one of his Tshirts, a votive candle flickering in a cobalt blue glass cup in her hand.

  She stood by the bedside, close to him.

  “Hey.”

  He smiled up at her. “Hey.”

  She put the candle on the bedside table.

  “I’m all better now, Jenner. Want to see?” She was speaking slowly, almost slurring her words. She looked him in the eye as her hand went to the hem of the T-shirt and lifted it up, showing him her belly. She wore nothing underneath the shirt. “See?”

  He reached up for her and pulled her down to the bed. “I see.”

  She walked back from the kitchen naked, carrying a bowl of cereal and a spoon.

  “Budge over, Jenner. Here, I made you gourmet cereal for looking after me.”

  He gave her some room, and she put the bowl down. Weetabix; he raised his eyebrows.

  She frowned at him. “It’s from Dean & Deluca, it cost a fortune, trust me: it’s gourmet cereal. Jun said it was your favorite.”

  Jenner sat up, wondering where Jun had got that idea. She sat next to him; they shared the spoon.

  When they finished the cereal, she climbed back under the covers, curled up against him. He looked over to the Precious Blood

  139

  window; she’d raised the shades. Outside, the world was murky blue, the buildings across the street soft and blurred in the rain and the mist.

  Whe
n he woke, she was leaning on one elbow, looking at him intently. “I feel different now. Do you feel different? It’s different now.”

  “Yes, I suppose it is.”

  She rolled her eyes and punched him in the shoulder.

  “Jesus H. Christ, Jenner! Stop being such a guy! What, now you think I want to move in here and play house with you?

  I’m just saying I feel different. Don’t you?”

  “I said I did!”

  “Seriously, Jenner, lighten up. Sometimes a girl just needs to get laid. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Jenner felt a flush of embarrassment: he hadn’t touched anyone, hadn’t been touched by anyone, since Julie left. It had meant more to him than it had to her.

  They lay under the big cashmere blanket on the floor in front of the TV. La Strada was playing soundlessly.

  She stroked his hair.

  “Jenner?”

  “Yes?”

  “You should tell me about it.”

  When he didn’t answer, she rolled onto her back, away from him. “Jun really likes you, you know? He says you’re great.”

  “He’s a good guy. Really smart, too.”

  “He said things were hard for you after 9/11.”

  Here we go.

  “Things were hard for a lot of people after 9/11.”

  “I don’t care about a lot of people. Tell me about what happened to you.”

  “It doesn’t make a good story.”

  “I don’t care. Tell me about it.”

  He snorted. “God, what is this, a Julia Roberts movie? You 140

  j o n at h a n h ay e s

  get me to talk, and then I’m suddenly warm and lovable?”

  She made a face. “Oh, I think you’d be pretty icky if you were warm. But you’re actually already kind of lovable—in your own messed-up way.”

  He looked at her, lying there next to him, her arm across his shoulder, blue eyes serious and expectant. He breathed out.

  “Jenner, you have to let it be over.”

  He shook his head. “See, that’s just it—it’s not over. Not for me, not for many people. Maybe it’ll never be over.”

  “What won’t be over? Your part in it is finished, Jenner.

  You’ve got to move on.”

  He closed his eyes. She was right.

  And before he knew it, he was telling her about it, laying it all out, making his statement to her, just as she’d made hers to him and Rad a week ago. About working all those nights in the makeshift morgue on the sidewalk of Thirtieth Street, under the tenting and the high spotlights. About the flood of volunteers who came from across the country—ambulance crews, cops, firemen, sanitation workers, corrections officers, Salvation Army, anthropologists, so many volunteers.

  How they’d worked all day and all night for eight months, doing their best to identify the bodies, the limbs, the tiny fragments of tissue. About seeing the cadets, some barely out of high school, lining up to carry bagged remains to the X-ray unit or to the dentists.

  It hadn’t been like any other disaster. Usually, the pathologists had no connection to the victims, they could just concentrate on the work, on the science, clean and abstract, hidden away in the mortuary. But this time, there was no distance, no separation. Every night was an unrestrained parade of grief and anguish, a stream of stumbling survivors, cops and firemen, their backs broken by the searching, their hearts crushed by the finding.

  Each time they recovered a member of service, the squad assembled and lined up to salute as yet another comrade was Precious Blood

  141

  carried in, as yet another flag was taken off a body bag to be folded into a neat triangle. Later the silence of the arrivals would give way to the muffled sound of men sobbing quietly in the dark, hiding in the alleys behind the trailers.

  Relationships started to fall apart because it was easier to let them go than to talk about it, replaced by pathetic affairs that died quickly in the middle of all the pain. And in summer, when it was finished—or rather, when it stopped—

  he didn’t know what was left of him, didn’t know what to do or where to go next.

  She listened, stroking his hair. And she cried, and her tears made him feel foolish and weak. And she tilted her head against his, and held on to him, and held him under the blanket with her when he felt he couldn’t stay there anymore.

  When it had finished, standing by that aching, empty space at Ground Zero for the ceremony marking the end of the recovery, dry-eyed as they led the riderless horse up out of the pit, he thought he was okay. That he’d got through it in one piece.

  But he had stopped sleeping. On his days off, he walked through the city, away from his own little vortex, watching to see how it had changed. He became very sensitive to triggers—when a plane flew low over the city, he always imagined the trajectory continuing, smashing straight into one of the Midtown skyscrapers.

  He slept less and less; nights gradually became tidal, the darkness rolling in quickly, then slowly rolling out, Jenner sitting wrapped in a blanket, staring at the paling sky through open windows. And eventually his career began to wind down.

  One day, as the sun was beginning to show over the East River, Jenner gave up on trying to sleep and went in to the office. Whittaker was already there, triaging the day’s autop-142

  j o n at h a n h ay e s

  sies. Apologetically, Jenner explained that he wasn’t really sleeping, and asked for an easy day; he wanted to leave early and get a prescription for something to help him sleep.

  It had been four years since Julie had chosen Jenner instead of him, but Whittaker never missed an opportunity for payback. There were five autopsies, and Whittaker could easily have cut him loose; he didn’t even glance at Jenner as he assigned him two cases.

  Jenner convinced himself he was getting a second wind during the first case, a jeweler who had dropped dead in front of his shop, but by the second, he could barely stand.

  The decedent was a cachectic transsexual with advanced AIDS. She’d had the disease for almost fourteen years, and her physicians had sent her home to die, but the family demanded an autopsy, insisting that the public hospital had treated her poorly.

  It happened right at the end. He’d completed the autopsy proper and was removing her breast implants so they wouldn’t burst during cremation. The scalpel slipped from his fingers, almost numb under three pairs of gloves, the textured fingertips slick with blood.

  The scalpel tumbled from the table, landed almost vertically, and then bounced back up off the floor toward him.

  There was a brief white flash of steel as he felt the blade slice through the leg of his scrub pants and cut into his skin.

  He pushed back from the table, cursing, amazed by the freakishness of the cut. Fuck. He’d cut his hands before—

  they all had—but this just seemed incredibly unfair. Fuck.

  HIV. Fuck.

  Tearing off his gloves, struggling to pull off the bunching, snagging gown, he went to the sink, jammed the hot tap on full, pulled up the pant leg, and began to squeeze the skin, milking blood from the fine half-inch cut, trying to wash out the tainted blood.

  He called to Brooklyn Frank for bleach, but they couldn’t find any. Finally, Antwon Terry found some powdered stain-Precious Blood

  143

  less steel cleanser, and Jenner slapped some onto the wound; it stung, and caked the blood almost immediately.

  He tried gripping his hands around his upper calf like a tourniquet, but it made no difference. Then Tree came in with a brown plastic bottle of hydrogen peroxide. Jenner splashed it on neat, and it frothed the steel cleanser and burned like a bitch, but it felt like it was doing something.

  “Go on, Doc. Put on some more. Use it up.”

  He sagged into a chair and looked down at his shin. He had rinsed off all the powder and blood, and the wound now barely fizzed with each new application, the edges pale and feathery, the surrounding skin now pink, the center of the cut live
r brown.

  “You okay, Doc? Was it HIV?”

  Jenner looked up at Tree and gestured weakly toward the body. An old Public Enemy song ran through his mind, Flava Flav saying, “Yo, Terminator—meet the gee that killed me. ”

  “I went over to the Bellevue ER, where they gave me a two-month preventative supply of AIDS drugs. And then I had to wait to see if I was infected. I was fine, but the medication made me really ill, and I became anemic. I stopped taking it after a month, but it took me months to recover from the anemia—months of pure exhaustion.

  “I went back to work, but I was pretty much done, physically, emotionally. I kind of didn’t know how to stop working. Didn’t know what I would have done with myself. The deputy chief was fucking me over because his girlfriend had left him for me—each day, he’d load me up and sit around watching me burn out.

  “And finally, I missed a murder. An old lady in her eighties, long history of heart disease, found fully clothed, lying on her bed. I didn’t do an autopsy because she’d had heart attacks in the past. I shouldn’t have been there, I knew I was too ill to work, really, but it was my call, and I chose to be there.

  144

  j o n at h a n h ay e s

  “Anyway, I looked at her under poor light, and I noticed her face was a bit purple, but I thought it was because of her position.

  “I certified her death as due to natural causes, and would have sent her on her way if the morgue tech hadn’t spotted a bruise on her neck. I did an autopsy and found the woman had been strangled. There were no external injuries on the neck—it was very subtle. But she’d been murdered, and I had missed it.” He paused. “And the thing is, I just didn’t care . . .

  “The next day, I asked to meet with the chief and Whittaker to tell them what happened and to ask for a break. I figured Whittaker would push for my dismissal, but the chief would be on my side. And there was a lot of understanding about stuff in the post–9/11 period.

  “But I realized I’d had enough. It was harder and harder just showing up at work each day. And not just because I was ill. I’d loved this city so much, and now it seemed like it was gone forever, and each day was just another day where something horrible could happen.