Smacked

by Eilene Zimmerman

  Juliet Schor, a sociologist at Boston College and author of The Overspent American and Plentitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, says for those at the top—financially and socially—it’s not just about consumption but about conspicuous consumption. “The more money you can waste, the more you can show how wealthy you are,” she says. “Society has naturalized insatiable desire, the idea that you can never have enough.”

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  SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER WILLIAM helps us take the first load of valuables from Peter’s house, I will receive a copy of the autopsy report; a couple of months after that, the police report; and a year later, police photos taken at Peter’s house after I called 911. Together these represent a terrifying and remarkable accounting of his death and, in an odd way, his life too. The autopsy report reads like a cross between a true crime novel and a grocery list, with a detailed accounting of the physical body, the weight and condition of each organ, of blood vessels, of bones and skin.

  It starts with a cold, clinical description of Peter’s physical body, “a well-developed, thin, Caucasian man” and “the body measures 73 inches in length, weighs 170 pounds.” It becomes an unemotional commentary of what is normal and abnormal in a human body. Peter is mostly normal—symmetrical facial features, symmetrical ears, lips that are free of trauma, teeth that are “natural and in fair repair,” facial hair consisting of “irregularly shaven whiskers in a usual distribution,” and so on. It’s also a story, the ending of which reads: “Cause of death: infective endocarditis due to injection drug abuse.”

  Peter did not overdose. Instead, he contracted an infection that became the “infective endocarditis” listed under “Cause of Death.” Bacteria entered his bloodstream through one (or more) of the tiny injection holes in his body and seeded itself in his heart (most likely in its valves) and from there it multiplied exponentially, traveling into his kidneys, liver, spleen, and brain. He likely died from some combination of infection and heart failure. According to the attached toxicology report, Peter’s blood tested positive for benzoylecgonine, hydrocodone, and dihydrocodeine. Cocaine abuse is usually confirmed by the presence of benzoylecgonine, a compound that is formed when the liver metabolizes cocaine. Hydrocodone is an opioid pain medication, and dihydrocodeine is also an opioid painkiller (frequently compounded with aspirin, acetaminophen, or caffeine), similar in structure to codeine. It’s often used in cough medicine.

  “The upper extremities are normally formed,” the autopsy report continues. “There are prominent needle tracks with multiple punctures, ecchymosis (bruising), and scabbed blood on both upper extremities.” The report notes Peter’s tattoo, a “sun-type design on the left lateral arm. There is a horizontal, 1-½ inch, linear scar in the right lower quadrant of the abdomen. There is a 3-inch needle track along the distal lateral right forearm, vertically oriented, with gray scarring and numerous punctate scabs and surrounding yellow-green ecchymosis.”

  I remember the night he got that tattoo. A guy named Guf did it, in Ocean Beach at Ace Tattoo, which was located above a Mexican restaurant. We went to a bar beforehand and both of us, a little drunk, decided Peter should get a tattoo. He consulted with Guf about what the tattoo should look like—a sun of some sort, but with an edge. They settled on a sun with whirling blades in the center, something I never really understood but that Peter loved.

  The scar on Peter’s abdomen tells another story, of his emergency appendectomy at seven, after a nighttime of intense pain—so intense Peter told me he could remember sweating and shivering—but, for some reason, he didn’t leave the bedroom to tell his parents. He felt that he might get in trouble for not staying in his bed. In the morning, they rushed him to the hospital. He started suffering in silence early, it seems.

  The next section of the report focuses on the internal exam. This is the substance of an autopsy, where each organ is inventoried—examined, weighed, and then described. “The right lung weighs 820 grams and the left weighs 770 grams.”

  “The duodenum, small intestine and colon are unremarkable.”

  “The gallbladder mucosa shows a typical velvety green appearance. The bile ducts are patent and of normal caliber.” It’s both beautiful and profane.

  Near the end is the “Microscopic Examination” subsection, where slivers of tissue from the vital organs are examined for evidence of disease or infection. This is the story of risks taken, vulnerability, and neglect. Here in black and white is the extent of Peter’s endocarditis, a listing of the many organs in which bacteria had infiltrated and colonized, where it had flourished and, ultimately, triumphed.

  The police report is shorter than the autopsy and has different details, focused more on the scene at Peter’s house than on his physical condition; it’s less grocery list, more true crime. What the report and photos have in common is how little of what they chronicle I remember; so many details about Peter and the house I still cannot recollect.

  The police call Peter “the decedent” or “the victim,” as in “the male victim was wearing only a pair of red underwear and a pair of black socks on his feet.” Why “victim”? I wonder. A victim of what? “The victim had several minor wounds on his body…and bruise marks throughout his body.” I was right up against Peter’s chest, listening for a nonexistent heartbeat, I was holding his arm, and yet I didn’t see any bruising, nothing unusual except that one hole by his elbow.

  I decide to look at the police photos. The way they were taken, it’s like walking into the house all over again on July 11. The front yard, the entranceway, the backyard, the stairs, the kitchen, the hallway, the door to the bedroom, the bloody sheets, all of it. I can smell the dry grass, yellowed and brittle in the heat. There is Peter’s white sports car parked on the street, the windows so dirty you can’t see inside. I forgot about the lights strung across the patio, leftover, I imagine, from some past night of merriment.

  There are photos of Peter’s body from different angles as well as close-ups of his arms and legs. It’s impossibly difficult to look at these, but I want to see what I didn’t see. Every time I pull one of these photos up on my computer’s screen I have to walk away for a few seconds with my hands over my eyes. Then I walk back, peering through my fingers as if I’m watching a horror movie until I find the courage to remove my hands and take in the entire image. The details my mind shut out are here now, in full color, on my computer screen. Here is a six-foot-tall Peter (who, five years earlier, was twenty pounds overweight), so thin his knees and the knuckles on his hands seem to be proportioned wrongly, the outline of his ribs so clear it’s as if he is holding his breath. Peter’s head is far too big for his neck; right below I can see his collarbone, protruding and elegant, like a woman’s.

  The police report’s description of his arms and legs is brought to life in close-up photos that reveal an otherworldly galaxy of black and red pinprick stars scattered among blue and purple clouds of bruising. I study the police report, trying to take it all in. I’m trying, illogically, to figure out the timing of Peter’s death. I don’t know if it was actually that morning. I want to know what happened and when. I want to know if I could have saved him.

  If I had come up that Friday morning—instead of Saturday morning—could I have prevented this? Despite what the medical examiner and the grief counselors said, the futility of this inquiry isn’t obvious to me, not yet anyway. I’m still haunted by the what-ifs. No matter how useless this line of questioning, I feel compelled to ask.

  I call the doctor named on the autopsy report—Steven Chapman, deputy medical examiner—and ask him if there was something different I could have done, something that might have saved Peter’s life. Something besides what I didn’t do, which was recognize his drug addiction.

  Dr. Chapman is kind to me. “Everyone wants to know that,” he says. “Could they have done something to save their loved one?” Peter, the doctor tells me, was extremely sick,
his vital organs in the choke hold of a virulent infection and shutting down. A piece of the aortic valve in his heart had actually broken off. There were colonies of toxic bacteria (“septic emboli,” the autopsy report calls them) all over his heart, in his kidneys, liver, spleen, and brain. Dr. Chapman said Peter’s brain showed evidence of bleeding, which may explain the irrational thinking and the tirade he directed at our kids two nights before he died. And he was weak and sick from his drug habit. I take all this as a kind of confirmation of what we’ve already been told—that none of us had the power to save him. And what would we have saved him from, anyway? Peter, if he had lived through the night, would have needed heart surgery, weeks or months of antibiotic treatment, and even if he somehow, miraculously, recovered, the statistics say he would likely have gone back to using drugs four times before ever getting clean.

  “It was noted that the body still had warmth to it and was in a state of rigor mortis,” reads the report. Rigor mortis is the stiffening that happens to a body after death because of the loss of adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, a molecule that carries energy to living tissue and gives muscles their flexibility. Rigor mortis generally starts about two to four hours after someone dies. The small muscles stiffen first—the ones in the face, neck, arms, and shoulder—and then the larger ones, with the whole process peaking twelve to twenty-four hours after death. Peter’s small muscles were already stiff when I got there—his face was in a kind of half-grimace, which I thought meant he’d been in pain when he died, but it was simply his facial muscles contracting. I will never know what Peter was thinking—if he was thinking, or if he was anesthetized by the emptied syringe on the edge of the bathroom sink—as he lay dying. No amount of physical evidence will ever tell me that.

  If a body is warm but stiff, the time since death is estimated at three to eight hours. Peter’s body fit that description. Yet there is this small detail in the police report: “I noticed that there was a light on in the victim’s bedroom. No light appeared to be needed during the daylight hours.” Those are the least clinical sentences in the report and also what makes them the most heartbreaking. He turned on the lamp beside the bed. At some point on Friday night, Peter turned on the light, like anybody might do when getting ready for bed. He was able to do that. He was still alive. But by morning, he wasn’t.

  For months, I go over and over the police report, until I begin to see that it doesn’t really matter if Peter died at midnight or at three A.M. or at nine A.M. Because no matter what I think might have happened if I had done something different, I didn’t, and I can’t do anything different now. So yes, he was able to turn on his beside lamp that Friday night. He was also, somehow, able to load up two syringes with a light brown concoction of what was probably cocaine and tramadol, and carefully set them on the edge of the bathroom sink. It troubles me that I only know they were there because I can see them—one empty, one full—up close in the police photos. I was crouching right below that sink the morning I found Peter, but I never saw the syringes.

  There is so much I didn’t see, or didn’t want to see.

  The mess of the house. Cleaning supplies and books and baby wipes and toilet paper all thrown haphazardly onto a side cabinet in the hallway. The night tables in the bedroom cluttered with half-drunk bottles of diet soda and Vitaminwater and dirty drinking glasses. Beats brand in-ear headphones, a cigarette lighter, portable hard drive, writing pad, and a syringe, empty except for a reddish-brown substance caked at its tip.

  On the floor beside the bed are socks, khaki pants, black jeans, and piles of other clothing. There are open legal-size envelopes, their contents extracted, lying on the floor; packages strewn about, some opened and others not. More piles of clothes against the door and a stand-up mirror; on the floor an empty box of cigarettes, pieces of torn paper, and a washcloth covering the bloody vomit I know is there because Evan told me about it. (The police have also curled the washcloth back to show the camera.) On top of that washcloth is another cigarette lighter and a bloodied tissue, beside that, an unused, still-wrapped Band-Aid. There are two digital alarm clocks, one on the night table and one on the floor. The one on the floor reads “12:50 P.M.”—about eighty minutes after I called 911 for help. On the side of the bed is a 7-Eleven Big Gulp soda that’s two-thirds empty, an orange straw poking out of the lid and an empty Vitaminwater bottle next to it. There’s a small yellow-lined pad tucked behind the bed pillow, which Peter was using to record injections and dosage. On the bed, atop the rumpled and blood-spotted white sheets, I can see a red tourniquet, Peter’s iPhone, the card key for his office, and his wallet.

  The bathroom looks as if it’s been ransacked, like a crime scene. The framed map that used to hang on the wall is leaning against the shower, and there are the remnants of egg cartons, cardboard toilet paper rolls, and boxes scattered everywhere. These were the building blocks of a homemade habitat Peter had created for Snowball, his pet mouse (which was found dead under the bathroom sink). Had he dragged it into the bathroom so Snowball could keep him company? Did he destroy it because he was angry? Frantically looking for something? Was he lonely? Scared? In pain? But if that was the case, why didn’t he call someone? His phone was right on the bed. Around the broken mouse habitat are cotton balls, pill bottles, caps from pill bottles. There is a small wooden stool in front of the sleek bathtub.

  On that stool is a yellow and green plastic box that presumably held drug paraphernalia. Next to it, a silver garbage can, missing its lid, and inside, bloody tissues. On the sink I can see Peter’s razor. Was he actually able to stand up and shave? There’s even a washcloth next to it, which he would have run under hot water and pressed to his face to soften the bristly growth before applying shave cream. The floor is filthy, a yellowish-brown liquid staining it.

  In one photo you can see the police photographer’s torso reflected in the bathroom mirror, like a bad dating-profile selfie. I zoom in on a shelf beneath the mirror and see a lighter, an almost-empty glass bottle of Diet Coke, a syringe on the shelf, empty but used. A bottle of Synthroid—the only prescribed drug in the room—for Peter’s thyroid condition. Farther down the shelf is another lighter, an asthma inhaler, a half-used tube of Neosporin, and a pair of reading glasses.

  On the sink sit several plastic boxes, including an oblong container for flexible “dry fit” bandages, several boxes of “tough strips” bandages, and more tubes of Neosporin antibiotic cream. In the boxes are syringes—they appear unused but unwrapped—and cotton pads, rubber bands, plastic caps, and what look like miniature silver bowls for heating things, along with a tiny scale. In another box, more Band-Aids, sterile syringes, a University of Michigan shot glass. There are toilet paper rolls sitting on top of what looks like a silver letter opener. I’m trying to understand why there are so many toilet paper rolls and how they are used in this ritual. There’s lavender-scented hand soap in an Anthropologie-esque bottle and skin cream for shaving (a rare glimpse of what normal life once looked like), a small silver spoon with an orange plastic handle bent at the neck (so the spoon part angles up), a very small red plastic bowl over which is poised a syringe, empty but used.

  The other syringe on the sink, next to the red bowl, is filled and ready to go. There is a Sonos system speaker, its top dusted with the white, pebbly powder of crushed pills, a gray haircomb, a big white rock of some sort, and a Ziploc bag with white powder in it. Behind all this, on the walls and on the sink, is the splatter of bloody vomit.

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  BY THE TIME I am able to walk into Peter’s bedroom again, a few weeks after his death, professional cleaners have mopped up fluids and wiped down walls and cabinets and cleaned off the sticky residue that seemed to cover every surface in that room. They have thrown out all the garbage, folded clothes, made the bed.

  A couple of years later, when I’m still doing EMDR therapy, I’ll start to see—in my mind—other things I didn’t remembe
r, a few vague, flashing images. The dead mouse in the bathroom, the little cuts around Peter’s fingernails, the words Hugo Boss on the waistband of his briefs. I will be sitting on a small sofa in my therapist’s office, and in front of me, held up by the kind of stand that holds sheet music, will be what looks like a very small blackboard. In the center of the board is a small circle of green light that can move back and forth horizontally. It reminds me of the Lite-Brite game I played as a kid. My therapist, Kim, will sit to the left of the board holding a remote that controls the speed of the little green light, and can activate or halt its movement. Some EMDR therapists use a light bar instead of a light screen, others use handheld devices that vibrate back and forth between a person’s two hands. I knew of one therapist who asked clients to simply tap their fingers rapidly back and forth on alternating thighs. The common denominator in all of this is bilateral, or two-sided, movement.

  Before watching the light, Kim and I decide on a painful memory or thought I want to target. For months after I first start this treatment, I just want to get the image of Peter’s dead body out of my head. EMDR will make those memories less visceral and more like something I might have dreamed than something that actually happened. After Kim and I decide on a memory, I will bring it to mind and then try to describe how it feels, in my body, to be thinking about it. The tightness in my chest, the feeling that I’m about to cry, the churning in my stomach, the shortness of breath. It might seem an odd way for a therapist to treat someone with traumatic memories—asking them how their body feels—but there is a great deal of research that shows a strong connection between emotions and bodily sensations.