Authors: Lydia Cooper
I shower and dress and drive to campus. The class I teach meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which means that I don’t have to teach or go to the office today. Days that I don’t teach I work in the library, researching for my dissertation. When I climb the shallow steps to the library I pass through a mist of cigarette smoke around the pebbled ashpits. The smokers chatter like blue jays.
Upstairs, I unlock my study carrel and sit down. I square the edges of the stack of books, arrange a yellow legal pad in front of me, line up my pens. Then I pull over an Old English dictionary and a pocket verb guide. On the other side of the legal pad I smooth out a copy of an Old English manuscript page. The Xeroxed copy of a vellum manuscript is smudgy and gray. I take notes, looking up words, declining verbs.
My life is like an encyclopedia, a structured taxonomy of proper social behaviors and daily functions to which I adhere like a human-sized strip of duct tape.
The filigree of ancient Latin script blurs.
I put the pen down and push over the pile of books. They slither down the desk, collapse like a minor avalanche to the floor. The thin volume of German philosophy sits isolated on the shelf. But I don’t know what else I can discover by opening it to the missing page again. The book was never checked out. I don’t have any way to place a mind behind the missing page. Only the evidence of its absence. And I burnt the page itself.
I don’t know who wanted me to find the body. I do know I should leave it alone, leave it — fuck, call the cops, be done with the whole hideous thing already. But how do I do that without ruining everything I’ve constructed over the years?
If I can figure out
who
it is, or at least
why
, I can go to the proper authorities then.
But how do I find out anything? I’ve arrived at a dead end. A dead end — I grimace and rub my fingers over my temples. My head hurts.
The dead body. That’s it. That unsheathed carcass once possessed a mind. The mind holds its own secrets in death. How does a person go about deducing the physical identity of a body when the obvious things like a wallet or dog tags aren’t likely to present themselves?
I figure a cop would go back to the house, look for trace physical evidence, receipts, clothing tags, shoe size. Collect forensic samples. And wear sunglasses at night. That’s what they do in those cop shows, anyway.
Cop shows. The police. I think the police department keeps public records of people who go missing, or at least they do for kids. Those flyers of missing kids are plastered all over Walmart entrances.
I type quickly, pull up the Akron Police Department webpage. Ah, yes. A link for reported missing persons. I scroll through the lists of names, only opening up the files on male names with ages between twenty-five and fifty-five. Clicking on posters with pixilated faces staring blankly back at the world, looking for features that might belong to a man who is only a vague impression of porous, wax-slick skin, attached lower earlobes, and gray-streaked lank brown hair. I read through descriptions. Tattoos, scars, complexions, eye and hair color.
Then one of the posters makes me pause. James A. Sims, Caucasian male, thirty-four, brown hair, blue eyes, no scars or tattoos, epileptic, no permanent address. A note at the bottom of the poster claims that MP could not contact his only known living relative, a sister. The face in the grainy photograph is several years out of date. Wide, unfocused eyes, a button-down shirt, a thin neck with a prominent Adam’s apple. I squint and move my face close to the laptop screen. His earlobes are attached.
His neck is so thin. The shirt hanging on a frame that must have been underweight. I close my eyes and try to remember the corpse but all I see are rough brown-gray spinal knobs, whitish pink flesh clinging to the underside of the skin.
I realize how stupid I am. I wasn’t paying attention. I’m not an investigator. Whoever left the notes for me was not asking me to solve a crime. It was the string dangled in front of the bored cat. Cats don’t care who dangles the string. They only care that they are the ones who demolish the string.
My fingers move across the keyboard, opening new searches. Websites devoted to butchering. The correct way to hold a hunting knife. Directions for killing and draining an animal. Slit the jugular. Or sever the spinal column at the weak area where it joins the skull plates. My fingers go to the back of my neck, press against the skin at the base of my skull.
The thing is, I don’t even know what the
point
of that message in my mailbox was. What was I meant to figure out when I went to that house?
Who
killed the man, or
how
he was killed? The how is easier. At least, it’s easier for me to remember the look of that skin, the shredded edges as if a serrated blade had chewed through the skin. Of course it would be, for a person of my proclivities and neural condition. How would I possibly be expected to deduce human motivations? So I think this is what I’m meant to see and understand — the killing itself. But that seems so pointless. What possible motivation could a person have for tempting me into the dark recesses of my broken mind with a trail of once-human breadcrumbs?
I wonder if I could kill a person. An odd thought. It’s one thing I’ve known since I was ten, that I could kill a person. But not like this. Not using my hands to wield their dooms, not putting my fingers on the body and carving into it. The thought of that — a part of me does want to know what it feels like, to slice through skin like my mother slices through a pink ham, the thick meat ripping at the toothed knife blade. I shiver. And then I realize that I don’t want to kill anyone. I want to feel what it is like, but I don’t want to wake up the next morning knowing who I am, knowing what I’ve done, for the rest of my life. I already know how it feels to walk everywhere, to run, to sleep, with the weight of it like a homunculus crouched inside your chest. I don’t think I’ve inhaled fully since I was ten years old.
I slam the laptop shut and stand up. It’s a bit of a relief, actually.
To know there are limits to my depravity.
The house on Allyn Street is a clapboard two-story, built in the 1950s when the city burgeoned with textile and tire factories. The Chevelle’s idling engine vibrates through the coiled springs supporting the driver’s seat. My hands grip the wheel, even though the parking brake is on. My knuckles are white. I swallow and close my eyes. Not looking at the house, at the boarded-over window. Not thinking about what lies inside that room, on that narrow metal-framed bed.
I felt strong, realizing that I didn’t want to kill anyone, that staring at the mutilated body didn’t send me hurtling past logic and the ability to think in the future tense about consequences. And because I felt strong, I came back. But now my body is undergoing some strange physiological reaction.
When I got out of the psych unit, the shrink who put me on a low dose of anti-anxiety medication didn’t wait long enough. The new meds, combined with an antipsychotic that hadn’t cleared my bloodstream, sent my nervous system into overdrive. I felt my brain dissolve. Ants crawled through my veins. My blood went sluggish and my muscles got lax and heavy, but my skin shivered and my heart raced. I felt like a hummingbird trapped in a polar bear’s body.
I feel like that now. Like metal toothpicks prick up and down my arms. My skin twitches but the muscles are dull, leaden. I want to know who he is, the man handcuffed to the bed in the room with the Victorian bureau and the dusty floorboards. I can’t move. Can’t slow my heartbeat.
Well. I’m here anyway. I reach for the door handle. Anything that happens, from this point forward, I have done by opening this door. I know this is true, but nothing feels real. Even the air when I climb out has the weightless blank quality of a dream.
The house’s side door is still ajar and the dark slit between the wood slab and frame makes my stomach feel strange, like I might throw up or start laughing too loudly. The house is like a cracked eggshell, all the ripe insides turning rotten.
Afternoon sun shines warm on the side of my face. When I close my eyes briefly it turns my eyelids the color of pink Zinfandel. I shouldn’t be here, not in daylight. Shouldn’t be here at all.
I open my eyes and pull the door open.
The house is dark, the thick stench of decay so strong that the air feels soupy. Instead of heading for the stairs I look around the first floor. A few empty rooms at the front of the house. My breath echoes faintly. The house feels still, frozen.
Empty.
The kitchen windows are all boarded over, leaving only dark behind. A tar-thick black that presses against my eyes. I get out my cell phone and touch the screen, shine the small bluish light around. The kitchen is full of shadows, gaps in the counter and cupboard blocks where the sink was removed, the refrigerator pulled out. The holes look like the result of some monstrous botched surgery, empty electric outlets staring up at me like black eyes. When I take a step into the kitchen the linoleum crackles under my sneakers like cornflakes. A gray blanket. I kneel down, careful to keep my fingers off the blanket. With the edge of my cell phone, I nudge it. Drag out a corner. It’s just a blanket left balled-up in the corner. When the fabric loosens it releases a sweet rotting smell like old urine. The stink is as sweet as caramelized sugar but pungent, spicy. My eyes water.
A rustle. A small plastic baggie in the folds of blanket. When I move the blanket I see a twist of tin foil with a lump of caked yellowed gunk that looks like rosin, a faint powdery residue in a halo around it.
In the corner something glints in the watery glow from my cell phone. I go over and kick it lightly. A backpack, but not like a college student or a hiker would carry. It’s pink with shiny appliqué pieces, a cartoon picture of a black-haired girl. Some cartoon character for kids. Stephen watches cartoons sometimes and I have seen it briefly when he flips channels. The name comes to me then: Dora the Explorer.
I look around. No one would have a kid here, surely. Would they? Who would leave drugs and a kid’s backpack? Someone who left in a hurry. Obviously.
There are no more rooms on the first floor and no more objects to poke at, so I head upstairs. The stairwell closes around me like crushed velvet. I run the back of my hand against the wall to keep my balance in the stygian dark.
The first door is still locked, the second one open. When I click on my cell phone and shine it around I see the bed, but for a second I think the man is gone. Then I see the white glare of the cell phone’s light glinting off a handcuff, the bloated blued-white of skin, and I realize that he is still there. But someone has dragged a sheet over the corpse.
The smell in here is rancid, so thick that it coats the inside of my mouth and when I swallow I can taste rot.
Dark stains in small coin-shaped spots on the sheet. When I shine the light on them they look like oil, not blood. I think the blood has mostly drained from the body. Maybe a spleen burst open from the pressure of bloat, or some other organ gave way to decomposition.
I cough a little and bury my face in the crook of my arm. I think about the blanket downstairs, and the backpack. The contradictory treatment of the body on the bed — someone shackled him and skinned him; someone covered him with a sheet.
There are signs of habitation here, but the detritus below, the body in the bed, and the sheet over the corpse point to different people. To someone dark and rotting of soul, and to someone childish, scared. Someone unable to call the cops but driven by a desire to put the ravaged body to rest. Someone human.
According to the missing persons report, James A. Sims was mentally disturbed and had no fixed address. The unlocked door and the condemned sign on the front of the house must mark a temporary crash pad for transient people. Or, did mark it. Until someone — one of them? — turned it into a deranged artist’s studio.
And the next camper discovered the house was already habited, if not by the ghost of the violently deceased, then by the ghost of future cops, detectives, and forensics teams.
A drugged-up homeless person with a Dora the Explorer backpack has more sense than I do. I don’t want to touch the sheet, release any more of the rot into the air, and there is nothing left for me to find as far as I can tell. So I turn to leave. But when my hand closes over the door handle, I see something on the back of the door. I hit the screen of my cell phone so that the light brightens.
Someone has written on the back of the door, scrawled in blue ink across the once-white paint.
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
“Sullied,” I say.
My voice startles me.
For a second, breathless, I imagine the sunken eyeholes of the corpse turning in my direction. The whole world waiting for my next words.
I cough again, swallow, and duck my chin against my neck. I put my cell phone in my pocket and leave, pulling the door shut behind me. But I can still see the words in my mind, that sharp downward slanted print.
O, that this too too
— it’s from
Hamlet
, of course, but most copies of the play use the word “sullied.” There is some disagreement about which word Shakespeare intended, which word is a copier’s error. I have always preferred “sullied.”
But it occurs to me as I go carefully down the dark stairs that however sullied the corpse, it is inarguably less solid and will slowly disparate into parts, the liquid leaching out, gases escaping, the drying remains shrinking in on themselves until they turn to dust.
All flesh that was solid once will melt.
When I get outside the sun seems too bright. I stand blinking and put my hand over my face. Does my skin smell like rot? I can’t tell. I can’t smell anything.
It’s too hard, the sunlight. My skin feels exposed. I’m a fool for coming back. I don’t know what I thought I would find.
I don’t know how — God,
how
? — my mystery murderer knew I would come back. Or were those words there before, and I just didn’t see them?