Below the Surface

The problem with sleeping is you always end up waking.

I opened my eyes to a gray sky. I didn't know where I was. I didn't know who I was. For a few magnificent seconds I was nobody. Then the world came back the way it always comes back, like a dog you kicked out that comes back anyway.

I was on a bench. The wood was damp. A park. One of those places nobody goes except those who've got nowhere left to go.

In my gut, something hollow knocking against emptiness. The belch rose slowly. When it reached my mouth I got the taste.

Not bourbon. Bourbon I recognize even wasted, even half dead: dry burn, wood, vanilla going sour. This was something else. Sweet. Round. Something they serve in glasses too thin, in places where the menus don't have prices because people who look at prices aren't allowed in.

I bent over and threw up in the grass.

It came out warm and thick and made a pink puddle on the green. I stared at it too long. An almost childish pink. Badly mixed gouache.

That pink had no business being there.

I've got nothing inside me that makes pink.

I wiped my mouth with my sleeve. It smelled like sidewalk, cold sweat, sleep piled up in layers.

I searched my pockets the way you search through rubble.

Left: keys. Wallet. Receipt folded in four. Right: portable charger. Phone. Dead.

On my head: nothing.

I raised my hand to my skull. Once. Twice.

The cap was gone. The green John Deere. The bleach stain on the brim. Four years I'd been putting it on without thinking, like locking the door on your way out.

It was gone.

The morning cold was getting into my scalp. A direct cold, unfiltered, that wasn't used to being there.

I put the phone back in my pocket. And I saw my right thumb.

Under the nail. In the angle where skin meets keratin. A dark fragment. Dry. I scratched. It resisted, then gave all at once. A small flake in the pad. I crushed it on my jeans.

Dirt, I told myself.

Just dirt.

That's the word you use when you don't want to look.

Because asking the question meant opening. And behind it I could feel a whole room. The night. Filed away, locked. My brain was keeping the books. It wasn't showing me the ledger.

It wasn't giving me the key.

I sat down. I plugged in the phone. The screen took its time coming back.

Seven missed calls.

Garza. Seven times Garza.

My chest tightened. Not panic. Work. Work that finds you even when you wake up in a park with pink vomit between your feet. Work has no manners. It knocks and it waits.

I played the first voicemail. Midnight.

— Denny. We got a job. Murder on Willow Creek. Call me back.

Second: shorter.

— Call back.

Third: calm with cracks in it.

— Fuck, Denny.

I didn't listen to the others. I looked at the times. 00:20. 01:00. 02:00. 03:15. 04:00. 05:10. He'd been knocking all night.

I stayed sitting. The cold in my pelvis. The heat in my hands. That sweet taste stuck to the back of my mouth.

If I'd drunk that kind of liquor, it wasn't on a bench.

Six years I've been doing this job. Crime scene cleanup.

We show up when the cops are gone. When the gloves are in the trash and the little yellow numbers have been placed on what no longer has a name.

They take the body.

They leave the rest.

The splatter. The streaks. The soaked fibers. The insects, sometimes, if time got a head start on us. The matter. Matter has no morals.

The equipment fits in two hands and a protocol: gloves, bucket, red bags, products that smell like ammonia, scrapers, absorbents. They call it trauma cleanup so it sounds clean. I scrape. I rinse. I scrub until the floor stops talking. Until the surface becomes surface again.

There's what comes off and what stays. What stays isn't always what you see.

The secret of this job isn't the horror. The horror you take it, you look at it, you put it somewhere. The secret is the habit. Being able to eat after. Being able to sleep. Coming back the next day with a heart that beats the same.

That morning we had a murder. An apartment full of blood.

And I was on a bench. Palms on fire. In my mouth a strange taste.

The van was there. GARZA REMEDIATION SERVICES in blue on the flank. Certified Trauma Scene Cleanup underneath. A white rectangle like a thousand others, parked on streets nobody looks at.

I pulled the handle. The smell hit me. Heated plastic, worn rubber, old coffee, chemicals. My job. My life.

I looked for the cap. Seat. Floor. Trunk.

Nothing.

I turned the ignition.

At the second light the phone buzzed.

Curtis.

I picked up and his voice filled the van.

— Where are you.

— In the van.

— My van.

— Garza's van.

— The van I take every night. That you were supposed to bring back yesterday after packing up the gear. That you didn't bring back. So Garza calls me at midnight, murder on Willow Creek, and I'm standing in front of my house like an idiot.

I was watching the road. The white lines sliding under the hood.

— My phone was dead.

— Your phone is always dead.

It wasn't a jab. It was a fact.

— You've been drinking.

It wasn't a question.

— A little.

— With you a little means you disappeared.

A silence. Short.

— Come get me. And open the window. I don't want the van smelling like a distillery on the scene.

— Okay.

— And if you puke in the van I'm billing you biohazard rate.

He hung up.

He had the right.

— Willow Creek. 4B. Second floor, third door. Knife. Garza said it was bad.

Curtis lived ten minutes away. He was on his stoop. Coffee in his right hand. The other resting on his knee. Work jacket clean, zipped, ready. Curtis was always ready.

He stood when I braked. He took his time. He got in.

A smell of soap and fresh coffee came in with him. Mint, pine, something clean. It lived for a second with my stench. Then mine took over.

Curtis rolled down his window without a word. The cold air did what it could.

— It's a knife, he said. Old guy living alone. Garza says it's bad.

— Okay.

He clenched his jaw.

— It's not okay. It's bad. It's not some guy who rotted for three weeks. It's fresh blood. Knife blood. Doesn't smell the same.

He took a sip.

Old people, that's the daily.

Old people alone. The ones who die on a Tuesday and nobody comes looking until the following Tuesday because everyone has a life and lives take up all the room. They sit down in an armchair and they sit down forever. The body didn't get the news. It keeps obeying the simple laws. It flows, it sinks, it seeps. The floor takes it all.

After a while it's not stains anymore. It's layers.

And then there are the worms.

Them you can count on. Neither the cops nor the families have that punctuality. The worms do. They come. They show up on time.

On Decatur, a retiree. Two months without a visit. The worms took the floor, then the cracks, then the level below. The neighbor found a worm on her counter one Monday. She crushed it with a sponge. Next day there were three. Day after that they were coming out of the baseboards. A week later it wasn't her apartment anymore. It was theirs.

She ended up in the hospital. She said she saw them everywhere. Outlets. Faucet. Tile grout. The doctors said post-traumatic stress.

Me I thought: she looked at the real too long. And the real, when you stare at it, it ends up breaking something inside. Something below the surface. Something you don't fix.

Curtis set his cup in the cupholder. The cardboard snapped on the plastic. The only sound between us.

— This one's a knife, he said.

— I know.

— Not the worms.

— Not the worms.

A knife is almost simple. The blood is liquid. Liquid obeys. It absorbs, it dilutes, it rinses. The worms you have to pick up one by one. A splattered wall tells a short story. The months of solitude cling to the corners.

My job is erasing.

That morning something in me didn't want to stay erased.

The building was red brick. The kind that's taken rain for thirty years and stopped protesting.

We climbed the stairs. Second floor. Third door. A yellow tape hung there.

Curtis opened.

The smell came out. Blood, metallic, heavy. And underneath a softness. Sandalwood, or something like it. The scent of a man who'd wanted his place to be livable even alone.

And the color. Before even the blood, the color.

The walls were orange. Not construction orange. A late-afternoon orange, as if someone had trapped a sun inside plaster. Moss-green couch. Mustard cushions. A walnut bar with thin glasses and bottles whose shape I didn't recognize. A chrome arc lamp curved over the living room. Vinyls. Coltrane. Davis. A smoked-glass ashtray.

A man had built something beautiful in a place nobody looks at.

On the white carpet the red had taken the shape of a territory.

I set the bucket down. I pulled on my gloves.

And my feet went somewhere else. A feeling of déjà vu.

The hallway. Second door on the right.

I didn't decide. It just happened.

My hand found the switch. Low, on the left, where nobody puts a switch. It found it with a certainty that didn't belong to my head.

The turquoise tiles. The sink. The vetiver soap. A towel folded too neatly for a man who lives alone.

I knew this place.

Not through thought. Through muscle.

I let the water run, too hard, to cover my breathing. It had risen high in my chest, fast. The breath that says run. I didn't listen.

The bedroom was at the end on the left. I knew it. I knew the small step before the door. I knew the bed pulled tight at the corners. And I knew what was above the bed.

The step. The door. The bed.

Above it, a painting. Bears in a forest, painted by hand. The paint a little worn. A corner of canvas warped. A nail set back crooked. It held anyway.

The sweet taste rose again. Round. Fruity. A trace you can't spit out.

Another man's liquor in my body.

Maybe the other man was me.

I came back to the living room.

Curtis had started. On his knees on the carpet, scraper in hand. His blade made a wet sound on the fiber.

— It was nice at the gentleman's place, he said.

He glanced at the walls. The bar. The cushions.

— Garza told me he was gay.

He lifted his chin. As if that explained the orange and the moss green and the thin glasses and Coltrane.

— Doesn't surprise me. Look at the walls.

He smiled. Small. Without seeing that I was looking at the walls too and seeing something else. The old man had decided something. He'd decided his life wouldn't be ugly. The world had told him you're old and you're alone and you're queer and you live in a brick building that's peeling and nobody gives a damn about you. And the old man had said alright. And he'd painted his walls orange. And he'd bought Coltrane. And every morning he got up in that orange and told the world go fuck yourself.

I knelt beside him. I took the sponge. The blood resisted. My forearms burned. I scrubbed and I wasn't looking at the carpet. I was looking at the bottles behind the bar. Their thin silhouettes in the orange light.

I had their taste in my mouth.

I scrubbed.

Curtis talked so he wouldn't hear the room. He did that often.

— I tell you about the McDonald's?

— No.

— Tuesday. I'm ordering. The girl at the counter. I take my bag, I say thank you ma'am. She won't let go of the bag. She's holding it like my nuggets are a hostage situation.

He scraped. He started again.

— I say thank you ma'am again. She goes: it's not ma'am. I say excuse me? She says: no. Apologize. In front of everyone. There was a line. She was staring at me. Me I was hungry.

The water in the bucket turned pink when he rinsed the sponge. A pale, dirty pink.

— I apologized. Because I was hungry. It's stupid. I just wanted to eat. After that I ate in the parking lot in the car. I never hated a nugget that much. I felt like I'd become someone bad for fucking nothing.

I scrubbed. Under the brown the pink. Under the pink a white that looked like before.

— After that I opened Yelp. One star. Rude staff. In your face.

He nodded. As if the world were a courtroom and you had to survive it through small concessions. Through nuggets swallowed alone in a car in a parking lot.

— The world, Denny.

— Yeah.

I kept going. That's what I do. I erase.

But there on my knees on that carpet in that orange apartment, with that taste in my mouth, I didn't know what I was erasing.

I didn't know which side of the scraper I was on.

On a chair, a wool vest held the shape of shoulders. In the sink a mug with a dry ring of coffee at the bottom. On the table a novel open facedown on the wood, stopped at a page he'd never finish.

Gestures made the day before without knowing it was the last time.

The ammonia covered the vetiver. The vetiver covered the blood. The blood covered the entire life of a man.

Curtis went quiet.

That's how I knew. Not from a sign. From the absence. Him who'd filled the air since we'd put our knees down, and suddenly nothing. The brutal silence. Louder than the rest.

I looked up.

He was standing near the armchair. White. Still.

And in his right hand he was holding my cap. He was holding it by the tips of his fingers. As if the fabric carried something contaminated.

The green John Deere. The bleach stain on the brim.

He was holding it by the tips of his fingers.

— Where'd you find that.

My voice was flat. The voice of a man asking what time it is.

— Behind the armchair.

Behind the armchair. The words opened a draft in my chest.

— I'd lost it.

Curtis didn't answer. He looked at the cap. Then me. Then the armchair. The van not returned. The dark crust under the nail that I'd crushed on my jeans. The dead phone. The switch low on the left. The step before the door. The bears above the bed. All of it passed behind his eyes without words.

I'd seen it and I'd told myself just dirt just dirt.

— You didn't have it this morning, he said.

It wasn't an accusation. It was a fact.

I said nothing.

Curtis set the cap on the armrest. Gently. With the exact caution of someone setting down a dangerous object without admitting it. Then he pulled off his gloves. He tore them off as if the latex burned. As if everything here were contaminated.

Including me.

He gathered the equipment fast, sloppy. Curtis usually put each thing in its place. Now he was tossing, stacking, grabbing blind.

He wasn't looking at me anymore.

— We're done, he said.

We weren't done. The kitchen was left. The sink. A patch of floor. But we're done wasn't about the carpet.

It was about us.

The cap on the armrest. The bleach stain on the brim. Four years on my head.

I held it in my warm hands and I thought of nothing. I let myself not think.

Then I put it on my head.

For a second I saw what came next. Curtis on the phone. The cops. My name. And me sitting under a white light explaining a night I didn't own.

Then the thought was too slow.

My body was already somewhere else.

I stood. My knees cracked on the wet floor. Two steps. Three. My hands closed around his throat from behind.

The sound he made wasn't a scream. A gasp. The bucket tipped. Dirty water splashed the hardwood. He dropped the bag and the tools hit the floor with a short clatter.

His hands grabbed my wrists. He clawed. Pulled. An elbow to the ribs. My hands didn't move.

Curtis was strong. Strong from work, strong from habit. But habit doesn't prepare you to die at the hands of a colleague.

His face changed color. Pink. Red. Purple. His eyes went wide and they looked at me for real. Not with anger. Not with disgust. With naked bewilderment.

He fell first to his knees. Then the rest followed.

We ended up together on the floor. In the bucket water and the other man's blood.

I didn't let go.

I squeezed long after he stopped struggling. My hands refused to open.

Curtis was on the floor. The bucket water was seeping into the fibers of the carpet we'd just cleaned. The equipment scattered around us like after a normal day.

When at last I released, there was a small silence. Three seconds. The exact duration of grief for a cleaner.

Then, the work. So the surface could become surface again.