My father, a compulsive liar, once told me that a person dies every time a leaf falls from a tree. If you catch a leaf before it touches the ground, you save a person’s soul.
It’s early September in Chicago, and I’ve already let thousands of souls perish.
I walk to work, from one graffiti-stained side of Wrigleyville to the other. The sidewalks, congested with foot traffic an hour before, are now clear. The only people I encounter are pampered trophy wives walking their dogs. It’s the law in Chicago that these women must be on their cell phones at all times, even while scooping dog excrement. I take great interest in my cigarette as they walk by, avoiding eye contact.
As I near the office, I see Jessica Kwan hurrying from the opposite direction. She looks the part of a consummate female professional: knee-length grey skirt, black blouse, peacoat fluttering open as if she didn’t have time to button it, Starbucks coffee cup in hand. I’ve asked her about that coffee cup. It’s the same one every day. Turns out that Jessica Kwan doesn’t drink coffee. She just likes to look like every other working woman in Chicago.
She easily beats me to the front door. That’s okay. I wasn’t racing. I shield the stub of my cigarette from the wind and inhale three times, quickly, one after the other, the elixir of nicotine storming my consciousness. I need this before I open the door.
“LPR Media, wel—” The secretary cuts herself off when she sees that I’m an employee. She smiles to herself, a secret, knowing smile, and looks down at her paperwork. She does not finish her welcome. Lydia, or Lynn—whatever her name is—welcomes clients, visitors, strangers, but not employees. I’m under the impression that she thinks she’s better than us because we work in the field instead of sitting behind a desk all day. Let her think that. It’s her ass that’s getting fatter by the day, while I’m getting free exercise out in the fresh air.
Jessica Kwan has stolen the one working elevator, so I drag myself up the two flights of stairs to my division: Photography and Graphic Arts. My boss, a recent graduate from Northwestern, is walking down the center aisle of cubicles towards me. I whip out my camera and pretend to photograph her, shooting from low, exaggerated angles. “Yes, perfect. Work it. Work it!” I say. I don’t know why I do this. I do it all too often. Sometimes I actually take the photos when her skirt is short.
Brie strikes a pose, hand on hip, shoulders back, dark eyes squinting, and holds it while she addresses me. Why she indulges my little photoshoot game, I don’t know.
“Tucker, babe.” She calls everyone “babe.” “I need you to shoot Il Fratelli today.” She sees my reaction, which I hope looks like exasperation. “Please?”
“Am I the only photographer here who can shoot Italian food?” I say.
Brie relaxes her pose. “Short answer, yes. You’re the only one who can capture the essence of…of….” She rolls her hands, beckoning for the next word.
“Italian food?”
She claps. “Yes! Or whatever BS makes sense to you. Just do what you did for Capreccio’s.”
I shake my head as I walk to my cubicle. “A new restaurant opens every day in Chicago,” I say over my shoulder. “Do we have to review them all?”
I actually don’t mind taking pictures of food; it means free lunch for me. The restaurants always feed me before we shoot, as if buttering me up helps their review. It doesn’t. I don’t even talk to the reviewers.
I pass the graphic designers on the way to my desk. They have the middle cubicles so the glare from the windows doesn’t tint their computer screens. Some day each of them will be replaced by four undertrained Chinese children working 18-hour shifts for a fraction of their salaries. I smile. You can’t outsource photographers.
I’m reminded of the e-mail I received last September. It went to my junk mailbox, so I didn’t notice it for a few days. Fortunately—or, as it would turn out, rather unfortunately—my eyes caught the subject line before I habitually deleted the spam.
“Freelance inquiry, will pay,” it read.
I’ve since wiped my computer clean of that e-mail and my response. I don’t know what the government can track, but maybe it’s floating out there in cyberspace. All I kept was one hard copy, which is now stowed in a plastic bag in my freezer. Just in case I ever need to prove my innocence. It’s been 11 months, so I think I’m fine.
I drop off my camera and my satchel and go find the coffee. Unlike Jessica Kwan, I need caffeine in the morning. I like the feeling of stacking it on top of my nicotine buzz. Later I’ll get high before the photo shoot. Try smoking up and then taking pictures of food. You’ll shoot every pasta primavera as if it’s your greatest love.
Alas, I’m out of weed. I’ll need to pay my supplier a visit before I go to Il Fratelli. I check my watch. Saul should be awake by now.
After checking e-mail and touching up some photos of an art exhibit I took yesterday, I grab my things and head back out into the crisp fall air. I wave goodbye to Brie and roll my eyes as I walk out. She winks in response. This would normally make my day, but as the elevator doors open, I’m immediately greeted by my own reflection in the mirrored panels. Was I ever a handsome man? No, probably not. Serviceable, but not handsome. And that was back in college. Now, eight years past graduation, my hair is thin, my shoulders hunched, my face pale and pockmarked. The maroon corduroy jacket I wear every day looks more like a scab than haut couteur. My fingers tremble as I push the button for the first floor. It wasn’t that long ago that I was playing football. Now I can’t even lift my arms above my shoulders.
I dial Saul, using my cell as a barrier against the receptionist as I walk across the lobby.
“Hello?” He sounds suspicious. Saul, a vigilant dealer, doesn’t program any numbers into his phone, lest it be absconded by the police.
“It’s Tucker. You in?”
“Oh. Yeah. I’ll unlock the door. Meet you in the kitchen.”
Saul lives a few blocks south of Wrigley Field in a white rowhouse with green trim, the most innocuous of houses. Saul’s day job, which he performs mostly at night, is as a medical examiner at the Central Chicago Morgue. I met him while photographing the dead of Mather Tower.
I knock on the front door and push it open. “Saul?”
The living room was immaculate, not a single coaster out of place. A huge flat-screen TV hung on the wall, surrounded by a black-leather sectional couch that looked like it had been bought yesterday. The coffee table was made of brushed aluminum, as were the side tables and lamps. The shades were drawn, but the room was brightly lit.
As far as I knew, Saul was single. Whenever our personal lives came up in conversation, his only contribution was, “You know how it is.” I suspected at one point he had told me exactly what his marital status was, and now it was too late for me to admit that I had no idea. I only saw him at home during the day when his wife—if she existed—would be at work, and only at night at the morgue, where I can’t imagine anyone visiting for fun.
“Saul?”
“In the kitchen! Come on back.”
I walk through the dining room to the kitchen. The first time I saw this room, I had to say something to Saul.
“Dude, this looks like an autopsy room.”
Saul had looked up from the cilantro he was dicing with a blank expression. “Does it?”
I thought he was kidding, but he had no idea. Every flat surface in the kitchen was made of gleaming stainless steel. The row of drawers on the far wall were the size and shape of body-bag drawers. The fluorescent lights loomed large and insidious over the island. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that Saul worked from home on occasion.
Saul is watching TV on the 14-inch monitor in the corner as I enter the room. It’s an older black-and-white set, the kind small companies use for surveillance.
“Dude, you have sixty inches of pure glory in the living room. Why aren’t you watching in there?” I don’t call other people “dude” anymore, at least not since I got a regular job. This expression particularly doesn’t apply to Saul, with his carefully parted hair, pale complexion, and bony shoulders. Bad habit from the old days, I guess.
Saul lowers himself from his perch on the counter. “I just feel more at home in here. Plus, Regis is too much to handle on the big screen. I don’t want that guy in my living room.” He walks across the room and offers me his hand. “Good to see you. How’re things?” His clammy palm presses against mine.
“Could be worse. It’s gonna get cold soon.”
He shrugs. “I’m underground in a giant refrigerator ten hours a day. I’m used to it.”
I once asked him if he smoked on the job, and he looked at me in horror. The last place a person wants to get high, apparently, is surrounded by dead bodies. I hadn’t thought of that.
“So what do you have for me today?”
Saul turns to one of the body-bag drawers and enters a code on the keypad. It beeps approvingly and slides open. I can’t see well from my angle, but I’d estimate that there are at least 8 pounds of marijuana in the drawer. “The usual?”
“Yeah.”
He extracts a plastic bag and slides it across the counter. “$285.”
“Damn inflation.” I hand him the bills and take a whiff of the weed. I want to climb into the bag and live there.
Saul taps his hand on the counter. “Almost forgot. Got a body yesterday that might be perfect for your piece. Any interest in coming by?”
He is referring to my book, a study on death that I’ve been working on since Mather Tower. For about a year now I’ve been fascinated by the peculiar ways people die. It sounds morbid, I know, and it’s not exactly coffee-table book material, but I’m not compiling it to make money. I’m doing it because I’m trying to make sense of death, to objectify it. I have a good system set up: Saul calls me when he gets an interesting body, and if I can make it over to the morgue before he has to send the body to the funeral home, I’m free to take photos. Of course, the families that claim the bodies don’t know about my clandestine photoshoots.
“Sure. After work okay? Seven-ish?” I have a therapy appointment at three, so I’ll have to work late after that.
“I’ll see you then.” Saul ushers me to the front door, shakes my hand again. “Thanks again.”
It’s now almost noon; I need to get over to the restaurant. I need some time to smoke up before I get there, so I scout a route through the neighborhood that’ll get me to an L station about ten minutes from here.
I used to be petrified of smoking in broad daylight, but since I created the Tucker Splif, I’ve never been caught. Roll a joint (Saul had been kind enough to pre-roll a few for me), hold it next to a cigarette, and light them both at the same time. Gives you an unbelievable high, and the joint is pretty much invisible. Obviously I wouldn’t walk right by a cop smoking this thing, but if they can’t smell it, they’ll never know. I don’t want to smell like marijuana when I get to the restaurant (even though half the busboys and dishwashers in the place probably reek of it), so smoking as I walk is the perfect solution.
The place is busy with lunchtime customers when I arrive. I stare at the hostess’s butt, shrink-wrapped in tight black pants, as she leads me to the kitchen. Ah, the ripeness of youth. I’m greeted by the co-owner, Benito Viviano, who envelopes my hand with a wet, doughy paw and immediately insists that he knows what I want for lunch. At the mention of food, I’m hit hard by the delicious odors that fill the air: garlic bread and marinara sauce and oregano and basil and fresh pasta…. I’m suddenly crushed by hunger.
Mario, an exact replica of his brother, minus the sweat and plus a mustache, is on the phone in his office. Benito gestures for me to wait there, and he waddles back to the preparing station, yelling something in Italian.
Mario lowers the phone. “Mr. Hart. Thank you for coming. Please, sit down.”
I wedge myself into the cheap plastic seat on the opposite side of his desk. It’s a small office with no natural light—we won’t be able to photograph the food in here.
“Thank you for having me. The Post is happy to review new restaurants.”
“Well, we’re not all that new.” Mario leans back in his chair, eyes darting between me and the door as if he expects me to make a run for it. “Three months since our soft open. And before this, we ran a little place up in Wilmette. Two Brothers Deli—you heard of it?”
I shake my head. There are thousands of delis in Chicago.
He waves a hand at me. “No matter. It’s good, small but good. Try it sometime—say Mario sent you.”
I wonder if this tactic will work at any Italian restaurant. Say that Mario sent you, get a free sandwich.
Benito appears in the doorway, plate in hand. That was quick. “One chicken parmesan, just for you.” He looks at Mario. “Mosca.”
Mario smiles. “Ah. Something to drink?”
“A Pellegrino would be great. Thanks.” Benito disappears again. I cut a piece of chicken, balancing the plate on my lap. “This is delicious. Very…garlicky.” It’s by far the best chicken parmesan I’ve had today.
“Yes.” Mario leans forward. “Did you know that if you put a single clove of garlic between your toes for 5 minutes, you’ll taste it in your mouth?”
“Is that so?”
Mario leans back, a satisfied look on his face. “It is.”
The shoot takes a little over an hour. I take a Pellegrino for the road and bid the Vivianos farewell. As I walk away, I want to take a photo of the two brothers standing in the entrance of the restaurant, one welcoming, one not, but by the time I pull out my camera, both have disappeared.
I’m early for therapy, so I light a splif and stroll through a nearby park. I try to remember what we talked about last week, but nothing comes to mind. I need to write this stuff down. Fifty bucks a week and nothing to show for it?
That’s not to say that the kid isn’t making progress on me. He’s good, damn good. I was hesitant at first, going to a child therapist, but my sister insisted that I try it. “Give it two sessions,” she said. “What do you have to lose?”
What did I have to win? My sister knows nothing about me. A few death photos and people think you’re manic-depressive. Honestly, though, I’m glad she pushed the point. I don’t feel depressed, but for a while, I’ve just felt…off. Off balance, maybe. I wasn’t willing to get help for myself, but when Mona Hart gets an idea stuck in her head, she doesn’t back down. I needed the push.
Plus, the idea of a child therapist intrigued me. I thought there were labor laws for this type of thing, but apparently it’s perfectly legal. “Say anything you want,” the supervisor told me before my first appointment. “Billy has his own therapist to filter out anything that confuses him. And one of us will be there the whole time.”
She was referring to the other supervisors. They sit in the room for the duration of the session, probably to assure skeptics that patients aren’t abusing the children.
“Tucker!” I hear a shriek of delight as I walk into the office. Billy is charging toward me, his arms outstretched. I bend down in time for him to hug my neck. He smells of crayons and baby shampoo.
“Hey Billy! How’s it going?”
He smiles, suddenly bashful. “Good.”
“Good.” I walk in and take a seat on the sofa. “Hey, Sharon.”
The supervisor looks up from paperwork on the far side of the office. “Hi, Tucker. Ready to start?”
I nod. Billy has pulled himself up onto an easy chair that makes him look even more diminutive. His silvery blonde hair clings to his forehead, and I’m a little envious of his Transformers t-shirt. He leans over the armrest and grabs a sketchpad from the lamp stand.
“Here. I made this for you.”
I take the pad from him. On it are Billy’s notes from the previous session. Prominently featured are a stick figure of a man feeding a dinosaur. A Stegosaurus, I think. There are smaller stick figures underneath the dinosaur, maybe under the ground. The ground is always a single green line in Billy’s notes. A simple house—door, two windows—is next to the dinosaur. There is a sun in the sky, but it’s blue, not yellow. There’s also the red outline of a heart, Valentine’s style, next to the sun.
I try to find meaning in the drawing, keeping in mind the advice the supervisor gave me during my first appointment. “Be open when you look at his notes,” she said. “It’s what you see that matters. If you see yourself in a tree or an animal, talk about it. Treat it like a dream that he’s drawn for you.”
Billy fidgets in his seat. He’s impatient for me to speak.
“Okay, I see…what do I see?” I try to recall what we talked about the previous week. “Oh! We talked about my father. Which one is he?”
Billy shrugs. “I dunno.”
“My father…well, I was telling you about how he left when I was in high school. After Mom died. I feel like, I don’t know. Like, I wish he was in the house, but the house is empty.”
“Why?”
Ah, the “why’s” begin. It’s a surprisingly effective—and sometimes infuriating—question, coming from a little kid.
“You know, I wanted him to be home. Mona and I needed him.”
“My sister is Ellen. Where’s your sister?”
“I think…I think she’s the big person.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. And I’m the dinosaur.”
Billy nods knowingly.
“I just feel like, like she’s always trying to take care of me. To spoon feed me. I mean, I’m grown up. I’m 29. I can take care of myself, you know.”
“You’re a big boy, like me. I’m four.”
“Exactly. Don’t get me wrong, Mona’s fucking smart. And she makes a killing. But I do well for myself, you know?”
“You’re great, Tucker!”
I smile. “Thanks.”
Billy moves to the edge of his chair, legs dangling as he peers over at his notes. “You’re the Stegosaurus?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Why are you standing on those people?”
I feel flushed. “I don’t think I’m standing on them.”
Billy looks at the drawing again. “Oh. Okay.”
I hand him the sketchpad and he flips to a new page. He grabs a handful of crayons from the lamp stand and props the sketchpad against his knees. I won’t be allowed to see this week’s notes until my next session.
“Have I told you about Dipti, Billy?”
He giggles. “What’s a Dipti?”
I smile. “She’s a woman. A woman I fell in love with. Thought I did, at least.”
“How old were you?” Billy was sketching with a red crayon.
“27. This was a few years ago.”
“Did you meet at the zoo?”
“No. We were on a flight from New York to Chicago. She had the window seat.”
“I’ve never flown in a real airplane.”
“It’s not worth it. Too much heartbreak.”
“Why?”
I don’t have an answer to that. I realize that my previous response didn’t make much sense. Score one for Billy.
“Dipti was gorgeous. Very pretty. I kept looking over at her for the entire flight. I don’t talk to girls that pretty.”
“Why?”
“Because…I don’t know. I’m not all that good-looking.”
Billy stops coloring and looks up. “The girls at school say that Bart Bogglesworth is the best looking guy in kindergarten.”
“Well, I’m no Bart Bogglesworth. But here’s the thing, Billy. This girl wasn’t normal. Her hand was all weird and misshapen. Like this.” I curl and contort my fingers to look like Dipti’s. Some of her fingers protruded from the back of her hand, which I can’t imitate.
Billy does the same with his hand. “How did she tie her shoes?”
This stops me. I don’t think I ever saw Dipti tie her shoes. Maybe she only wore slip-ons.
“I don’t know. But she did—she could do anything.”
“And you talked to her?”
“Yeah. I thought, like, I could be the guy who saw past her weird hand.”
“And she was pretty.”
“She was so pretty. Seriously. Hottest Indian girl I’ve ever seen. But I, like, pitied her.”
“Pitied?”
“Felt sorry for her. That she had to go through life with a hand like that. You know?”
He nods.
“So we dated for a while, and then we broke up. Well, she broke up with me.”
“Why?”
I sigh. “She saw through me.”
“Like a window?”
“Pretty much.”
Billy selects a blue crayon and drew something on the pad. I don’t say anything. I know I’m supposed to be able to tell him everything, but how can you explain an fMRI to a kid? I find myself growing angry. Angry at Billy. Angry at myself. Angry at Sharon, sitting over there all smug and getting paid $50 an hour to babysit. I squeeze a pillow in my fist.
“The whole thing wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been in New York. New York sucks, Billy. Sucks. People say it’s the greatest city in the world, but it isn’t. It’s the worst parts of every city in the world smashed into one overpopulated metropolis. I’ve been to Tokyo. Mexico City. London. They’re beautiful and huge and…and unique. They have their own personality. New York is this hodgepodge of hundreds of different nationalities. No identity of its own. And the thing is, people who live there think that they’re the center of the universe. They think the world rotates around them. Do you know how many novels come out every year about New York? About 9/11? Movies, too. Look at any disaster movie or alien movie or monster movie. They always attack New York. Not because it makes sense, but because that’s what movie producers think that people want to see. A giant tidal wave taking out the Empire State Building. Yeah, that’s never been done. How about Chicago? Same thing with televisions shows, too. How many cop dramas can take place in one city? If the city has that many cops and that much crime, shouldn’t they maybe focus on fixing that in real life instead of just burnishing the city’s image?
“You know what I think it really is? I think that people fall in love with the idea of New York. The glamour, the prestige, the sexiness of it all. And once they’re in love with the idea, they stop seeing anything else. They ignore the overpriced groceries, the rats, the homeless men stretching blankets over steam vents. The endless attack of extraterrestrial monsters. Because in their heads, all they see is this flawless entity that they get to be a part of. They get to be the center of the universe simply by getting a 212 phone number.”
I look up to see Billy staring at me. I realize that the volume of my voice has been steadily increasing. I hope I haven’t scared him.
“All I’m saying is that there is no center of the universe. The Mather Tower bombing confirmed that. It’s not just about 9/11 anymore. It’s not just New York and their glorified firemen. Firemen are heroes everywhere, not only in the Big Apple. You just can’t love anything that much. It’s impossible. It’s an illusion. And it’s, you know, I mean, one row back and I never would have talked to her. Never would have known what it feels like to be told that you don’t feel what you think you do. Factually, scientifically. That’s what I’m saying, man.”
I’m done, but Billy’s not. He changes crayons several times as he draws. I really wish he’d just show me this one before next week. What if there is no next week?
Finally he speaks. “Godzilla was in Tokyo.”
I smile. Smart kid. “You’re right. He was in Tokyo.”
“I think Godzilla needs a hug.”
While I’m pondering the depth of this statement, Sharon announces that the session is over. I hand her a check and accept a goodbye hug and a high five from Billy. “See you later, alligator!” he says.
I know the response. “After a while, crocodile.”
He grins and pumps his fists as though this simple exchange is a great victory. I leave on a high induced by neither nicotine nor marijuana.
I return to the office to Photoshop the Italian photos for a few hours. At a quarter to six I log off my computer and head out. The morgue is three blocks away. The temperature has dropped in the absence of sunlight, and I wish I had brought a winter coat to work.
I eschew the front entrance for a side door in the alley that is rarely locked. It lets me bypass the reception area and go straight down to the goods.
I once asked Saul why the bodies are stored underground. He shrugged. “We’re in a business district. People don’t like the idea that the dead are on the same level as they are.”
Saul is in the autopsy room in the basement. A plate-glass window separates him from me. He’s in full gear—white jacket, Latex gloves, surgical mask—and is engrossed with the body of a large woman. She doesn’t seem to mind that her small intestine is coiled around her breasts.
Saul looks up and sees me, gestures for me to wait. I sit down on the same worn plastic chairs on which hundreds of people have waited before identifying the dead. I look around. It’s a small room; only enough space for five chairs and a plant that mysteriously persists despite zero access to natural sunlight.
This room must have been standing-room-only after the Mather Tower bombing. Lines out the door on November 9 and the days that followed. Saul said they didn’t have enough drawers for all the bodies, so they had to outsource some to suburban morgues. I had showed up after the crowds had thinned. Tried to gain entrance by slipping Saul a $50 bill, which he refused.
“I need to see their faces,” I said. Held up my camera and press ID for credibility.
Saul’s eyes were sagging with exhaustion. It looked like he hadn’t shaved or slept in days. “You need to see more than that,” he said, ushering me into the room.
He’d given me free reign to open drawer after drawer and photograph the dead. It was in the middle of this, both the easiest and hardest photoshoots I’ve ever done, that the idea of the book started to form in my head. A study on death. These bodies were scarred with burns that would never heal and bruises that would never fade. Dented and filled with dust and rubble, dismembered and displaced, their death was frozen in time in these drawers. Eighty-three members of the Chicago elite were on the club levels of Mather Tower when the bombs detonated. Time of death: 6:12 in the evening, for most of them. Several people tried to jump over to adjacent buildings. They died 23 stories later than the others. The majority of the people on the lower levels of the building were evacuated before it collapsed.
Saul snaps me out of my daze by tapping on the window with his elbow. His gloved hands, held vertically near his face, are smeared with bodily fluids. He nudges the release for the door and it slides open.
“Come on in!” Saul is more animated in this dungeon than he is in his beautiful house.
“Thanks, man.” I nod at his hands. “You been digging for answers?”
“Oh, this? Gotta wash it off. Just confirming colon cancer in Miss America over there,” he says, motioning toward the bloated body on the far table. He leads me to the industrial sink, where he washes his hands twice; once with gloves on, once with them off.
“You got plenty of memory? You’re in for something unique tonight,” Saul says, peeling new gloves over his hands. He tosses me a pair.
“Anyone come to claim it?”
He shakes his head. “Naw. No need. Police found him with full identification in his apartment. Single guy.”
“Neighbor smelled him?”
“Didn’t say.” Saul walked across the room, checking a clipboard for the drawer number on his way. “One-oh-three, one-oh-three…here we are.”
He jerks open the drawer and unzips the grey bag with practiced ease. “Check him out! Average guy, right?”
I look at the body. It’s a man, early thirties, bony face. In fact, he’s bony all over. His naked skin is pale under the fluorescent lights. I noticed that his toenails are trimmed to perfection. I’ve never seen nails that well maintained on a man.
Two perpendicular incisions part his chest hair, the vertical one leading beyond where I can see.
“Let’s get him on a table,” Saul says, zipping the bag closed. He takes the head and lifts it out of the drawer. I cup the leg area with my forearms. He barely weighs more than the bag.
“How do you get them in or out when you’re alone? Or if they’re 300 pounds?” I ask, placing the body on an examination table.
Saul points over to the hefty female. “I have a dolly for them. Slide the body onto it, tilt it over a drawer, done.” He swivels his hands like a blackjack dealer finishing a shift.
“Got it.”
He unzips the bag down to the toes. I can’t help but glance at the dead man’s penis. “Dude, do we have to—”
Saul gives me a look that tells me to man up. He peels back the flaps of skin on the man’s chest, followed by both sections of ribs. There are saw marks through the sternum.
“See anything out of the ordinary?”
By this point I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies. Mom, for one, and Steven Kiley, my best friend in elementary school who got struck by lightning. And then hundreds more over the last year, many of them with their chest cavities open like this one.
I had never seen a stomach this big. Particularly in a man as thin as this one.
“That is his stomach, right?” I say, pointing to the tepid mass at the base of the abdomen. A normal stomach, as far as I can tell, is about the size of your fist. This stomach was bigger than a football.
Saul has a gleeful look on his face. “It is indeed.”
“What did he eat?”
“It’s not what he ate that is the issue,” Saul says, flipping over the stomach to reveal an incision on the back side. “It’s what he wasn’t eating.”
As the stomach spilled open, my first thought was, Why is his intestine in there?
“It’s a damn tapeworm.”
Saul nods. “Cestoda. Parasitic flatworm.” He reaches to show me something, but I touch his wrist.
“Let me get a few photos first.”
He waits patiently while I check the light meter and adjust the lens. The fluorescents overhead aren’t ideal, but they’re better than nothing. When I’m satisfied, I gesture for him to proceed.
“Check out its head. I couldn’t find it at first.” Saul parts the base of the esophagus to reveal the top of the worm. It’s slightly wider than the rest of its body, but otherwise it doesn’t have any distinguishing features.
“Have you seen this before?”
“Not like this. In fact, usually the scolex—the head—is attached to the intestine. Look, here.” He shows me that the tail continues into the intestine. “It probably started down there, but it grew so long that it rented out the stomach too. I’d say this one’s over a hundred feet, tip to tail.”
I continue to take photos. He pokes the intestines and chuckles. “You know why they usually don’t get this long?”
“No, why?”
“Because people shit them out. Sit down with the paper and push a snake out of their ass!”
“Dude.”
He laughs. “Seriously. For this guy not to have ejected the worm a long time ago—before he starved to death—he must’ve gone out of his way to keep it inside.”
I put down my camera. “What? You’re saying that he intentionally let it grow?”
Saul shrugs. “I’m just postulating. Tapeworms go where gravity goes—down. They spend their whole lives fighting just to stay in place against the natural flow of digestion. This thing,” he points at the coiled mass, “this thing was headed in the opposite direction.”
I get goosebumps. I’m sure there’s plenty of foreign bacteria in my body, but the idea that something this large could inhabit my stomach gives me the creeps. Suddenly I have to know this man’s name. I check the toe tag. “Craig Gotkowski.”
“May he rest in peace.”
I don’t mean to see it, but the street address listed below his name jumps out at me. “Donovan Boulevard? Shoot, that’s my street. He’s like a block and a half from my place.”
Saul laughs and starts to close up the chest cavity. “He doesn’t live there anymore, you know.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I know.” An idea is starting to form in my head. I want to know more about this guy. A little investigative reporting, like those idiots on the fourth floor who think the public cares about elementary school grade inflation and closeted gays in the city assembly. I’ll call it research for my book. Learn a little about Craig Gotkowski—where he died, what he read while he was dying. And if I’m lucky, determine why he didn’t go to the hospital to prevent himself from starving to death.
I toss my gloves in a trashcan and thank Saul for the invite.
“You like this one?” he asks with a hopeful look in his eyes as the door slides open.
I pat my camera. “Fascinating stuff. As always, much appreciated. Check you later.”
The wind has picked up outside. I clasp my arms across my chest, trying to retain my body heat. I realize that I didn’t even notice the smell of formaldehyde in the morgue. I guess I’m accustomed to it by this point.
I think of Dipti, foolishly hoping the thoughts will keep me warm. But it’s the end that I remember the clearest, not the good times that preceded the grand finale. I still don’t know what triggered her doubts. Maybe a friend, maybe Oprah, maybe me. Honestly, I thought she was just trying to get a reaction out of me the first time she accused me of not loving her. “Of course I do,” I said. “I love you. It’s as simple as that.”
I started to check off reasons why I loved her, but she cut me off. “No! No lists! Show me in your eyes that you love me!”
I looked into the deep brown of her irises. “There. Do you see what you want?”
Her eyes glazed over with tears. She shook her head and ran from the room.
Things were normal for another week, and then we had the same argument. I bought flowers for her, chocolates, her favorite Indian take-out. I kissed her in her favorite places. I held her deformed hand as we walked to the movies. She shook off my grip. “Hold my other hand,” she said.
She didn’t break up with me. She said she couldn’t. Said she loved me. Yet her belief persisted that I didn’t love her. That I was in love with the idea of her. The idea that I was willing to be with someone broken. Someone pitied.
She barely ate. Just picked at her lentils. Eventually she stopped sleeping too. I’d wake up to see her leaning over me in bed, propped up on an elbow.
One night I awoke to her sliding her legs over my waist, guiding my erection inside of her. We hadn’t had sex in a while, so I said nothing, not wanting to ruin the moment. We stared at each other for the duration until I silently came. She stayed on top of me, laid her head on my shoulder. “I need you to do something,” she whispered in my ear. “I just need to know.”
Dipti had a friend, a neuroanatomist, at the Loyola University med school. Jasmine was a PhD student with access to fMRI machines during off-peak hours. Dipti asked me to go in for a scan, and I, foolishly, agreed. I thought that she was worried for my health. Maybe thought I had a tumor or something.
As I lay down for the scan, I thought I saw Jasmine mouth the words, “You okay?” to Dipti, but I couldn’t tell for sure.
“Tucker, I want you to look at Dipti during the scan, okay? It’ll only take 12 minutes total,” Jasmine said.
“Got it.”
I stared at Dipti, precious Dipti, and for the first time in weeks, I detected a smile on her face. A hopeful twitch at the corners of her mouth.
Thirty seconds passed. Jasmine said, “Okay, close your eyes and count to forty. Out loud.”
I did as instructed.
Then, “Look at Dipti for thirty seconds.”
And so on for the duration of the scan. When it was over, Jasmine wore a grim expression. She asked to speak with Dipti alone. I stepped outside and closed the door.
At this point, I was legitimately worried that I had a brain tumor. What else could explain all the fuss? Had Dipti seen this coming? Is that why she had been pulling away?
Dipti appeared at the door a few minutes later. Before I could enter the room, she walked out and gave me a peck on the cheek.
“Am I okay?” I asked.
She nodded, but the tears in her eyes betrayed her.
“What? Just say it. It’s okay.”
She shook her head. “No, it’s just…I know you weren’t lying to me. I want you to know that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I just needed to know.” She pulled me into an embrace, touched her twisted hand to my cheek, and took a step back into the hall. “I’ll wait out here. Go on.”
I was too confused to argue, so I went into the fMRI room. Jasmine was seated on the end of the examination table.
“Come on over here, Tucker. I need to show you the results of the scan.”
I held up my hands in protest. “Just say it. Tumor?”
She shook her head. “No. Your brain is healthy.”
I exhaled. “Okay. Okay.” I walked over to the table to look at the computer monitor to Jasmines’ right. On the screen was a cross section of a brain, a right-facing cerebral mugshot. A chunk of the brain on the left was highlighted by reds and bright yellows, as was a smaller portion near the forehead on the right.
“Is that my brain?”
“No. This is the control against which we’ll compare your brain.” Jasmine spun the trackball and selected a different subject. “This is you.”
Unlike the control, my brain was had minimal highlights, and even they weren’t in the same areas. “Am I brain dead?” I joked.
Jasmine gave me a sad smile. “You’re fine. But…okay, I don’t know how to tell you this.” She took a deep breath and exhaled. “The control brain that I showed you is a person who went through the exact scan that you did. Except that person, and the other people in that study group, were in love with the person they were looking at. The illuminated areas you see here are the right ventral tegmental area and the caudate nucleus, which—”
“Wait.” I stood up and took a few steps back. I felt a wave of anger wash over me. “Dipti put you up to this. She doesn’t believe that I’m in love with her. That—” I pointed at the screen. “That is just some bullshit you’re telling me. She put you up to this.”
“Tucker, no. This is real. This is a real study. It’s proven, tested many times. And this is your brain. The results indicate that you’re not in love with Dipti.”
I felt embarrassed and ashamed and angry all at once. “This is fucking ridiculous. I don’t have to listen to this from you. How the fuck would you know whether or not I’m in love with Dipti? With your, your machines….”
“Look, I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? Yeah, you’re sorry.” I turned to the door. “Where’s Dipti? Does she know this?”
“Tucker! Come back. She knows.”
“She fucking left?” It then dawned on me that Dipti wasn’t there, that she had already said her goodbye. I looked at the floor. “She left. My Dipti left.”
Jasmine, presumably too afraid to reach over to give me a hug, adopted a soft tone of voice. “It’s going to be okay.”
“But I love her.” My voice was just about a whisper.
“You—I can’t tell you how you feel.”
I looked at her. “But you can tell me what my brain feels.”
“Yes.”
“And you believe that’s true? That’s all there is? Love or no love.”
“Romantic love, yes. It’s conclusive.”
“How did she know?”
“Woman know. We know.”
I saw Dipti once after that day at the hospital. Just a glimpse of her back through the window of an uptown bakery. I stopped, contemplated taking a photo, but decided against it. I wondered what my brain looked like at that moment.
I reach Donovan Boulevard. Craig Gotkowski’s apartment building is sandwiched between two much larger buildings. I approach the front door, which is propped open by a stack of phone books. I start to walk in, but I stop myself. What am I doing? Why am I breaking into a dead man’s house? The smart thing to do is to walk away and sleep on it. Figure out if I really give a damn. At least in the morning I’d have enough light to take photos.
Saul said that the guy lived alone, but what did he know? I decide to hit the buzzer, just to see if someone would answer. I wait for a response. Nothing. Buzz again. Nothing.
Shaking my head at my stupidity, I ascend the stairs to the second floor. A single light bulb, its cover missing, illuminates the stairwell. A notice about trespassing is stapled to Gotkowski’s door. I’m more concerned with the deadbolt than the notice.
I go back outside. There’s barely room to walk square-shouldered through the alley below Gotkowski’s place, making it easy to climb. I feel the stitches on my jacket stretch as I pull myself up onto a window ledge and then a stone rim ten feet above the ground. I balance between the two buildings, peer into the apartment. I can’t see anything.
The first window is bolted shut, but the second slides open. Paint chips flutter to the ground below like leaves. For a second I think I’m going to fall, but I find a grip and swing into the apartment, landing awkwardly on my knees.
It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust. I can see the light from the hallway shining under the door, so I feel my way in that direction. I catch my shin on something and swear. When I reach the door, I grope the wall for a light switch and find it.
What do I expect to see when I turn to face the room? Books everywhere, drawings stapled to the wall? Thousands of candles and effigies? A floor teaming with tapeworms? I don’t know. What I see instead is a tidy, sparse living room. There is a single overstuffed chair, an end table, a coffee table, and a small television with rabbit ears. There are two bookshelves, one stocked with National Geographics. Several marble-bound journals are stacked on the end table next to the chair.
I’m compelled to look in the refrigerator, to see what a starving man eats. A fluorescent light flickers on in the kitchen when I hit the switch. There is no table in this tiny space, just a few cupboards filled with canned beans and tuna. There isn’t much more in the short fridge in the corner, just some eggs, condiments, and some milk. A coffee maker sits on the counter, a drum-size tin of Folgers next to it. Either Gotkowski ate out a lot, or he didn’t eat. Either way, the tapeworm had consumed the vast majority of everything he put in his system.
I turn off the light, go back to the living room, and sit down on the edge of the chair. This is where he spent his days, reading, watching TV, and writing. I pick up the top journal and flip to a page in the middle. “Today Sylvia and I watched a marathon of The Cosby Show,” it read. “We laughed and laughed.”
So the old man had a girlfriend. I keep reading.
“Sylvia has a much better temperament than Lauren and Natasha. We’ve been together for three months, and I have yet to get sick. The other two gave me the most intense stomach pains. Perhaps the same will happen with Sylvia, but I’ll keep my hopes up.”
I don’t recall my girlfriends giving me stomach pains. I used to get the farts after Dipti and I ate at her favorite Indian restaurant, but that’s as bad as it got. I flip to a later entry.
“Is this how pregnant women feel when they rest their hands on their bulging stomachs? The assurance of company? Sylvia is always there, always with me, always growing. She seems to like the tuna I feed her.”
An image of the tapeworm from the morgue flashes in my mind. Disgusted, I skip to the last entry in the journal.
“It takes all of my strength to lift this pen to paper. Sylvia is plump and happy, but I have never been thinner. I have given my body to her, for her, and thus I am happy. The company we keep.
“I fear that my time is short. I doubt a journal entry from an emaciated man counts as an official will, but in case it does, I leave my possessions to Sylvia. May she continue in my stead. If anyone cares to read this, please know that I have atoned for my sins. I have suffered. Now I must sleep.”
That was it. I poke and prod around the rest of the apartment, finding nothing out of the ordinary until I open the medicine cabinet. There I find a small vial marked “tapeworm diet pills” in English and Spanish.
I slump into the chair, pills in hand. Gotkowski had infected himself with a tapeworm. He didn’t seem concerned about weight; rather, he just seemed to like the company.
I snap a few pictures in the dim light and let myself out through the front door. The street is silent, void of life. I reach my apartment within minutes, and soon have a pot of water boiling on the stove for tea.
The police will read Craig Gotkowski’s journals and wonder about the “sins” he mentioned in his last entry. Maybe they’ll pin a cold case on him, just to give someone closure. And if I’m lucky, they’ll dust for prints and find mine all over the apartment. I don’t have a record, but perhaps they’ll find me anyway. They’ll come over, show their badges, ask if they can come in. “Of course,” I’ll say. And then I’ll tell them about what I did. That on the day that I learned that I didn’t love Dipti, I replied to an e-mail asking for my services as a photographer.
“Freelance inquiry, will pay,” it read. “Take the photo of Mather Tower. All directions, and direct views of the club levels a must. E-mail photos to this address. Will pay via e-check.”
Despite knowing in my gut that something was wrong about the request, I took 34 photos of Mather Tower the day of the fMRI. I didn’t care. I cashed the check two days before the building crumbled to the ground, leaving bodies strewn across the streets of Chicago.
This I would tell the police.
I pop the top of the vial I stole from Craig Gotkowski and put a pill on the edge of my kitchen sink, which doubles as my bathroom sink. I’ll see how I feel about it in the morning.
Now I understand. Billy’s right. Even Godzilla needs a hug.