Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Finding my body

On the third day my neighbor, Jim, is concerned enough by the three newspapers in the driveway that he crosses the street to investigate. He opens the mailbox and sees two days' of mail in it. He looks in the garage and sees that the car is there; I'm not on a trip.
Jim looks into through the kitchen door, which looks through the length of the house's first of its two floors. He's apprehensive as to what he might see and relieved, a little, to see nothing. He rings the doorbell and knocks. Nothing. He thinks of circling the house and looking in other windows but instead he calls Sam, one of my two brothers. John lives nearer and travels outside the area less often than Sam, but Jim knows Sam better and has his number in his phone. He reaches Sam, who thinks of asking him to get the key to the house hidden under a rock and go inside but abandons the idea before he articulates it, knowing it's beyond the scope of a favor to ask a neighbor, however good a friend that neighbor might be.
None of them are hardened to these matters as others would be. Cops, doctors, emergency medical workers. Sam calls 911 and requests a wellness check. A police officer will be there soon, he's told. He tells Jim where the key is and asks him to give it to the officer, and leaves for the house. During the twenty-minute drive to it, he calls John and tells him what's going on, and John too heads for the house.
The police officer arrives before either of them do and enters. His voice booms with an official tone as he states his reason for entering and calling for a response. Jim stands in the driveway and waits for my brothers, relieved he's not obligated to do more than that, glad he isn't faced with the prospect of finding a body, maybe naked and sprawled on a bathroom floor.
Me, 1959.
I'm in bed and I've been dead for two days, my aortic aneurysm having exploded at night, the kind of death I'd hoped for. The cop finds me quickly, led to my bedroom on the first floor by instinct and the smell of death in the house, which is mild at this point—it's cool in the house—but his nose is a practiced one. He puts a blue latex glove on his left hand and checks for a pulse. It's obvious that he won't find one, but he follows procedure. He's certain it's not a crime scene but that's not his call to make so puts on a second glove. Using his portable radio, he call the coroner, then departs to talk to my brothers, who have both arrived and are in the driveway. He delivers the news, waits for it to sink in for a few moments, then tells my brothers, politely, that they will want to move their cars to let other vehicles into the driveway. Jim tells them to park in his driveway.
He walks around the house, looking for broken windows or anything unusual that might have been discarded near it. 
The coroner arrives with an assistant. He checks for a pulse, makes sure my pupils are fixed and dilated, listens for a heartbeat with his stethoscope. The put my body in a bag and zip it up.

1 comment:

  1. What wait? Is this for real? Sorry, I am completely new here and this was the first post I saw, and I saw it was relatively recently posted..

    ReplyDelete