ANDREW F. SULLIVAN
After a while, you know how they died just by the smell.
“He left his watch in the sink. Filled it with water first.”
The man did not kill himself. We wade through pizza boxes, rat feces, and empty cans of mushroom soup, the last few drops leaving behind putrid whiffs that complement the greasy outline where the body used to lie on the couch. The couch itself will be taken away and incinerated tomorrow. So will the clear plastic bags of congealed underwear, busted socks, travel magazines, and tangled extension cords. Icy vistas and soggy jungles splayed out on the floor. The smell clings to everything inside the house, a thin film of loss. Angela has already started to wash the kitchen walls with industrial soap. We will all stand in the shower for hours tonight, trying to wash it out. We will call people we love and ask them to remember things, anything really.
“A heart attack…at forty? No shit.”
This is what happens when you are alone long enough. The smell is thicker and heavier than a suicide. If it’s an apartment, the landlord usually calls us. He calls us because there is no one else to call. He calls us because the property is no longer making him money and the other tenants are complaining. If it’s a house, it’s the neighbours calling, the ones with the very high fences. There is a new smell they can’t place – until they do. Someone reaches out to the family, to whatever shard is left over from an old Thanksgiving dinner that ended in a stabbing or a bottle of gin bounced off someone’s head. An estranged uncle, a forgotten sister, a son who doesn’t care what we do with the body, just clean the place out.
And so we do.
The van is parked out front, but there is no logo. We don’t make a fuss. A crew of five cleaning out the dead, cleansing all the fallout from abandoned fathers, neglected mothers, and wayward sons. We find hard drives full of evil, folders of letters never sent, pictures of families that are more like fables. Every one of these homes is betrayed by its smell.
I usually deal with the human element. Anton and Dennis handle the biological hazards, the rats and roaches lingering around the edges. The cats who have finally tasted human flesh. The bats in the attic and the songbirds in the rafters. Angela covers the surfaces, the deep cleaning. Her fingertips are always pink. Sometimes at night, she holds them up to mine and I have to ask her if they’re burning. She gives off so much heat in the dark. She is my furnace.
Caleb is in charge of sorting through what’s left. He tries to find the pieces that haven’t been ruined yet. Anything worth saving is passed along to the family members, donated or auctioned off somewhere. Free weights. Televisions. Jewellery and collectible Star Wars figures. The rest is thrown into the fire, any fire that will take it. He is sorting through mail and old photo albums when I pass him in the living room.
“Just a lot of nature shots, old fields, houses, pets. Is there a pet here, Tasha? Looks like there were cats and dogs before, but no one said anything about it. And I don’t smell the shit.”
“I don’t either,” I say. “I think just the tenant. Paramedics didn’t notice anything.”
The couch is lost. The body had been here for at least a week. I struggle through the stacked garbage bags up the stairs to the bedroom, cataloguing the mess to conquer. The previous tenant had taken to blowing his nose on the walls, arcs of fine blood now misted brown onto drywall.
I find what I am looking for huddled in the pink bathtub. Its presence chills the room.
Massive black paws dip over the side of the tub, a large head with floppy ears and wide black nose sniffs at the air when I enter the room. He doesn’t always linger like this.
“Go home,” I say. “He’s gone.”
The Shuck pretends it can’t see me. Its thick hide rises and falls as it pants. Four hundred pounds of canine wheezing and snuffling, half-hidden by a shower curtain. Its fur is black and shimmering. Your hand can slide right through the coiled flesh. I don’t tremble or flinch. I stand tall surrounded by the pink tiles. It is sated, for now.
“He’s gone,” I say. “You can’t feed anymore.”
The beast rises to its feet and stands almost above my waist. It bows its massive skull and passes through my white coverall, my jeans, my flesh. A cold wind.
It continues down the hall behind me and out through the wall. No one else can see it here. It walks through them without a sound. Its howl carried away by the breeze, by a conversation, by the rattle of the radio or someone’s inner monologue reciting an argument.
It only comes when you are alone. Alone within yourself and all you carry.
A speck of dust in the air after the light goes out. A growl from below. And a smell.
When my mother died years ago, we all returned to the old valley up north near Sudbury, to the house filled with her face, our faces, all of them peering down from the walls to examine our red eyes and raw knuckles. You could watch my brothers ageing on the walls as you walked down the hall toward the bathroom. There was only one-ply dangling from the toilet paper roll.
The line for the wake stretched around three sides of the funeral home. The sea of hands passing, shaking, weaving, sweating in the summer heat. No smell of rot. A clean death, someone said and someone else coughed into their hand. I still shook it. I shook them all.
My brothers and I all stood in a line, Dad at the end. He didn’t see the beast beside him, didn’t hear it panting in the spaces between prayers and promises and weeping. She was only 57 when it came for her, the casket closed because he couldn’t bear to see her, to deal with it himself. An infection in the blood is what the doctors told us, but they only shook their heads when I asked for more. There was nothing I could change. Nothing clean about it.
I spent the night in her old house, now his old house, alone, studying for exams, rewriting my name in the top corner. Tasha, repeated over and over until it didn’t mean anything and the black dog stopped pacing outside in the hall. I knew then he was asleep and I could close my eyes.
The next day, walking through the graveyard, Dad caught up with me.
“You can leave if you want, you know. I can see you don’t want to be here.”
He didn’t notice the heaving dog behind him, the beast almost as large as him. He couldn’t smell the stench, old milk and wheat and blood seeping through its fur.
“No one wants to be here. It’s a funeral for fuck’s sake,” I said, trying to walk away. He slipped a hard hand around my wrist, closed it tight. For years, I had only came back for Christmas. His hands were too familiar. They recognized the old cracks, the spots I couldn’t cover. I was alone here. It was night again. Even under the sun, sweating through my dress, sweating in all the worst places, sweating in broad circles under my arms, it was night.
“I know your heart,” Dad said, the words sputtering out of his mouth. “I know your heart.”
I pulled away, kept walking, keeping pace with the crowd as we skittered between tombstones, toward the open dirt maw across the field. My brothers were pallbearers. My father did not give a speech, just tossed his dirt into the hole. And then I tossed mine. And then I left.
I know your heart.
That is what I do best. I leave.
Angela presses hot fingers into my spine, runs her dexterous hands over each node. She finds the spots where I carry the weight of the day, the families asking for our help, for our discretion, our ability to make their shames disappear. We are a service. Lethe Restoration. No symbol on our uniforms, no logo on the truck. A small website on the Internet. Discreet.
“Maybe let Caleb handle this. Give him some time on the phones. I heard that McCaul lady yesterday, I mean, everyone could hear her. Grief, whatever, that lady was a shit bird.”
This is what they want most from us. This is what they pay us to do. To keep whatever secrets their dead leave behind. Or to mop up the mess when no one else will claim them.
“It’s fine. It’s part of the process. She’ll pay just like everybody else. The dirty laundry has to go somewhere and she does not want to touch it.”
“And that is why your neck is so fuckin’ twisted, Tasha. Feel that. Here. Put a finger on that. Hmm? How does that feel?”
“Like a rock. A pebble.”
“Yeah, under your skin, you think that’s healthy? You think that’s wise?”
I grunt and roll away onto my side of the bed. Our apartment is close to empty. Angela would call it minimalist. It is better this way – we are well-acquainted with hoarders. Twenty-seven years of Entertainment Weekly and Newsweek toppling over to trap an old woman in her powder room. A man with a fungal infection in his brain after every pot and pan and plate became a litter box. The woman in her mid-forties who drowned in her own diapers after the toilet stopped working. I don’t miss stacks of books on the floor or overflowing laundry hampers. We only have two sharp knives in the kitchen and four plates. We only have what we need for now.
“You can’t just roll over and pretend we’re done here.”
Sometimes I see the Shuck on street corners, heaving shoulders and thick black coat standing out under the sun. It is always following someone, always attached to a new victim. Even in the crowd, that person is alone, an island separated by some vicious currents beneath the water, things that we can’t see. The Shuck can smell it, feeds off it, follows like a loyal pet, but the beast is something more like a parasite.
“But I just did. And we are done.”
“You’re an asshole, Tasha.”
Sometimes the Shuck lingers even after it has all become too much, licking the ground around the splatter, panting beneath a length of rope hung in a closet or dangling from a shower rod. It lurks around the scene, its hide flashing between the bright warning lights and caution tape before the cause of death is determined. It struts down hospital hallways and barks at the windows outside church basements hosting support groups, asking them to have another drink, another swallow, another lurch into their veins.
The Shuck always needs to feed.
My dad’s mother is the one who first explained the Shuck to me. A single tree on a moor somewhere on the island that she came from, a single tree and her own father dangling from a branch high up, so high no one could reach him from the ground. And a dog in that middle distance, pacing beneath the body and the puddle of shit beneath it. A big black dog circling the moor, silent and cold. She said they must have brought it with them, across waves and through storms. A harbinger, she said. A terrible bedtime story, my mother said.
A lie, Dad said.
“I am an asshole,” I say. The fan keeps the noise of the street at bay, lets us believe we are the only ones in this place tonight. It keeps out the drunk screams and shouts on Saturdays, the cranking lifts of garbage trucks on Wednesdays and the nightly huff of the late bus hydraulics. It keeps out the doubt when you’re alone and even the Shuck can’t make itself heard.
“I know. I’m the one who said it.”
I wrap my arms around her body, feel the heat push its way into me. I am cold, but I can feed off of her heat. I can thaw. She flicks her hair into my eyes, but I don’t pull away.
“Yes, you said it. But I can be other things too.”
I push my body into hers, my lips into her lips, and it is in this place that the Shuck cannot find me, cannot smell my breath, my loss, my loneliness. I know the Shuck is out there though, down in the subway somewhere, stalking a platform, waiting for someone, anyone, to jump.
The new job is a widow in a penthouse overlooking the city from a hill, staring down over the streetcar wires and specks of people down to the waterfront. Her son is the one who phoned a few days ago, claiming she refused to see him for the last two years after he married a woman from a Catholic family. She called him a Papist, called him a betrayer.
He seemed to genuinely miss her, but we don’t offer a discount for legitimate grief. It was the doorman who found her while delivering packages after she kept ignoring the notices, the doorman who found her slumped down in the shower, curled into the fetal position. So many of them are found naked, stripped bare for no one. She left behind a thick brown stain on the bath mat. We parked the van around the corner to avoid making a scene.
“She really liked dogs, I can tell you that much,” Caleb says, going through her hard drive. The rest of us are moving furniture. There is not much mess here, except inside the bathroom. The usual sex toys are tastefully arranged in the bedroom, primarily glass and steel. The reams of old letters disparaging relatives, husbands, the women on the charity board, all are ordered in neat folders in the living room. We ride up and down the elevator with old armoires and a writing desk from the 1850s. A moving van has been ordered by the son.
Anton and Dennis sort through the clothes and try to make themselves busy. There are no biological hazards here. Angela scrubs and scrubs away at the floor in the bathroom, a mask pulled up over her face. My white coveralls are spotless. I sit in the bedroom on a bare mattress, a few stains from old romances scattered over the flower pattern. I sit waiting for the dog I know should be here, to shoo it away once again. Sometimes it gets its fill before we arrive.
None of the others can see it. My mother never could. Sometimes I ask Angela if she feels the cold, if there is a wind cutting through her too, but she just tells me we’re wired differently. She runs hot at all times. She always needs more fuel. A lot of rice and noodles in the kitchen.
“Where are you, you mutt?”
The smell of loss is still here, even without the Shuck. Thickest in the bathroom, even with all the cleaning. A stroke in the shower – it is so easy to die in the bathroom, so many unfortunate places to fall, so many hard unyielding surfaces to hit on your way down.
Only the kitchen is more dangerous.
“Where are you?”
When my phone vibrates, I hesitate. Another recluse in a tower somewhere discovered this morning, a floor littered with what looks like cheese, but could be pus. A dead man on a balcony waving to his neighbours. A noose in a split-level over the stairwell. A pile of used matches beside a bed, a bent spoon and curses carved into the bed frame. Fuck you all. It vibrates again.
“Hello?”
“Tasha? You at work?”
My brothers tell me he won’t see anyone. They tell me he has the door barred against them, that he is cursing, that he still has that old shotgun, that the grass is growing up over the porch. The pheasants he used to raise behind the barn are tearing each other’s throats out, feeding on the blood. The septic tank is flooding. They tell me he won’t see them, won’t see the doctor, won’t see the priest. Dad doesn’t trust the voices on the other side. He doesn’t trust what he can’t see.
My brothers stopped visiting after Mom passed. They took their cues from me. They heard enough to know enough, but they don’t ask questions because they have circled the same drain. They are worried though, worried about a scene, a mess, their consciences most of all, I suspect. I listen to them rant and rave, their voices whistling past one another.
I wait for the Shuck to appear here, to shoo it away once again, to keep it from waiting outside my door. These confrontations keep us equal, keep the distance real and viable. Cleaning up the leftover people, the bodies. Just bodies. Keep people like Angela safe in the dark while I lie awake and count steps up to the roof of the building, metres to the ground, measuring the physics of impact and the probability of passing pedestrians in the middle of the night.
“What am I supposed to do about it? He gave up a long time ago. You know this. I know this. Fuck. Come on. Ancient asshole that he is, he knows he has nobody left.”
There is a pause on the end of the line that says please, that asks for more.
Everyone is so hungry.
“I’ll come up tomorrow,” I say. Their voices fill the phone again, but I hang up.
Angela is standing in the doorway with a string of teeth on a wire. A necklace.
“She kept this in the water tank behind the toilet bowl.”
A string of baby teeth.
“Throw them out.”
The house lies at the floor of the valley. It was once painted blue, now faded to grey and distended with benign additions. The pheasant coop is quiet. They have all finished one another off or escaped under the loose chicken wire. I park my car out by the laneway, make my way through the grass that reaches up to my knees. My brothers stayed back in town, drinking, talking to each other in the back room of their shop, surrounded by half-built engines and retired motorcycles. Parts bikes, they say. We just harvest the good bits.
The old oaks behind the house do their best to block out the sun. I continue wading through the grass. My phone sputters on and off with reception out here. I can’t rely on it to help me.
“You don’t need to go, you don’t owe him shit,” Angela said last night. She wouldn’t touch me, just sat in the corner of the room, the silver stilts of the chair wrapped around her legs.
“Just think of it as clean up then,” I told her, packing a bag, ignoring her words, wondering where the dog was lurking. Lethe Restoration had another job that started this morning, seventy-five cats in a basement after the owner fell asleep forever watching Law & Order. Her walls were covered with portraits of Jerry Orbach. The floors were covered in scat and cats that could not go the distance. Animal control had been notified. It would be a joint operation.
I told the daughter she would not have to worry. We would take care of everything.
“And do you know when you’ll be back?” Angela asked, her voice chasing me down the hall. “Do you know when this shit stops? Tasha. Listen to me. Does it ever stop?”
It doesn’t. It never does.
I try the front door, but he has pushed a table or the couch to block it. The windows are papered over, fading headlines, fading faces. Reds turning to pink. Accusations in bold print. A sound coming from inside the house, the place itself sputtering to tell me nothing, nothing at all. The Shuck waiting here for me, its weight palpable, its cold present even in the summer. Its smell calling me like it called to Dad his whole life.
I smash a window with my right hand wrapped in an old T-shirt. The kitchen is empty. I tear foil and newspaper down from some windows to let in the light, find dust stacked on the counters, find coffee cups arranged in swirling circles on the floor. I kick them into the corners. Ceramic explosions to get his attention. A voice upstairs, calling for someone. Not for me.
The phone line has been cut.
Sometimes Dad would come home from the school, hands already clenched into fists. My brothers and I would sit at the window, watching him walk back and forth across the yard, watch him headed toward the hill above us, the elm watching over the house. I asked my brothers about the dog with him, the beast almost half his size, and they told me it was just a shadow I was seeing. But I knew what shadows were, knew that they stretched out at the end of the day. The dog did not stretch. The Shuck was not a shadow.
It sat beside him like a lap dog when I came home alone after soccer practice, when he sat in front of the television, yelling at the Blue Jays. It raised its head whenever I walked in the door. It was there when his voice would whisper in my ear to be good, to be patient, to be quiet when we had company. It paced the front yard when I came home late one night with Kevin Higgins, came running up to the car door, howling and barking at the full moon. My father had stood on the porch, swaying, cursing. I told Kevin to go home. To never come back.
“I know your heart,” Dad bellowed from the porch, but I thought he was talking to Kevin.
“You can’t scare me like that, you know. You’re mine,” his voice said as I fled to my room, the same room I head toward now, taking the stairs two at a time. Our faces still line the hallways, our growth charted by Sears two months before every Christmas. I hit twelve and I stopped growing. I hit twelve and the Shuck started to follow me too.
His body barely fits in my old bed. His beard is grey, thick, and full of old food. The bottle in his hand is empty. He has soiled his pants and isn’t wearing a shirt. This is not new.
“Who said you could come in here?”
Kevin Higgins did not come back for me. My mother did not come back for me. She stayed in the ground, buried deeper than I wanted to dig. My grandmother saw the same thing when she looked out into the night. She told me the Shuck did not understand distance or faith. It did not know oceans or skyscrapers or touch screens. It only knew the weight inside you, how to be alone in a crowd of people, how to lie in someone’s arms and remain entirely apart.
“You see him, don’t you? Tasha, you see him, don’t you?”
After the school didn’t need him and Mom didn’t need him, Dad tried raising rabbits. He tried raising pigs. He tried raising pheasants, but sometimes he put two males into the same cage, got stuck watching them tear each other apart, afraid to stick his hands inside. Anything to ignore the Shuck. It waited peacefully. It waited because that is what it was born to do.
“Yes. He’s here.”
The Shuck is in the bed with him, its massive body sprawled across Dad’s stomach. It gazes at me with empty sockets, heavy breathing. Each exhalation chills the air between us.
“You were the one who knew.”
I never should have told him I saw the dog, that I was like him. Dad followed me after that, his car parked behind mine at baseball games and bush parties. Lurking outside my door, asking me if I could see it behind him. What was it waiting for, he asked sometimes. Why were we bound like this together? His hand around my wrist, his other hand on my shoulder.
“Make it go away. Make him go away.”
The Shuck climbs to rest its head on my father’s chest, breathing directly into his hazy eyes, soothing his bright red brow. I don’t move from the doorway. I don’t speak.
When I told them I was leaving for school, he ranted and raved, slammed doors up and down the hall, kicked my brothers out of the house. My mother hid in the basement. The Shuck lurked behind him in the hallway as he held me up against a picture of his mother, as he shook my face in his hand. “You would do this. I know your heart. I know. It’s a faithless thing.”
The Shuck pulls itself further up onto Dad’s body. All the windows here are covered with newspaper. I begin to tear the paper down, the light pricking at the darkness on the bed. The dog melds with the body. Dad’s eyes begin to close. Dad’s eyes begin to clear. He nods at me.
Soon, all I see is the Shuck in the bed. Its stomach is distended. It is full. It is waiting.
It has always been there.
I walk back down the stairs. You can always tell by the smell. Cancer. A heart attack. A suicide by pills, by knives, by rope or a bullet up and out through the skull. I smell the fear here. This is how he died. Fear clenching his throat until he could not breathe. Hate degraded until every shadow was a nightmare. Until every knock was reason for paranoia. There is always something coming for you.
I shove the kitchen table out from the door and step outside. The sun is still in the sky and I head toward the hill, the same one he used to pace before dinner. I head toward the highest point I can find, an open field with one old elm tree stranded among the hay. Behind me, I feel its presence, the weight of the Shuck plodding behind me. It has waited so long. It had skipped out on other meals to find me here. Toward the top of the hill, I gaze up into the branches, waiting to find bodies in the family tree, waiting to find someone like me.
At the top of the hill, I finally have reception. Angela picks up on the first ring.
“I need you to bring the van. The whole team. Tonight.”
The Shuck walks up to me, nuzzles its head against my waist. Stale sweat and old urine.
“We’re already on our way.”
I run my hand through its black fur. I rub my knuckles between its ears. The Shuck gurgles and pants. The tree above me stays empty. The house remains a hole. I pet the beast’s head again.
I can almost forget the smell.