It rose out of the trees, pale in the pre-dawn, temple-like but without the carvings and monkeys that could’ve given it true character. Years ago the stoneware and brickwork might have been whitewashed, but had been a colorless gray for so long that I no longer remembered. We followed one of the stark walls back around to a loading bay and through the door that had been sprung for several presidential administrations, and finally had to turn on our flashlights. Wherever the beams fell they landed on peeled paint and abandonment and years of vandalism and heaps of junk so useless it was worthless even as scrap. Step through that door and the aloof vibrancy of the woods fled, to leave you swallowed by silent echoes from some lost decade.
“What a desolate place to die,” Rachel said.
It crossed my mind that Jamey was hardly the first, and that I’d done in my virginity here, too. Atmosphere is a low priority when your hormones are loud and shiny.
Andre led us to him, in one of the middle rooms. As the place had been gutted since its demise, over the years we’d never known exactly what occurred where, but I suspected that the dank sepulchre where Jamey lay with the needle in his vein and rubber tubing loose around his bicep was where saws might’ve whined while tatters of flesh speckled men in slick raincoats.
Everything he’d needed was still there, if not in his arm, then close at hand. Bent spoon, pinch of cotton; the votive candle had burned down to a ring of wax. He lay turned onto one side, his unstuck arm drawn up to pillow his head, nose ring and half-smile still in place.
“And there was this, too,” Andre said as he handed us a slip of paper. “The spoon was on top of it.”
We read: No, it wasn’t an accident this time. No apologies, no mewling, which I respected but kept to myself. Andre didn’t look up to hearing that.
“It’s dated eight days ago?” I said. “Who dates his suicide note to begin with?”
“He always was pretty detail-oriented, for a junkie,” Rachel said.
Andre bristled. “He wasn’t a junkie.”
“Sorry, I guess I was confused by the syringe.”
“Angus, tell her he was no junkie.”
“Far as I know, he never shared a needle in his life,” I told her, from the floor. “He was in control.”
“What are you doing down there?” That frown, that beautiful frown. “You don’t think he’s … still…?”
“Eight days?” I was on all fours on the gritty concrete. Had touched his supple cheeks and now hovered in to sniff. “He doesn’t smell bad. Doesn’t even look like he’s started to decompose.”
“Well, it does feel like a meat locker in here … if you’ll excuse the expression.” Now Rachel was being nasty, seeing if she could make Andre flinch. “Probably it hasn’t warmed up much even on the sunny days, the past week.”
“But look at his color,” I argued, too intrigued to feel much grief, which maybe I wouldn’t have felt regardless. I’ve always had this easy take on death, just part of the natural order and sometimes a smart career move, and if I never could believe in Father, Son, or Holy Ghost, I could still believe in System.
Although for being dead, Jamey had a hue that could be called robust. As Andre squirmed, I peeled aside the jacket Jamey was wearing only on one arm, and his flannel, and his T-shirt, to bare the shoulder he’d been lying on. Blood should’ve pooled there, left the skin as dark as an eggplant. I believed in gravity, too, until now.
“Oh, this is creeping me out,” Rachel said, but leaned over my shoulder without apprehension. When a corpse won’t behave like one, it’s easy to overlook a technicality or two.
Andre groaned and told us we were like two six-year-olds with a dead cat, and turned away with his flash and stole half our light. We looked up when he quit shuffling and flapping his long olive green canvas coat, and left his beam on a wall and what had been spray-painted there. All three of us agreed that Jamey had done it, given the presence of both the can and his trademark A’s, with the horizontal extending past the diagonals, like the anarchy symbol without the circle.
“‘Musica mundana’?” Andre read aloud. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
We couldn’t decide. Lately Jamey had despaired over his own floundering musical aspirations, whatever talent he had on a fast exile to oblivion. He employed a small arsenal of keyboards and samplers and tape decks, collecting the noises that engulfed the city and combining them with those of his own creation into aural collages that nobody could dance to. It still seemed unlikely that he’d call his own work mundane, then misspell everything to boot.
“Looks Latin,” Rachel finally said.
“Nathan would know,” Andre said. “Nathan should be here, and Mae, Mae should be here too, I should’ve called them,” and he set off again for a phone before Rachel and I could persuade him that a few more hours wasn’t going to make any difference.
That Jamey. When he set his mind to it, he always could throw the most interesting parties.
*
Someday when I have a hundred bucks an hour to blow to hear an informed opinion, I think it could be really fun to go to a psychologist and see the reaction I get, admitting that the one constant in my life, at its various stages, seems to be a derelict slaughterhouse.
Of course I remember it from a time before dereliction, still operating but in the process of being driven under by incorporated abattoirs, tottering on its independent legs like a newborn veal. Although it was years before I realized this, that whoever had worked there would’ve been jettisoned toward the unemployment line within a few months of that magical and terrible winter day.
What I best remember is tramping there through the snow with my father, because it was within walking distance of our house and he’d wanted to order a side of beef to lay in stock in the freezer downstairs and knew he could get it for not much over wholesale cost there. I was six, on Christmas vacation from first grade and already tired of the new toys, maybe, but swept up in drama that afternoon as my father and I bundled against the cold and set out like a pair of trappers for the family meat.
We must’ve talked, but what about I can’t recall, except for him teasing me that I’d better not tell any of the meatmen my name because they might mistake me for a cow. Which utterly perplexed me until he explained that my name, my fine Scottish name that he had given me in a fit of nationalistic fervor for a homeland never seen, was shared by a breed of cattle.
Twenty-one years later I still remember the milky gray of the sky and the icy whisper of snowflakes as we stomped and stamped along; the way my father would grab me by my mittened hands and swing me up and over when the drifts got too deep. I knew that day that I must’ve grown older and more able in his eyes, that this would be the first of countless adventures that he and I would have in the coming years.
While my father was deciding how best to apportion our beef into steaks and roasts and ground, I strayed off out of curiosity and boredom, finding myself behind the slaughterhouse, undetected while I watched some squat, grizzled man gnaw at a wet cigar stub and grumble curses as he shoveled up a spill of what I took to be fat ropes. They slipped and slithered and glistened as he chased them, favoring one leg, and left pink smears in the snow while he slung them into an enormous wheeled pail that must’ve overturned. He noticed me finally, and now I sort of knew what the gray ropes really were, and with one fatty loop draped over the rim of the pail, he leaned on it and grinned around his cigar. His teeth were stained, and one eye covered by a gray film.