Dan Johnson

The doorbell interrupted Jenn mid-sentence.

“Must be UPS for you, Thomas,” I said.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “My next order shouldn’t come in until tomorrow; I tracked it this morning.”

“Well, somebody’s gotta get it,” I said.

Jenn and Thomas immediately put their fingers to the side of their noses.

“All you,” said Jenn, grinning.

A cop was at the door. He was an Asian guy, shorter than me, a bit overweight, carrying a battered notebook and a weary, lined face.

“Hi,” he said. “Do you live here?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Is there anything wrong?”

“I’m afraid there is,” he said. “Does Brent Scalia live here, also?”

“Sure,” I said. “What did he do?”

“I’m afraid I’m going to ask you to come with me,” he said.

“What did I do?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “I need you to come to the medical examiner’s office.”

“The hospital?”

“No,” he said. “The morgue. Brent Scalia is dead.”

The morgue is a place that you never want to visit while you’re still not dead; the building is in a severely industrial area of SOMA on Bryant Street near the freeway overpasses, a few blocks from the county jail. The cop let me sit in the front seat on our ride down.

“Tough day?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Shuttling you there is the last thing I have to do before I clock off. Spent most of the day in the Tenderloin answering pick-up calls.”

“What’s a pick-up call?”

“Someone’s passed out on the sidewalk and a well-meaning tourist calls the cops to come pick him up. The guy on the sidewalk just wants to sleep, nobody else really cares, but we have to call in the paramedics and a social worker. A big mess each time, for someone who just wants to lie there in a haze and not bother anyone. But if you call, we respond. ”

“Oh,” I said. I had been going to empathize and talk about how my day at work was kind of a pain, too. I kept my mouth shut.

At the morgue the two-man security team made me walk through a metal detector and patted me down - in case I was there to stab corpses, I guess. I signed a bunch of forms declaring that I was there with no ill intent and wasn’t allergic to dead people, and then an old guy with wispy hair and a white lab coat took me to an elevator. He said nothing as we descended three levels to a little room with a metal door that opened with a wheel lock.

The wheel made no noise as it turned, and the old man pushed the door open with a couple of fingers. It must have had great bearings; that door was at least six inches thick. Inside, it looked exactly like the morgues on bad medical TV shows, right down to the brushed aluminum walls and the one shelf that someone had left open.

“Whoop, we can’t have that,” said the old man. “Something might decay.” He cackled, walked over to the shelf and pushed the gurney back inside, then closed the door.

“Let’s see, now where’s your friend…” he said.

“Housemate,” I said.

“Housemate,” he said. “Right.” He took a palmtop computer out of his pocket and started to peck at it with the stylus.

“They gave us these a few months ago,” he said. “Something about being able to more efficiently track our guests. I kind of miss my paper, but…ah, here he is. Number sixty-three. Hit by a car in SOMA just today.”

He walked over to a handle that looked like every other handle in the room and pulled out a gurney, then gestured me over.

“Is that Brent Scalia?” he asked.

I looked down. There, lying on a bright steel table, looking nothing more than asleep, was the guy who’d lived downstairs for four months. On the TV shows, the dead people look like they’re asleep. He could have been asleep, except that his shoulder was cranked far forward, and one side of his head looked flat, and was matted with blood. It was definitely Brent, though. He slept on his side; we all knew this because he had a tendency to conk out on the couch during Monday Night wrestling. He liked to drink orange juice in the mornings while eating Total and watching ESPN. He was about five foot five and had a little bald spot in his black hair. When he’d interviewed to be in our house he’d said his pet peeve was when people took water glasses from the kitchen and kept them in their rooms. He hadn’t become a friend yet.

And now he was lying on his back on a steel table. He’d probably been hit when he was on his way back home from work. His off-white button shirt had come untucked. Brent always wore off-white shirts to work; I’d made fun of him for it after I noticed, and he’d pointed out that wearing the same thing every day made it easier to get out of the house. His skin was paler than usual and his left arm was twisted low across his body, his elbow at a hard right angle, but the hand backwards from where it should have been. I could see his fingernails; they were ragged and bitten. The edge of his bald spot was just visible under his curly hair.

“That’s him,” I said.

“OK,” said the old man. “You have to come upstairs now and take care of some paperwork.”

“What happened to him?” I asked.

The old man looked at his forms. “Didn’t the cops tell you?”

“I mean, I know he was hit by a car,” I said. “But I don’t know anything else.”

“Says he got hit by a car,” he said. “That’s about it on the coroner’s notes. There’s a copy of the police report here. Want to read it?”

“Not right now,” I said.

“Make sure they give you one when you go upstairs,” he said. “Sometimes they forget about that kind of thing.”

Upstairs, I filled out some forms. The forms had lots of words, most of which I didn’t really understand. I mean, I read them – it’s impossible to not read if you know how – but they didn’t register. It was like reading a school assignment that you knew the teacher would forget to ask questions about; I read it, but not really.

Except for the last form, which read “next of kin statement.”

“I can’t sign this,” I said to the nervous-looking woman behind the counter.

“What do you mean?” she said, twirling her hair around her finger. She had been twirling and untwirling her hair ever since the old man had dropped me off at this counter, which I guess was where everyone in the city came to sign away dead bodies. She had a pretty terrible job.

“I mean I’m not the next of kin,” I said. “I just live in the same apartment.”

“Lived,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Well, since he doesn’t live at your house any more, you should use the past tense,” she said.

“What?” I said.

“Respect for the dead should include proper grammar,” she said. “You won’t believe what some of the people who come through here say to me.”

“I believe it,” I said. “ His room is…was downstairs from me, off the kitchen. The cop brought me here to identify the body.”

“Well, since your signature is on these other forms, the body is now your responsibility,” she said. “It would be very helpful to us if you could notify the next of kin so we can get this last form signed and release the body to them. Once the body is identified, we like to get them out of here as soon as I can.

“OK,” I said. “Wait…what if I hadn’t identified the body?”

“Then we’d keep it as a John Doe for three weeks, then we’d cremate it,” she said, snapping her gum. “But it’s much better now that it’s been identified – you have a little more time to find the next of kin and get him out of here.”

“Does this happen often?” I asked.

“People with no families?” she asked. “All the time. Half the homeless people they haul in just go right to the burner – they have no ID and we have no way to track ‘em down.”

“Right,” I said. “OK. Can I have a copy of the police report?”

“The police should have given you that,” she said.

“They didn’t,” I said. “And the cop is gone.”

“Well, you should go over to North Station and get a copy from them,” she said. “But I’ve got a few of them here, and nobody ever notices if there’s one less piece of paper in the final packet for a stiff.”

She handed me the report. I left. The day had turned dark, and I was standing on the sidewalk with no one to give me a ride home. A homeless guy had made camp in the little hollow between the stairs and the building, sheltered from the wind. He had stretched a tarp from his cart to the top of the stairs, weighing it down with water-stained books. I peeked in; he was watching a Giants game on a battery-powered television, and he pumped his fist as the batter swing and missed.

Naturally, there was no bus stop anywhere near where I was, so I started walking north. After two long blocks I noticed a faded yellow stripe on a stoplight pole, with a faintly stenciled “19” that had been partially obscured by a tag that read “Goat Fornication.” A bus stop.

The 19 bus makes a loop through South of Market, running under several freeway-overpass homeless camps, the courthouse, and the police station. It continues north of Market Street through the Tenderloin, a good neighborhood for scoring your daily supply of pre-processed street pharmaceuticals. The bus that showed up had everyone - the gap-toothed methamphetamine freaks, heroin addicts with brown sores oozing through threadbare sleeves, over-the-hill hookers commuting back from a night in jail, a worn-out security guard coming off-shift, and two well-dressed young Chinese boys, holding hands and staring openly at everyone else. I couldn’t find a seat, so I stood to the side of a zombie-thin man with well-picked scabs on his nose and lips. He mumbled and sniffed at me when I reached over him to pull the cord that signaled the driver to stop.

I waited on the bus platform for about ten minutes, along with several other forlorn-looking people.

“How long you been waiting?” I asked the group.

“Ten minutes,” said a voice. “Maybe twelve.”

“Not so bad,” I said.

“Wait and see,” said the voice. “MUNI will screw up.”

They sure can. My group waited for another twenty minutes before any bus showed up. While I sat on the bus, I read the report. Most of it was boring – the time of the incident, the name of the reporting officer, the names of the paramedics who’d responded, the total time between incident and the road clearing. I skimmed over that and read over the report of the actual accident.

Witnesses McDonnel and James observed the victim walking along the sidewalk at approximately five-thirty p.m. on Wednesday, July 18. Victim slowed to look at his cellular phone, removed the phone from his pocket and started a conversation. Victim was then struck from behind by a dark red, dark green, or dark blue sport-utility vehicle, which had come up on the sidewalk and then accelerated. Witnesses put the speed of the vehicle at approximately 40 miles per hour. Reporting officer notes that this speed would be possible, and since the victim was struck near a corner at the end of a long block, this story checks out. No witnesses were able to confirm the license plate of the vehicle, although Witness 1 is fairly sure that it contained a 2 and a V. This incident is being judged as a hit-and-run accident pending further investigation.

That was it. The report itself took up all of four pages. By the time the number 6 dropped me off two blocks down the hill from my house, the journey had taken me over an hour and a half. I could have walked in less time.

The front door was locked, and I remembered that I had neither key nor phone, so I held down the door buzzer until I heard some footsteps come thumping down to the door. Thomas.

“Alex,” he said. “Where have you been? We tried calling you.”

“I left my phone in my room,” I said. “Sorry – I kind of left quickly.”

What’s going on?” he said. “Where were you?”

“At the morgue,” I said. “Brent is dead.”