Airline Support: The Cleanup Crew
I was pulled off the Fed Ex ramp to clean up after someone’s suicide. I scrubbed hair, brains and skin from the ceiling. The blood of a terminally ill man the same age as my father.
I was on the Fed Ex ramp, waiting for a cargo plane to taxi into place, when Don came over the radio.
Chip, are you at the Fed Ex incoming?
Check, I’m here. They’re about to open the door.
Turn around.
I turned around and saw Don’s Cadillac speeding across the tarmac. He told me to come down. Someone else was on the way to handle the flight.
I climbed into the back seat. Ken was in the passenger seat, stone-faced, staring forward. He didn’t say hello.
Don said: I’m going to ask you to do something and I want you to know you don’t have to do it. By the way he posed the question, I knew he had no other options. My best friend’s father just killed himself. He needs my help. He asked me to bring two people and you’re the only other one I can ask.
I remember the leather interior. I was sitting on my hands and could feel the warm folds of the pleated seat under my thighs. Before I answered I was sure of two things: that I would say yes, and that what I was about to do was something most people would not choose to do if given the choice.
His friend’s father had cancer and a troubled marriage. That afternoon he’d been bumped from the transplant queue. He sat down to dinner with his wife, something brought the conversation to a heated argument, and at the apex of it he took off his wedding ring, slid it across the table to her, went upstairs to his bedroom, and blew his own head apart with a revolver.
We were the cleanup crew.
On the fifteen-minute ride to the house I slipped into a frame of mind that is difficult to explain. A sustained, focused rush of adrenaline that drew walls in around the way I perceived everything. I knew before I walked into the house that this focus would let me do whatever needed to be done and not give it a second thought until the work was finished.
When we pulled up there were private cars and trucks in the driveway but no emergency vehicles. No police. Walking in, we passed a small dumpster with a queen-sized mattress in it. There was a large pink stain in the middle. When they’d tipped it to get it in the dumpster, blood ran out like a freshly steeped tea bag.
We followed the man’s son upstairs. No one in the house spoke. There was no light in anyone’s eyes. None of the tension-breaking humor you sometimes get at funerals. I had pictured something from a gangster movie — blood on the walls and ceiling. I prepared myself for something gruesome.
The room was surprisingly clean. That was my first reaction. The body had been removed by the coroner, along with any pieces of flesh or bone larger than a cherry. The way the bullet destroyed his head, the blood poured out when his body flopped back onto the mattress, and the mattress soaked up most of it.
Then the smell. Not just blood — it had the metallic tinge of powder discharge from the pistol. Fresh. Only repugnant when coupled with the awareness of the source.
The son could only bear to be in the room for a moment at a time. He came and went until someone told him to wait downstairs. That left Ken, myself, and two others.
We had to erase every visible trace of the fact that an hour earlier a person had ended his life in that room.
Labor was divided. One man on the floor, collecting every bit of organic material from the carpet. Ken and another on the walls. I got the ceiling.
We had buckets of warm soapy water, scour pads, and whatever metal instruments we could find — nail file, pocket knife, screwdriver — to dig pieces of skull out of the drywall. Some had scalp and hair still attached. There were small holes where skull fragments had flown with enough velocity to pass clean through.
My job was the hardest to stomach because of the orientation. Looking up, scrubbing in large circles, tiny drops of water would fly from the pad with every stroke. At first it seemed like soapy water. But as I kept going, bits collected in the sponge, the bubbles receded from the surface of the bucket, and underneath was a cooling gray broth that I knew contained human flesh.
After that I noticed every drop that landed on my face. I squinted and clamped my mouth shut and just kept scrubbing and scrubbing and scrubbing.
By the time the first stage of cleaning was done we were all crying. There were people in the room who stood by for moral support. I have never needed moral support like I did for those forty-five minutes.
When the walls and ceiling were washed, we spackled the holes in the drywall. While the putty dried we ran a steam cleaner over the carpet. Then two new coats of paint. When the job was done the room smelled no longer of death but of renovation.
We had erased the immediacy of what had happened. And it was with an eerie sense of pride that we left the room and left the house.
From my journal that night:
I was pulled off the Fed Ex ramp to clean up after someone’s suicide. I scrubbed hair, brains and skin from the ceiling. The blood of a terminally ill man the same age as my father. The smell of blood-iron, meat, like a dog’s breath, not necessarily foul. Nor pleasant. The son with red-rimmed eyes, with whom I soon bonded. I gave his daughter a dollar to save for college and he gave me a hundred.
Sitting in the driver seat of the company van, reading Herzog by Saul Bellow. A man and a woman pull up and look at me and wonder, “what’s his connection? Maybe just a driver.” No. I scrubbed his head off the ceiling and walls after the .44 took his cranium, leaving the lower mandible and medulla oblongata, little else. I touched human disaster, I breathed death.
Desperate death, suicide. Oh, what a mess. Sticky, sticky blood and membranes.
His last words may have been “Fuck You.” Then his skull ripped holes in the drywall.
Thanks, @Justin Seitz!
You should send this out to get published