Public Novel Progress     

On the morning of December 28th, 1990, a man signed  himself into the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, complaining of a persistent chest pain which had burst forth as he was jogging a few days earlier. He stood at a Brobdingnagian six foot five and a half inches and walked with a distinctly rigid gait, or so his physician (who had never met someone so considerably tall and clunky) noted. He provided the attending nurse with a rather dehydrated urine sample and upon requesting several additional pillows propped himself up in his bed and flicked on the television. Based on his demeanor, the well-meaning staff of Cedars-Sinai assumed him a drug-seeker or to have confused a common bronchospasm for something much worse, and left him to rest while they handled more pressing matters. Within a few hours of this initial appearance, he abruptly coded and was pronounced dead after an earnest resuscitation attempt by the good folks at Cedars-Sinai. 

Almost as soon as the search for next of kin had begun, it was discovered that the name and phone number listed on his paperwork did not in fact match and were in fact fake, and a search of his person was conducted. His inner jacket pocket housed a threadbare leather wallet in terrible condition, in his left and right front pants pockets a lighter (well used, judging by the scarce levels of butane left in it) and a thoroughly smashed packet of Saltines (the kind you might receive on an airplane), respectively. The usual out of the wallet— a few bills, a handful of loose change, a surplus of  tacky business cards belonging to various enterprises, the type which one could imagine the unidentified man plucking gingerly from the fingers of some solicitor, promising to reach out immediately if he should need to exchange multiple pounds of aluminum for cash or acquire a lawyer for a motorcycle crash. To the empathetic nurse sifting through his various treasures these silly sentiments reanimated some small bit of the steadily graying corpse before her, and she was all at once reminded that all corpses once had errands to run, phone calls to make and aspirations to actualize much like herself, and she found her searching encumbered by unease as she gazed upon the pinkness draining out of the man’s face.

She quickly excused herself from the room to enjoy a cigarette in private and I (Jim Dooney, nurse practitioner, then thirty-nine) was ordered to take her place in resuming the investigation. I re-examined each of the previously removed cards and flipped each one over a few times, turning up with nothing. I looked on as the nurses went about preparing the man for his approaching journey to the hospital morgue– one, tasked with carefully sanitizing the man’s skin, looked to me expectantly as if to say “Anything?.”  I shook my head at her and she pursed her lips together so that they formed a flat line: “Too bad.” I had just begun to place each card back in its slot within the wallet when I felt the soft, worn edge of a paper bit slip across the quick of my index finger.  I again removed the cards and pried open the wallet slot with my fingers, holding it to the light. Sure enough, a folded index card, weathered from what I’d guess to be multiple years of handling, fluttered into my lap like a moth out of a jacket. I carefully undid the overlaid halves of paper and smoothed out the creases on the edge of the table. On it was written the name of some self-storage place about thirty minutes away from the hospital, a locker number, and a six digit code. As the man’s body was covered up and lifted onto a gurney to be wheeled downstairs, I headed down a few rooms to my right– I’ve been retired for some time now and  I’m sure that they’ve repurposed the space since my leaving, but back then it was a computerized nurse terminal used most often for patient logging and the like. The computer, a great boxy thing– painfully slow by today’s standard– booted itself up with a mechanical groaning noise as I stood there, idly tapping my finger against the ENTER key. When at last it woke from its ten thousand year slumber, I made a few quick glances between the index card and the screen and punched ‘E-Z Storage’ onto the ever-clacky keyboard, watching as the computer translated it into its standard typeface within the search bar and began running the input through its various cogs and gears. A tedious moment later, the search engine provided me with a relevant phone number and address which I wrote down and placed in my pocket for safekeeping. I later passed that note along to the county medical examiner worker who showed up for the body, who passed it on to the police, who arrived at E-Z Storage three days after the man had arrived at Cedars-Sinai. Since modern justice is often a multi-year process, this hotfooting on the part of the sheriff’s department was more than unusual– clearly, they’d had their eyes on chest-pain man and his accompanying storage unit for some time and would swiftly seize whatever contents they were after whether anybody  liked it or not.

The E-Z Store employee working the front desk on New Year’s Day, 1991, one Rosa Lopez, at first displayed hesitancy when the police somewhat forcefully requested directions to locker 420B, especially when she noticed the absence of 420B’s contracted renter and even more especially when she noticed the guns strapped intimidatingly to the hips of each posse member, but quickly stepped aside after they slid her a less than gentle aide-mémoire detailing hefty fines and multi-year jail time in accordance with obstruction of justice charges. They had locker 420B cracked open and gutted less than ten minutes later, and their shortly following precipitous inventory goes roughly as follows:

Fourteen porcelain nesting dolls, each doll layer wrapped in gift-wrap tissue paper

Various pieces of home and patio furnishing

A lime green typewriter, key lettering worn off, presumably due to excessive use

A box labeled ‘Az’ containing a multitude of infant and toddler toys, some still packaged, some wrapped as Christmas gifts

A long molded-over loaf of bread, opened but unconsumed

Approx. ten grams of cocaine– low quality, likely street, contained in the thumb of a rubberbanded dish glove

An empty propane tank

A gas grill, well used

An armoire filled with loose women’s under and over garments

A jar containing various internal and external contraceptives

A smaller jar containing a variety of loose pills, some crushed

Three suitcases

A long dead pet hamster in a plastic ball

A smashed television set

Of course, this doesn’t by a long shot account for everything in the man’s possession, considering the sheer density in which locker 420B was packed. In fact, it took the effort of several property and evidence organizers over multiple days to sort through all the junk the man had left behind, and even longer to categorize and label it all. Eventually, though, their work came to fruition and each item removed from E-Z Store locker 420B was neatly packed away, stickered and, at long last, at the disposal of father government (who, after the final t’s and i’s of the case had been crossed and dotted,  moved it to a shelf in some off-site facility to collect dust along with all the other post-mortem possession evidence they stashed there). 

Of all the things taken in for police inspection, perhaps the most important is the stack of lightweight cream paper they found beneath the man’s typewriter. As a nurse, I had a habit (a bad one, really, especially since I worked in intensive care three days a week) of developing an attachment to my patients, even going as far as to follow up with their families after they’d either died or been dismissed– I did my best to keep a tab on the investigation (through a friend of mine, who happened to work mostly in evidence storage and police inventory). Years after these events came to pass, once the case had become much bigger, I was able to obtain photocopied transcripts of the patient’s papers at an auction and a portion of my time has been devoted to assembling and retelling (as repeatedly requested (demanded?) by the deceased) the story they tell ever since.

This is a confession, to some extent of the word. Yesterday was my twenty-ninth birthday, and I spent it alone, as I usually do. I’ll try not to immediately fill my narrative with useless prevarications since I’ve put forth my share and then some of those over the course of my thematically deceitful existence, so I’ll level with you: my horrid spitefulness accounts for much of my motivation in spending my final year cranking out this story. Though it’s nothing but a childish fantasy, I can’t help envisioning the look on Sheriff what’s-his-face as he gets an eyeful of this– I should be ashamed, really, hopping all around them all these years, but as you’ll soon discover, dearest reader, I lack many such vital qualities.

That aside, this is also for my beloved daughter, Azure, and for my love, Penny. I hope they see this (or at least hear of it, anything’ll do). Despite my ambitions, come next year I’ll hardly feign shock upon peering past the mortal curtain to see my precious manuscript in the hands of some slimy policeman, but for my own assurance I’ve chosen to believe that my messages will at some point reach their intended recipients and not the lapping flames of a garbage incinerator someplace. Knowing this now, should you, my dependable reader, prove to be a policeman, I do hope you’ll have the good sense to reduce your sliminess by respecting the wishes of the dead. The following is my recollection in full of the past twenty-nine years.

One

I was born sometime in the afternoon on December 28th, 1960 and subsequently christened ‘Michael Dillon Ambrose’, though Mike stuck.  I weighed a slightly below average 6 pounds 9 ounces and my length, for whatever reason, went unrecorded. I had big, near-black almond eyes and a thicket of deep brown hair (as I do presently, though it’s coiled closer to my scalp since then). I sometimes bit people, and my first word was “no”. This is as much as I know of my infancy– my father worked odd jobs to fund our mostly hand-to-mouth existence, so the thought of budget space for a camera or even so much as a nice Christmas card photograph was almost laughable (and my mother was never the retrospective type, as will become clear in the following chapters). I was the final installment in a miserable quartet of siblings. Lenny, the eldest, was born healthy and cognitively average on October 9th, 1954. Martha and June were born November 22nd, 1957. As many twin parents do, my mother and father initially expected one baby. They were rather displeased when the second fetus was found– money was tight to begin with and doubling the required infant necessities forced my father to pick up a third job, but their zealous Catholicism and passionate aversion to abortion (back then it was primitive, but had they made an effort to seek it out I’m certain it could’ve been performed without a hitch) is what ultimately founded the birth of both babies. 

My mother went into labor while my father was at work, and took the bus down to the hospital since she didn’t have a license (or a car). The birth was an unpleasant one, even by the standards of the time, but everybody (initially) survived. Martha, profoundly retarded (no doubt a result of my mother’s private drug problem, which she had failed to kick at the news of her pregnancy), was born first. She was the stronger and heavier of the two babies, which didn’t end up too well for our poor sister. June was born twelve minutes after Martha and, after failing her newborn reflex and sense test, was immediately whisked away to intensive care. Several of her major organs were underdeveloped and repairs were attempted, but odds remained bleak. She made it a week before passing in her sleep. This event was thankfully not one she felt. A short, private ceremony was held in the church my parents frequented and an eerily tiny coffin containing June’s remains was blessed and buried in the cemetery behind it. To my knowledge June was hardly discussed, if at all, after that. In my teenage years I came to know of her birth and death only because of its mention in my mother’s diaries (which I obtained following her death) and my frequenting the cemetery housing her gravesite. 

Unfortunately, my early childhood memories are hardly notable– things start to pick up at age five, around the time I first start school. I was one of the youngest in my grade and physically one of the smallest; I shot up about halfway through middle school, but up until then I trained myself to handle the deluge of teasing remarks  about it. I didn’t do exceptionally well in anything except  literary arts during my time in elementary school, which was reflected by my C-average report cards. My parents were on the disciplinary side, but hardly gave me grief about my underachievements (and, thankfully, lack of sport activity– for a time my dad tried to convince me to try out for the county junior soccer team, a suggestion I dodged until he forgot about it). Truthfully, I don’t think they wanted anybody noticing marks on me and turning up to the house, or worse, getting someone else to do it. 

I’ve noticed that, in recent years, the umbrella term ‘abuse’ has greatly expanded, now including things as common as spanking– my mother and father didn’t often hit us but when they did it was usually with some random household item or apparatus, etc. (typically spoons and shoes, though there were frequent outliers; a handheld egg beater, markedly).  They were both prolific alcohol abusers in my later childhood and these beatings increased in frequency and severity proportionally as I got older, but at least pertaining to this time they were few and far between (nevertheless, by today’s standards my childhood was rife with offenses that should have warranted foster placement). Although this familial security was without a doubt what kept me from raising eyebrows at school, larval stage Mike was still constantly on his toes.

When I was nearing eight years of age, Martha’s up-till-then steady (if poor) mental state began to rapidly decline for reasons still unknown. My parents’ government assistance allowed several therapy visits a month, sessions in which various doctors attempted to teach my sister to do things a normal child her age would normally do, and their efforts often yielded little success, but they had managed to get her speaking at a slightly normal cadence over a period of years; this sudden regression undid that work. Martha and I shared a room up until the day I moved out, so I was largely responsible for getting her up and ready for school each day. Throughout the process she often required redirection and repeated instructions– both of us were late more often than not due to this– but after the random mental atavism she began to exhibit less and less awareness and was eventually excused from a traditional education. 

For her, school was really the only alternative to home (such was the case for the rest of us, but at least we had options later on), and this change essentially meant the beginning of a multi-year shut-in– of course, I had my own schooling to attend to and couldn’t stick around to watch her, so that left her my mother to rely on.  If you’re thinking that my jobless, at-home-all-day-except-for-grocery-shopping  mother contributed in any way to Martha’s care, my dear reader, you’re sorely mistaken. It’s not your fault, of course– I imagine that you’re probably a decently empathetic person who would assume the best of a mother’s intentions towards her children, and you’ve also had the privilege of remaining a stranger to my mother. Don’t blame yourself, dear reader, but wrap up those lovely empathetic assumptions and save them for a more uplifting story. I often returned home to find Martha wandering aimlessly around, my mother sleeping off the drinks in front of the television set. I gradually learned never to expect anything beyond this, but returning home each day to see that same dazed look in Martha’s eyes never became any less disconcerting. 

She was never definitively diagnosed because, regrettably, we were unable to afford insurance coverage for the testing. In my spare time I’ve read bits and bobs about utero-stemming mental disorders, but the thing that sets her apart so distinctly from the usual DNA deletions is how she worsened over time, and how her capacities fluctuated so randomly.