a rantangent short story
A woman is found dead in her apartment after eviction proceedings for unpaid rent lead to the landlord, accompanied by a deputy Sheriff, knocking and entering the unit. An enclosure of dark red sparkles in the sunlight beaming through the door past the two men’s shadows. Stunned, shocked, horrified. They say nothing. Their eyes just wander about the scene. They simultaneously stop all movement including breath when their eyes focus in on what they innately knew they were looking for.
A body. Her body. It lays dormant in a pool of dark, crude, dried or nearly dried and still drying blood. A 20-foot long streak of black leading from the bedroom to the kitchen trails behind it. Her iPhone lays on the countertop above her body, but her arms are severed. One of them is found on a shelf in a closet, little crusty blood icicles hanging from it. The other at the foot of the bed, the sheets of which are torn and blood soaked. Blood splatters cover the walls, ceiling, and floors of every space.
The first words uttered since the exploration commenced eek shallowly out of upper portion of the deputy’s vocal chords, “come on sir, we’ll go outside, lock up…and…and…I’ll radio the station.” The pair’s eyes remain down, figuring the most direct pathway back to the place from when their mental state forever shifted. Who they were is gone. The former simplistic identity, like any other found in the monotonous social rolodex, was reached from somewhere else…a state nobody comes back from.
The landlord remains especially stunned as he mopes back to the front office, watching out the window and wondering how such a murder could have taken place so long ago and in a unit whose front-door entry is within view of his office. He stares at it. The sun moves across the sky, now beaming down on him, he gets a small sense of warmth as he notices some cars pulling in the parking lot. The investigators arrive followed by an ambulance. All is silent in his mind.
The team of investigators keep things quiet, not using caution tape since the scene is exclusively inside. The landlord sees the black bag carried away by two medics. After locking up and putting cameras and clipboards in the vehicle, the lead investigator heads to the office to ask some questions of the landlord and see how he’s doing.
The landlord has little to say, never having seen anyone enter the apartment and not knowing if the woman ever had visitors, friends or family. “It’s a big complex, we have over 200 units in 3 buildings” he tells the investigator. “Sure, we have cameras, but the recordings run continuously and only backlog for 7 days. I’m no hematologist, but, well…” The two part ways as the investigator offers a pair of business cards, one of his own and another for the county’s psychological counseling services.
Pondering for days, or so he thinks, the landlord’s desire to know what transpired only grows. Weeks have passed, his mind racing with unanswered questions, his heart pumping the sleep out of him. He must know. In his confusion, weeks turned to months before he could gather himself to do much of anything. His energy sparked ablaze he says aloud in the empty office littered with empty coffee cups and envelopes stuffing the door slot “I’m not just going to let the authorities leave me out of this fucking thing.” The mystery of how and why she died this way is something he couldn’t forget. He ponders what kind of person he would be if he could lay it to rest. What kind of person could he become?
Knowing if he probes, he’s likely to get some initial runaround, he begins his journey by spending his time searching the local paper and internet for articles and obituaries. Dumbfounded to have found nothing of Jennifer Anton or any murders, he lays down on the office floor, physically hindered by a brutal realization of the madness stirring about. Florescent lights beaming through his vision, he looks away to avoid the strain, instead counting the holes in the ceiling panels. A 20-minute moment later, another cup of coffee, a continued and infinitely more difficult scouring of the data sources begins.
The sole piece of potentiality comes from an obituary of a Sarah Taylor, a 34-year old divorcee, the town of residence matched, the cause of death wasn’t stated. The striking part was the date of death, labeled as over six weeks before the issue date of the paper. He reads on. The woman is survived by her parents, and yet there was no address provided or funeral scheduled. The sole paragraph explains she had a permeable love for life, and hopes of becoming a writer, waitressing her way through a literature program at the local community college. The landlord more than suspected this to be the woman, but the answers he seeks only create more questions.
Having reached the end of his ideas, the landlord acknowledges the only conceivable route he can proceed from this point forward. Unsure of how he was going to do it, he knew he had to contact the investigator. Who else could he talk to? Where else could he search? Could he research Sara Taylor or her alias Jennifer Anton and find more about those origins? Those would be wild goose chases, he reasoned. He certainly couldn’t contact Meaghan and Lawrence, Sara’s parents…not after what he’d seen in that apartment. Definitely not after what he’d seen. Absolutely not, especially not without answers. Resolved to contact the authorities, he made up his mind that the lead investigator was the only one he’d contact, going straight to the prime source. After all, it seemed fair considering he’s the one he’d already met and conversed with, though conversation is hardly the right word for that diluted mumbling of disoriented ramblings about what he’d seen and his knowledge, or lack thereof, of the woman’s habits or apartment history. Now, the issue was how. How could he approach the investigator in a way certain to get an open, honest, truthful response?
“The investigator was disturbed himself” he thought. “Ugh, I mean, this was a man slightly past middle age with a heck of a lot of experience I gotta figure…and he, even he, was struggling to ask me questions, spitting out the words and reasoning the proper questions alike!” “If I just call him up and ask him what the results are of his weeks of investigation, what are the chances he’s just going tell me outright?” He reasoned aloud to himself, still stuck in the office with the door of apartment 149-B still in sight. “Surrre, it’s possible…but that fucker hasn’t called me with any follow up questions and certainly not to volunteer any info nevertheless give a damn about my well-being.”
Knowing the investigator wouldn’t unveil his discoveries, the landlord pondered how he might get the most out of him. He decided to tail him. From there, the point of contact would present itself, he assumed.
Grabbing the keys to the Cadillac off the hook they’ve been on since he couldn’t remember when, he swept the mail from the doorway with his foot and strolled the sidewalk to his car. The sky was grey, but he couldn’t tell…it all felt so bright to his sensitive pupils.
En route to the police station, he couldn’t assess his own driving. “Am I driving okay? It feels fast.” He looked to the cars around him, nobody was honking or passing him. He checked his rearview, nobody was flashing their brights at him. “Holy crap, was that light yellow?!” He felt he was accelerating to make the last light, but wasn’t able to pay attention with the fear of the idea that had just popped into his head. “If I’m going to the police station, I have to drive carefully, because there’s likely to be cops in the area driving to and from the exact location I am heading.”
He tapped the brakes. “What the hell is the damn speed limit here?! It hasn’t been posted for blocks!” He started to think maybe he shouldn’t be doing what he was thinking about doing. He kept his speed steady, took a breath, and saw the station ahead on the right. He vividly remembered the tan sedan with the black spotlight on the drivers side as the one driven by the investigator from the month or so earlier when they had met. It has a sticker on the bottom right corner of the dash that was a badge. It reminded him of a Junior G man badge he’d gotten out from a bookmarked space in one of his father’s Dick Tracy comics when he was a kid. He thought about how much more difficult being a real detective must be than the simplistic crap funneled into his childish mind. Now lost in his mission, he felt a sense of comfortable concentration.
He found a cross street with metered parking and a great view of the entry driveway of the station. He made a U-turn and settled in the perfect space, hoping to be able to spot the investigator leaving. He turned off the engine, but left the ignition in place so he could have the radio on. After scanning a few channels, sports talk, pop music, a rap song he couldn’t understand a word of, a country song about a girl in skin tight jeans, and static over a deep voiced radio host he remembered from college when he listened to him on his morning commute, he shut it off. “Damnit” he uttered. He leaned and reached in the glove box, pulled out a package of beef jerky he thought he’d forgot about, and started to eat in silence. Chewing the tough stuff made him a little sleepy.
“Knock knock knock!” The investigator was standing at his driver’s side window. Startled, he pressed the window button down and said “hey…ahh.” The investigator interrupted “I just got off and saw you sittin’ over here. I hope you didn’t think I forgot about you?” The landlord just stopped. Staring over dashboard for moment, he turned his head back up to the investigator, “ah, actually, yeah, I kinda did.” “Listen…” he said but was interrupted again…”what do ya say I buy you a cup of coffee?” the investigator suggested. “Yea, sure. Let’s go” said the landlord and they headed to Annie’s Cafe, a 24-hour diner a few blocks away.
The conversation lasted four cups of Joe each…and two waitresses, one of whom had reminded the landlord a second time that they don’t serve alcohol and therefore can’t make his coffee “Irish” like he’d already asked. The investigator confirmed the alias theory was true, Sara Taylor was her real name. He relayed that the key suspect is an old boyfriend, one that predates the ex-husband who still has a local address but has been living in the Big Apple since the divorce…a claim the investigator affirms to the landlord. “It checked out. We called him on a Manhattan landline too. Haven’t heard shit from the ex-boyfriend, though. Ain’t like we haven’t been trying. Forensics suspects she left the back window unlatched, which we think was the suspect’s method of entry.”
The landlord abruptly whispers “do they not know what the hell it was like in there? How difficult can it be to establish what happened in a scene like that?! It was monstrous!” “A nice girl like that…” he reasoned “…she isn’t just murdered, limbs dismembered…something was going on that just i’n’t right. Now I know you’ve been honest with me right up until now…and I’m tellin’ you, its too dark to see what it is, but I know something’s there.”
The investigator knew the jig was up, “You’re right. I’ve seen more than my share of murder cases, each and every one of ‘em has a story. This one is no different in that sense. But you’re right, there’s more on this one and while I can’t afford to share it with nobody…we have protocols, rules, and with good reason…now I knew the moment I saw you sittin’ in your car wearing that same hideous gray flannel buttoned down shirt that I was gonna have to give you something. So here it is…”
“The lady and her boyfriend were off and on a long time I gathered. Even during her marriage they had spent some time together. Now Ms. Taylor had been seeing a head shrink over yonder in the offices behind Donatello’s strip mall. You know, one of these PhD-types charging $125 an hour in an averaged-sized town with an average -sized income, surely under six-figures. Doesn’t add up. Well, as turns out, Ms. Taylor wasn’t the only one with the alias: the boyfriend, get this, had one of his own and had been visiting the same shrink or psychologist or whatever in the hell these looneys are called nowadays…” The landlord interrupts and says “that’s it…this guy’s screwed up!He’s been following her…” The investigator raises his hand to stop the landlord’s speculation, and continues on “no, no, no.”
“You need to hear this, this will explain more completely”, tapping his pointer finger on the table top. “We ran a search on her phone. Took us up until yesterday to get a warrant to get access from the phone company. We tried from the company that manufactures the phone, but their privacy policy makes it so even they don’t have access. Technician at the local store says they couldn’t even do it if they did have the legal authority to do…these devices are locked solid without the user password. Anyhow, the phone companies call log reveals she had dialed 9-1-1 as her last outgoing call. The call was dated twelve days prior to the date you and Deputy Markowicz discovered her. Here’s the catch…forensics’ hematologists report the blood to be at least a week older than that.” “Whaoooh” sighs the landlord.
“We’ve been figuring the suspect, the ex-boyfriend, was staying with the body. Perhaps sulking, perhaps reminiscing, maybe contemplating what to do next. We really don’t know, but this is all strong evidence that the suspect knew the victim, leading us to now where we’ve got plenty of fingers, but only one person to point any of them at. We’ve called his phone, knocked at his residence, even set up a stake-out there, but there wasn’t any movement there. The shrink said she’d tell us if she caught wind that he might be guilty, but that’s been a dial tone. We did get ahold of the victims mother…says Ms. Taylor ‘never should’ve moved away and married that man.’ She seemed to be fonder of the boyfriend, but her sentiment completely contradicts the evidence. Says her daughter gave up a nursing career she’d dreamed of since she was a little girl to move to a bigger city and have a metropolitan lifestyle, funded by a hot shot race car mechanic who gets contract work to design and test engine parts. The boyfriend, we don’t know what he does for money, but there was a fancy SUV parked in his garage at the apartment complex. It couldn’t have been more than a couple years old. A Land Rover…fancy thing.”
The landlord interjects “look, I appreciate all the detail, but what about that scene. What do you suspect was going on that led up to that?!”
“We can’t seem to figure that out. We are near certain there was a gap in the time of death and that phone call I told you about, to emergency services. Which we can’t make sense of, because she had made an obvious attempt to move toward the kitchen, where her phone was found with no fingerprints other than her own. We don’t know if she was struggling to reach it or what. Wouldn’t have made much sense without arms anyhow. Forensics is having a hard time figuring out when or how the dismemberment played out other than that it happened on the floor of the bedroom. No weapon was recovered. The psych-team figures it wasn’t a typical rage scenario. Me, I don’t know how in the hell it could’ve been anything but a rage scene. They do know that she died of loss of blood. No cerebral hemorrhaging or central pulmonary damage was discovered on autopsy.”
The landlord stopped him abruptly “What?! You gotta be kidding me…she didn’t die of blood loss, she died from a psychopathic killer!” The investigator explained “I mean the actual physical cause of her bodies death.” The landlord rebuts him “Are you crazy?! The actual physical cause of her death was a man that does not rightfully deserve to be called a man! You can’t sit here and tell me that blood loss was the cause of death and give no deference to the axe or machete or chainsaw or hacksaw that is needed to do that, and you can’t detach the insanity in whoever did it!”
The investigator, humiliated, says “Okay, you’re right. Just listen here, we don’t know exactly why she died or who did it, but we’ve got a great lead with the boyfriend but he’s missing.” They both stop, the landlord looking into the eyes of the investigator, the investigator gazing off toward the glass display case filled with pies. After pondering a moment, the landlord says “I bet your right about the boyfriend…have you got anything else on him?” The investigator replies “the phone records. A handful of calls, incoming and outgoing between Ms. Taylor’s phone a number we learned belonged to the ex.” “Well there ya go! Make it happen! Find this guy and take him down!” exclaimed the landlord.
“Hold your horses just a moment, sir” said the landlord. “We’re looking for him, don’t get me wrong. But we can’t prove he was at the scene or that he knew. There were additional calls from his phone to her phone AFTER the time that we presume she had died. Not to mention, a flight only takes a few hours, so we can’t be too certain the ex-husband is clear either, though we believe he is for purposes of how we have to direct our energy and efforts for the time being. Further, the phone records reveal another number Ms. Taylor had contacted several times, all before her death, to a woman we found who is a secretary at the local warehouse where the ex-husband worked and is where they ship and receive most of these auto parts they test for the racing world, globally. We haven’t been able to reach her to find out what they had been discussing, but we did find out she frequents a local bar from the undercover we had tailing her. It’s a gay bar if that means anything. Either way, the significance could be mute, but we can’t rule anything out.”
STOP
This writing was never intended to be a literary work, but rather a parable created solely to serve as a basis upon which to elaborate & explain various conceptions.
ANALYSIS & EXPLANATION
¶ 1. The first paragraph is intended to show the common understanding of a man who manages an apartment and a police officer. Though in different professions, they each know and understand what is happening and can even interact without words. The officer enters the apartment as part of his job, and the manager technically as part of his job. Even though a murder scene typically would not be a place the officer would allow him to go, the officer can’t think straight and is in awe. I assume, in the writing/as a writer, that the reader will know this, but maybe they won’t. Did you?
In changing societies and with people of varying ages, normalcy or propriety is often misunderstood. Either a young cop could perhaps not know the implications of his blunder, or the manager could not know that he’s supposed to stay out. The law says what to do, but the emotions of the people and the circumstances they are in motivate something else. Lastly, to introduce a final point regarding the pair inherently knowing what to look for (a corpse): the similar or shared feeling they had about how to proceed and how horrific and bizarre and stunningly mysterious that moment was that they shared knowing they were going to find something that wasn’t good (the corpse)…people, in their depths, have the ability to know what matters and reach a heightened sense of awareness in universal ways. They could be incredibly different people, but they both behaved similarly when they knew what was going on once that door popped open.
SOCIOLOGY: This might seem like no big thing, a common part of writing, even a common part of society. But does anyone ever explore how people can really know one another or what beliefs are considered “commonly held” or why? The truth is that society has lingering ideas that enter consciousness, transfer through minds and generations, and have lasting effects until either re-wired, questioned, or the physical embodiments of ideas are destroyed. These things are both good and bad…oftentimes they produce normal methods of thought and behavior that are incredibly oppressive to others as they assume righteousness when oftentimes there are nuances of the underlying philosophy or social structure that are indeed flawed or altogether wrong. This can be seen throughout Thomas Kuhn’s explanation of the Copernican Revolution. Further, however, is the formation of such norms the sincerity of bonding over discovery and learning shared truths which is the essence of true social establishment.
Without some level of established knowledge, there would be no civilization, despite there needing to be room for amendment without drastic measures like accusations of heresy. there was a term used to describe a society experiencing the absence of norms or customs—anomie. Coined by one of sociology’s founders Emile Durkheim in the late 18th century, it refers to normlessness or even confusion from sharing a society with people who may be “ontologically different” in some respect (or perhaps in many ways). The idea being that, through promoting diversity, America as a whole has to deal with some of the added byproducts of that. As humans are social creatures and tend to be happiest when their beliefs are shared and their energy for social interaction can flow, certain things need to be dealt with to reach this state.
¶ 2. Death: body versus the essence of a person’s life.
When the men first discover the body, the body is called “a body” like it is a mere thing, then amended to the possessive “her body”, and again back to “it.” Who or what really comprises of a body? If, as in the modern Western world, the body is viewed as chiefly that of the imagined soul, or essence, or individual that embodies it, then it stands to reason that the language of people would be exclusively using the possessive form of bodily ownership.
Death, however, changes this by mainstream Western thought. The authorities of this world acknowledge some sort of essence beyond the mere physical body, but also that it is irrelevant and done when the heart stops beating or by some other physically measurable standard. Thus, when someone dies, the body is only a mere body and no longer owned by anyone. In fact, bodies are not even legal property of the living family members. I know that people think this is wrong, but the reality is that the law, by each of the 50 respective statutes, requires burial or cremation within a relatively short time period after a body is no longer “alive.” In doing so, the legal system essentially leases the body to family members for a limited time, depriving them of potentially claimable property interest depended upon the particular thought-forms of the people. In the overwhelming majority of cases in Western culture, this is unproblematic. However, there are certain cultures whose death rites are interfered with. I, personally, sincerely desire to have an ossuary for a loved one whom, in this life, I was not able to love or share bodies with. To me, her and her body are one in the same…and each and every part of her body is alive without regards to the way the modern world views death. Though Americans might only understand a woman refusing to let go of the body of deceased child, I already know how it will feel to me when this person I love “dies.” Being illegal, I cannot even approach the person to offer a contract for their body at death in exchange for money in this lifetime, regardless of whether the person would agree to it—even if only on the basis that the body is useless to them at that point. To say that the law is not invasive, that mainstream society’s adoptions cannot be oppressive, would be improper. History is littered with suppressed souls, unlikely to change.
Though bodily preservation seems bizarre in the modern world, the ancient world was abound with sarcophagi. Even today, with the rise of scientific thought among the worlds rapidly grown massive population, innumerable instances of genetic preservation, from archeological to existential standpoints like the polar genetic underground compounds (special preservation for alien recovery in case of global existential desolation). On a more personal level, thoughts on control or power over an individual’s own body are expressed very strongly in terms of sexual consent, and additionally in mere affiliation—“freedom of association” is the legal terminology. Interestingly, as much as this pleases the desire for individuality and power of the selves of the individuals that comprise of the society, under the same law are innumerable instances of lack of power to control or regulate things that drastically affect the lifelong health of those very same bodies. Interestingly, too, is that the sense of control over one’s own bodily existence is the extremely powerful hidden force of human consciousness that encompass the infinite thought-forms that can rise and fall through the minds of the masses, yet having significant impacts on the individual’s acceptance and use of their own body as shared with the world. Though there are many instances of this, romantic or sexual narratives are a particularly powerful area where certain frameworks, themes, or ideas can become popular conceptualizations that are then influential over for sure, and sometimes harmful to people’s otherwise deeply personal beliefs and imaginings about the meaning, purpose, and storyline of their bodily purpose. To think that we are in total control over our own bodies while simultaneously engaging socially, whereby we eat, drink, use chemicals, intake ideas, experience life, share our bodies in various ways, and even risk physical bodily death, is irrational.
The remainder of the paragraph is about two things: blood and technology. The iPhone is in tact on the counter. In the meantime, it’s user is dead, murdered, and there is blood everywhere. Human beings are flesh and blood. Technology cannot change this. Technology can assist us in our lives and allow people to do things they were not able to before, but humans are flesh and blood…fragile. Ancient ruins across the planet were once thought of as revolutionary and prosperous, but these things were perennial.
Blood is our real life. A river of it flowing through our veins full of oxygen when we are healthy and breathing fresh air. Exercise feels good. Nature and fresh air feel good. Living in the here and now feels good.
The iPhone can distract us from this. The blood is on the sheets, the carpet, the cabinets—where people eat and sleep and make love and cook and bathe and play. When there is death, the iPhone loses its purpose for existing. Indeed, the murdered woman likely couldn’t even reach her phone to save her. Her armlessness represents how helpless human’s really are, particularly without our bodily faculties…faculties which sedentary computer-based lifestyles diminish. What good is focusing on technology as a significant planet-wide part of our economy when we don’t even know how we might die, thereby falsely assuming it is going to save us?
¶ 3. Place from when (whence) : mental state changing…experience.
Essential to truly living according to many philosophies is the idea of oneness. The particularity of the unity is between self and time. The fact of reality is that even though humans take the form of a body and a mind which possesses built-in systems of memory, memory itself is not necessarily permanent and exact. For example, it is well established and accepted as common knowledge that people can be biased in their recollection of events. Remembering past relationships or experiences as more positive than they were in reality is a common one, though the same could be said that mis-remembrance of experience could be tainted by later traumas and therefore reflection could be negatively tainting a more enjoyable prior experience. Memory is known by members of the legal profession to be highly questionable and biased, from the interpretation of sounds, the timing of events, the terminology used to describe character traits, and in the criminal context there is often significant human error in terms of identifying perpetrators.
To whit, memory is largely subjective and experiential. In an utopian world, perhaps Atlantean or Edenic but rhetorically speaking, the human mind could exist in perpetual bliss…the sense of self being unified with all things, time, space, others, animals, nature, materiality, etc. Such experience tends to make memory so purely subjective that, when later “snapped out” of it for the purpose of clarifying objective reality to detectives (or anyone), the experiencer may be of little to no real use, barely being able to tell the identity of a passerby or whether a car was red or blue or if an actor was angry or beligerent. The character or tone of a person is more subjective than society tends to realize. Likewise, the only purely factual matter in that pattern was whether a car is red or blue.
For purposes of truthful, objective, advancement of the species universally, it would likely be a good thing to exist on an objective plane, no?…particularly where the objective plane doesn’t oppress the subjective experience of the individual. Is this even possible or is it contradictory to the inherently imagined experience of people in everyday life? The potential of such a manifestation is unknowable by human beings…maybe. One thing is absolutely certain until this point in my personal experience: nobody actually seems to want to put any work into fulfilling such an ideological work that might bring about such utopianism. Instead, a “world of realists” engage in immense, lifelong labors of creating governmental systems, world economies, education systems, production and assembly lines, engineering feats to rival the ancients in prowess (not depth of meaning), and in constant individual personal struggles. It is utterly senseless that they will try to move boulders on their own when together they could not only move mountains, but mold mountains into living spaces so abstractly beautiful and habitable that the need to move it would be moot.