Mat Johnson - Hunting in Harlem

Snowden felt weird being in the dead guy's apartment, guilty for thinking of him as just that, "the dead guy." These are the dead guy's condoms on the coffee table, note the deceased's optimism. This is the dead guy's remote control, its batteries would outlive their owner. This thing they were both sitting on, this was the dead guy's couch.

"The deal is, a lot of people die in Harlem." Lester removed his Cigarillos tin from inside his breast pocket, lit one. His cigarillos lasted longer than regular cigarettes, stunk worse than regular cigars. "A lot of people die everywhere — everyone dies, to be truthful — but when they die in Harlem, in a Horizon property, we have to clean up afterwards. We got a license with the City of New York Sanitation Department, a special-use permit for the industrial cleaners you can't get over the counter."

"Is the dead guy in the apartment? Is that what you're going to tell me?" Snowden felt weak, not for what he just asked but for the way Lester laughed at him.

"Relax, this is an easy one just to get you started. He didn't die in here. It's just, this is your special project with Horizon. You'll be paid bonus money for these hours, since Tuesday's your day off. There's a lot of older folks in Harlem, a lot of people living risky lives, we get jobs like this pretty regularly."

"I can handle it." Snowden nailed the point home with nods.

"Good. Thing is, this has also got to be low profile. We have all these people coming back to Harlem now, real estate market booming, vibrant, but it's fragile, see? A lot of it's PR, public perception. Death, that's not something people want to hear about. Especially people looking for a place to live during a housing crunch. Who wants to know they're moving into the home of someone that just kicked it?"

"No one. So I'll keep it quiet."

"Exactly. The other two, your coworkers, don't even tell them. The point is, Snowden, to protect the client, the neighborhood. People are always looking for bad things to say about Harlem, let's not even give them an excuse."

When you die, it shouldn't be like this, a stranger and a brightly dressed man breaking the silence of your abandoned home to go through your things and throw most of them in the trash. Lester leaned a chair against the splintered front door to keep it shut, started giving out his orders. They were so specific, so mundane. Clear a room at a time, you start from the back, I'll start from the front. Place all electronics and small appliances in the center of the living room, all books in the bathtub, all photos and official documents in white kitchen bags, clothes in the green trash bags, the rest in the black lawn bags to be thrown out. Glasses, dishes, silverware: trash. Double-bag them.

It was a two-bedroom. In the back was the kitchen, behind that a small room being used for storage. It was amazing how fast it was possible to clear away someone's life when you threw it in the trash. A couple of full arm sweeps into open bags and the kitchen was nearly barren. Snowden was even more impressed with how much was obvious from the trash he was dumping. The dead guy was Carlton Simmons (cable and electric bills stuck to the freezer door identified). Mr. Simmons had family in Buffalo: Rena Simmons, whom he called for brief minutes during the week, longer on holidays and weekends (Verizon). If Mr. Simmons cooked, it was fast and simple: spaghetti or an occasional burger. Of all the pastas available to him on the grocery shelf, the only one he'd bought was angel hair, probably because it cooked fast and he was impatient. The frozen burgers were bought in prepackaged bulk, the meat mechanically shaped into CD-thin wafers. Carlton Simmons must have liked the idea of health because there were greens in the crisper, but he wasn't completely invested in it, because each individually bagged bundle was completely untouched and rotting. What this brother really liked was Chinese food. Evidence lined every shelf in the refrigerator as proof of a daily habit. Fried and breaded pieces of dark meat glazed red or brown on beds of yellow rice. Imported bottles of blistering hot sauce in the cabinet a nod to some West Indian or African ancestry.

Snowden the detective, Snowden the archaeologist on a dig into the permafrost lining the freezer, searching for artifacts. The more mundane the job, the more his imagination took over, the more fun it became.

In the back bedroom, Snowden lost himself between his janitor motions and his detective dream. The clues were endless, heavy, the garbage much the same. Carlton Simmons ate fatty foods and dreamed of the skinny days he'd long deserted. Nearly all the worn pants were forty-two waist, disregarding a few scarred and veteran forties, and then on the top shelf of the closet Snowden found a stack of pants size thirty-six waist. They were different colors but all the same brand, all new with their retail folds undisturbed and starchy, a purchase for a waistline that would never return until the fat decomposed off of him, and then he wouldn't need pants anyway.

One large box remained at the back of the closet floor when all the clothes had been evacuated. Inside, obscured underneath a pile of video game magazines, was a beige metal safe the size of a dictionary and a paper grocery bag. Snowden pulled at the safe, played at cracking its combination for a bit before growing bored, and took the bag. Pictures, loose and organized in books. Snowden decided it was time for his break, took a seat on one of the fully packed bags of clothes.

Carlton Simmons, his face in repetition. They were the same age, Snowden and the dead guy, had shared the same era of childhood. Snowden recognized the clothes, the hair, fell into the past and saw the other there as if he had known him. Carl had been to Atlantic City, there was a picture of him leaning back on a bench with the Sands behind him. Carl had been to the Washington Monument. Carl had a daughter. Her pictures, from newborn to infant, joined his own.

Trying to pile the loose photos together, Snowden noticed a white envelope lying at the bottom. It held a key inside, one he soon found out worked on the beige safe. The safe had no money in it, just another, older envelope inside.

In the span of time it had taken Snowden to clear out most of the kitchen and what amounted to a large closet, Lester had cleared out the living room, the bathroom, and was sweeping up the debris from his assault on the master bedroom. Along the far walls of each room were stacked layers of blank brown boxes, topped by trash bags, plush and shiny and full. It was the precision of repetition, of muscle memory of countless other jobs like this one. For Lester, this duty seemed to have the meditative value of pulling a rake through a Japanese rock garden. The only thing that brought him out of the action of moving the straw broom across the wooden floor was the way Snowden sounded at the door.

"What am I supposed to do with this?" Before him Snowden held out the white envelope like someone had just hit him with it. The thing was so worn, the paper so dirty, uneven and stiff in his hand, it was like it had been left out in the rain for an entire season. Lester removed the plum kerchief from his jacket's breast pocket and held the envelope with that by its corners. When Lester took it from him, Snowden looked relieved to not hold it anymore. Inside, Lester found Polaroids with their stiff white borders, took them in a stack and let their packaging drop to the floor with the rest of the trash.

The first picture was of a woman naked, leaning back on the couch of the room he'd just cleaned. Even if Lester was attracted to women, he doubted this one could excite him. You could see the dark brown blotches on her legs, the even darker flesh under eyes as wide and dead as deviled eggs. Around her skull a legion of hair had reverted to chaos, rioting in neglect. On her breastbone was the wrinkled line of a pulled-up shirt, at her calves matching crumpled pants, both articles ready to be pulled back into position as soon as the flash had dimmed. Lester looked at the track marks on the arm, tried to locate the fresh one. The second photo was of a mother and her infant child, whom she held on her side as she leaned forward to fellate the cameraman. The third was of a little girl, dressed only in her colorful braids. It took a moment for Lester to recognize her as the one who'd just peeked out at them from down the hall, the one Snowden had been talking to. What Lester noticed the most about this photo, as opposed to the ones of her that followed, was that you could clearly see the dollars in her hand, gripped fiercely in discomfort.