The Body Farm, page 22
Behind the walls, the Body Farm comprises forty acres. The area was chosen for its variety: a stretch of forest, a stream, a meadow, zones of unbroken sunshine and perpetual shadow, a wetland, and a dry, high slope—as great a range of types of terrain as can conceivably be found in a single biome.
During that fateful winter, this idyllic stretch of midwestern greenery was inhabited by 127 dead people.
The purpose of the Anthropological Research Center is simple. Within its walls, corpses decay in every conceivable way, and my colleagues and I observe and record it all. How will a body deteriorate if we bury it in a shallow grave on a windy hillside? Will the data change if the corpse is nude, half dressed, wrapped in plastic, or slathered in sunscreen? What is the exact, mathematical progression of larval growth? What happens to the internal organs after four days, seven days, two weeks? What happens to the bones?
New corpses are always coming in. Thousands of people have signed up to donate their bodies to the Anthropological Research Center after death. (My own will stipulates the same.) Whenever a new cadaver arrives, the other researchers and I debate where to place it. Our aim is to study decomposition in every possible locale: riverbank, direct sun, partial shade, tall weeds, swamp. Each season of the year brings new information. Corpses are different from day to night, winter to summer—there’s always more research to be done. Should the cadaver be stripped naked this time? Should it be injected with heroin or OxyContin? Should it be hanged from a tree? What kind of data will be most beneficial? What gaps currently exist in our research? Once the corpse has been laid to rest—perhaps buried in sand, perhaps floating in the creek—its decay will be charted until nothing remains.
I’m one of eight on the team. Georgina is our botanist. Hyo specializes in fungi and bacteria—“the slime lady,” she calls herself. Kenneth trains law enforcement officers in the science of decomposition; they come from all over the world to learn at his feet. Luis focuses on microbes, a new and fascinating field, with groundbreaking applications for antibacterial medicines and anticancer chemotherapeutics. Jackson and Cal, both MDs, share the study of the corpses themselves. They dissect and photograph festering skin, weigh liquefied organs, slice up bones, and keep samples of blood at every stage of putrefaction. Then there’s LaTanya, who has the most difficult job of all. She serves as liaison, publicist, spokesperson, and official witness, testifying in court cases on behalf of us all and translating our data into digestible, user-friendly language.
I am the Body Farm’s entomologist. I spend my days among beetles and blowflies. I know the life cycles of pyralid moths and cheese skippers. In cold weather, I check for winter gnats and coffin flies. At a glance, I can tell the difference between species of insect eggs. The shelves in my office contain preserved larvae at every stage of maturation, lovingly coated in chemicals that won’t dehydrate the samples or change their color. My drawers hold trays of beetles, bright as pennies, and velvety moths arranged by size.
It’s disgusting work. But the grotesqueness of the Body Farm stands in direct proportion to its worth. Months, sometimes years after a corpse has been found, my colleagues and I can pinpoint the time of death, cause of death, manner and likely location of death, and more, offering a cornucopia of distasteful but salient facts. Killers have been convicted on the strength of our research.
The dead can’t speak for themselves. The story of how someone died—and, even more important, what happened to their body afterward—has fallen to me and the other researchers to uncover. I help put away “bad guys,” as you would call them. I name the nameless. Too many children die at the hands of a parent. The number one cause of death for pregnant women is homicide, usually by an intimate partner. How can a person walk around knowing these things and not participate in a solution? I get answers for the bereaved. I reunite the dead with their loved ones, bringing anonymous bodies, badly decomposed, home to the family who declared them missing months earlier. The dead can’t speak, but insect activity communicates loud and clear.
Still, I do not talk about my work with most people, and certainly not with my children. I have never told you anything about the Body Farm, my beloved twins—not until now, writing this letter, my confession.
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On the day the blue envelope came, I woke with a foul taste in my mouth. Working the night shift always leaves me disoriented and bad-tempered. My colleagues and I take turns handling this unpleasant but vital task.
I climbed out of bed and washed my face in the bathroom sink. There was a bang, and one of you—I could not immediately tell which—dashed through the door and slammed into my legs. I let myself be climbed like a tree, then taken by the hand and led downstairs, where a glorious mess greeted me.
Given the bitter wind howling among the rafters, Beatrice had decided that this was a good day to make bread from scratch. She always spends the winter baking, chasing away the midwestern chill with the warmth of the oven and the comforting aroma of yeast and sugar. Flour coated the kitchen floor and hung in the air in a fine mist. Both of you were covered in it too, your curls powdered like the wigs of British lords. Music jangled from the radio. Scuffling around in the snowfall of flour, you two were playing the mirror game, imitating each other so closely that I could not tell who was leading and who was following.
At the counter, Beatrice kneaded a sticky lump of dough. A smear of flour painted one cheek. I leaned in for a kiss and realized that her eyes were bloodshot and swollen. She had been crying.
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She and I did not have a chance to talk until your nap time. You were on the verge of giving up this relic from your toddler years. When Beatrice was on her own with you, she often let you skip it rather than risk a dual tantrum. I, however, intended to maintain nap time for as long as possible, until you were in college, hopefully.
I set you both in my lap in the rocking chair in Theo’s room and read the dullest, most repetitive nursery rhymes I could find. Against your will, you yawned, your heads drooping and rising again, each blink slower and more prolonged than the last. I nestled your precious bodies, limp in my arms, beneath Theo’s blanket. Your faces inches apart. Each of you breathing in the air the other had just exhaled.
Then I went downstairs and found Beatrice at the dining room table, her head in her hands, staring at the electric-blue envelope.
I sat beside her. I rubbed her back. She was crying again, no sobs, just a wellspring of tears that seemed to ooze from somewhere deep down.
“I don’t know what to do,” she whispered.
I picked up the envelope and pulled out the note inside—the same color and weight, azure card stock. Two words had been scrawled in ballpoint pen:
FOUND YOU
Beatrice wiped the tears away with her palm. “What are we going to do?” she asked, still in that throaty whisper. “What can we possibly do?”
I thought about burning the note or running it through the shredder in the office. But instead I put it carefully back in the envelope, preserving the evidence.
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And now I must go further back. At the age of four, you were not particularly interested in how your parents had come to be together. You knew that having two mommies was slightly unusual but not unheard of. Domingo, a boy in your class at the preschool you attended a few mornings a week, had two daddies, and another girl lived with her grandparents, no mom or dad in the picture. Your teacher made sure to read books that highlighted all the different shapes a family can take.
For my part, I’m a gold-star lesbian and proud of it—no boyfriends ever, not even in my childhood, when all it took to become affianced to a classmate was a shove on the playground. I like the term sexual orientation (as opposed to sexual preference, the problematic phrase used in my youth) because it so closely mirrors my own experience. I was born with a compass in my chest that points truth north. There was never any question about which way the needle would lead me.
Beatrice, however, identifies as bisexual and primarily dated men before we met. That’s fine, nothing wrong with men, they just aren’t my personal cup of tea. But among her sensitive poets and tattooed drummers, Beatrice happened upon a sociopath. Or maybe that’s the wrong diagnosis—I don’t know, I’d never met the guy, not then, anyway. A bad egg, a ticking time bomb, pick your metaphor.
They dated in college, long before Beatrice and I found each other. I’ve seen pictures of Emerson: a corn-fed white boy, strapping and tall, with a receding chin. Beatrice never loved him. She was young, sowing her wild oats and reveling in being out of her parents’ house. After one single evening together, this man told her he planned to marry her. He told her he’d been waiting for her all his life.
She has never disclosed very much about that time. Even now, it’s hard for her to talk about. Emerson consumed her college years—I do know that. She stayed with him because he made it clear he’d kill himself if she left. No more wild oats. Four years of Emerson walking her to every class and panicking if she didn’t answer his calls. He bought her necklaces and bracelets and pouted if she didn’t wear them, which made her feel, she told me, like a pet with a collar. He pleaded with her to leave her dorm and move in with him off campus. She was able to hold him off only by blaming her parents, claiming they’d revoke her tuition if she did such a thing, though truthfully they wouldn’t have cared either way. In photographs, Emerson is always touching Beatrice, one arm snaked around her waist, sometimes holding her braid in his fist, while she flashes a fixed, panicked smile that does not reach her eyes.
After graduation she found the wherewithal to end it. She took a job in the Colorado mountains, miles from their New England campus. She did not tell Emerson a thing about it until the day of her flight. Then he wept, pleaded, and threatened suicide. He outlined all the plans he’d made for her life—marriage, dogs, babies, nothing she’d ever consented to. When Beatrice held firm, Emerson opened the window of her third-floor dorm room, now bare, all her things packed and shipped already. He flung one leg over the sill, yelling that he’d throw himself out if she left him.
This time, however, she was prepared. She called 911, and Emerson spent the night in a hospital on an involuntary psychiatric hold while Beatrice flew across the country, believing she was finally free.
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We had a security system installed at the house the next day. You were both ecstatic to have workmen clomping up and down the stairs and looming on ladders outside the windows. Nothing this exciting had happened to you since a fire truck came down the street the previous afternoon. Shrieking and pointing, you shadowed the workmen all morning while Beatrice attempted to nap—it had been a sleepless night for her—and I guarded the bedroom door, keeping you out.
At nap time I tried to sedate you with fairy tales, but my plan backfired. You are growing, always growing up before my eyes. Suddenly you could follow the plot, whereas only a few weeks earlier you would’ve been interrupting me constantly to ask unrelated questions about the nature of time or farts. Now, however, the story caught your attention, and you sat up straighter in my lap. Your eyes shone. “And then what happened?” you each whispered at intervals. I ended up reading fairy tale after fairy tale right through what should’ve been your nap time, all damsels in distress and armor-clad knights and a happy ending, maybe with a moral thrown in.
My shift started at three that day. I did not feel right abandoning my family in this moment of crisis, but Beatrice rose from our bed and said she’d be fine, you’d all be fine. The alarm system was armed now, and she had let a few friends know what was going on. They’d be dropping by and checking in throughout the day. She promised to keep you both at home. She promised to text me instantly if anything untoward happened.
In the parking lot behind the Body Farm, I took my vial of peppermint oil from the glove compartment and dabbed a few drops, as always, beneath my nose. Over the course of the workday, I would become inured to the stench of decay, but the first wave was invariably overwhelming.
I passed LaTanya’s office on the way to my own. She was on the phone, leaning back in her chair and speaking in her most soothing customer service voice: “I understand, but that’s not information we have. I can’t help you. I’m happy to share what we do know at this point. However . . .”
She caught my eye, made her fingers into a gun, and shot herself in the head. I laughed and moved on down the hall. I did not envy LaTanya, always on the phone, on the go, consulting with overworked police officers and blustering district attorneys. Every murder case is an emergency, while our work remains gradual and complex and painstaking. Decomposition can’t be rushed.
Stepping onto the grounds of the Body Farm was like teleporting to some echelon of the underworld. An elderly woman lay swaddled in a heavy tarp, only one hand visible, curling limply upward, not yet touched by maggots. A teenage boy had been rolled in a pile of leaves, naked from the waist down, his limbs smeared with mud. Corpses in direct sunlight. Corpses on the riverbank. Some were fresh, still recognizably human. Others had decomposed to the point of genetic regression, returning to an amoebic state, pink and gelatinous, perfuming the air.
The afternoon was icy, the sky frosted over with pale clouds. Leafless trees surged in a stiff breeze. I wore my usual uniform—latex gloves, a surgical mask, and cotton clothes that did not retain odors as much as polyester. On the hill lay my first stop of the day: a twenty-two-year-old woman, dressed in jeans and a neon-green T-shirt, half-buried in soil. She had been there for six days, and her organs had melted into soup. Her torso appeared sunken, the ground beneath her stained and damp. Her brain, I knew, was already gone. The bacteria in the mouth worked quickly after death, devouring the palate, then everything else.
I opened my tool kit and took out my forceps. There were several maggot masses. I collected a few samples from each area, then checked the temperature of the flesh; the insects’ bustling generated its own heat. I plucked up the wriggling bodies with a practiced motion, dropping each one into a separate jar. As always, I kept half alive and killed half immediately, preserving them for later inspection.
Next I studied the area around the body. Since the corpse lay on a slope, some of its fluids had seeped downhill. Maggots always follow fluids. I dug through the leaf litter with a sterile tool. Insect activity is a fairly reliable measure of time of death, though many things can alter the data: if the body has been moved, kept in extreme cold or heat, or covered with fabric or plastic. Part of my job is to think of every possible factor that could alter the timeline, study each one, and keep records.
Not long ago, I discovered that cocaine in the bloodstream of a corpse will supercharge the maggots, accelerating their growth and maturation, whereas barbiturates have the opposite effect, lulling them into lethargy. A serial killer was convicted on the strength of my data. That’s right—a serial killer. LaTanya testified on behalf of our team, as she always does, offering glossy photographs and her patented brand of wry humor to put the jury at ease. The result: multiple life sentences without the possibility of parole.
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Emerson began stalking Beatrice the moment her plane touched down in Colorado. That was not the word she would have used then, however. It was a less enlightened time, lacking the language to describe the many kinds of mental and physical violence people can inflict on one another. If your boyfriend followed you everywhere you went and never let you out of his sight, that was puppy love. If an ex called you long-distance hundreds of times and bombarded you with bizarre gifts and death threats, that was just the natural expression of his heartbreak.
Beatrice stayed in Colorado for two years. She was content there, working at a coffee shop and daydreaming idly about getting an MFA in visual art or theater, something creative. She liked the clear mountain air, the hiking trails, and the breathtaking vista outside her living room window.
Emerson remained in Massachusetts on the campus where they’d been happy together, at least in his mind. Most days he called Beatrice dozens of times, leaving ragged, rambling voicemails. He sent presents at least once a week—a teddy bear with a heart on its chest, a charm bracelet, nothing that suited her taste at all. She figured that eventually he’d wear himself out. Surely he would find a new object for his affections. Every now and then, she decided it was time to reason with him and answered the phone, leading to hour-long arguments that left her raw and shaken.
She has a good heart, your mother. She did not realize that each time she gave in, she was training Emerson to be persistent. Not that I’m blaming the victim, you understand—he should have stopped the first time she said no. Always remember that. And Beatrice meant well; she had compassion for Emerson, no matter how much he hurt her. But if he called fifty times in a row before she answered the phone, he learned that it took fifty-one attempts to force her to submit. If he sent her ten cutesy stuffed animals without reply, then sent another and received a text saying Please don’t give me any more gifts, he learned that eleven unwanted presents would trigger a response.
Back then, Beatrice still believed she could set boundaries if she just explained herself well enough. Perhaps she hadn’t yet been clear, she thought. This is the danger of being a decent person in this complicated world, someone with a functioning conscience. She could not imagine the malevolent mentality of a brute like Emerson. All he wanted was contact, and every time he got it—even if it was “No” or “Stop” or “You’re scaring me”—his desire was met and his resolve strengthened.
Beatrice probably would have stayed in Colorado, and she and I might never have met, and you two would never have been born, if Emerson had not turned up on her doorstep one evening, sweaty and disheveled, suitcase in hand.
I wasn’t there, of course, but I can picture it clearly. Beatrice has told me the story many times. He tried to push past her into the house. He told her he was sick of “doing long distance” and it was time for them to try living together. Her “little independent phase” was getting him down.
