I wanted to try and resuscitate but Anthony said not to bother. He said he’d write that we made an effort when filling out the report, but there was no point in really trying. We all stood around for a few moments and then Anthony shrugged and sucked on his coffee. He had a huge plastic cup and the straw squeaked against the lid. The liquid inside was pale with sugar and cream.
The man’s legs were stiff when I reached into his pocket. Rigor mortis sets into the lower extremities six to eight hours after death. Decomposition, in the summer heat, in about twenty-four hours. Apparently, we were somewhere in that window; he had likely collapsed the night before and lay undiscovered in this lonely corner of the mall parking garage. He had a worn nylon wallet that closed with Velcro. The ID was behind a clear plastic shield: his name was Robert Evans and he had been forty-six years old.
“How much cash is that?” Anthony asked. Anthony was the senior paramedic. I was the newbie. Carlos drove the rig. He used to be a paramedic but now he had some sort of medical problem and couldn’t lift anymore.
“Sixty-three dollars,” I said.
“Take it.”
I looked at him, then at Carlos. We were the only people around, standing between the ambulance and the Toyota Corolla this guy had been getting into or out of when he had a heart attack or stroke or something. “I don’t want the money,” I said.
Anthony’s story was well-known to everyone in the department. You heard it within a day or two of joining. He’d had perfect SAT scores and went to Middlebury College on full scholarship. Then he got kicked out, circumstances unclear. Now he was a pre-med student at BU, taking night classes. That had been going on for eleven or twelve years. “I didn’t ask if you wanted it,” he said.
“It’s his money,” I said. “It should go to his next of kin.”
Carlos studied a crack in the wall of the parking garage. He never had an opinion about anything. I had the sense that he felt lucky to have a job and wasn’t going to make waves.
“Did you know,” Anthony said, “that 93% of your body mass is hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon?”
“No,” I said, “I didn’t. Also, I think you’re standing in his urine.” The human body often releases urine after death, when the sphincters relax.
Anthony didn’t move his foot. “What do you think happens to those elements after you die?”
I shrugged. I was still holding the wallet. Carlos was still looking at the wall. Anthony was still standing in pee. Robert Evans of 110 Maple Street was still stiffening.
“They drift apart,” Anthony said. “The elements that made you you, that were bound together into your heart and liver and brain, which gave rise to your feelings and your thoughts and your moral qualms, they all drift away from each other. They go their separate ways and embark on other projects. Ferns and racoons and parking garages like this one.” Anthony was sometimes given to rants, especially if he’d had too much Red Bull. I’d seen him slam three that morning. His eyes were bloodshot. He said he’d been up all night studying for an organic chem exam. He’d used that excuse more than once, though I never saw him with books or notes or flashcards. “What I’m asking,” he continued, “is whether you think you’re special?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t think I’m special.”
“You think you’re 93% hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon?”
“At least 93%.”
“You think, in seventy or eighty years, your elements are going to have broken down, been reabsorbed by the earth, and molecular pieces of you will be part of a raccoon or a parking garage?”
“Yeah.” I hoped for the garage. Raccoons freaked me out.
Anthony sucked on his drink and looked at me. “Then take the damn money.”
I took the wad of bills and tucked them in my pocket. Then I put the wallet back in the corpse’s pants and we started the job of picking him up and taking him away.
***
After I got off shift I gave the money to the first homeless guy I saw. That night I couldn’t sleep. Not the next night, either. I lay in my bed in the open concept, hyper-modern, well-air-conditioned three thousand square foot condo none of the other paramedics knew I owned outright. I thought about molecules dancing through space, blending in the soil, combining and re-combining into raccoons or into the Armani suits from my old job, still hanging in the closet. I thought about Robert Evans lying in the morgue with the elements that constituted him disbanding. This was not the fantasy, taking sixty-three bucks from a dead guy’s nylon wallet.
I inventoried a few of the things that I had, in my former life, spent approximately sixty-three dollars on:
• 1 ¾ pieces of sashimi (Seoul)
• Almost one of the two opal cufflinks in an engraved set (London)
• My fair share of a bottle of Spanish liqueur split with three other consultants (Barcelona)
• About half of the tip I slipped a bouncer to get me and an old girlfriend into a sold-out show at the Bowery (Manhattan)
On the third day, exhausted, I phoned in sick, dressed in civilian clothes, drank some kombucha and then, giving up on what was supposed to be a thirty-day caffeine detox, made myself two espressos. Wired, I set off with eighty dollars in my pocket. I had nothing but twenties; the Evans family was going to earn 26% interest on the two days they didn’t have their money.
An hour later I stood in front of 108 Maple Street. It was a purple Cape Cod with peeling brown shutters. The grass in the front yard was overgrown and there were bare patches around a metal stake with a chain attached to it but no dog. I turned and walked about forty feet to my right. 112 Maple Street was in considerably better condition, with fresh paint and neatly mowed grass.
110 Maple Street did not exist. Where it should have been, between 108 and 112, lay a dirt road rutted by heavy tires leading from Maple Street to a housing development that was still under construction. I could see, from the frames, that the houses were going to be much bigger than 108 and 112.
I decided to go up to number 112 but no one was home. I waited for an answer at the door, knocked again, and finally walked back to where number 110 should be. Looking down I saw that I was about to step on a pair of penises, drawn in what had once been the wet cement of the sidewalk. Beyond them there were three sets of initials, presumably taking credit though I wondered why, if there had been three artists, there were only two genitals. In the next square of sidewalk someone had drawn a cat with exaggerated whiskers, and then at the mouth of the dirt road, in front of the missing house, a drawing of a heart with a weird undulating W inside, the culprit apparently interrupted before they could finish the initials for Wilma or William or Warren or Wynona.
Was it a W? It didn’t look right. I walked around the heart a few times, tilting my head like I was studying a new installation at the art museum. It didn’t matter; it would all be torn up when they paved the road leading back to the new development.
The sidewalk in front of number 108, the purple house, was unvandalized. Possible W-names spinning in my head, I turned onto the walk and was halfway up when my chest exploded in red mist. “You’re dead!” a voice called.
I felt my torso. There was no wound underneath the “blood”, though it hurt. A paintball. A girl came from around the side of the house. She wore cut-off jeans with the left leg significantly longer than the right. She had a peach tank top and her hair was braided and curled around each ear in an effort to mimic the world’s most famous cinematic cinnamon buns. She was holding a blaster.
“That hurt,” I said.
“Dying hurts.”
“Not always.”
“No?” She lowered the paint gun. “You’ve known people who have died?”
My shirt was ruined. I dimly remembered buying it in Tokyo and not caring how much it cost. “I’ve known some,” I said, “though not very well.”
“I knew one. My grandma. Though I didn’t know her very well, either.”
“Lucy!” A woman came out the front door. Her hair was down and she wore a brown bathrobe. “Oh my God, mister, did Lucy shoot you?”
“It’s okay,” I said, “it was probably an accident.”
“She’s very sorry,” the woman said.
“It wasn’t an accident,” Lucy said. “I have excellent aim.” She did not look the least bit sorry. I pegged her as one of the penis-artists from the sidewalk.
The woman sent Lucy into the house (blaster still in hand) and turned back to me, eyebrows raised. I guessed that she was gauging whether I had come to sell something or to serve her with legal papers. Whoever I was, she sensed that I wasn’t entirely benign. I had accrued a backlog of untrustworthiness during my prior career as a consultant and I was still working it off. “I was wondering,” I said, “what happened to number 110?”
She gestured toward the dirt road. “Gone. Eighteen months ago. They’re building that goddamn development back there. It’s terrible.”
I grimaced in what I hoped was solidarity. “What happened to the people who lived there? The Evans’?”
“Bob and Cassie?”
“Yeah. Uh – sure.”
Lucy’s mom shook her head. “I’m not sure, to be honest. Are you a friend?”
“Yes. An old friend. I wanted to get in touch.”
“I saw Cassie, a few months ago, at the Gulf station out by Route 2. She was putting exactly seven dollars of regular into that old minivan. I mean, if you can only afford seven dollars of gas you should probably get something more fuel efficient, don’t you think?”
“Did she say where they had moved?” I asked.
She shook her head again. “I just spoke with her for a few moments. It doesn’t take long to put seven dollars of gas in a car, you know? She said she was doing okay, all the kids were okay. She and Bob aren’t together, you know that, don’t you?”
I frowned and nodded in an effort to look knowledgeable about the Evans family and also to encourage her to keep talking.
“I mean, they hadn’t been doing well for some time. They didn’t get what they deserved for the house” – here she nodded again to the new, unpaved road – “and one of the problems when they left was that Bob wanted to get his own place. I told her, I said she needed to get a lawyer and file on him, stop him from using whatever assets they had for himself and get ahold of them for the kids, but I think part of her was hoping things would work out. In my experience, that’s the problem: people keep on hoping for far too long.” She stopped and looked at me more closely. “Are you a friend of Bob’s?”
“No, more of…um, Cassie’s.”
“Poor thing, whatever their set-up was she clearly wasn’t getting enough cash out of him. She was working at Target; she was wearing the red shirt when I saw her. She said she was splitting time between menswear and electronics. Electronics! Cassie could never get her own cell phone to work! I hope she takes him to the cleaner when the divorce goes through.”
Lucy’s mom clearly hadn’t heard about Bob and I wasn’t going to be the one to tell her. “Thanks,” I said, “this has been very helpful. I’ll try to track her – them – down; I’d like to re-connect.”
“If you see them, tell them that Sandy Dalton says hi.”
“I will.”
On my way out I glanced down at the three sets of initials in the sidewalk. Sure enough, one of them was LBD. I would have bet all the single malt in my scotch cabinet that Lucy’s middle name began with B. I got into the car, drove away, and then pulled over and checked my phone for the Target closest to the Gulf station by Route 2.
***
Robert Evans had essentially no online presence, other than an old Linked-in account that identified him as a self-employed accountant and a site for robertevanscpa that said “under construction” when I clicked on it. I tried Cassie Evans as well, with no luck. Cassandra Evans turned up a bunch of hits on social media but none of them looked likely.
There were eight Targets within thirty miles of the Gulf. I started with the closest. The guy working in electronics didn’t recognize her name and said it was just him and three other men in the department. I tried the next closest store with the same result. I got a coffee and a burrito, ate in my car, and drove on.
This was the fantasy. I was doing it. Spending an off-duty day running down a lead so that I could return someone’s property. Selflessly giving of myself for no compensation, no personal upside, to regular people, people with no privilege, no leverage, no access.
The greeter at the third Target finally said it: “Dude, did you bleed all over your shirt?” I chose a plaid button down, paid for it, took it into the changing room, and threw the stained shirt in the trash on my way out. I’d get back to Tokyo someday.
I found her at the sixth closest Target. “Yeah,” the kid in electronics said, “Cassie works here. She’s on break.”
“She’s at work today?” I asked. I had assumed she would be out on some sort of bereavement leave, even if she and Bob were separated. They had kids, they would need her. I had planned to leave the money with a co-worker, maybe with an unsigned note, and be done with it.
“Yup. She always works Fridays.” He seemed unaware that Cassie would have any reason not to come in.
“Where is she?”
The kid leaned over. He had bad breath and a bloom of acne on his left cheek. “She’s been smoking on the roof during her breaks” he said, nodding toward the back of the store. What an asshole. I could have been anyone, an ex-boyfriend maybe. At a minimum he was doing a terrible job of covering for his colleague, who was presumably not supposed to be smoking on the roof. I thanked him, walked to the back of the store, let myself out, and stood by a foul-smelling dumpster. A rusty red ladder was bolted to the side of the building. I climbed it and stepped onto a flat roof pockmarked with puddles from rain the night before.
Cassie Evans was tiny. Not just short, not just thin, but small boned. She was crouched down, hunched. Perched. Her back was to me and she brought a hand to her mouth and her shoulder bowed as she sucked and then she exhaled a cloud of smoke that gathered above her head and drifted away.
“Excuse me,” I called, not wanting to startle her, “Cassie?”
She stood and turned, dropping the hand with the cigarette to her side and a bit behind her leg. I walked over. Her face was as delicate as her frame, high cheekbones and sharp nose. Black eyes, not dark brown but black. I read somewhere that there is no such thing, that the darkest irises are just dark, dark brown, but I swear that hers were actually black. I introduced myself and, not having prepared for the conversation, lurched directly in: “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry about your husband.” As I understood it, he had still been her husband.
“How did you know about Bob?”
“I work for the city.”
“Oh.” She seemed unsure, which was fair. It was not necessarily intuitive that a city worker would come out to her workplace and track her down on the roof just because her estranged husband died within municipal limits.
“I’d like to give you sixty-three dollars,” I said. “Well, eighty dollars, but you can keep the change.”
“My husband died on Wednesday,” the woman said. “You want to give me eighty dollars?”
It suddenly seemed like an awkward transaction. “It’s yours,” I said. “I mean, it was his, so now it’s yours. I was – uh – I’m a paramedic. My crew was called out for him. This is his money, but…” I trailed off. I realized how terrible the story sounded and I did not want to tell it. I had the sudden impulse to pin things on Carlos; Anthony seemed dangerous, even at a distance, but Carlos could take the fall. He never said anything. “A buddy, the guy who drives the rig, he didn’t follow procedure, and this was supposed to be forwarded to you but it didn’t, uh, transfer, and…” I stopped again, hand outstretched with the cash. The woman looked at it, looked at me, looked at the money again, and finally took it, folded it three times so that it was a perfect rectangle, and slipped it into her hip pocket.
There didn’t seem to be much left to discuss. “So,” I said, “you smoke up here?”
“Yup. Is that a code violation or something?”
“I don’t know. I’m a paramedic, not a building inspector.”
“Call it a guilty pleasure,” she said. She took a drag and looked down. “That shirt’s supposed to be marked off. It’s supposed to be $12.99.”
I followed her gaze. A tag still hung from the hem of my new shirt indicating that it had been $19.99. “Is it on sale at all Targets?” I asked. “Because I didn’t get it at this Target.”
“When did you buy it?”
“Today.”
“You’ve been to two Targets today?”
“I’ve been to six Targets today. I’ve been looking for you.”
Cassie Evans’ eyes widened momentarily and then she took a step away and looked around the empty roof. I wished I could take the words back. Something I learned in my time as a consultant: once you lose someone’s trust, it’s very difficult to regain. I had just raised the serious possibility, in Cassie’s mind, that I was a psycho stalker who got off on tracking down new widows and it was going to be a challenge to shake that suspicion.
She took another step, putting her foot into a puddle and that made her move to one side without looking, bringing her close to the edge. I reached out and she leaned away and for a moment I saw her, stepping into space, plunging down onto asphalt, crashing into some shopper’s plastic cart of newly purchased products – manufactured and shipped halfway around the world with an efficiency I had once dutifully applied myself to enhancing – and leaving however many kids she and Bob had as orphans due to nothing more than my oblivious clumsiness, my fantasy.
Cassie regained her footing. She glanced down and stepped away from the edge of the roof. “I think it’s marked down at all local Target stores,” she said. “You can probably get a refund.”
I did not want a seven-dollar refund for my shirt. I hadn’t even kept the receipt. I tore the tag off and stuffed it into my pocket.
Every fantasy is a fantasy about being somebody else. It’s not so much that you want to sleep with the girl, it’s that you want to be the guy she desires. You don’t want to do the hard work of saving a kid from a fire but you do want to be brave enough to run into a burning building. It’s about being better. It’s about being more. “I’m sorry if I startled you,” I said. “Honestly, I just wanted to make sure you got the money back.”
She nodded and started in the direction of the ladder. She took one more drag from her cigarette and tossed it into a puddle. “My break’s about over,” she said. “I have to get back to work.”
There were a lot of cigarette butts in that puddle. I thought about telling her that the guy in electronics was a jerk, that she shouldn’t trust him with her secrets, but what was the point? I could give her more money. I could give her enough that she wouldn’t have to work at all. She could take time off, be home with her kids, fill her gas tank all the way up. If I dipped into the 401k I could give her enough that she wouldn’t have to work for a year. Maybe two, depending on how many kids she had and their expenses.
Cassie Evans walked toward the ladder. I wasn’t going to give her money. That wasn’t how the world worked. It wasn’t how I worked. You can change your job and change your clothes, you can ride around in an ambulance and save a few lives, you can climb onto the roof of a big box store and do a good deed but every day, when you wake up, you’re still the same bunch of molecules just waiting to be a goddamn raccoon.
She reached the top of the ladder and put one hand on the rail. Then she turned back. “Did he say anything?” she asked.
“Who?”
“Bob. Did he say anything?”
It took me a moment to realize I had identified myself as a paramedic but neglected to mention we were several hours too late. For all she knew Bob Evans died in my arms as I strove valiantly to bring him back. “He did,” I said, “though it was a bit difficult to understand.”
Something flickered and then she looked away, over the flat rooftops of other stores along the strip. I remembered what Lucy’s mother said: people keep on hoping for far too long.
“I think maybe it was for you.”
I studied Cassie’s face, her fine bone structure, her true-black eyes. It seemed like she could step off the rooftop and glide away.
Fuck me, I thought, of course. That W wasn’t a W. It was too wavy to be a W, too rounded. It was symmetrically placed in the center of the heart with no room for two more initials. It wasn’t a letter at all. It was a doodle, a picture, a pair of wings, and all at once I saw him: Bob Evans, self-employed CPA with a shitty do-it-yourself website, watching the neighborhood kids draw in the wet cement and then venturing down to the edge of the lawn, picking up a stick and etching a poorly-drawn tribute to the woman he loved, or used to love, or wished he still loved before the sidewalk dried.
“It was hard to understand him, in those last moments, but I think he said ‘bird’?”
She went very still, one foot extended, about to step onto the ladder.
“Something about birds,” I said.
She bit her lip. Not quite right.
“A bird?” I continued, feeling my way along as though edging over a tightrope.
Yes. Maybe.
“Actually, I’m pretty sure it was ‘his bird’.”
Her chin lifted, angling her face slightly upward, a tiny pinch between her eyebrows. I was almost there. God, I still had it. Once a bullshit artist, always a bullshit artist.
“I think – I’m not sure, but I think – his words were: ‘tell my bird that I always loved her.’”
I knew that I was right. I saw it. As quickly as she pivoted onto the ladder and dropped out of sight, I saw the look on her face and I knew that she believed it and though she didn’t say anything, and though when I went down the ladder almost an hour later I walked around the outside of the store to my car rather than going back inside and maybe bumping into her, and though I never saw Cassie Evans again I knew that, for once, it made a difference.
Image by Ph B on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
- Keep the Change - February 25, 2025