Refreshing Places, Violence, and Coffee

There might not always be the perfect tool for the job, but I’m the one who gets things done. Lots of times the mess sat for days before anybody ever knew about it. It can be weeks before they’re certain it’s ok to start clean up.

My boss keeps giving me raises, desperate I will leave. Finish the degree. Remember just why life is worth living. Take even one deep breath.

Ok. That’s not fair. How would my boss monitor my breathing 24/7. Why would he want to? Breathing is up to me.

It’s just that being a black man seems so confining - even decades past civil rights.

I don’t quit here. I’m continuously numb.

People tell me the job itself is the reason the depression lingers.

But I like knowing what to do about brains caked on a wall . . . how to banish the vestiges of blood spatter.

There’s a sense of power in the redemption of a space. Like the clock wasn’t merely turned back but was replaced. A new clock. A different version of time.

We wisk into the same neighborhoods seeing iterations of the same violent ends. Bowels or bladders evacuated. 

How much stuff should be donated? Things the family couldn’t bear to retrieve.

How much trashed? More than I’d like.

Do we scrub or paint? Dry clean or launder? Refit plumbing? Replace floors?

Because in neighborhoods like these, landlords are hungry. Voracious for the rents they lacked during investigations.

It’s a bright spot in the haze of my life when I find it again. Not that it’s valuable. A keychain I rubbed shiny on the inward facing side. The St. Louis arch.

I’m certain it’s mine. Memento of the one time I still remember feeling happy. Big link in the chain squished with awkward repair.

I probe around the edges of the memory, waiting for any jolt of pain. None answers.

I can even remember the day. The person.

Was that a full breath as I let my finger slide into that empty spot of the arch?

Well. Maybe it wasn’t a whole lung full. But close to it. Was that a smile? Do I really still have that ability?

Well. Maybe not. But neither my cheeks nor my eyelids felt like a series of tiny weights dragged them down with unrelenting pressure. A near smile.

The long days making a home ready for habitation again can last an entire twenty four hours - an obvious depressor.

Is that a real word: depressor? I run on coffe. Black like me.

Was that a joke? Only kind of.

Am I the only one left who read that book?Didn’t like it. Use the title as a punchline.

Ann, at the coffee shop: hair in a worn-out shade of purple and wears open-fingered gloves. An unconvincing wild child.

Her eyes flick to my keychain then rest curiously on my face. A hawk on a telephone pole calculating if the squirrel has time to make it into a safe hole.

The smile my face almost made a few hours ago seeps out like a nosebleed. I hold up the keychain. “Found it.”

The burst of joy she shows is like that hawk unfurling wings in glistening sun.

“Congrats. The usual?”

She’s not surprised when I shake my head and get a fruit cup. No caffeine today.

I’ve got a pattern. I lose stuff. On the day i find something, it’s a new beginning, some different food comes along.

When I found those retro fuzzy dice again, it was an omelette. A Las Vegas pen with holographic cards forever flipping front to back? That day brought hot chocolate.

Ann thinks I’m too depressed to notice she always seems happier than me on each new finding day.

Not today, though. She doesn’t know I hate fruit. Tyffani loved fruit.

The days of found objects come quicker.

Sometimes the turnaround time is only days. A tool. A jacket. Earbuds.

Does this mean the depression is clearing or getting worse? Does it mean I’m more forgetful or better at remembering?

Things disappeared from the car at first. Easy to chalk up to fatigue at the end of a shift. Or bad neighborhoods. Now, they slip away and return even on the job.

Something else nags at me. The smells of work are decay, disinfectant, bodily fluids, new paint. What’s the foreign smell?

A fresh floral whiff lingers in the air some days. A memory of Tyffani resurfacing?

Am I going nuts or coming alive?

When thoughts of her passed the gag of firm fingers across my mouth, pain tore.

At work — too soon, most people feared — I was the one to process her crime scene. That fresh smell lingered. 

I saw patterns. Clues. A clear trail leading to Tyffani’s killer. Without the degree (or at least the nerve to complete the academy) I can’t do detective work. No chance.

Is this newness of smell coming out of darkness? Or is it my subconscious giving me a reason to end everything?

Coffee got me through the hard work of happy times before the crime. 

Coffee’s there for the wrenching times, too.

Vacillating between understanding and insanity. There’s always black coffee.

Ann is the touch point tethering me to the coffee shop. Her curious eyes. The delight when I find something. It’s a constant.

Has Ann always worn the same perfume as Tyffani? When did the sense of smell return? Did my brain simply keep me from registering important details?

There’s the day I can’t ignore it any more. The time something goes missing from my apartment. The smell lingers. Strongly.

The patterns are returning like that cloying sweetness. A woman killed . . . 

. . .followed by her boyfriend.

Within a day, there is a gun leveled, not at my head or my chest. At my gut. 

My laptop had disappeared from inside my apartment the day before. I see it, like a baby cradled in the arms of Ann.

Her hair is fading to pink. Things with Tyffani were gruesome, even to a professional. They'd be even worse with me if patterns stayed true.

As I watched the cool calculation in those eyes, there was certainly intelligence. Was it really bird-like, or more primitive?

The chill I felt never reaches my eyes. This will be hard, but I will get through it.

Tyffani deserves that much.

I never met Tyffani, of course. Agents are carefully selected to be plausible to a life.

Who better than a young black man to capture this killer who has worked a series of cities?

The outrage I feel at each killing never fades, unlike the pink hair of the woman in front me. The time for pretending has not yet ended, though. I will still play a grieving boyfriend.

Ann still doesn’t know very much about me. She knows my height and build. My skin color. How I act when I have found some thing. She hardly knows why I live the life that I do. She can’t know. I don’t allow it.

Ann does not know that before Tiffany, who I never met, there was somebody important. A different person who got killed. One I truly cared about. Now I use this way of building a fiction I can believe in, and sell it like a sweet treat to a psychopath who can’t resist me.

It’s like restoring a living space.

Ann does not know that I have been shot before. 

It doesn’t mean very much to me. I come back.

If she is the hawk swooping on the defenseless squirrel, I am the coyote.

I am an ambush. I always get my quary.