My high school chemistry teacher was also a forensics investigator. He specialized in arson, burned bodies and flammable chemicals, and he entertained us with sometimes gruesome stories from more than twenty-five years of duty. There was the skeleton of a woman, average height—which is to say five foot four—somewhere around thirty years old, reduced to blackened bones and cinders in a house fire. He gave us two clues: “For example, the middle finger on her right hand has a large calcification on the top section, like you might have if you wrote heavily with a pencil, for example.” He said ‘for example’ at the beginning and end of everything. “For example, she also has a tiny indention, a notch, in her front tooth, also the right one, for example.” It was our job, eager students, wound up by the grisly details, to figure out her occupation.

Work changes you. It shows itself on your body. In the same way that a carpenter’s hands are tuned to the nuances of hammer and nail, the way wood can talk to you through your arms, my hands listen to numbers on files, to injection records and saturation levels, to painful and courageous histories. I filter through the hundreds of thousands (could be millions) of dead medical records at St. Vincent’s Hospital, and line them up in ascending order by year of admittance.

The files begin with a complaint. Something like “My back hurts and I don’t know why,” or “My leg is broken,” or worse things—usually only one sentence, typed up by someone in Admitting. Then a social and family history, which is dictated to the nurse by the patient, and hand-written. This is where the nurses fill in what’s really happening, the stuff that doesn’t show up in the complaint: “Woman claims to have walked into door,” or “Child has bruises on back and legs, father says they are from falling off the bed.” Then a medical history, a list of procedures performed, if any, and finally billing information. Sometimes there are x-rays, sometimes there are sonograms. Sometimes there’s hardly anything—a blurry carbon copy and illegible signature. The files are stored vertically on shelves in thirty-two rows. They’re accented by six different color-coded stickers (green for first-time emergency visit, orange for same-day dismissal, red for D.O.A., yellow, brown and light blue for what I haven’t been able to figure out yet.)

My fingertips are tough, callused by the constant shuffling and reshuffling of paperwork and paperclips, removing the tiny staples, and my cuticles are often rubbed red and raw from jamming my hands in between two folders, cut open on the sharp edges of the files.

I work alone. I don’t talk to anyone, don’t see anyone. I don’t know who deposits the manila folders into the wire inbox. I only know that when I arrive, the box is full, and the files are sometimes spilling over into two or sometimes three stacks on the carpet. I work when I want to. I don’t make enough money to get by on this job alone, so I hustle. Truthfully, I was hustling before I took this job, and if you ever see a documentary film about strippers, or prostitutes, or hustlers, they always say something like: “I couldn’t make enough money waiting tables, so I started turning tricks and here I am.”

With me it was the opposite.

The fact that I work alone also means that, in some ways, I have no proof of the work at all. I have no product. Other than my fingers, I have nothing to show for it, no physical manifestation of time passing. Hustling is the same. If I flatten myself out enough (in my head, I mean) then it’s easily forgettable. And because it’s a secret, an almost invisible transaction between strangers, it doesn’t really exist. But I will—reluctantly—say this: all the anonymous numbers, all those forgotten histories, the injuries and surgeries and remarkable recoveries, they hide in my fingers. Where the sex work goes, I don’t know.

The burned woman? She held a pair of scissors which pressed on that knuckle, and she tucked bobby pins in that tooth, where over the years they carved out a little nick in the enamel. She was a hairdresser.

Right now I’m sucking this guy’s cock in his rented BMW and as he starts to fuck my face his balls tighten up like he’s going to explode and it’s shoved too far down my throat for me to practice my practiced technique.

When I look over at my hand holding the armrest of the door, my fist is clinched tight around the brown leather and the dust starts to settle over my eyes. I reach down and start rubbing my finger across his asshole, then pushing it up until I can’t get in any farther. He squirms, then moans. Not pleasure or pain. It’s a moan of not knowing, of losing control. There is no before and there is no after, there is only now, like the queasy instant just before you sneeze.

He shakes, stops thrusting and grabs my ears. He presses my head down. His cum squirts in three short bursts into the back of my throat and it’s sour and acrid and awful.

I swallow.

Tomorrow, I think, it won’t be so bitter.

***

These things happen when I’m lying on my stomach. Always when I’m lying on my stomach. Things come back into mind. Images, moments from the past. It’s not terrible, it’s simply a nuisance.

I was twelve.

He was sixteen.

We had been swimming.

There were lines on our thighs, the places where our swimsuits ended and our legs began, where our skin smelled like coconut suntan oil. We played Sunken Treasure, Sharks and Minnows, and sometimes, even though it wasn’t allowed, we played Jump or Dive. One person gets up on the end of the diving board and mustering up all the bounce he can, springs into the air. At that intoxicating moment when you’re not going up, and you’re not coming down, and the blues of the water and sky melt seamlessly into each other, the rest of the swimmers yell ‘jump’ or ‘dive.’ You have to hit the water doing one or the other, whichever they yell at you. Mid-air you twist your spine or bend at the waist, hoping that by the time the water rushes over you, you’re in the right position.

I liked him, and I wanted him to like me.

The days were longer.

We walked home, past the green house with the broken mailbox, past the house with the fiberglass deer, past the place where they cut down all the trees and put up power lines. He told me the big metal structures that held the lines high off the ground were actually robot skeletons, left from a million years ago. They had immense battles, as territorial armies and in clumsy fight-to-the-death combat. After years of roaming and conquering, they died out, vanished. Their outer bodies decomposed and left the steel frame skeletons to loom over future subdivisions. Then later, after electricity had been invented, he said, since there were so many of them, scientists hung the power lines up on their bones.

He had hair in his armpits.

I wanted to touch him there.

He smelled like chlorine.

We built mud and rock dams in the storm creeks behind his house. We cut out all the vines and weeds, using them to make thick green arches over the water. We found a forgotten birdbath basin and filled it with dirt. We mixed it with creek water and then added salt and pepper from disposable shakers we had stolen from fast-food joints. And when it was thick as concrete, we added pine needles, rotting leaves, broken bark and grass. First we placed a line of long rocks across the water, then some mud, then smaller rounder rocks, then more mud. Over and over until the dam was high enough to make the water back up and pool out. It would hold for a few hours. Sometimes, if the water wasn’t running too fast, it would hold overnight. And once in late September, we built the rocks up so well that only the packing washed away. It left a heavy stone lattice across the widest part of the creek. He went on the other side of it to pee and I watched him tap the little drops off his dick, then poke it back into his underwear. The whole production must have only taken twenty seconds.

He was in high school, played basketball.

He tasted like sweat.

I met his sister, the one with Down’s syndrome, on Halloween. We were trick-or-treating and when we came to his house he ran inside to dump his candy. I was left under the yellow porch lamp with an eye patch, tiger stripe bandana, and an eyebrow pencil scar. She came to the door barefoot in a black sweater and black tights. Her face was covered in green make-up, and her hair was cut short and out of her face, her glasses thick and murky with fingerprints. She stood inside the house staring out at me. “I’m a witch,” she said, and showed me where her teeth were missing. Then she smiled her goofy, crooked grin and crammed gobs of chocolate in her mouth. We looked at each other for a long time. I tried to smile or wave back at her. But I just stood there, afraid she was going to open the door.

***

I get called to do this S&M party and although I don’t really want to go, I do anyway. I could use the money. At the last one someone paddled my nuts for like a thousand hours and the next day it hurt to wear underwear. This guy’s basement is filled with all kinds of slings and sex appliances, even a mechanical chair that fucks you while you sit in it. (No thanks.) When I get there everyone is already in their chaps and harnesses. “Fantasies are completely unoriginal these days,” one of them is saying, “handed to us by Scandinavian illustrators and fake porn narratives from the seventies.”

Still, I think, here we are.

My clothes come off. I feel a mouth on my asshole and then a tongue reaching inside. One guy sucks on my nipple, while I bite down on his fingers. Eventually, I come in somebody’s mouth.

Then I stand by the door while the host counts out my money, watching the faded green bills flip over in his hand, trying to count them as he’s counting them—one hundred, two hundred, two fifty—without being obvious about it.

That’s my favorite part—the gathering up of clothes afterwards. Everyone is more relaxed, the nervousness dissipates, and you can have interesting conversation, sometimes. Boundaries are less important, and people tell you what they do for a living, or they complain about their boyfriends and how they never have sex anymore. They swear they’re good husbands and fathers, despite our transaction. Sometimes you still sound like strangers afterwards, which of course you are, even though you’ve shared something personal. Or deeply impersonal, which itself is a certain kind of intimacy—what it says about the person who requests it. And all that can’t make you completely unfamiliar. Can it?

After the party I go straight to work. From work to work, as I say. The hospital is basically calm today, nothing of note to relay—except a new brand of potato chips went into the snack machine it the waiting room. There seemed to be some ruckus in the emergency wing, but I didn’t hang around long enough to see what it was.

I did seventeen files immediately, all outpatient visits that I could hold in one hand without much effort. Then I started on two stacks of thicker files from surgical, which were mostly in the same area of the filing room, meaning not a lot of walking, and one even ended up on the bottom shelf, which isn’t all that common, because those files are older. The rest of the day was spent dealing with six cartons of files from the early nineties—five hours and I didn’t even finish. It never ends. Last year’s numbers for the entire hospital system, which includes several facilities throughout the city, when touted around by the PR department, went something like: 625,000 home care visits, 90,000 inpatient discharges, and more than 1,000,000 outpatient visits. The emergency rooms alone saw 255,000 people.

It’s not boring, what I do. It can be infuriating—when a particular file doesn’t know where it belongs, and so I have to pore through the paper innards looking for the right detail. Anything that looks like a patient number will do in some cases. And it can be numbingly mechanical. Sometimes I get four hundred incidents in a single day, none of them admitted, just treated and released. Those files lack any sort of tangible personality, and often you can file several of them at a time, because they’re sequential, so there’s no detective work. But I never find it boring, exactly.

Boredom indicates that although you are mentally fixed on a single task—waiting, reading, listening to a stranger’s conversation—what you would rather be doing is something else. And I find that often what I would rather be doing is filing. Meaning, I never say to myself, “Wow, I’d rather be getting fucked right now by a temp on his lunch break.” I like the motion of this work, the back and forth between the aisles, the quietness of the room. The immediate gratification—when I’m finished, I’m finished, and I get to go home.

There is a peace to the bureaucracy. Among the crowds of humanity I feel infinitely small. Inconsequential. These files were here long before I was, and they’ll be here for years after I’m gone. I only intersect them briefly, passing into their lives and then out, invisibly. Someone once told me that the job sounded like a horrific humdrum torture—stacks of befuddling paperwork and bloody, hapless fingertips—but I disagree. I take the opposite point of view. Didn’t Camus say that we have to imagine Sisyphus happy?

***

Sometimes I can tell you what sort of files are going to find their way into my hands, and into my life, before I’m even in the room with them. First I get a feeling, an ominous weight to the morning, perhaps. A drizzle of rain which turns to fog and back to rain again all before I get out of bed. Weather as foreshadowing. And then my Metrocard won’t read properly, and I swipe it ten times before the technology does what it is supposed to do and I finally get on the train. Sometimes I say a quiet prayer—to nobody really, I don’t actually believe in that stuff—that the day will behave as planned and whatever turbulence arises won’t shake me right out of the sky.

For example, today a janitor accidentally dropped a tray full of silverware on the floor in front of me, forks skewing in every direction, the sound ringing down the corridors, halting movement in every direction. People in the waiting room covered their ears.

I knew right then that something in the files today would be a little too familiar. And now I’ve found it. It’s a gay bashing from a few months ago. I find more and more of them every day—maybe twenty in the last year alone, spreading like a rash. In this case, a fag walking home from the gym decided to take a shortcut through the park and—zap—they got him with a stun gun. For twenty-seven minutes, they got him. So says the police report, which is strangely included, along with other documents and written statements—some of the forms I’ve never come across before. Signatures everywhere.

They treated him for bruises and swelling in his face where they punched him, two broken fingers (left third and fourth,) marks on his throat where they strangled him. One of the doctors suspects it was a telephone cord, or something similar. “Shoelace?” says one of the papers. Plus a mysteriously dislocated kneecap. And the place where the stun gun shot him through with electricity was burned and bleeding.

I’m thinking about that spot—the two tiny holes in his side, halfway up his ribcage, the only place where they managed to enter his body. I’m thinking about how that feels, to have your flesh opened up like that, your aura burst like a soap bubble. But he survived.

One of the most difficult parts of my job is not knowing the rest of the story. I process the incidents without having all the details—I only know the beginning and end of the story. I don’t know if a lover came to take him home, if family members rushed to the bedside. If they caught the jerks. There is an old custom of hiring mourners at a funeral, to be sure that the deceased are properly lamented. And that’s sometimes what I feel like: a grief vessel.

I swallow the pain, shove the folder into the rows with all the others, and walk back to the inbox, where I pick up ten or twelve more. And just like that, the day continues.

This story © Lee Houck 2008, all rights reserved.

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