The bodies—or rather, the bags in which he assumed the bodies were disposed—appeared one wet evening underneath the train bridge spanning over Wood Street at 16th around 9pm. He hadn’t seen them at their moment of apparition, but having walked his aging canine around this block three times a day for the last six months, he was sure that he would have spotted them on an earlier walk that same day, either in the morning or during the dusk hour in which he arrived home from his job at the museum and took his dog around the block for her afternoon relief. The bags—oversized, glossy black plastic sacks that bore the heft and scale of being made for industrial use—would have stood out in the clear and cold morning air, even despite being somewhat hidden, dotted sporadically between the rusted iron pillars of the train bridge like the last remaining worthless votives abandoned among the arcades of a centuries-ago plundered temple.
He noticed that the trash bags—perhaps six or seven of them all told, if there weren’t more slouching unseen in the shadows of the poorly lit, crumbling superstructure—herniated from the apparent weight and girth of their payload, their plastic skins bearing the extreme bulges and creases of corpulent strain. Moreover, he noted that the contours of each bag (or its contents, since what’s in the bag determines, mostly, it’s shape) suggested human forms. Indeed, the bottom corners of each bag were inflated to total fullness by whatever seeping liquid filled them, resembling stubby, abbreviated feet. He observed that the wrinkled, half-full top of one particularly gruesome and overstuffed bag, unable to complete with the steadfast downward trickling of it’s innards, sagged forward above the engorged belly of the sack, giving the appearance of a fat drunk who has nodded asleep on himself.
Perhaps it is unfair to use such metaphorically narrow language to overstate the humanlike qualities of the bags under the bridge, but whatever pareiodolia under which the witness suffered can be excused by the inescapable fact that the bags both looked like people and looked like they might contain people or parts of people.
If the trash bags were just that—trash bags, full of something other than bodies, perhaps debris from the warehouse construction up the road, or several illegally dumped consolidations of residential garbage from one of the nearby unincorporated villages that cannot afford consistent municipal services—their sudden appearance under the bridge at 16th and Wood was nonetheless alarming. At the very least, he was witnessing a crime, he was sure of it.
His first instinct was to touch one of the bags, to press his fingers into the plastic skin and feel the insides give way to his prodding. It was only the second sub-freezing day of an unusually mild winter, and the thought of feeling heat through the plastic appealed to him in the same perverse way as the momentary warmth of his dog’s shit that he felt through the grocery bag he used to pick it up. As soon as he realized the nature of the thought he was presently entertaining, he shook it out of his head, quite literally, with a twist of his neck that was as meaningless as it was contrived.
And besides, he reasoned, the train bridge was notoriously (at least, to him) unreliable and might collapse over him if he ventured underneath. Just last week, during the same morning routine, he had witnessed a group of men in white hardhats and reflective orange vests examining its structure. He could not tell exactly what they were looking for, but they seemed most concerned with the joints where the rusted vertical braces met the bridge’s concrete underbelly. The day before their visit, he’d stopped to watch a double-decker commuter train cross over it. How impossible it seemed to him that so many tons of heavy machinery and overweight bodies would not crush the spindly, rust-rotted legs which, for one moment at a time, supported the weight of an entire train car. As he watched them rumble by, a few small chunks of concrete dislodged from the bridge’s ceiling and dropped to the ground, as if to confirm his fear. One landed in a pool of water that had collected in a gaping pothole in the road. The splash echoed as if it had happened in a cavern, or a tomb.
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The bags remained under the bridge for weeks, perhaps a month. For the first few days after their arrival, he remarked on them each time he rounded the corner at Wood. Their appearance was a scandal in the neighborhood, or so he imagined. He didn’t actually know anyone in this neighborhood, though he had lived there more than half a year by the time the bags arrived. Mostly working class, with the occasional white youth anticipating gentrification, the area was pretty in an urban way, but mostly empty. Not enough bars to get properly drunk (unless you found comfort in the cantinas on 18th, with corona in bottles and rancheros perpetually on the stereo) and not enough sidewalk traffic to feel busy and welcoming. He saw many people every day, the same people—teenagers walking to school in the morning in small packs, elderly women wheeling their pop-up shopping carts toward the grocer, young men biking—but all of them remained anonymous (generic would be a better word) to a person who saw the streets three times a day, for ten minutes at a time, around the same times each day. The people he saw and when he saw them seemed to him more a function of the time of day than individuals exercising their free will to walk about publicly in a city. And he imagined they thought the same of him.
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Over time, he forgot about the bags, and they faded into the scenery of his walk much like the people of his neighborhood. It was only their absence, the negative space created by their sudden departure, that he noticed one morning while walking his dog. Like the first time, the bags (rather, their absence) was at first shocking, and then intriguing. Who had finally picked them up, he wondered. Had some do-gooder neighbor become fed up and called the city, or had the city trash collectors finally noticed on their route and made an extra stop? What were the political implications of the city picking up refuse dumped illegally? Would it encourage more dumping? How might that burden tax payers who actually paid for their city services? Does a large city account for such expenses in its budget? If so, does that encourage crime? Does a city expect and condone crime?
Another, less immediate disappointment he felt at witnessing the absence of the overstuffed trash bags was the realization that he would never more be able to discover what was inside of them. When they first came, he entertained the idea of opening one up just to see the kinds of rubbish that filled them. And yet, he never did, partly because the bridge scared him and mostly because he thought the contents would be disgusting. Not gruesome, just disgusting. He didn’t think of bodies anymore. Just other people’s garbage. He felt disappointed all the way home and the feeling lingered with him into the evening, but he didn’t realize why he felt this way until that night when he woke suddenly from a dream in which he had cut open a black trash bag and guts spilled out onto the concrete.
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The bags returned the next week.
They were probably not the same bags, but nonetheless, a wake of overstuffed black trash bags of industrial capacity appeared scattered underneath the train bridge a mere six days later. Just like the first bunch, these bags slouched between the rusted iron supports, looking more sinister than the last. It might not be fair to say that the bags were lurking in the shadows under the bridge—more likely, someone had attempted to hide them there —but that is how they seemed that evening when he encountered them. Perhaps he thought so only because it was late and his sudden realization that the bags were back caused him to double take. The anatomy of the double take was as such: At first, seeing them felt natural, as if a missing piece of his scenery was restored and normalcy returned with it. But the bags were far from normal. They were grotesque, and as soon as he realized that their reappearance was weird and unwanted he shuttered and began to walk quickly by them, as one might upon encountering a vagrant lurching forward on the street in the darkness. For some reason, the bare minimum social niceties still apply in these situations, even when there is no reason to pretend that one has any intent but to flee from the undesirable person as quickly as possible. Hence, the rapid shuffle of a fearful but restrained retreat. This is all the more absurd when one is fleeing from trash bags instead of destitutes.
Back in his tiny apartment, his fear gave way to annoyance. He had gone out to stroll and smoke a cigarette and he had missed the opportunity because the bags had ambushed him.
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The next morning, while walking his dog around the block, he noticed that the bags had moved. Rather, he thought that they looked as if they had moved. They were still lurking under the bridge, but their arrangement seemed different. Not entirely different, but it seemed that some of them had switched places. He really couldn’t tell, since he hadn’t taken a photograph or made a sketch of yesterday’s arrangement. Still, he got the sense that there was movement afoot.
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The bags disappeared, and then came back again. A flickering specter. When they reappeared the next day, they were piled around the fire hydrant on the sidewalk to the east the bridge. He was reminded of stop-motion animation—the bags creeping forward without him witnessing the movement, only remarking upon the move.
He took a photograph of the bags with his phone. He thought to himself that the bags made an interesting arrangement, something like a sculpture, and he reasoned with himself that this was the real reason he was taking the picture—to make a photograph of a sculpture—and not because he feared the bags were moving or being moved.
The day after he took the photograph, he walked his dog around the block and felt what might be called excitement, if one can be excited to confirm one’s own horrific fears. He had a picture. He had proof. He had a baseline from which to make a judgement.
The bags looked, more or less, the same as they did the day before. He stopped when he reached the corner across the street from the bags and summoned up the image on his phone. He squinted at it in the sunlight. The image was faint in the strong daylight, but the resemblance was obvious. Nothing had moved, unless only slightly.
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He thought of hiring a detective. This idea appealed to him because it signified authority. In all the detective movies he knew, some poor victim hands over everything she knows to a leatherfaced booze hound who handles the case blithely and with a dispassionate focus on the outcome and the paycheck. There are obstinate stakeouts and 8 x 10 glossy photographs taken from over the dashboard of a pretty vintage car. There are interviews and cigarettes. Brown trenchcoats and rain from a fire hose spewing torrents from off camera. There are no suspects, only culprits yet uncaught. They materialize out of thin air, confessed and convicted. He wanted that kind of certainty.
He went to a place on Halsted Street that advertised itself as a private investigator firm. He’d seen it on walks before and always regarded it as fictional, or a front for something that was itself criminal. How could such a place seriously exist? Who can make a living as a detective these days?
He opened the wood-framed glass door and stepped inside. The place was an abbreviated storefront with a desk, a computer, and walls that were covered in wood paneling halfway up, and painted white the rest of the way. It looked fake—like am income tax office that barely takes the time to set itself up because it’s only used for four months out of the year. Like a place where your money gets swallowed up. Disappeared. Absorbed into the parched walls that were barely painted.
They wouldn’t take the case because there was no one to follow, they said. He tried to explain that the bags were the thing to follow, but that didn’t make sense to the detective, or whomever was at the desk that night.
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What does one do when there’s no where to go? No one to watch your trash bags move. No one to take the glossy 8x10 photographs and place them in a large envelope and deliver it to your mailbox with typed descriptions of minute-by-minute observations made from a car parked across the street. No one to construct the dossier that proves your hunch is more than just that.
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He didn’t own a car, so he had to rent one. There was a car share company that kept a car by the bank, some hybrid thing parked just off 18th street. He reserved it for three hours in the evening, from six o’clock to nine o’clock. He couldn’t rent it earlier because he had work that day, and he couldn’t keep it later because he had another shift the next morning.
He arrived home at five thirty and walked his dog briskly around the block, taking her in the opposite direction than their usual, as to avoid the bags. Back in his apartment, he fried an egg and ate it quickly while choking down a beer. This is a detective’s meal, he thought. Simple. American. High in protein and hydrating. Feeling refreshed and confident, he fed his dog and left the apartment. While walking down the steps between the third and second floor, he tripped on a loose step but caught himself on the handrail of the staircase. His sudden weight dislodged the rail mount from the plaster wall of the stairwell, and as it slipped from under him, he fell on the steps and landed on his back. He lay there for a moment, splayed across the steps, but once his heart rate had subsided he picked himself up and continued down to to the street.
He walked through orange cones of street light. He felt the cool and humid air against his face. He thought of being near the ocean at night. He wondered why the weather behaved so erratically lately, and if this winter would be cold like the last. Tonight, it felt like late summer. But it was nearly the middle of winter.
The car on 18th was unlocked, which he might have realized was unusual had he not been preoccupied with his imminent assignment. As he opened the door, a high pitched buzz assaulted his ears and awakened his reflexes. He dove into the car and slammed the door behind him, imagining himself to have dodged wild gunfire. The buzzing stopped and he groped the passenger seat for the keys. They weren’t there, nor were they in the glove box that was stuffed with used tissues, a crushed pack of cigarettes and crumpled receipts. He found them in the ignition, hanging halfway out. He pushed the key in all the way and turned it over and the car sputtered to life.
The corner of 16th and Wood was two blocks away. He turned the headlights on to drive a block down 18th, but turned them back off once he turned onto the side street. For two blocks he drove in darkness, fortunate that no one was out walking on these blocks. He felt extremely nervous and he might not have noticed someone walking in front of the vehicle until he had already hit her.
At the corner of Wood Street, he turned right, toward 16th Street and the bags. His foot barely touching the gas pedal, he crawled the car forward, looking for parking on the right side of the street. The left side was mostly empty, but this was not an option, since it was the same side of the street as the bags and thus too close to them. Also, that side of the street was too bright on account of all the street lights being mounted along the tall concrete barrier on top of which ran the train tracks.
As he crept closer to 16th Street his nervousness increased. The bags were close and there was no open parking to be found. Sooner than he expected, he was upon them, a pile several times larger than he remembered situated directly under the street lamp next to the train bridge. It was wrong. All wrong. The bags were supposed to be on the other side of the bridge, surrounding the fire hydrant, but now there were more and they were closer. Realizing that he couldn’t avoid being seen in the glow of the same street light that drenched the bags themselves, he panicked and slammed his foot down on the accelerator. The engine roared and strained and a rubber belt squealed from underneath the hood. Seconds later, the gears grabbed the transmission and the wheels jolted in to top speed. For half a block, the car scampered across damp pavement before veering in to a parked truck.
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He expected the police to arrival shortly so he waited for them in the car. He did not anticipate being treated hostilely nor to be arrested for auto theft. He still hadn’t noticed the six brown paper bags full of groceries in the back seat of the vehicle. When the police approached the car and asked him about the bags, he told them that he had nothing to do with the bags except that he was watching them too and thought they might be evidence of a crime.
Words by J.R. Elliot, photographs by Laura Damian
