The Smell

Yesterday around 4 o'clock my neighbor banged on my door and exclaimed, "Did you smell that awful stink the past few days?" I hesitated, as she is prone to over react about things, and said I had -- thinking to myself that I'd mentioned to my girlfriend a few days earlier that it smelled like the sewer may have backed up in the basement again. "They found a dead body next door," she blurted out as we walked into her apartment, which overlooks the backyard on the northern side of the building. "The cops have been here for about an hour," she explained shakily. "I was getting ready to go swimming but was waiting for my friends so I walked next door to chat with the neighbors," she continued a little more in control of her voice. "I asked when the mail usually comes, to the guy who was sitting on the front porch reading a magazine; and he was like, 'Our neighbor found a dead body in the shed,'" now her voice beginning to crack with stress.

The neighbor I've never really liked because of his holier-than-thou attitude and the loud parties he's thrown throughout the year, which are invariably busted for underage drinking and noise violations, had stumbled across a dead body hanging in a shed behind our houses. The two homes which have been converted into apartments share the same back yard and both houses walk through the yard to take out trash. The shed is no more than 15 feet away from their house and perhaps 30 feet from ours. Everyone had noticed the smell. It was pungent and smelled of decay; a distinct odor. An odor I will not soon forget.

"Oh my god! This isn't right. This is wrong. I wish I could just hit the rewind button and be in that place I was earlier today," my neighbor's voice now breathless and on the verge of crying exclaimed. With a strange and morbid curiosity my first instinct was to go grab my camera. Now with her full body shaking she begins to wail. Wrapping my arms around her I do my best to comfort her. "Just this morning I was like, Melissa, that smell kept waking me up as it kept wafting into my room all night with my windows open. Like something had died outside or something..." she trails off into fits and starts of full body wailing. "You don't know, I have this thing with death... you have no idea," she tearfully tries to explain. Her small frame wracked with the stress of the situation on her state of mind.

It is clear from her reaction that she's never dealt with death in any personal way. She rambled about seeing things like this in the movies and on TV but it being completely different when it is "in your fucking backyard!" Having lost relatives to old age, acquaintances to suicide, and a good friend to the war in Iraq -- smelling the dead body of a complete stranger in my backyard was more interesting than devastating. After getting her to calm down and drink some cold water I talked to her boyfriend and to her friends on the phone and waited with her until they arrived.

The entire time I was there the main thought was not with my friend who was in need of my help, she was receiving the best I could give her, but with the scene just outside our walls and a few feet away. Her friends arrive to go swimming, oblivious to the situation and barge in with their usual hippie-esque zeal for friends, and are physically stopped by the sight of their friend half sitting on the ratty love-seat in the living room clearly wracked with emotional turmoil. She begins to haphazardly walk around the apartment trying to regain control by getting things together and making plans "to live tonight." "I'm closing all the windows.... turn on the air conditioner..." she half demands to no one in particular in the living room. I go around closing windows and turn on the air. Her boyfriend arrives and as soon as I was confident she was in good hands I left to see if I could get a glimpse of what was going on.

I call the landlord of our properties, thinking he may not have heard about what was going on his property. "Someone must have stumbled in their... And did what they were going to do..." he says half reassuring me and clearly concerned for his tenants. "Everyone is accounted for..." he says before I say my goodbye and head for the window over looking the scene. The window is directly centered over our backyard. At the moment I felt lucky to have such a good view of the goings on below. It wasn't until later that the clear line of sight into the shed became disconcerting. Their eyes last gaze falling through the dirty windows of the shed onto our homes—filled with college students surrounded by friends and comfort.

The CSI was geared up and combing over the site while snapping pictures of this or that, tagging things, bagging things, and moving in and out of the shed. The body, which had been taken away before I was able to get to my window was, I over hear from one of the crew, so disfigured due to decomposition that the sex and race wasn't visually identifiable. Later I would hear that, when the body was released, from whatever had been used to hang it there, it literally moved with insects and began to just fall apart. Between the humidity, heat, and bugs there wasn't a whole lot they could do to preserve it. Nature is quite good at cleaning up decay.

I was sitting there at my window looking for a glimpse and perhaps an opportunity for a picture of the body. A body that in my mind would have been more like my grandmother's well cared for dead body than the rotting corpse described by those on the scene. I don't know what my reaction would have been. But in my mind's eye, the body is hideous and beautiful at the same time; poetic in its sad ending and slow decay. It is not a nightmare. It is simply mesmerizing; hidden, hanging there overlooking our yard. The CSI deals with these things all the time. Death is a job and I'm sure that like pilots who no longer see the beauty of clouds after thousands of flights these men simply saw a job to be done. I'm not there, and I hope to never be there.

Within hours the scene was thoroughly examined and cleaned up. No trace was left that just a few hours before a team of police investigators had been swarming around the area looking for clues to why there was a hanging body in that shed. It was just a backyard that if I hadn't seen or heard what had happened I would have walked through to take the trash out like any other day.

The body in the backyard was gone. The only thing that remained was the story and the effect this has had on the person who discovered the source of the smell.

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Lawrence Journal World Article