Note: Normally, this column is not so disturbing. However, this summer, I found a murdered man in Central Park and it's been messing up my head ever since. The following is my release.
Me, witness to a dead man deaded by bullet holes no name just laying there (drunk thought the passersby who might care less) it was slightly past sunrise and here he was assumed black and homeless though he was just lying there stiffened, his arms frozen under his belly one squeezed between the grass and the dirt the other outstretched its fingers near a gun and crooked as if the bile leaking into his blood wrenched his wrists and tightened his tendons (pain will do that) strange that no one heard him screaming as the bullet burrowed through the lining of his stomach the pistol was small caliber and near his head who knows if it was suicide (not me) but who shoots himself in the stomach I was the first one to notice and care and offer attention to the body in denim without a rising chest I wanted to make sure sleeplessness wasn't fogging my perceptions but as I reached for an artery saw the gun and got scared disappeared to look for cops they'd just been around but now they were nowhere no one did anything just sat there wishing for tickets or arguing about donuts or the best way for girls to squat over a public toilet he had been dead for hours there was no blood anywhere just flies laying eggs in his scalp judging by his socks he couldn't have been homeless but then again no one but me bothered a second look there were greater concerns like tickets hey they're free and it's Chekhov and Meryl Streep and this is New York it's just like the cop said people die all the time you shouldn't let it get to you. Yes I said but I don't usually find their bodies or almost brush against their flesh and it's the fact that he's dead and rigid and anonymous forever that's got me down.
"And look its like I said I lucked across a life left lifeless," I told the third detective of the day "he was dead and laying there and I saw him not breathing, walked over and reached for his neck (yes to take a pulse) and saw a gun and bugged out enough to look for you guys I swear you had just been there five minutes ago but now you were nowhere so I went to call someone" I guess that's just how it goes these days in Central Park said the cop as my lungs lifted in smoke from a cigarette offered to me with a joke and a laugh, (a regular Perry Mason, he called me)--he was a man-giant dressed in a brown suit and a tie to match, the first wave of cops in suits and the second wave of police in general (there were three more to come) I watched the two emerge from car ACU-471 and later (taking my turn to interrogate him) knew that these men and women worked nights on Nightwatch and responded to all of Manhattan's midnight violence so nothing here was new to them though this isn't quite what the big man imagined when he was little and thought cops saved their moms from the bad guys. Meanwhile the ticket-wanters went on wishing while planes drifted overhead and buses tracked their usual routes. I sat under the police line do not cross alternating the focus of my stare from the August grass to my unusually cold palms to the stiffened corpse under the sunrise sky, trying to beat back the advance of a haunting image as it crept into my consciousness to make a lifelong nest of my dreams.
