SMITHEREENS OF DEATH 12 Stripped

Going through dead people's pockets, that's how we made a living, my brother, Sniffs, and I. You could say we lived off death. The good thing about this kind of livelihood was that there was never a shortage of deaths and the dead in our neighbourhood. Death was cheap around here. People died copiously, everyday: stabbed, shot, strangled, overdosed, underfed, heartbroken, skull open. . . Death came in various hues. We didn't care about how a fellow had come to his death, we were usually just grateful to have a corpse at our disposal. And we went to 'stripping' it.

Yes, stripping; that was what we called our job. Emptying a dead man's pockets to make him lighter for the final journey, Sniffs would joke. We never took clothes. It was unfair, and indecent, to leave a corpse naked. That was Sniffs' idea. Clothes, he reasoned, were the only shred of dignity and ident.i.ty a dead man had left; especially a dead man on the street. I couldn't understand this rationalization of his. But I figured that must be why people were buried in their best suits. For decency in death.

After these stripping operations, the guilt would rise in my chest as a wave of nausea, so that whatever food we bought with the stripped money I usually ended up throwing it up in the gutter. And there were the ghosts, with their pockets turned out, behind me all the time. Stripped ghosts. Sniffs said I should have been a writer; my powers of imagination were useless as a thief. He also dismissed my guilt as silly and valueless, since we were not the killers of the dead people; we only "divested" them of their belongings, which, being earthly, would be useless in their new residences, where streets were made of gold, and houses were mansions.

Sniffs should have been the writer; he was good with words like that, and knew a lot of big ones. Divest. He was always reading these thick, aged paperbacks that stank of p.i.s.s and mould. It must have been from these books that he got his twisted idea of chivalry. In our strippings we never touched women; he would look at a female corpse with liquid pity, and respect, in his eyes, mutter something that was between a prayer and a string of curse words, and hurry along.
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The stripping procedure was always the same – Sniffs would do the top half of the corpse, while I covered the bottom, the trouser pockets. I didn't like this; it meant my fingers had to come in contact with a dead manhood. The limp, rubbery memory would linger on my fingers for days, as if I was actually holding the dead man's hose everywhere. That, and the ghosts, and the often vomited guilt, were enough to drive me crazy.

I eventually ended up mad, one day.

Sniffs had a habit of disappearing for brief spells after a nottoo-profitable stripping. He would appear days later, reeking of luxury wines and expensive city wh.o.r.es, a sated smirk dangling drunkenly off his face, and the remnants of the revelry hanging from his pockets and dropping off his lips in his sleep. Putting these pieces together, I suspected he must be doing some big jobs out there.

This one time, he didn't come back for weeks. Then months; two months. Then four. I couldn't strip without him by my side. I couldn't approach a corpse without my brother's courage beside me. He had enough guts for a whole gang, and a pack of wolves. Stone guts. My own liver was just fresh lily, and my heart mush.

I took to begging. But I wasn't getting as much as we usually did stripping corpses. The people in this neighbourhood were so poor they couldn't afford to notice beggars.

The night I went mad, I was going home after a hard day's

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begging, with nothing but hope in my pockets. I was almost at the door when I stumbled over a body. I started. Struck a match. It was a man. A dead one. Cold as dog food. Stark naked, manhood and fingers gone, chopped off – the local traditional punishment for armed thieves.

The face still had that dangling smirk. It was the only thing he had left. He had been stripped of everything, only the smirk; as if taunting the killers – You can take everything, my clothes, my money, my life, but not the light! You cannot kill the light! He was the only dead person I'd ever seen with light in his eyes! I left them open.

I took off my own clothes, every piece, and covered him up – covered his happy face with my faded YMCA T-s.h.i.+rt, covered his still chest and stomach with my baggy trousers, then I worked my only boxer shorts up his legs and covered what was left of his manhood. Decency in death. It was the only last decent thing I could do for a brother; a brother who had not been my parents' son, but had been there ever since I could remember, as a parent, a friend, a mirror, a dictionary, clown . . . and general idiot.

I walked away, naked as in birth, out of the dark womb of this neighbourhood forever. I walked into the new light I could see beyond.

A different kind of light from Sniffs'. The isolated Light of madness. A different texture of madness from the common.

I had been stripped of my only family. My people say, "People are the only clothes you have." I had had only one piece of clothing all my life – Sniffs, and I had been stripped of it.

His corniest line wafted before me, in his thin, feminine

voice: Brother, we're not brothers, but look at us, thick as thieves! . . . Gerrit? Thieves!

Hhhh

He laughed like those rickety blue grinding machines, in coughing spurts. I should have laughed with him.

Now, I laughed, like him, louder than him, turning my open mouth up to the heavens and pouring it all out of my chest. For him.

My laughter grew louder, the further away I walked, into my new-found madness. Then I began to run.

And fly.