The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death Read Online Free PDF Page B

apartment, and what the constant background rustling sound was caused by.
    So I freaked a little.
    A couple hundred cockroaches come spilling out of the shit-encrusted nooks and crannies of a dead shut-in's festering den and start racing each other up your legs to see which can be the first to crawl in your facial orifices and see if you don't freak.
    Po Sin watched the freaking. Stood there with his arms folded, framed by towers of piled trash and bundled newspapers and plastic gallon milk jugs filled with urine, and watched all the cockroaches in creation crawling on me trying to find holes they could climb into.
    —Can't handle this, you can't handle the job.
    He stood in front of me, his torso being populated by swarms of roaches combining into continents, pieces breaking off and drifting and formingwith other masses. The geophysical history of the earth enacted by roaches on a globe of a man.
    He extended an arm and elegantly brushed a few from the sleeve of his Tyvek.
    —Worse things to be covered in, man. Let me tell you.
    Gabe walked past me, edging down the open corridor between the piles of refuse, making for the dim light at the back of the place where they'd excavated a couple windows the day before.
    —Lots worse things.
    He disappeared, lost in bugs and towering waste.
    Po Sin watched me.
    And, not wanting to at all, I thought about worse things.
    Po Sin crunched over.
    —OK?
    The legs of one of the roaches tickled the exposed rim of skin running between my filter mask and the edge of the Tyvek hood. I flicked it to the floor and stomped on it. And, incidentally, about a dozen more.
    —Yeah, I'm fine. You're a dick, but I'm fine.
    He nodded and pointed toward the back of the apartment.
    —Then head back there. Gabe is bagging the shit. Start hauling it down to the service elevator.
    I started down the hall, the smell of rancid crap already seeping through the mask.
    —You suck, Po Sin!
    Appearing in front of me, Gabe shook his head.
    —Here's the thing. You don't want to yell like that. It will break the seal of your mask around your chin and jaw. They'll get in. You take off the mask to get them off and they'll be all over your face. Be in your nostrils.
    Roaches in your nostrils. Pretty bad. But still, like I say there are worse things.
    So I got to work.
    I hauled shitbags. A lot of them. The shut-in who lived in the place, he must have shit like a dozen times a day. He must have eaten nothing but beans and broccoli and topped it off with Müeslix.
    Hauling the big black garbage bags filled with little bags filled with shitbetween the teetering masses of putrefying garbage, the smell of fermenting waste in my nose hairs, I tried to do some math. I tried to figure out how many years the guy must have been shitting in bags to create this kind of poundage.
    I took another load of the bags down in the service elevator and out the back to the bin Po Sin had rented for the job and had parked in the alley. My face itched under the mask and I wanted to take it off, but I knew the reek coming off the bags would kill me without some kind of protection. I started taking bags from the dolly I had piled them on and began flinging them over the side of the bin.
    I tried to remember how much Chev said a new cellphone was gonna cost. Almost two hundred. At least twenty hours of shit-flinging to pay that off.
    Crap.
    One of the bags snagged a flange of steel at the top of the bin and tore open and little ziplocks of shit spilled down onto the asphalt.
    —Crap!
    I bent and started picking them up.
    Three hours in, and my back and knees and arms and shoulders were killing me. I remembered my dad and his cronies sitting out on the porch behind the Laurel Canyon house, sipping bourbon and water and playing
Worst Job Ever.
All trying to one-up the others.
    Gas-pump jockey.
    Bellhop.
    Stable boy.
    Cabby.
    Janitor.
    Cow inseminator.
    Night watchman.
    High school teacher.
    That last one from my dad. The trump that beat