I had a dream that was not all a dream. I stood, my back to Commerce street, the pressing thorn milling behind me. The wall of television screens behind store-front gglass broadcast the throng and the barricaded Commerce Street Square, police officials alternately staring the crowd back and nervously wandering like ants amid a rubble of bodies draped with grey coverings. From the vantage point of the news helicopters overhead, the dead littering the square seemed scattered detritus, no different from the decomposing newspapers that tumbled through the early morning streets.
The crowd’s hazily reflected backs stood like ghosts reflected in the storefront glass, a wash of disappointed spirits, backs pointedly turned to the carnage reported live on the news.
At this point I had awakened.
It was rare for me to be called to any homicide. Meat driven indiscretions were the banal daily grind of the regular police force. Nor was I used to being called at night when the yellowed street lamps washed the crime scene in sepia tones. There had been a rash recently of suicides among the various government agencies. For some time we had all been playing down han ensuing epidemic of Regressive Information Disorder slowly dismantling the city?s psyches. It was much like watching a metropolis of grandmothers slowly forget themselves in delirium. And the violence of our murders had become correspondingly more horrific.
The news led with reports and theories, but we suppressed as much as we could, and played off the rest as hysteria and superstition.
It was the homicide officers who were the first to break. Those who could muster the reason fled with what families they had to less urban areas. As if they believed evil somehow uniformly congregated amongst the city?s immoral throng. Other took their lives. At first, seasoned detectives would simply not appear at their desks in the mornings. After a long day or so, a squad car might be dispatched to check on their residence. After the first few, it was merely assumed they had died. Officers merely went to confirm. Then their desks came at their desks, amidst busy afternoon offices, in their cars in the garage, on the benches in front of their lockers.
The youth advanced to replace them broke even sooner not having their elders’ seasoned perspectives. I do not think they were adverse to death. In a world where your comrade’s death is broadcasted and recorded, death comes very naturally, in all manners, in all guises.
It was not long after this the shortage of any homicide detective necessitated the call of just any detective. This was my assumption when the phone wrested me from my dreams of Commerce street during the languid, darkened hours of early morning.
By the time I had arrived, the news anchors were oddly absent. The alleged murder of a notorious prostitute was worth little more than a few words on a local news ticker. Two patrol officers had barricaded the alley’s entrance with yellow police tape. They agitated as I approached. They knew my office by the long grey coats we wore. Their gate-keeping was desultory, automatic, and policy.