A Headline Not in the Paper

Scared to Death?

Not many people read news reports from all of the places that I do, just those who see the Big Picture, that obtuse angle of perception that makes other people anxious, so they change the subject and end a conversation as if the one speaking to them was somehow contagious. I have learned not to discuss these things with just anyone, so I will record my findings here on the Internet and occasionally try to find clues to map out the world that is hidden under the day-to-day life that the mundanes think of as reality.

This morning I got up early, before the crack of noon, and saw the same news story in Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, London, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, and Sidney. In each of those cities a body had been found in a locked room, no signs of forced entry, no signs of foul play, just an otherwise healthy and normal person who had apparently died of heart failure. I will not be discussing this with my neighbours either, just you, my fellow creatures of the night…

Living in the wilds of the San Fernando Valley, land of porn studios, the Galleria, Valley girls, and all-night hookah lounges, it was easy to take the express bus over the hill and then catch another one to the scene where one of the bodies was found, an apartment complex in the Pico-Palms area of West Los Angeles. Walking down from Robertson, everything looked normal. The sun was shining, there was a light breeze, and the mercury was up to 78 degrees. The local Sikhs were in the park by their ashram fencing with wooden tulwars in their gleaming white uniforms. Kids were playing football in the street, worn out sneakers dangled from the telephone cables over intersections where drug deals took place, and the local Pakistani transvestite was dressed in black with a lace veil over his face, roller-boogieing up and down the sidewalk while listening to his walkman. It was just a typical mid-winter day in West Los Angeles.

I skated down Wooster and over to Shenandoah, went past Sawyer half a block and spotted the apartment complex. Some yellow crime scene tape was dangling from the door, but it looked like most of it was decorating a nearby magnolia tree. It was the middle of the day, there was no one around, so I let my self in, picking the lock and quietly ducking into the apartment. It was a typical lower middle class apartment, lots of sports memorabilia, a huge stereo system, lots of magazines and cds, no books anywhere other than the Bible and the Illuminatus Trilogy. Everything was pretty normal, typical guy stuff, not real clean or tidy but not a complete pigsty. It was definitely a single guy living here, but it looked as though he had female company now and then, so he was neither a hermit nor a loser, just a young guy heavily into the Lakers and Tupaq Shakur.
I snagged some cds and porno mags that caught my eye, stuffing them into my knapsack, then started looking around the apartment for clues. The kitchen was dusty and offered up no clues besides the fact this guy never cooked anything that wasn’t heated in a microwave oven. The bathroom had the first sign of trouble, a medicine cabinet full of tranquillisers and uppers, as if this dude didn’t know whether he wanted to sleep or not.

The bedroom looked like another dead end, just a DVD collection (a.k.a., more free porn for me…), more magazines, lots of gangsta gear, some weed (woohoo!) hidden under his mattress, and a blinking answering machine. I checked his messages. He had one from his girlfriend, one from his other girlfriend, one from a homey, and one from a neighbour. The third, one spoke volumes: "Yo, boy, how you sleeping? Those fucking nightmares go away? Gimme a call…" That was worth the price of admission right there. But the fourth message was the clincher, the voice of a really torqued off lady screaming in to the phone: "WHAT THE (expletive deleted) IS (expletive deleted) GOING ON DOWN THERE?! STOP (expletive deleted) SCREAMING, ITS (expletive deleted) 3 A.M.!" There was nothing else worth seeing in the rest of the apartment, so I snagged his DVD player and booked, skating back up to Pico to catch the bus back to beautiful downtown Van Nuys (cough).

When got home I opened up my laptop and used my backdoor to get into the coroner’s files. You have to love a coroner’s office with a weak firewall; there is just no end to the stuff you can dig up. There was no mention of drugs in the cause of death, just a trace amount of a sleep aid. From the look of things this dude had maybe taken a tranquilliser a day or two before he died. The medicine cabinet clue is a dead end as far as cause of death is concerned. But then I saw the photos taken at the scene and by the coroner. This dude’s face was frozen in a scream, his eyes bulging out and his tongue hanging out of his mouth. The approximate time of death was (drum roll…) 3 am. For whatever reason, this dude died screaming at three in the morning of an apparent heart attack despite a lack of any previous health conditions and no sign of drug interactions in his body.

I needed to get the scoop on the other deaders and I knew there would be smoke offline as well as in the net, so while I researched the other cases I sent an email to my fellow nocturnal prowler, CKi, a freelance reporter on assignment now in Sidney. Through the internet I found out all the deaths apparently happened at the same approximate time, 3 am PST, all the dudes were in good health but had shown signs of problems sleeping, and none of them had high levels of drugs or toxins in their systems. But CKi found out something that was not in any of the official police reports through a connection in the Sidney police department, namely that the victim there had also been complaining of nightmares that were especially terrifying. So, just like the victim in Los Angeles, the one in Sidney was having nightmares. Were the others? I have no idea. But could a nightmare kill someone? What could these poor bastards have dreamt about that was so horrible that it scared them to death? Do we really want to know?