Given the circumstances it was only natural for the M.E. to ask if Jim’d had mental problems, and to this I had to say yes, well, probably, I mean, I suspected so. Nothing on the level of climbing up into the rafters, but he’d done a few things in recent months that didn’t lay quite level on me. Take his garden for instance. Jim had a garden patch with a couple of wire lattices he used to grow a couple of tomato plants and a couple of banana peppers. Occasionally a cucumber vine. I’d see him go out and pick something and just slice it up and put it on a roll with some mayo and that was a good enough dinner for an old bachelor. Only this year he hadn’t done that. I’d watched all that stuff grow, ripen, change color, get big, get nasty, eventually fall off and spawn clouds of little dotty flies on the ground, and I asked him why he wasn’t eating any of the stuff and he said it didn’t look right. He didn’t care for the shape it was growing in. Didn’t smell right either. He thought there might be some soil contamination and he was afraid to touch or even approach it. Warned me away too. Seemed to think I was just itching to eat those rank vegetables turning to goo on the lawn. Don’t try and eat those while I’m not looking, he said. Said it might turn me into something scary. Turn me into something? Did I hear that right? Like a werewolf or…? I asked what it could turn me into and he scoffed cryptically and said, “Take your pick.” Now a botanist I am not but I’m fairly sure that doesn’t happen.

The M.E., by his own admission, wasn’t the handiest person in the universe and he had no idea from what angle to this task. Jim’s body was in a really unusual position, perched between the brace and the cross beam, his right foot caught between the roof and the beam, his left leg hanging down in a space between the beams, pointing toward the floor at an almost 90 degree angle. Jim’s torso was squished between the roof and the rafter and his belly swelled to fill the angle like overproofed bread dough. He did have quite the belly on him, but it still seemed incredible his body bloated enough to stick. There was a beam wedged right between one of Jim’s love handles and his ribs, and I thought “that looks painful” before I thought better of it, and then I thought better of thinking better of it because logically he must’ve been alive and conscious in that position at some point. His left arm was stretched out to the next beam ahead of him, his left wrist resting on it, fingers dangling over the edge. His right arm was crooked, forearm resting on the beam parallel to it, and his head was turned to the side, on the back of his right hand, as if he was taking a nap up there and using his own hand as a pillow. For all we knew, that’s what happened.

The paramedics were a young bunch, not looking like they’d had many years on the job. They had braced ladders just about everywhere near Jim’s body. They’d pulled from every conceivable angle. Nothing was working. It was obvious we were going to need to cut something out. With no next of kin to say what part of the house they’d prefer destroyed, we were forced to choose between either cutting the rafters out or making a hole in the roof from outside. The former was simpler but incurred the risk of Jim’s body dropping and possibly (depending on how decomposed he turned out to be) making a great big mess on the floor, which would not only be hugely revolting but also make an autopsy a thousand times trickier. The latter avoided all that but might make the house harder to sell later, if we were worried about that kind of thing, which I didn’t see why we should be. It was all probably going up for auction anyway.

Still, our general instinct was to choose the less destructive option first. Hence the choice was made to cut the rafters. The paramedics rustled up some jigsaws and Dremels. I was impressed at their Boy Scout preparedness and told them so. They said saws were an absolute necessity in their line of work, especially these days. Hadn’t I ever seen those TV shows about the 1000-pound people? How they had heart attacks or whatever and you had to widen the door frame or maybe even take a wall out of the house to get them to the hospital? I could tell they had started on this topic before their sensitivity seminars kicked in, and, unable to reverse course, now they were choosing their words carefully to avoid sounding like they were casting judgment on anyone who managed to get that fat. They didn’t entirely succeed.

Before long one of the paramedics, a sturdy blonde woman, was on a ladder, couple steps up. The whine of the SKIL saw filled the attic and a small pile of fine sawdust collected next to the ladder. The other paramedic, a skinny man with dark bunchy hair, was ineffectually watching from the floor and telling her not to get her saw blade too close to the flesh. There was a splintery snap and the lower part of Jim’s body sagged but made no sign of falling to the floor. Undaunted, the blonde scootched the ladder up to the rafter which cradled Jim’s upper body and made ready to start sawing it too.

The M.E. pulled me over and asked if I wanted to help catch the body when it fell. I was nonplussed. Was I licensed, or however you’d put it, to touch bodies? The M.E. said if he said I was OK no one would say boo about it. I felt like he kind of put me in a spot where I’d look like a chickenshit if I didn’t, but as I’ve already said, I’ll volunteer for anything.

It didn’t truly hit me until I was already underneath Jim, holding my hands out wide above me like a little kid trying catch his first football, that I was about to touch a corpse. I was hoping to catch Jim by the torso, well swaddled by Jim’s typical old man clothes, corduroy pants, flannel shirt, and ordinarily but for the summer heat, a pilled and wooly gray cardigan. Still though, I thought I’d be able to detect something beneath the clothes with my fingers, and that something, I was sure, would feel different, qualitatively, something you could never mistake for living flesh. Would Jim still be in rigor? What did rigor feel like? Stiff like a flexed muscle? Like wood? Like rock? For some reason I couldn’t stop imagining the solid, impassive muscle flanks of a horse. On the other hand, maybe putrefaction would have already set in, and if so, what would that feel like? This time my mind kept jumping to fruit. Bruised apple. Soft banana. Overripe plum. The disintegrating tomatoes on Jim’s lawn. Would the flesh give underneath my fingers? Would it break open? Would it squish? Would it issue juice? What would the rot smell like? There was a smell in the air, I realized, something I hadn’t picked up on before, kind of reminiscent of a cat fart, but I couldn’t tell whether it was rot or whether it was shit in Jim’s pants. I knew people often shit themselves after death. I was full of little tidbits like these, I realized. Thank you, CSI.

It was taking forever to saw through that rafter, like that saw blade was catching in the flow of time, which made it shudder and inch its way through. I knew the blonde paramedic was just being careful but I got the impression she could go faster if she wanted to. The air in the attic, already hot, thick, stuffed with the odors of our errand—the attic dust we were displacing, the sawdust we were creating, and the faint reek that might have been shit and might have been rotten flesh—swelled, vibrated with waiting. I was holding my hands up so they nearly touched Jim’s lower trunk and upper leg. My arms were beginning to ache from holding them at the ready for so long. I had my ears pricked, focusing best I could through the whine of the saw for the telltale crack before Jim tumbled into me.

I never got to it. Maybe it was too stuffy in that attic. Maybe I was dehydrated. Maybe I was lured into a sort of hypnosis by the thin whine of that saw. Maybe I was just more worked up emotionally by this whole scenario than I had been able to admit even to myself. Whatever it was, static flooded the edges of my vision, I lost a few seconds somewhere, and I came back around on the floor with a sore tailbone, and Jim was already on the floor right alongside me.

It was embarrassing to say the least. I mean, what kind of man faints? I swore up and down to the paramedics this was not typical of me at all, I couldn’t remember ever fainting before, if that’s indeed what happened. They kept hovering around me with their pulse oxes and everything else in their goodie bags, wanting to shine a flashlight into my eyes and so forth and I did my best to shoo them away, I felt fine, I really did, thanks but not necessary, and they finally broke off after the M.E. told them I was going to be OK. He shot me a look with arched eyebrows which I couldn’t interpret and didn’t appreciate.

And there was Jim. I tried to look at him casually because I was already embarrassed by my lack of chill in front of the corpse-handlers. But I found myself looking a good long while, or what felt like one. I had expected Jim to look way different than he did. His eyes were closed and he could have been sleeping. Such a trite thing to say about the dead but he really could. The mottled blue of his skin made him look cold, which he literally was of course, but you know what I mean—like it was winter, and he’d spent a horrible night locked outside underdressed in a biting wind chill, and despite the stifling heat in the attic I felt a sympathetic wave of cold flop over me. His wrist had slipped out from under his cheekbone and there was a big scarlet stripe where his face had rested against his hand. Another TV tidbit told me blood had probably pooled there. Jim’s lips were pulled down in kind of an annoyed scowl, like he was having a perfectly good nap up there till we barged in.