The Dead Request
By: Stephie Neuman
Tags: Work, Life, Death, Journalism, Short Story

“Hey little one, you seem a little gloomy…”, my dad said dropping me off at work. “You ok?”

“Yeah, I’ll be fine.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Not sure”, I said. “I just feel like… Uhm, forget it.”

“Call me if you need anything.”

“Thanks, dad”, I said kissing his forehead through the driver’s window.

I waved “bye” as I hurried through the company’s yard, trying to reach the door quickly, dodging the thick raindrops that remained after the storm.

When I left my house at seven o’clock, there was no more electric light. The rain blew up a few generators on my street. Fortunately, in that region, everything seemed fine. Yet, on that night, I had a strange feeling inside my chest.

Got inside the company, greeted my colleagues and sat behind the large monitors on my sector’s table.

There’s a subject on my university called “information management”. In these classes, depending on the semester you’ll learn how to deal with a few secctions inside journalism. I attended the criminal ones during the second year. And in those classes, the teacher would display criminal cases and ask us how to cover each one depending on the vehicle you work on.

I was very young on my first job interview, they asked me a series of questions related to heavy cases. They told me about the kind of content I’d have to deal with, and I was always okay with that. Personally, I have always been aware that once you deal with the idea of death at work, you must nullify any and all feelings you may have towards the subject.

With the time you get used to the stories. You get used to seeing dead and unleashed bodies, blood, hear scabrous testimonials and used to the tragedies. You have consideration for everything that you hear and see, but learn not to feel close to the cases, and as I said, it comes with time and the mindset you have towards it. Is all in the way you see and deal with it.

I never opened myself much on what I do today. People who don’t know me or just know me a tiny bit, strongly believe that I work with sports journalism and that’s all. But no, that’s not all.

Ever since I started in that area, I’ve never been let down by the stories. In a few months, many people have called me crying, asking for help. Some I could help by giving a little emotional support, as I used to do during the 7Cups era (2013–2015), or telling them what they were supposed to proceed. Others, I couldn’t really do anything besides listening and telling them kind words of consolation in situations where this is not even close to enough — as on the day I called a man who had just lost his son who was shot after robbery to ask him for burial coordinates.

The tactic, for me, is always the same. Pretend there is a barrier between you and the stories. Pretend they are just stories. Maybe you do not like to know about it, but it’s a way of looking at, the canceling of feelings and, in a sense, dehumanization is more like a kind of survival in that environment.

It’s like a video game in which sometimes you can participate, be quick and change some details in the course of the story, but it is not 100% up to you. You shall watch it more than interact. You shall be quick to understand, to get the whole story with details enough to make sense and evaluate how much it deserves to be shared with the world and why, keep yourself distant and register, but 99% of the time you can’t really do something that is able to change it.

“Hey, look!”, my mate said pointing to a tweet. “This is huge.”

He instantly stood up, shouted to our colleagues who takes care of reporting teams. “We have a big case in service!”, he shouted while I called the fire department directly.

It was around half past eight when the person we sent arrived there. A new tragedy, a new sad story to come. I wasn’t physically there, in the place where things happened, but still, was tracking, and in a way, remotely monitoring, keeping in touch with rescue workers all the time.

Nine o’clock. New facts arrived. Dead bodies in the woods. Ten minutes later, new details about their death. Normal life for me, writing stuff down.

Fourty minutes later, pictures of the tragedy. Picture of the woods, the debris. The phone vibrated again. One ID found.

“Wait…”, I said.

“What’s wrong?”, someone said.

“I… I know him.”

“What?”

“This dude… I know him”, I said as I typed his name on Facebook and found his picture with the bunch of mutual friends appearing there. And so I stared at a Facebook profile that I haven’t yet selected “accept” or “refuse” to the friendship request.

This is a kind of case I had never seen in class. When a victim is part of your circle.

I think this is the kind of thing that no one is going to prepare you to handle, it is something you’ll just pass through when the time comes.

I can not describe for sure what the sensation of finding the body of a person you know in the woods and knowing that it is no longer among you. Does not seem real.

I think sometimes we see so much of this kind of thing that you feel nothing at all. You’re so used to canceling out your feelings that it doesn’t look like you’re in real life, even though it looks like real life. Everything seems to be a movie, a very bad movie, in which at first you feel simply nothing at all. But once you think deeper over whatever you’re facing, it turns your stomach upside down, gives you a cold twinge in the belly and an oppression in the head. Depending on how you are it disappears as fast as you feel. It’s a ripple in your senses, a wave in your bones, but it soon goes away.

I proceeded in the same way as in all cases, with the difference that I decided to make a call.

The person I was calling did not answer. I called again. It was around ten.

“Hey there, kinda urgent”, I said.

“What happened?”, the voice on the other side of the phone asked.

“Uhm, do you know [the name]?”

“Yeah… I do. Why?”

“Do you see him often?”

“Yes… why?”

“Is he with you?”

“Not really…”

“Can you try to reach him?”

Remember all those mutual friends we had on Facebook? I called my closest once cuz I had to check. Not for the records now, but I wanted to be sure I was not hallucinating to think it was someone I knew, as much Facebook said it was.

And, unfortunately… It was.