Expiration Date

See that body sprawled on the hardwood floor, marinating in a pool of his own blood?

That’s me.

Five minutes ago I was shot in the back. Three times, right between the shoulder blades. The guy who runs the late-night beer bodega downstairs, Willie Shahid, heard the shots—bang bang bang—then saw somebody with a revolver go shuffling down Frankford Avenue. After a few minutes, he walked upstairs to check it out.

Now Willie’s outside the apartment door. He knocks, and then waits a second. Something’s not right. He sniffs the air; the acrid scent of chalk and burnt paper fills his nostrils. Gunpowder. It’s not an unfamiliar scent to Willie Shahid. Not in this neighborhood.

Watch Willie Shahid take out his cell and dial 911, giving the proper address and even the floor. Guy’s a real pro.

If you hang around a little longer, you’ll see the EMTs arrive, and then the Philly PD, 15th District. They’ll move me to a stretcher and carry me out the front door of the building, under the rumbling El train and past a bunch of dudes in oversized white T-shirts and deadpan expressions.

Soon the surgeons at nearby Frankford Hospital will dig the slugs out of my back, place them in a kidney-shaped steel tray. From there, they’ll transfer them to a plastic evidence bag and send it down to the Philadelphia Police Department’s forensics lab at Eighth and Race. Standard procedure—bullets from GSWs always go right to the lab for ballistic analysis.

A few days later confusion will sweep over the forensics guys’ faces. Identifying the type of bullet will be no problem: .38 caliber.

No, something else will trouble them.

After analyzing the slugs and gunpowder, the CSI guys will determine that the bullets are at least forty years old. They’ll also discover that this specific type stopped being manufactured back in 1967.

Now, old bullets can still work. But they’ll have to be asking themselves: Why use forty-year-old ammunition to snuff somebody?

Some people have the idea that when you die your life flashes before your eyes, like a movie on fast-forward.

Not quite.

Time’s arrow only appears to fly straight when you’re alive. Dead is something else. Once you cross that invisible line, you see things how they really are. You see that every moment seems to happen all at once.

Which makes telling this story—or the most important parts of it, anyway—difficult. Usually, you start at the beginning. Or the middle, so the listener doesn’t get bored.

Problem is, I’m very hazy on the beginning and the middle, as I came in during the end. I can speculate, but it’d be nothing more than a wild guess.

I guess I should start with the day I moved into the apartment and went back in time.