The Criminal Within Essay, Research Paper

AT the information desk of a downtown Manhatten Barnes And Noble, I ask about a title–Be your own undertaker. How to dispose of a dead body. The young man behind the desk doesn’t miss a beat. “Has it begun to smell.” he asks,with a perfunctory grin that acknowledges yet undercuts the small joke between us. He knows there is no corpse in need of disposal my inquiring openly aboutsuck a book in a Barnes and Noble is proof enough. And I know he knows this; indeed, any slight self -conciousness on my part stems from my awareness that buying this book is akin to purchasing one of those tourist T. shirts depicting a revolver above the tire tag line. “Welcome to New York.” But this book is a hipper jest, something truly arch. That doesn’t mean it lacks gruesome details on how to rid yourself of an inconvenient body: Before you sink the stiff in the river, author A.R. Bowman advises don’t forget to “take a long, sharp object like a tire iron or a very very large screwdriver, and drive it through the corpse numerous times” to allow for the release of buoyant gases during decomposition. And if you’ve got to remove incriminating ballistic evidence from a head wornd, you can “cut the skin off the forehead, break up the skull bone behind it, and reach with long tweezers, chopsticks, or something similar….”Bowman’s earnest, intimate tone–”if you find yourself gripped by a constant urge to visit or look over te site…resist it” is both eerie and hilarious.