Curtains (7 page)

“The teeth,” he says. “What do you do with them?”

“What do you mean?” I say, checking name tags.

“The
teeth,”
he says, and then taps his own in case I’m fuzzy on the concept. “Gold teeth. You pull them out, no?”

“Why would we do that?”

“For the gold.”

My corpse is tall, his feet hanging past the end of the
gurney. I rip a hole in the plastic sheet and check for jewellery.

“We don’t pull out any teeth,” I say, but the guard smiles and winks, picturing me, I can tell, with a pair of pliers and my foot on someone’s jaw. This is how people see us, if in fact I’m an “us” yet. Gothic weirdos and alchemists, the so-called Dismal Traders, with a bucket full of teeth we put under our pillows to hose the Tooth Fairy.

“I guess I’ll have to take out my own,” he says.

“That’s probably a good idea.”

At the Factory, pulling out the stretcher with the tall man strapped into it, I trigger the collapsing legs just as I was taught, forgetting that I was taught to trigger the collapsing legs on the way into the van, not on the way out. Collapsing the legs on the way out is bad. I know this from experience. The stretcher drops, head first, again, hitting the floor, leaving me to stand with the foot-end in my hands while Jon rushes out to see what all the noise is about. This turns out to be a company record: two dropped bodies by a single funeral assistant in a supporting role. Maybe I’ll get a plaque on the wall of the lunchroom.

Nat tells me to change into scrubs and meet her in the prep room, and to put some Blistex under my nose if I have any, to kill the smell, until I get used to it—although, she says, you never get used to it. This is my penance for dropping the tall man. Now I have to help embalm him.

I don’t have my own scrubs so she issues me a purple set that belonged to an embalmer who used to work here but left after an incident involving his wristwatch. Nat says she accidentally knocked the watch off a shelf in the dressing room. In response he tore off his clothes and ran through the parking lot in his boxers,
took her to small-claims court for the cost of repairs, and quit his job. I think he had bigger problems than the watch, she says.

The prep room is smaller than in my workplace nightmares. The walls are white tile, and most of the space is taken up by a steel table, underneath which is a toilet, a lidless American Standard toilet. I know a toilet when I see one. I just didn’t expect to see one here. The shelves are stacked with colourful liquids, oranges and reds and purples and milky pinks, just like the bottle in the
Canadian Funeral News
ad. Below the shelves, next to a sink, are the tools, tweezers bent and straight, probes and hooks and pokers and scissors, a cardful of bobby pins, Gillette disposable razors and a pump bottle of Helene Curtis ThermaSilk shampoo. Charts on the wall show the circulatory system in red and blue rivers, mapping a human-shaped continent. Nat and I slide the body from the stretcher onto the table and she sprays it down with blue Dis-Spray, which smells of rubbing alcohol. Both of us are dressed head to feet in splatter gear: scrubs, a paper bonnet, a plastic face-guard, a surgical mask to keep from inhaling chemical fumes.

You never know what you’re going to get when you open the shroud, she says. Could be a bloody accident victim, or an old lady with no teeth, her mouth wide open. Nat’s enjoying this. She loves the prep room and she wants others to love it too. With a snap she reveals a handsome bald gentleman, half smiling. His eyes are open, one more than the other, but they’re dry and foggy. This is the unembalmed, undecorated, raw look of death. I take a close look. If he could be said to have an expression, it would be one of dopey curiosity, upper lip curled, as if he were trying to remember where he left his car keys. Maybe this is how it happens. You make a sandwich, you scratch your ear with a butter knife, you try to remember
where the keys are and then
whack
: lights out, forever. In any case, our job is to massage and prod and infuse the man back to a more palatable appearance. We start with a thorough washing.

Nat hoses him down, then soaps his head and encourages me to clean his fingernails with a file and a J Cloth. The radio on the wall plays the Foo Fighters and she sings along.

“
That’s just the way life is
…” goes the chorus.

His skin is yellow and cold. To prepare him for infusion we have to “break rigor,” which means bending his arms and legs at the joints to rid them of their natural post-mortem stiffness. Natalie cranks his arm over his head as if it were a rusty pump handle. I lift a leg, foot to ceiling, yoga-style. It’s hard, heavy, physical work. The joints are seized, even his fingers, which we massage until they’re no longer clenched. The man maintains the dim smile as if he’s enjoying this, and issues a dribble of brown drool the colour of weak coffee, which Nat refers to as “purge”: the stomach contents leaking out. Next she “fixes the features,” setting them into a more dignified expression of repose before the chemicals go in and harden them into place. Make a face and someday it’ll stay that way, your mother said: same principle at work here. To fix his jaw she threads a needle with twine, pops it through his upper palate and feeds the needle out through his nose and back again. Then, with some deft wrestling, it appears through a spot under his chin, and she pulls both ends taut until his head rises from the table. She saws the twine back and forth and ties it off over his teeth, and now his mouth is firmly shut. She tucks the ends of the twine under his lips, then plumps them lightly with one of her gloved fingers, and turns his head slightly to the right. In fact the textbook calls for exactly fifteen degrees of tilt, the proper “viewing position.”

Then, the eyes. She uses plastic “eye-caps,” little pink half-shell contacts, one side of which are pocked and nubby to keep the eyelids in place, so they don’t open up at an inopportune time, say, in the middle of an open-casket funeral. The corners of the eyes and mouth are droopy, so she applies some Dodge feature builder with a syringe, under the skin. Botox of death, she calls it. All the while she tells me about the renovations she and Robbie are doing at the house. They’re painting the walls dark burgundy, and employing an African motif: monkeys and zebras and whatnot.

Just as I’m thinking we must be running out of things to do to the poor man, she cuts a hole above his right collarbone and uses forceps to fish out the common carotid artery and a heavy vein, snips them, and inserts a cannula attached to a rubber hose. The hose leads to a machine on the wall the size of an air conditioner. Into it she empties bottles of Permaglo, a tinting formaldehydebased preservative, and Metaflow, red like cherry syrup, to break up clots and condition the blood vessels, and a water softener to take the hard edge off the mix. Machine on, she steps back, and the rubber hose hops on the man’s chest.

Formaldehyde changes the structure of the body’s protein, cooks it the way lime juice cooks seafood in a
ceviche
, making it inhospitable to the bacteria of decomposition. The man turns from yellow to patchy pink, as the blood runs free from the hole in his neck along a channel in the steel table, where it soaks my J Cloth and the sleeve of my scrubs, then empties into the toilet, where it’ll be flushed into the Winnipeg sewage system and, as sometimes happens when the pumps at the North End Treatment Plant fail, into the Red River where, at Lockport, sport fishermen catch catfish for supper.

Nat claps her hands.

“Clots!” she says, watching the stream of blood. “I love clots! It means he’s getting good distribution.”

We massage his limbs and rub his feet and the palms of his hands with our knuckles, to encourage circulation, aware of the time on the clock over the door. In thirty minutes his family will be in the Committal Space for the viewing. Natalie works with the speed and confidence of a professional athlete. She reads the body for colour and tumescence as if she were reading an opposing team’s defence.

She deems the distribution of chemical “not bad,” except for his legs and feet, so she calls an audible: we’ll open the two femoral arteries in the groin and pump in more chemical (“we”?). She feels for a spot on the fleshy inside of the man’s right thigh and cuts a neat hole, tears back and forth at the tissue with her probe and forceps, then isolates the artery and ties it off with twine. She then passes me the knife and invites me to do the same on my side. I figure it’s worth stopping here to consider my options. I’m all for learning by doing, but as a beginner I feel it’s appropriate to plea-bargain my way down to a lesser duty: perhaps I can comb his eyebrows or rewash the hair on his chest until it’s pillowy soft. Cutting a man open, even a dead one, strikes me as an act, like hang-gliding, that I’d rather read about than do. Behind her hazmat chador, I can see Nat blink, waiting me out.

“Only if you’re comfortable,” she says.

I do as I’m told.

I cut the skin, dig through muscle with my thumb. The hole is cold and wet and meaty. I find what might pass as a blood vessel and hook it with my forefinger.

“That’s a nerve,” Nat says.

I try again. In my peripheral vision I see the man wince, but of course it’s just a trick of the air or my mind. I can feel my own groin tighten and I suspect I’ll sit funny for a week. My thumb hooks another wet wormy thing.

“That’s a muscle.”

Third trip in, I come up with the plum, if only by the sheer process of elimination: the femoral artery, as thick as a penne noodle.

“Good,” she says, and after snipping a hole in the vessel and pumping it with fluid from the cannula until his knees turn pink, she shows me how to close the incision with heavy twine in a baseball stitch, which is even harder than finding the artery because I can barely sew a shirt button, much less a hole in a human leg.

As I sew there’s a knock at the door. It’s Neil. This is less a spot check than a moment with the corpse, since as it happens he knows the man: they took Icelandic language lessons together. The dead man, Neil says, had a sense of humour, a cottage at a nearby lake and grandsons who play hockey. Except for the hum of the ventilation, the room is silent.

“Well,” Nat says finally, “he has amazing drainage!”

Everyone smiles, because in the prep room good drainage is a valued quality, like good manners and good diction.

The last step calls for stabbing the man in the belly with a long steel harpoon called a trocar. Attached to a vacuum hose, the trocar sucks the fluids from the abdomen and heart and lungs, which will be replaced by more preservative. Nat has to stand on a kitchen stool to work the trocar, spearing it in and out, in a kind of ballet-fencing move, until the man’s belly drops and he’s dry, then she pours two bottles of purple Spectrum cavity fluid down the
hose. When he’s done chugging the Spectrum, she caps the hole in his abdomen with a plastic screw, paints his face and hands with Kalon cream, wraps him in a flannel sheet, and ships him to the dressing room, where he’ll be suited and casketed and smudged with purple lipstick. I follow.

After dressing the bald man and winching him into a Prairie Beacon casket, we roll him on the “church truck,” a casket dolly, into the Committal Space, where the light feels too dim after the fluorescents of the prep room, and my ears pop from the quiet. Nat leans in close enough to kiss the man, and blows gently on his face to clear away any errant powder. Then, as she lines up the casket under the pot lights, the gum falls out of her mouth and lands on the lid of the casket. She flicks it into the wastebasket and wipes the wood with her sleeve. As I follow her back stage again, I can see the family in the parking lot, two boys with wet hair and hockey jackets and a woman stamping her feet against the cold.

During the visitation, I stay in the back and study the Dodge chemical manual. If I’m to understand the odd amalgam of clinical science and spa treatment that makes up the prep room routine, I have to figure out my Permaglos from my Introfiants:

Permaglo: “Where it is important to create an illusion of vitality, the embalmer can rely on this classic arterial chemical to impart a stable, natural-looking glow to lifeless tissue.”

Chromatech Pink: “Here are some of the comments of our testers: Doesn’t fade, even after a week; very natural, I like it better than any other dye I’ve tried; excellent, a true pink; it didn’t have any of the red tones, just the pink I wanted; more lifelike than other pinks.”

Chromatech Tan: “… is especially well suited to people with somewhat darker complexions due to exposure to sun, ethnicity, etc.”

Introfiant: “Treats low-protein, low-albumen, aged and ‘institutional’ cases with excellent response…. May be safely used on normal cases without risk of ‘burning’ or ‘leatherizing.’”

The illusion of vitality—I know squat about Freud, I can’t read him without getting dizzy, but somewhere he’s described the uncanny, that powerful notion of fear in the face of the in-between: not real, not unreal, not human, but still kind of sort of. It’s a paradox that Japanese robot makers have been trying to solve. They keep building human replicas that look more and more lifelike (usually, for some reason, like hot Japanese women), but as a result of a Promethean behavioural twist, they find that the closer they get to perfection the more frightening the end product appears. A mannequin is creepy, but in the right context (say, in a store window, not in your bedroom at night) it’s not a source of fear. A cartoon character with human features is downright cute. But as you approach the point at which real and unreal are confused, the natural response is revulsion: roboticist Masahiro Mori called this the “uncanny valley.” Wax figures and zombies and automata live in the valley. Embalmed corpses, too. Natalie says embalming delivers to mourners the opportunity to face up to death, to see it for real, and to know the person won’t be coming back: the body is its own therapeutic tool for the balming of grief, a tool for transcendence. But explain that to my cognitive wiring. The embalmed corpse is an in-between: both a person and an object to fear.

Still, ours looked pretty good, now, I’ll grant her that: all sleepy and peach-coloured, his various holes and puckered stitchings well hidden under clothes. My hands, meanwhile, are ice cold. It occurs to me I’ve been through a rite of passage, like a Bantu boy who kills his first antelope. The experience was thrilling, in a primitive way. I should probably bay at the moon tonight. In any case, having literally got my hands wet and my garment soaked in blood, there’s not much doubt that I’ve been baptized as a make-believe undertaker.