Kingston Noir (13 page)

As I have mentioned, our relationship had never been an intimate one. My mother would not even come with me to oversee diplomatic formalities at the American embassy. I had to go there on my own as she was off researching a
Marie Claire
feature on Jamaican cuisine (at a time like this?).

Security was strict at the fortresslike embassy on Old Hope Road. “Excuse me. Is that a camera in your pocket?” The U.S. Marine spoke to me from a cubicle of bulletproof glass. All I could see of him was a pair of squinty eyes beneath a peaked white cap. I was glad that I did not have to make eye contact with him.

“No camera,” I declared.

“Please surrender your passport.”

Afterward I was met by a rather effete, silky-looking junior diplomat named Donald Katz, who was responsible for other red tape involved in air-freighting Dad home. “I’m so sorry to hear about your loss,” he said, putting on a face. (I could not tell if it was the
right
face; his eyes seemed to hold a friendly expression but without really having any expression at all.) He was a medium-sized blond man with white eyebrows and a tight, worried face. Not my type at all.

“Take a seat, won’t you?” We sat at either end of a sofa opposite a large framed photograph on the wall of Barack Obama. “Can I get you a coffee?”

As I sipped from the coffee mug Mr. Katz said he required a doctor’s note to show that my father’s body contained no “infective substances or tissues”; I had a copy for him and he thanked me for that. Then he said: “You know, we get very few American deaths here in Kingston. In Montego Bay it’s different. Nationals die there of alcohol, drugs, all-night partying.” He spoke as if this kind of thing happened every day. Maybe it did. (There was the case, only last month, of two elderly Americans who had gone to a Montego Bay nightclub called X-Tatic Moods, drank a whole lot, and were later found washed up on the beach, drowned.) Each year, Mr. Katz went on, hundreds of Americans are “repatriated” from all corners of the world; they die of electrocutions, traffic accidents, suicide. Airport cargohandlers refer to human remains as HUM.

“Most international flights have a couple of ‘hummers’ in the hold,” Mr. Katz let me know, adding: “I’m afraid that’s the way of it with repatriations. It’s not pleasant. But the bodies are there, you can’t just close your eyes and pretend they aren’t.”

What he said seemed logical, but it made no sense to me. Why should we
not
close our eyes to such horror? But then nothing in this story is plain as day. (I mean, previously, I had thought that Hummer was the make of an automobile, not a deceased human being.)

Mr. Katz got to his feet and said gravely: “Your father’s coffin will have to have a drop-in zinc liner and will be hermetically sealed.” (The zinc, he explained, was to guard against sepsis and other infections.) “Regrettably, we have to conform to airline and consular specifications.” He showed me to the door, and, taking my hand in his, said: “It’s been nice meeting you. It isn’t often that I get to talk about the things that matter.”

He smiled and made (I thought) an ambivalent gesture. I said goodbye to him and headed off in the direction of the funeral parlor we had been recommended. As I hurried toward Hagley Park Road, the sun was high and intense, sucking the color out of the sky. By the time I got to the bus stop on Parade, my brain was swarming with the beginnings of thoughts fastened onto the beginnings of other thoughts. Receiving so many thoughts took all my attention. I was preoccupied, above all, with the thought of how I might broach the subject of my father’s death with the undertaker. Dad as a living person seemed impossibly distant now; how to make him even remotely real?

It was nearly one o’clock when I reached Hagley Park Road. There, amid the secondhand Japanese car dealers and past the Ethiopia Repatriation record shop (the reggae bass reverberating heavy in my stomach), I found myself on a narrow strip of asphalt lined with shacks and barren yards. My face felt as if it was dissolving in the heat. I stopped at a bar for ten minutes and had a cooling Ting at the counter. Opposite the bar, the House of Comfort Funeral Home Ltd. radiated a suitably dismal air. Through dark-tinted windows I could make out a floral tribute to
Mom
next to another, to
Pop
.

After a long wait, I braced myself to enter. Inside, as well as plastic wreaths, hung a pungent smell which I could not place. Formaldehyde? At the far end of the parlor, a dark-suited man was sitting at a desk beneath a huge TV screen up on the wall advertising,
Limousine Service. Import & Export of Human Remains. Embalming.
He appeared to ignore me while I looked around. On one wall, in big gold plastic lettering, was a quotation (or misquotation) from Corinthians, 15:55:
Oh death, where is thy Ting?

The man finally got up and moved toward me. “I’m Derek Maunder,” he said, maybe a little wary. “The director.”

“Hello.”

“You look like a stranger.”

“I
am
a stranger.”

“So where you from, may I ask? From distant parts?” He stared at me so searchingly that I had to focus my gaze on his eyebrows.

“I’m from New York. Brooklyn.”

“New York?” His eyebrows quirked. “I’ve got a cousin in Brooklyn, or maybe it’s the Bronx.” There was a pause. “So how may I be of assistance?”

“Well, it’s sort of hard. I don’t quite know how to tell you. It’s a little delicate …”

“Delicate, you say?” Mr. Maunder held up a palm like a traffic signal to stop. “I must put my hand on my heart. Here at Comfort Ltd. we respect all delicacies. You know, service is more than just a word with us.” He gave a slight bow at this. “For those who require it, we even offer a session of free grief counseling.” To judge by the keening plaster angel on his desk, Mr. Maunder also offered eternal salvation as part of his undertaking package.

I explained my business.

“Repatriation?” He pondered this awhile. “I trust you don’t mean to Africa.”

“Africa? No, to New York. Why Africa?”

“I was just thinking. Here in Jamaica,
repatriation
is mostly a back-to-Africa thing. Haile Selassie. Ethiopia. That class of thing.” He looked at me quizzically. “You are not of the Rastafari faith?”

“Jah. Do I look like it?”

The director smiled slightly and got to the point. “So your father has died. Here in Kingston.”

“Yes. At the Pegasus Hotel.”

“My condolences.” His face seemed to express sympathy—or was it consternation?

“It could happen to any of us,” I said, not meaning to sound sarcastic.

“Touch wood it won’t.” On the word
wood,
with its suggestion of coffin, Mr. Maunder had tactfully lowered his voice. He was making a favorable impression on me.

“Have you been in Kingston long?”

“About a week now.”

Neither of us said anything for a couple of seconds. Then Mr. Maunder went to his desk and twitched an important-looking pile of paperwork. “May I ask if your father died of natural causes? We have to be sure. If your father did not die of natural causes, there will need to be an inquest. It’s the Jamaican law.”

“No, my father’s death was natural, all too natural.”

Actually, I was not so sure. Manslaughter? Accident? If a crime
was
committed, the motive remained uncertain: nothing, it seemed, had been stolen from room 508. Heart attack still seemed to be the sole plausible explanation.

Mr. Maunder pressed the heels of his hands together. “For health and safety reasons,” he said very softly, “your father will have to be embalmed. Embalming is a legal requirement for most repatriations.” He added that embalming had become
de rigueur
(“if you’ll pardon my French”) in the U.S. during the Civil War, when young men died so far from home.

“If you like,” he went on after a genuinely funereal silence, “we can perform the embalming here.” Saying which, he led me to a small, white-walled chamber at the back of the parlor. Three metal trolleys there stood against one wall; a large, hospital-type sink with elbow-operated taps stood in a far corner. “We use an up-to-date alcohol injection method,” said Mr. Maunder. Dad would have liked that. For all his business savvy, the director said he believed passionately in caring for the dead. The meaning of life is everywhere connected to what it means to die, he insisted.

We went into the showroom adjacent to a makeshift-looking chapel, where I had to choose a coffin from among the many models on display. “We have baroque, gothic, or jazzy styles,” Mr. Maunder said in a patiently reassuring tone. “I would suggest a Sea Mist polished finish. Or maybe a Lilac Bloom.”

On a trestle table in the chapel, disconcertingly, lay an open casket surrounded by a quietly grieving family. Embarrassed by their grief, I tried to select a coffin for Dad. The lighting was poor—just a couple of spots in the ceiling—but I managed to choose a casket of ash-blond wood; it was the plainest yet most expensive model in the showroom.

“That’s the Colonial Classic,” said Mr. Maunder (I think approvingly). Other models were gold-encrusted, with glass lids and frilly pink linings; even death wears bling.

But now a new thought struck terror to my heart. What if Dad was not in fact dead? Death is the final insensibility, they say, but still we have to make sure a person actually is dead, do we not?

“Not dead?” The director stared at me with great seriousness (like the doctor who had arrived at my diagnosis all those years ago). “Either a person is dead—or a person is not dead.” Dead or not dead. I took comfort in those stark oppositions, and I thought to myself: I have made no mistakes so far; why should anything go wrong now?

For such a grave undertaking, my visit to the funeral parlor had filled me with a curious energy. I popped another antidepressant and telephoned the mortician in Brooklyn who was to oversee transfer of my father’s corpse from JFK airport.

“Door to door, our basic repatriation fee is $2,500,” he told me, adding reassuringly: “We offer a bespoke service.” I arranged a site for Dad’s grave and began notifying relatives.

Exhausted by the effort, I lay down on the bed in room 508 and looked at my wristwatch. It was past nine thirty. Mom was dining downstairs in the Columbus Restaurant (
Dress Code Observed
; she was wearing a floral-print bikini combination under her purple bathrobe). I got up and stood by the window, and watched the moon riding, careering through the night clouds. Kingston had turned into an adventure for me, one in which my father was the detonating factor. Yet almost all of the adventure was taking place in his absence. I found the thought unsettling. Abruptly, a great sob tore though my body, and I wept uncontrollably.
Oh fuck.
Tomorrow I would have to steel myself for the worst task of all: I would have to “positively identify” my father’s body. It was a U.S. embassy stipulation. The wrong body might otherwise be flown home, or the
right
coffin put on the
wrong
aircraft. And that would be awkward.

Dawn was breaking when I got up the next day, went to the window, and pulled up the blinds. As usual the Kingston day had come up hot and still. Mom was in her bed snoring faintly. How long had we been in Jamaica for? Five days? Ten days? The time sequence was beginning to confuse me. I sat on the edge of my bed, and thought: through all these days of trial and uncertainty, only a numbness registered my shock at what had happened. When would it lift, this numbness? I put on my clothes—my mind was functioning—and took a cab downtown toward the worst horror of all.

Taking a breath, I walked into the refrigerated room on my own. My father’s body had been brought up to me in a lift from underground storage and now it lay in unremitting stillness beneath its white shroud. This freezing place, with its hum of refrigerators, galvanized buckets, and bare, carbolic-scrubbed walls had been my father’s habitation for the five days (it was definitely five days) since he died. I stepped close, looked at the placid, yellowish face. The eyes were half open and stared incuriously at the ceiling; they had a strange, flat glitter in them. I could not believe that this was my real father, in a real hospital mortuary. Who would have thought that his world would end here? I guess it was the closest he would ever get to a Jamaican dead yard ritual.

It seemed as if my whole life had been leading to this one awful moment.

Overcome with sadness, I put the palm of my hand to his forehead: it was cold as snow. I smoothed the forehead, and let my hand run softly over his hair. After a brief hesitation, and with a feeling maybe of guilt, I eased back the shroud to reveal his chest: a tangle of wiry white hairs, the nipples a livid gray-blue. An autopsy scar showed jagged down the chest like a railway track. Derek Maunder, with his corny undertaker’s trick of making things look new, had tried to make the corpse appear untainted by decay. Yet death is unfakeable. All the light had gone out of my father’s face; bruising showed blue around his lips from the ventilator tube. But what scared me most was the shape his open mouth made with the teeth bared. Was it a grimace? A smile? I decided it was a snarl. It was as though Dad was still reviewing books for the
New York Times
.

I stood very still. There it was again. The noise. I thought I could hear a noise. It was quite loud now. Three loud raps. In apprehension I waited for it to stop; but it got louder. I caught my breath and listened.

“Going someplace?”

To my astonishment it was my father speaking.

“Me?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m going back to the hotel.”

“That’s too bad. It’s so cold here. I don’t want to live in the cold.”

“I’m sorry—about the cold.”

A voice from the past warned me:
Don’t trust Dad
. And then I suddenly saw my younger self talking to him in New York sometime back in the 1990s.

“Dad, will you be nice to that new novel?”

“Me,
nice
? Over my dead body.” There was a silence. “So you’re on your way back to the hotel?”

“Yes. I’m going to leave this town. I’m not going to hang around.”

“So long, then.”

My father was going to saddle up and ride off into the sunset, was he? I felt he was amusing himself at my expense. Hardhearted and mocking to the end: that, sadly, was the dad I had come to know.