Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory (22 page)

SOLO WITNESS

I
t was November when Mike took a two-week fishing vacation with his wife and child, leaving me—deer-in-the-headlights
me
—in charge of the crematory. Worse yet, Mike had scheduled a witness cremation for first thing Monday morning. With him gone, I would have to perform the dreaded witness by myself.

“Dear God, Mike, reiterate all procedures and dispense positive reinforcement immediately!” I pleaded.

Mike took a different approach: “Don’t worry, man, it’s a real nice family. From New Zealand. Or Australia? Whatever, the son is cool, and I think he’s straight. He likes
Six Feet Under
, so there you go. Try to look nice on Monday. He’s coming into like twenty pieces of property. I’m trying to set you up.”

It was the beginning of a Jane Austen novel, if Mr. Darcy was a grieving son/HBO enthusiast from Perth and Elizabeth an entry-level cremationist.

Disaster lurked around every corner during a witness cremation. Just a few weeks earlier, the conveyor belt that’s used to roll the body into the cremation retort had developed a problem with its electrical system. The short caused the belt to stall occasionally. The stall was not much of an issue if I was alone; I could solve the problem by taking a running start and ramming the cardboard body box into the retort. But if the conveyor belt stalled during a witness, that option seemed far less viable.

I practiced what I would say if the worst occurred:
Oh, yes, that conveyor always stops right there. This is the part where I take a sprint across the crematory and slam myself into the box containing your mother and shoot her into the flames. Common procedure, sir; worry not.

The night before the witness I had nightmares about the conveyor belt breaking or, worse, the machine turning off as I loaded in the body. That had never happened before, but theoretically it
could—and with my luck would—
happen that day.

As another bit of fodder for my nightmares (besides telling me he wanted to set me up with the deceased’s son), the only other information Mike had given me was “Heads up: she’s not looking so good.” The whole family was flying in from New Zealand (slash maybe Australia) and the deceased was “not looking so good.” What did that even
mean
?

What it meant, as I discovered Monday morning, was that Mother’s cheeks had developed strange patches of bright-orange rot and her nose was covered with a hard brown crust. Her face was puffy and smooth, like an overripe peach. Human skin is confined to a dull color palette of cream, beige, taupe, and brown when people are alive, but all bets are off once someone is dead. Decomposition allows skin to flower into vivid pastels and neons. This woman happened to be orange.

As soon as I arrived at work I started on her makeup. I used whatever was available in Westwind’s makeup kit—half special mortuary makeup, half bottles from the drugstore down the street. I tried primping her hair to distract from the decomposition. I placed white sheets around her face, which was the size (and color) of a basketball, in an attempt at a flattering angle. After rolling her under the rose-colored lamplight of the viewing room, she didn’t look half bad.

“Not too shabby, Cat. Not bad,” Chris reassured me. “She was looking . . . unwell.”

“Thanks, Chris.”

“Look, I gotta pick up Mr. Clemons from the nursing home on Shattuck. They don’t hold bodies for anything; the nurse has already called squawking three times.”

“Chris, there’s a witness right now. I’m the only one here!”

“I know, I know, I don’t agree with it either. Mike shouldn’t have left you like this. He thinks everything’s easy. You need backup.”

True as this might have been, my old “Nope, got it” reflex kicked in. The fear of looking weak or incompetent was worse than any make-believe disaster involving stalled conveyor belts or orange skin.

“Go, Chris. It’s fine. I got it.”

Shortly after Chris’s departure, the woman’s son (Yenta Mike’s dream date for yours truly) showed up with ten family members in tow. I escorted them into the viewing room and led them over to the body. “I’ll leave you alone with her. Take all the time you need,” I said, backing respectfully out of the room.

As soon as doors were shut, I put my ear up next to the wood, anxious to hear their reaction. The first thing the son said, quite emphatically, was, “She looked better before. Mom looked much better before all this makeup.”

My immediate instinct was to fling the doors open and yell, “You mean when she was visibly decaying, buddy?” but I was aware that wasn’t the best customer-service move. After I had calmed down and overcome the insult to my handiwork, I wanted to speak with the son again, to tell him that I didn’t agree with the corpse-makeup industrial complex either, that natural
was
better, but that
maybe
if he had seen her he would have agreed the makeup was warranted. Then I would ask him to clarify what he meant by “she looked better before.” Was “before” when she was still alive? That made sense. Or was “before” when he last saw his mother and she wasn’t yet the color of a traffic cone? Most unsettling of all was the possibility that he was one of the rare creatures genuinely comfortable with bodies that have already moved into the stages of decomposition. In which case Mike was right, maybe this guy was my dream man. Either way, the conversation never happened and I’m pretty sure our rom-com relationship was doomed, despite the excellent meet-cute premise.

The family took their time viewing their matriarch before coming to get me for the cremation. Back in the chapel I was alarmed to find smoke wafting out from the sides of the corpse. The family had laid several thick bundles of burning sage in the folds of her white sheets. We didn’t usually allow open fire in the viewing room, but since Mike was gone and Mom resembled sports equipment, I let it slide.

Along with the incense, the family had placed a Häagen
-
Dazs coffee-and-almond ice-cream bar between her hands like a Viking warrior’s weapon. Those are my favorite. So I yelled, involuntarily, “Those are my favorite!”

I had successfully kept my mouth shut up till that moment (even after the insult to my skills as a corpse beautician), but ice cream proved a topic on which I could not remain silent. Thankfully, they just laughed. Coffee ice-cream bars were their mother’s favorite too.

With Chris retrieving Mr. Clemons, it was up to me to transfer Mom into the crematory. My first act was to ram the cot firmly into the doorframe, spewing forth a burst of sage smoke. I don’t remember exactly what I said—mortification clouds the memory—but it was probably something along the lines of “Whoops!” or “First door’s always a doozy!”

I lifted Mom onto the conveyor belt without incident, and then, to my relief, the belt’s soothing whir accompanied her right into the cremation machine. I let her son push the button to start the flames. Like many before him, he was moved by the button’s ritual power. The incense and ice cream had shown that this family was no stranger to ritual. For the moment it seemed he had forgotten the rammed door and the theatrical makeup (though he still wasn’t charmed enough to ask me out).

While Mike was on vacation, I cremated twenty-seven adults, six babies, and two anatomical torsos. Three of those cremations were witnessed, and they went off without a hitch.

On his first morning back, Mike glanced up from his paperwork and said, “I’m so fucking proud of you.”

I almost burst into tears right there. I felt like I had conquered something huge, like I was no longer a girl playing dress-up at this job. I wasn’t a dilettante. I was a crematory operator. It was something I knew how to do. It was a skill. And I was good at it.

If Mike had been in the habit of flattering my vanity the way I’d hoped he would, congratulating me on a well-swept courtyard or my cremating five babies before five, I would have become a far less competent worker. I succeeded because I needed to prove myself to him.

“You’ve stepped it up more than ninety-five percent of the people we’ve hired, man,” Mike continued.

“Wait, who are the five percent who worked harder than me?” My eyes narrowed. “That had better just be an expression.”

“We usually have to hire people with no experience. Or, if they do have any experience they’re goons from the removal service. I mean, it’s kind of a disgusting job.”

“That doesn’t pay very much,” I added.

“No,” he said with a laugh, “it doesn’t. We tricked you into it.”

My excitement at finally squeezing legitimate praise from Mike was short-lived, promptly turning into guilt. I had applied to mortuary school, and had been accepted.

Being accepted didn’t mean I had to attend. This was the end of 2008, the beginning of the economic crisis, a foolish time to quit any stable job, even a job as bizarre as crematory operator. But my life in San Francisco was still bland and lonely, and the Cypress College of Mortuary Science (one of only two mortuary schools in California) was located in Orange County, the suburban wonderland just south of Los Angeles and home to the
Real Housewives
and Disneyland. I didn’t want to be an embalmer, the trade taught at mortuary schools like Cypress, but I did want to discover firsthand how our national mortality racket was training its future members. Where, exactly, did things go so wrong: with the people who ran the industry, the people who taught them, or the industry itself?

Then there was Luke, more of a consideration than I would then admit to myself, who had been living in Southern California for several years. At the end of college we had planned to move to Los Angeles together, to get an apartment, and to live as penniless but fulfilled artists. Instead I broke north for San Francisco and pursued my wild hare of a death obsession. It was a selfish decision at the time, but things were different now. I knew who I was, my life had a purpose, and I was ready to be with him.

“So, you’re moving to L.A., Doughty? For real this time?” Luke asked, skeptical.

“Don’t be too flattered, buddy. It’s not that I want to move to L.A., per se, I just have to get away from all these corpses. Have you read
Explosion in a Cathedral
?

“I am tired of dwelling amongst the dead. . . . Everything smells of corpses here. I want to return to the world of the living, where people believe in something.”

He laughed. “Everything smells of corpses, eh? What’s your metaphor with that? Is the crematory made of corpses?”

“Yes, but they are incredibly difficult to build with,” I explained.

“I thought they were pretty stiff.”

“Right, so good for initial bracing. But their constant decay is bad for foundational security. Unpredictable, you know?

“Caitlin, I think you should get out of there before all of those corpses come crashing down around you.”

Luke tipped the scales. I would head south for the winter.

I finally told Mike a week later. He kept a poker face and said, “Well, if that’s your decision.”

It was more obvious that Chris didn’t want me to go. We had memories together, like the time we picked up an elderly hoarder lying in a pool of her own blood on the kitchen floor, the counter cluttered with open peanut butter and Nutella containers crawling with roaches. Many of our memories were disgusting, but they were our memories nonetheless.

As my departure approached, we posted the opening for my job on the Internet, and people applied in droves. The job market must have been abysmal, because people seemed eager to work in a mortuary.

Many people were applying to the job listing, but that didn’t mean many
good
people were applying to the listing. From one cover letter: “You can trust me because I am a Muslim. I don’t do fraud. There could be a $100 bill on the floor and I would not pick it up. The one thing that motivates me is incentive: If I run 3 miles a day, what will I get?”

Then there were the myriad applications with incorrect spelling/terminology/grammar: “Objective: To aquire experience and gain oppurtunity to work in field of mortuary.”

The real gems came in when we selected several people to fill out an additional questionnaire. I thought that the questionnaire was a little much, in an “if you were a tree what kind of tree would you be?” way, but one has to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Q:  In approximately 300 words explain why you are interested in working at a mortuary.

A:  I love the death.

Q:  Are you aware of, or have you participated in any religious/spiritual rituals surrounding death? Please describe these events.

A:  I play with the wigy [
sic
] board once.

Q:  Are you able to be empathetic to people without becoming personally involved? Describe a situation where you were able to do this.

A:  I kill a bunch of people once.

Q:  Are you able to be flexible with regards to your job duties and description?