Curtains

by Tom Jokinen

  A family of three arrives at the Factory. They’ve brought their pastor, a major from the Salvation Army, in uniform, and while Adina leads them to the Space, Glenn and I set up the body in the casket nook, behind closed drapes. The body’s in a cardboard cremation container. There’ll be no viewing. Instead we lay a quilted pall overtop, and then Adina joins us.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” she says. “Where’s Neil?”

  Glenn tells her to bring them water. Mourners are always thirsty. She fills four cups from the cooler, and I follow, to hold the door, and we run into one of the family members, a woman, possibly the widow.

  “Are we supposed to pray in here or what?” she says.

  “Yes,” Adina says. “Neil will be here shortly.”

  With little else to do until the boss arrives, Glenn and I wait in the dressing room. He reads Esquire and I wet-mop a floor I wet-mopped yesterday. Then Adina rushes in, this time waving a pocket copy of the New Testament.

  “It’s a Committal to the Flames!” she hisses. “They want a Committal to the Flames!”

  We snap into action, or rather Glenn does and I follow. First we roll the body from the nook into the tight workspace near Retort Two, hoist the box onto the scissor-lift, whip off the pall and open the retort door. The overhead fluorescents are shut off in favour of more flattering pot lights, and Glenn unfolds a pair of accordion screens on either side of the retort to block the view to the rest of the backstage, with the tools and the sort table and the vacuum-hood that looks like a fat evil snake. But there’s no way to dress up this room, with its concrete floor and all the overhead ductwork and the big black mouth of the open retort. The fake dusty ficus plant in the corner just makes it worse. We can hear Neil’s voice, and Adina runs out to brief him.

  “He doesn’t look happy,” she says on her return.

  “When does he ever look happy?” says Glenn.

  I brush the dust off my shirt.

  Adina’s stomach growls. “I’m starving,” she says.

  Glenn briefs us: on Neil’s cue we’ll roll the box from the scissor-lift into the retort, being mindful not to jam it against the stone wall, or we’ll have to pull it out and try again, which will disturb the gravity of the event. Now my stomach growls: performance anxiety. I’ve humped dozens of boxes into the retort without incident, but now, with an audience, I can picture the box sliding the wrong way off the lift and onto some mourner’s foot. The backstage door opens. First Neil then the pastor enter, the pastor holding a bible and patting his thin hair with a shaky hand, then the family. The woman is twisting a Kleenex. One of the men is wearing a black eagle T-shirt and red suspenders. He holds the woman at her elbows. Then, as the pastor reads from Scripture, how the Lord is our shepherd and we shall not want, and Neil makes the sign of the cross on the head-end of the box, the woman reaches out and lays her head on the lid and says, simply, “No.” The man in suspenders helps her up. She looks at the open retort, then at us, and she gasps, a short sharp yelp, like the sound a dog makes if you step on its paw just hard enough to surprise it. My hands are shaking like the pastor’s. I shouldn’t be here; this is too private. I feel like a voyeur.

  Neil nods and we push, one–two–three. The cardboard whines on the steel rollers of the lift. The box goes in smoothly, the door to the retort slides down and the rollers on the lift keep spinning. Glenn engages the fan and the machine roars to life, its walls rattling. As if they’ve seen and heard enough to get the point, the woman and the two men depart, followed by Neil and the preacher, leaving us to finish the job.

  “That’s nothing,” Glenn says. “We had a guy, a drug dealer, he did a header off the Maryland Hotel. His girlfriend was in here, she threw herself on the casket and all these other drug dealers had to haul her off.”

  But it wasn’t nothing. That animal noise, quick as it happened, was no performance. That was the real thing. Unfiltered fear or grief or a stormy mix of both. It seemed to me she looked into the open retort and knew: he’s going in and he’s not coming out. And for a beat, she forgot the rules about keeping her pain to herself.

  Tuesday: Richard is juggling a tight schedule at Aubrey. He’s booked an ash interment, otherwise known as an urn burial, for Chapel Lawn at 12:45, and another family is due at noon for arrangements. We need to be done with the arranging family and out the door by 12:30 to make it to the cemetery on time. I pack the 12:45 urn in a blue velvet bag, the standard travelling kit, but next to the urn I find a wristwatch. Richard tells me to put it in the bag, it belonged to the deceased, and he’ll give it back to the family when we get there.

  “Remind me,” he says.

  The noon family arrives, two women and their husbands. The women are sisters: their mother has died. She was Catholic and they’ve already booked Father Sam at Holy Rosary for a visitation and graveside service, followed by a catered gathering.

  “My mother wanted a viewing,” the first sister says. “She was very definite about that. But the four of us are very uncomfortable with it. Is a half-hour enough?”

  “An hour,” Richard says.

  “The point is I really don’t care,” she says. “We need to do it and then close the casket for the service. We’ll have a photo on the casket.”

  And flowers: azaleas, hibiscus, calla lilies, carnations, and something blue to make it all “pop.”

  “Okay. Father Sam will have a blessing, bless the cross and hand it to you, then we’re off to the cemetery. Send your flowers straight to Holy Rosary, we’ll go half an hour before to set up. How many people are speaking at the memorial?”

  “I’m speaking,” the other sister says. “It’s terrifying, but it’s closure for me.”

  “Coordinate your efforts,” says Richard. “Keep it to four or five minutes. Once you start it’s hard to stop. But that part you sort out. Our part finishes at the grave. Now, the removal’s been done, the embalming’s done—we need clothing.”

  “Can you take her glasses?” the first sister says, sliding them across the table to Richard. “She’d want her glasses.” Her voice catches.

  The four of them stare at the wire-rimmed glasses, smudged with fingerprints. Richard puts down his pen and folds his hands.

  The first sister looks up. “Can we get some Kleenex, please?”

  Again I’m caught, waiting for an intimate moment to pass. Kleenex is distributed, cups of water too. At 12:30, Richard rises to signal the end of the conference. Hands are shaken. I scoot to the back room to get the blue velvet pouch and we follow the family out the door. They go their way, and we head off for Chapel Lawn for the 12:45 ash interment.

  When we turn in to the cemetery, I can see a small group of people trekking across the grass. We pull up near the grave, which has already been dug, just a post-hole for the urn; it’s dressed with AstroTurf even though it’s summer and the real grass is lush. Two women and two children, a boy in a fedora and a tot in blue rubber boots swinging a Hot Wheels umbrella, gather around the hole. There’s no preacher today: Richard is clergy-by-proxy. He reads a passage from the Anglican short book, then, holding the blue velvet pouch by the strings, kneels and lowers it into the grave. The watch. I forgot to remind him about the watch. I whisper in his ear, and he reaches into the bag and pulls it out.

  “Do you want me to bury it or would you like to keep it?” he says, passing it to one of the women.

  “Oh,” she says with a sharp gasp. “It’s her watch.”

  She turns it over in her palm.

  “It’s still ticking,” she says. She hands it to Richard, who drops it back in the pouch.

  If we’re supposed to build a protective wall between our customers and the nasty fact of death, it’s a fragile wall. All it takes to punch through it is a wristwatch, or a pair of eyeglasses, some real object made suddenly unreal by its new, unwelcome context. To Richard and me the glasses are a prop. Same with the watch. To the families, they’re the women who wore them.

  As if to signal the end of the
ceremony, the little boy stamps in a puddle and chases a goose. The family leaves, and Richard and I head for the car, where I tell him I’m sorry that I dropped the ball and turned a simple graveside ritual into a cheap magic trick: ta-da! He might as well have pulled out a rabbit. He says it’s no big deal, what you do is stay loose and act like it’s normal. Never draw attention to mistakes. For all they know, pulling jewellery out of the grave at the last minute is part of the Anglican rite.

  According to Adina’s textbook on interpersonal skills training, the most vital characteristic of the successful undertaker is “the ability to convey accurate empathy.” This I find wildly unhelpful, but let’s pick it apart. For a stranger: I get your pain, but not overly so, let’s be honest here. We just met. But I do feel accurate em pathy. Not sincere empathy, which would mean I feel it like I feel love or a cold coming on, but accurate, which means within the reasonable pluses and minuses of bona fide empathy. And did I say “feel”? I meant “convey.” It’s a performance, a kind of method acting, but why not cut the textbook some slack and say it’s a benign, well-intentioned faux emotion-ette intended to put the grieving at ease. The corporate funeral homes use fake empathy as a lever, Neil says. They understand your pain, and they understand how pain can be relieved through the act of shopping. Neil picks on the corporates: they’re a broad barn of a target. But he’s right, people do throw money at grief, and he would know. It happens at his funeral home too.

  Monday, the Factory is buzzing. Shannon and Adina are wrestling with a problem case in the dressing room, a man who was dead a week in his apartment before he was found by the usual route: a peculiar smell. What is that smell? These are ominous words to hear in an apartment building. And the smell is what hits me when I walk into the dressing room. It’s more of a taste than a smell. It reaches past your throat and squeezes your liver. There’s a strong oily base of fish rot, with hints of black licorice and cooked turnip and burning rubber. This is the decomposing human body. Shannon and Adina were both in on the weekend trying to prep the poor man, poking for collapsed arteries and trying to bring moisture back to his dried lips and fingertips and ears, which are now black. The top of his head is red and blotchy. He looks like one of the mummified bodies from the Franklin expedition chipped out of the ice. The man deserves to be buried and have done with it, but instead we’re dressing him in a suit, because his sister wishes to view him.

  “She says she needs to get a few things off her chest,” says Shannon.

  Adina holds up his shirt, still in the store package.

  “Is this periwinkle?” she says.

  I put on the full prep-room gear, mask and rubber gloves, and together we wrestle the man into what Shannon calls the space-suit, a full-body form-fitting white plastic garment, with arms and legs like a union suit. This will keep down the smell during the visitation. Adina scoops San Veino powder into the spacesuit (“for use on: cancers, bedsores, floaters, burned bodies, incisions, autopsied bodies, mutations”). It smells of pine air-freshener, but it’s fighting a losing battle. We wrap the plastic suit at the wrists and ankles with packing tape, then wrap more tape around his torso, and the San Veino powder puffs out in clouds. I feel it sting my eyes. There’s no debate over whether to cut the clothes: the shirt and jacket are sliced clean through the back and tucked around him.

  “Holy moly,” Shannon says, checking her watch.

  The sister is due in twenty-five minutes. I winch the body into the casket, a Champagne sealer, the most expensive piece of furniture in Neil’s showroom. Shannon paints his face with a thick layer of Dodge foundation, but the black shows through, so she lays on more until he appears plastered. We roll the casket into the Committal Space, and Shannon sets a chair at the head end, then changes her mind and moves it to face the centre of the casket, so the sister won’t be staring down at his red blotchy scalp. He’s a carnival attraction, a rough rubbery fright of a former man, but we’ve given the woman what she asked for, and paid for: the most one-sided conversation she’ll ever have in her life.

  The sister is with him half an hour, then forty-five minutes, and by five o’clock when it’s time to go home she’s still there.

  The next day, to the man’s relief, I’m sure, he’s buried at Brookside. Twenty people gather at the graveside with no volunteers to bear pall, so Glenn and Neil and Adina and I corral two Brookside gravediggers in Carhartt overalls and the six of us carry the casket from the hearse to the hole, where, after a long week of cooking in his apartment, being prepped and jacked into plastic long-johns, painted and then left with a sister he hasn’t seen in five years, he’ll finally get his rest.

  Neil says you’ll go mad trying to parse the motivations of families. Grief is mixed up with guilt and shame and the dynamics of family politics. Sons and daughters will compete for the role of Most Crushed by the Loss, they’ll fight over the menu for the reception as if it’s the dead man’s estate, and Neil’s seen families break apart over the issue of where to emboss a fish or a tree on the urn. The best we can do is tell people there are no rules. Conventional wisdom has mashed Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of dying into the five stages of grief, which was never her intention when she wrote On Death and Dying. There are no stages. But families still do what’s expected of them. They follow a social script. The script does not leave room for a heavy sigh of relief, though Neil says it’s sometimes the case that when someone dies your life will get better, not worse—especially if the dead man suffered a long illness or was simply an irredeemable prick. Pricks die too. Part of the funeral director’s job is to give people room not to be sad.

  “I had this lady,” he says, “she told me she wanted her husband’s ashes to bury in her garden. I told her that sounded like a nice idea. She said, you don’t get it. I want to cement the sonofabitch into it.”

  TWO HUNDRED CUBIC INCHES OF YOU

  I need to spend more time at the sort table. The trade clients are complaining about the quality of the cremated remains. They say they’re used to nice, clean, ivory bread flour, and what they’ve been getting is dingy and grey—not what they expect from Neil. Neil is not the cheapest crematorium in town, but his brand depends on attention to detail, which includes the colour of the cremated remains (in the industry they’re called “cremains,” but we don’t stoop to euphemisms here, except that we call embalming the “preparation,” and the hearse the “coach,” and the funeral the “service.” In any case, “cremains” sounds too much like a name-brand coffee whitener). There are two reasons why Neil insists on a hand sort. First of all, he wants to be sure that when families scatter remains in the rose garden out front there are no impurities that’ll choke the flowers. Second, it’s an aesthetic issue. Some crematoria dump everything into the processor and have at it. Neil thinks it matters to people that the bag they get back is as close to pure former-human as us Factory monkeys can make it. That’s why he charges more than the local deep-discount bake-and-shakers. It’s the difference between a silk tie and a clip-on.

  So what am I doing wrong? I dump the pan of bones onto the steel table and crunch through it with the heavy magnet, which brings up a few staples and a black pants zipper. These go into the slag box, which will be emptied later into the Dumpster. The magnet is covered in red powder, which I take to be iron, from the blood, but Glenn says it’s just red powder that sticks to the magnet. Now I’m facing a pile of shattered bones, including one intact humerus and a snapped femur that I toss into the processing machine with a clang. The long bones feel like unglazed pottery. The skull is already broken into ladle-shaped pieces (Glenn would’ve smacked it with the iron hook during the cremation to expose the brain to the fire), and I use a rib to poke through the pile for the medium-sized chunks, the sponge-candy vertebrae and the crumbly ball joints. Most of it’s too shattered to identify, although a skilled sorter can usually spot the hyoid bone, one of the smallest bones in the body (after the bones of the inner ear), which sits at the base of your tongue, not much b
igger than a clipped thumbnail. To me it all looks like broken seashells, and as I sweep through with my hands, looking for more foreign objects, pieces get under my fingernails. They’re sharp. They hurt. I should wear gloves, but the heavy suede work gloves don’t give me the fine motor control I need to pick out the disposables.

  The heartbreakers are the black bits of coral, and there’s local dispute over their source: so much of this stuff sticks to the inside of the skull, it could be cerebral tissue, or cartilage, or possibly embers from caskets. I’ve seen wood embers that still glow on the sort table. Blow on them and they glow brighter. If these coral bits wind up in the processor, that’s how you get your unappetizing grey powder. They’re the source of my problem. So I flick them aside with a screwdriver, into a separate pile for the slag bin, and sweep the white bits into the processor with a horsehair brush. This goes on for half an hour. It’s hypnotic, Zen-like. I imagine how long it might take me, with tweezers and a tube of Testors airplane glue, to rebuild an entire skeleton: weeks, months, years. I would like to do this one day and shoot a movie about it, and then sell it to a studio that makes movies about meaningless, obsessive and doomed projects and the obsessive and doomed people behind them, like the fellow who built a castle out of pop bottles.