Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory (2 page)

Byron was (or, had been) a man in his seventies with thick white hair sprouting from his face and head. He was naked, except for the sheet I kept wrapped around his lower half to protect I’m not sure what. Postmortem decency, I suppose.

His eyes, staring up into the abyss, had gone flat like deflated balloons. If a lover’s eyes are a clear mountain lake, Byron’s were a stagnant pond. His mouth twisted open in a silent scream.

“Um, hey, uh, Mike?” I called out to my new boss from the body-preparation room. “So, I guess I should use, like, shaving cream or . . . ?”

Mike walked in, pulled a can of Barbasol from a metal cabinet, and told me to watch out for nicks. “We can’t really do anything if you slice open his face, so be careful, huh?”

Yes, be careful. Just as I’d been careful all those other times I had “given someone a shave.” Which was never.

I put on my rubber gloves and poked at Byron’s cold, stiff cheeks, running my hand over several days’ worth of stubble. I didn’t feel anywhere near important enough to be doing this. I had grown up believing that morticians were professionals, trained experts who took care of our dead so the public didn’t have to. Did Byron’s family know a twenty-three-year-old with zero experience was holding a razor to their loved one’s face?

I attempted to close Byron’s eyes, but his wrinkled eyelids popped back up like window shades, as if he wanted to watch me perform this task. I tried again. Same result. “Hey, I don’t need your judgment here, Byron,” I said, to no response.

It was the same with his mouth. I could push it shut, but it would stay closed only a few seconds before falling open again. No matter what I did, Byron refused to act in a manner befitting a gentleman about to get his afternoon shave. I gave up and spurted some cream on his face, clumsily spreading it around like a creepy toddler finger-painting in the
Twilight Zone
.

This is just a dead person, I told myself. Rotting meat, Caitlin. An animal carcass.

This was not an effective motivational technique. Byron was far more than rotting meat. He was also a noble, magical creature, like a unicorn or a griffin. He was a hybrid of something sacred and profane, stuck with me at this way station between life and eternity.

By the time I concluded this was not the job for me, it was too late. Refusing to shave Byron was no longer an option. I picked up my pink weapon, the tool of a dark trade. Screwing up my face and emitting a high-pitched sound only dogs could hear, I pressed blade to cheek and began my career as barber to the dead.

W
HEN
I
WOKE
UP
that morning, I hadn’t expected to shave any corpses. Don’t get me wrong, I expected the corpses, just not the shaving. It was my first day as a crematory operator at Westwind Cremation & Burial, a family-owned mortuary. (Or a family-owned
funeral home
, depending on which side of the United States you live on. Mortuary, funeral home, po-tay-to, po-tah-to. Places for the dead.)

I leapt out of bed early, which I never did, and put on pants, which I never wore, along with steel-toed boots. The pants were too short and the boots too big. I looked ridiculous, but in my defense, I did not have a cultural reference point for proper dead-human-burning attire.

The sun rose as I walked out of my apartment on Rondel Place, shimmering over discarded needles and evaporating puddles of urine. A homeless man wearing a tutu dragged an old car tire down the alley, presumably to repurpose it as a makeshift toilet.

When I first moved to San Francisco, it had taken me three months to find an apartment. Finally, I met Zoe, a lesbian criminal-justice student offering a room. The two of us now shared her bright-pink duplex on Rondel Place in the Mission District. Our home sweet alley was flanked on one side by a popular taqueria and on the other by Esta Noche, a bar known for its Latino drag queens and deafening rachera music.

Making my way down Rondel to the BART station, a man across the alley opened his coat to show me his penis. “Whatcha think of this, honey?” he said, waving it triumphantly at me.

“Well, man, I think you’re going to have to do better,” I replied. His face fell. I’d lived on Rondel Place for a year by now. He really
would
have to do better.

From the Mission Street stop, the BART train carried me under the Bay to Oakland and spat me out a few blocks from Westwind. The sight of my new workplace, after a ten-minute trudge from the BART station, was underwhelming. I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting the mortuary to look like—probably my grandmother’s living room, equipped with a few fog machines—but from outside the black metal gate, the building seemed hopelessly normal. Eggshell-white, only a single story, it could have doubled as an insurance office.

Near the gate, there was a small sign: please ring bell. So, summoning my courage, I complied. After a moment, the door creaked open, and Mike, the crematory manager and my new boss, emerged. I had met him only once before and had been tricked into thinking he was totally harmless—a balding white man in his forties of normal height and weight, wearing a pair of khaki pants. Somehow, in spite of his affable khakis, Mike managed to be terrifying, assessing me sharply from behind his glasses, taking inventory on just how big a mistake he had made in hiring me.

“Hey, morning,” he said. “Hey” and “morning” were flat, indistinguishable, under his breath, as if they were meant for only him to hear. He opened the door and walked away.

After a few awkward moments I decided he intended me to follow, and I stepped through the entryway and turned several corners. A dull roar echoed through the hallways, growing louder.

The building’s nondescript exterior gave way in back to a massive warehouse. The roaring was coming from inside this cavernous room—specifically from two large, squat machines sitting proudly in the center like the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of death. They were made of matching corrugated metal with chimneys that stretched upward and out of the roof. Each machine had a metal door that slid up and down, the chomping mouths of an industrial children’s fable.

These are the cremation machines, I thought. There are people in there right now—
dead
people. I couldn’t actually see any of these dead people yet, but just knowing they were nearby was exhilarating.

“So these are the cremation machines?” I asked Mike.

“They take up the whole room. You’d be pretty surprised if these
weren’t
the machines, wouldn’t you?” he replied, ducking through a nearby doorway, abandoning me once again.

What was a nice girl like me doing in a body-disposal warehouse like this? No one in her right mind would choose a day job as a corpse incinerator over, say, bank teller or kindergarten teacher. And it might have been easier to be hired as a bank teller or kindergarten teacher, so suspicious was the death industry of the twenty-three-year-old woman desperate to join its ranks.

I had applied for jobs concealed by the glow of my laptop screen, guided by the search terms “cremation,” “crematory,” “mortuary,” and “funeral.” The reply to my job inquiries—if I received any reply at all—was, “Well, do you have any cremation experience?” Funeral homes seemed to
insist
on experience, as if corpse-burning skills were available to all, taught in your average high school shop class. It took six months and buckets of résumés and “Sorry, we found someone better qualified” before I was hired at Westwind Cremation & Burial.

My relationship with death had always been complicated. Ever since childhood, when I found out that the ultimate fate for all humans was death, sheer terror and morbid curiosity had been fighting for supremacy in my mind. As a little girl I would lie awake for
hours
waiting for my mother’s headlights to appear in the driveway, convinced that she was lying broken and bloody on the side of the highway, flecks of shattered glass stuck to the tips of her eyelashes. I became “functionally morbid,” consumed with death, disease, and darkness yet capable of passing as a quasi-normal schoolgirl. In college I dropped the pretense, declared my major as medieval history, and spent four years devouring academic papers with names like “Necro-Fantasy & Myth: Interpretation of Death Amongst the Natives of Pago Pago” (Dr. Karen Baumgartner, Yale University, 2004). I was drawn to all aspects of mortality—the bodies, the rituals, the grief. Academic papers had provided a fix, but they weren’t enough. I wanted the harder stuff: real bodies, real death.

Mike returned, pushing a squeaky-wheeled gurney bearing my first corpse.

“There’s no time to learn the cremation machines today, so you can do me a favor. Give this guy a shave,” he requested, nonchalant. Apparently the dead man’s family wanted to see him one more time before he was cremated.

Motioning for me to follow, Mike wheeled the gurney into a sterile white room just off the crematory, explaining that this was where the bodies were “prepared.” He walked over to a large metal cabinet and pulled out a pink plastic disposable razor. Handing it to me, Mike turned and left, disappearing for the third time. “Good luck,” he called over his shoulder.

As I said, I hadn’t expected the corpse shaving, but there I was.

Mike, though absent from the preparation room, was watching me closely. This was a test, my introduction to his harsh training philosophy: sink or swim. I was the new girl who had been hired to burn (and occasionally shave) corpses, and I would either (a) be able to handle it or (b) not be able to handle it. There was to be no hand-holding, no learning curve, no trial period.

Mike returned a few minutes later, stopping to glance over my shoulder. “Look, here . . . no, in the direction his hair was growing. Short strokes. Right.”

When I wiped the last bits of shaving cream from Byron’s face, he looked like a newborn babe, not a nick or razor burn in sight.

Later that morning, Byron’s wife and daughter came to see him. Byron was wheeled into Westwind’s viewing room and draped in white sheets. A floor lamp fitted with a rose-colored lightbulb cast a calm glow over his exposed face—far more pleasant than the harsh fluorescent bulbs in the preparation room.

After my shave, Mike had worked some kind of funerary magic to close Byron’s eyes and gaping mouth. Now, under the rose lighting, the gentleman seemed almost serene. I kept expecting to hear cries from the viewing room of “Dear
God,
who shaved him like this!” but to my relief, none came.

I learned from his wife that Byron had been an accountant for forty years. A fastidious man, he probably would have appreciated the close shave. Toward the end of his battle with lung cancer he couldn’t get out of bed to use the bathroom, let alone wield a razor.

When his family left, it was time to cremate him. Mike rolled Byron into the mouth of one of the behemoth cremation machines and turned the dials on the front panel with an impressive dexterity. Two hours later, the metal door rose again and revealed Byron’s bones, reduced to glowing red embers.

Mike brought me a metal pole with a flat rake on the end. He demonstrated the long strokes required to pull the bones from the machine. As what remained of Byron fell into the waiting container, the phone rang. It boomed loudly through the speakers in the ceiling, installed specifically to be heard over the thunder of the machines.

Mike tossed me his goggles and said, “You finish raking him out. I gotta grab the phone.”

As I scraped Byron’s body out of the cremation machine, I saw that his skull was still fully intact. Looking over my shoulder to see if anyone, living or dead, was watching, I carefully inched it toward me. When it was near enough to the front of the chamber, I reached down and picked it up. The skull was still warm, and I could feel its smooth, dusty texture through my industrial-grade gloves.

Byron’s lifeless eye sockets stared up at me as I tried to remember what his face had looked like as he slid into the flames just two hours before. It was a face I should have known well after our barber-client relationship. But that face, that human, was gone. Mother Nature, as Tennyson said, is “red in tooth and claw,” demolishing every beautiful thing she has ever created.

Bones, reduced to just their inorganic elements by cremation, become very brittle. As I turned the skull to the side for a better look, the entire thing crumbled in my hand, the shards tumbling into the container through my fingers. The man who was Byron—father, husband, and accountant—was now entirely in the past tense.

I got home that evening to find my roommate, Zoe, on the couch, sobbing. She was brokenhearted over the married man she had fallen for on a recent backpacking trip to Guatemala (a blow to both her ego and her lesbianism).

“How was your first day?” she asked through her tears.

I told her about Mike’s silent judgment, about the introduction to corpse shaving, but decided not to tell her about Byron’s skull. That was my secret, along with the strange, perverse power I had felt in that moment as skull crusher of the infinite universe.

As the sound of ranchera music from Esta Noche blasted me to sleep, I thought of the skull lodged in my own head. How it would one day emerge after everything that could be recognized as Caitlin—eyes, lips, hair, flesh—was no more. My skull might be crushed too, fragmented by the gloved hand of some hapless twentysomething like me.