Curtains Read online

  We pass another doorway, through which I can see a young woman brushing an older woman’s hair. The older woman is lying on a gurney in a blue dress and clunky black shoes. The younger woman smiles and waves at us, then goes back to work, cradling the older woman’s hair in the palm of her hand, pulling the brush gently so it doesn’t snag. There are two other women on gurneys, both dressed in skirts and cardigans as if they were going out for afternoon tea with the third. One clutches a purse. It’s a quiet, domestic scene. They look so still and benign that there’s no reason my heart should be racing, but it is, and I back away from the doorway. It’s the stillness that scares me. Even sleeping people have some animating spark, you can sense it, and if you watch them for long enough you’ll see it too, a twitch or an itchy earlobe scratched. These women are empty. Well dressed and nicely groomed, but done.

  Jon flips the cover off the peephole on Retort One so I can have a peek. The man’s body is on its back in the chamber, hands at its side, feet pointing ten o’clock, two o’clock. The orange and blue fire roars from the roof of the retort like water from a firehose, hitting the chest, and I can see another jet farther down the chamber, and bits of fly-ash circling in the turbulence. The body is black, and the bones glow in the way a burning piece of firewood glows if you blow on it hard. There’s no smell, but I can feel a draft on my ear as an air current rushes past me, through the porthole, into the chamber.

  “The head burns slowly, the heart burns slowly,” Jon says.

  Hanging on the wall next to the retort are two iron hooks. When the body no longer looks like a body, when all that’s left are scattered bones and a black mass the size of a pumpkin, Jon feeds the longer of the two hooks through the porthole and rakes everything into a pile under the gas jet, to finish the job. Then he opens the door a crack to let the bones cool, and I can see the stone wall of the retort and the pieces, a hip ball-joint, a jaw, glowing red.

  We break for lunch and I scrub my hands and forearms in the bathroom and rinse my mouth with Scope until my gums sting. I tell myself I’ll get used to it, like the others who work here. And I know I’ll lick the primal uneasiness that drove me from a room full of harmless little old dead ladies, but right now I can’t imagine ever getting used to the violence of the retort.

  I find Jon and the young woman in the arrangement room having lunch. I have brought a sandwich from home, but my appetite left me somewhere around the baby urn. Jon eats a pizza sub and leafs through Maxim magazine. Natalie—I can call her Nat—used to work at Shoppers Drug Mart, where she sold cosmetics before she became a funeral director. Her hometown is St. Claude, a French farming community south of Portage la Prairie, which has both a dairy museum and the world’s second-largest smokable pipe, 20 feet long and weighing 430 pounds. Nat’s lunch is a micro-waved pork chop that she saws with a plastic knife, holding her fork in her fist the way a child does. She is the chief embalmer. Jon flashes her the Maxim centrefold, who wears a leather bikini.

  “Nice,” she says, not looking up.

  There’s a stack of funeral trade magazines here too: American Cemetery and Canadian Funeral News, no centrefolds, but Dodge chemicals has a full-page ad in CFN for Plasdopake, an embalming fluid that looks alarmingly like orange soda, and promises “fine tissue texture, glowing color undertones and faultless preservation.” It’s a “humectant-type arterial wholly free of circulation-clogging animal fat precipitation,” with a skull-and-crossbones on the label. I remind myself to drink only tap water at the new job, never anything from the fridge.

  I meet Annette, Neil’s wife, who shakes my hand loosely. I smile, she doesn’t. My impression of her impression of me is that I’m an interloper whose motives for nosing around her family business are still unknown and are presumed muckrakey. She’s a skilled hairstylist who still works on corpses from time to time when things get busy, but her daily job is as office manager. Not only is she the boss’s wife and business partner but she’s responsible for cutting the paycheques, so I promise myself I’ll be nice to Annette, even though, so far, she scares me half to death.

  That afternoon both retorts are roaring, and Nat has a job for me: helping her dress another of her endless supply of old ladies. I tell her, so she knows, that I sometimes have trouble dressing myself (button alignment issues), but she says there’s nothing to it. The arms and legs will be a bit stiff, but don’t be shy about manhandling them: the dead are uncooperative, but they respond to gravity and brute force, a kind of mortuary tough-love. Have I ever dressed another person? she asks. I don’t have kids, but there was that incident in college involving tequila and a grad student, and certainly I’ve known people who respond only to gravity and brute force, but otherwise all I can do is follow her lead.

  The lady is wrapped in a flannel sheet, her face and hands goopy with Kalon skin cream to keep them from drying out. She’s also green. Not sickly peaked green in the cheeks, but forest green, an artifact of the embalming chemicals reacting with the jaundice she had before she ended up here. This will be covered up by makeup, but for now she looks like The Hulk.

  We take turns, alternately rolling the woman to one side and then the other, scooting up her hose and skirt in stages, then the bra and blouse. It’s a funeral director’s job to counsel families on clothing for their dead: find something with a high collar (to cover the incision near the neck where the embalming chemicals went in) and please send underwear. Turns out most people don’t think of it. “I won’t bury anyone without underwear,” Nat says.

  They keep a bag of spares. Once they had an apprentice who was so firm on the matter, she used to raid Neil’s office for boxers and socks, where she knew he always kept a change of clothes for services (“Do you know how many people are buried in my clothes in Brookside cemetery?” he told me). Most men are laid to rest in suits and ties, and it’s got to the point that Nat can only tie a tie from above. When her boyfriend Robbie needs his tie done, she makes him lie down. “I had this dream once,” she says. “I was dressing my uncle, and he wasn’t even dead.”

  She shows me how to roll a corpse without dropping it: grab a wrist and a hip and hug tight, being careful not to be too rough with the bare skin, which has a tendency to slip.

  “Slip?” I ask.

  Come off. Bodies that have been dead a few days before embalming accumulate little bubbles of gas under the skin, which can cause the skin to slip off like wet saran wrap if you’re not gentle. Our lady is still quite sturdy and fresh, but I do as I’m told, hug a hip and pull. Her goopy left hand is hard to hang on to, and as a result she slides more than rolls, to the edge of the gurney, where gravity’s waiting. I hug tighter, and now we’re face-to-green-face. This must be embarrassing for her, that’s all I can think. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry she’s green, and half naked, and in the arms of a hapless stranger when she’d rather be alive and home watching Wheel of Fortune.

  The blouse is next, which requires wrestling with an elbow that won’t unbend: it’s like dressing a tree. When I lay her flat, her hand slaps me on the chest. Fair enough.

  To stick to the skin, real makeup needs heat, which the dead no longer have. Mortician’s makeup is more like paint. The green woman needs a heavy base, but for most corpses, Nat just adds a bit of colour to those spots on the face that naturally respond to sun (tip of the nose, forehead between the eyes, cheeks) and then works it in with a gloved finger. Lips are painted purple, which looks more natural than red on a dead person. Nat has a trade client named Reg, a local undertaker on Erin Street, behind a sports bar. He subcontracts her as an embalmer, instead of carrying the overhead of maintaining his own prep room. Reg likes a lot of purple on his corpses’ lips, even the men.

  Nat steps back to examine her work, then adds a layer of powder, and blows lightly on the woman’s face to remove the excess. I can smell Nat’s peppermint gum. Then she grabs my hands and holds them against the woman’s scalp.

  “Feel that?”

  “What?”

  I do feel
something, two knotty bumps over her temples.

  “Horns!” Nat whispers, wide-eyed. I pull my hands back. “Must be from the cancer, poor thing.”

  Cut into conceptual bite-sized pieces, all this might one day, like Jon says, be easier to swallow: the dead put on their pantyhose one leg at a time like the rest of us. But there’s something black and malevolent breathing in here too, behind that rumbling noise. Call it uncanny. For Freud, that feeling of vertigo when the rational and irrational collide is uncanny: he says there’s nothing more uncanny than a dead body. We’re still savages on the subject, informed by pre-modern ideas that “whoever dies becomes the enemy of the survivor, intent on carrying him off to share his new existence,” even as we know, rationally, that they’re just spent biology: dead meat. Freud also says that if we repress these primitive fears they’ll sneak back to haunt us later as neurotic symptoms. But I think repression is underrated. I have the feeling it’ll be my most valuable friend here at the death factory.

  When Glenn comes back from a removal with a small cardboard box, we gather around to see what he’s brought. Natalie opens it. Inside is an infant, blue-grey. She lifts it up. It’s still wearing a Muppets diaper.

  “Aww,” she says, “I can’t wait to start having kids.”

  Neil has an electric piano in his office. To relax he plays ragtime, slowly, the way Scott Joplin said it should be played. On his desk is a copy of Rheinhold’s sculpture of a philosophizing ape holding a human skull, a humble charm against hubris, a memento mori: if we think we’re indestructible, at the top of the food chain, nature has other ideas. When Neil was an apprentice, his father and uncle ran a conservative funeral home: they embalmed everything that came through the door. Cremation was a fad for pointy-headed university professors and Unitarians, until Jessica Mitford wrote “that book” in the early ’60s and the fad evolved into a social trend. But it wasn’t until twenty-five years ago that Neil finally embraced cremation and became what the mainstream industry calls a “bake-and-shaker, ” a lower-cost provider of a cleaner, more manageable, less Gothic and scatterable end product. Although he still believes in the therapeutic power of a well-embalmed body, you can’t fight a social revolution. Especially now, with the baby boomers idling in their Humvees at the lip of the chasm—76 million of them have already left their muddy tire-tracks in every other intersection of the economy, from pop culture to fashion to the derivative markets (well done there) to yoga and the ovo-lacto frozen dinner-treat industry, and are now facing a guaranteed 100 percent death rate. They’ll want something different from their grandparents’ church services.

  “The traditional funeral is gone,” Neil says, “and it’s never coming back.”

  A WAY OF LIFE LIKE ANY OTHER

  A week into the job, I come home at night in the dark (in Winnipeg, in the winter, the sun goes down soon after it comes up, sometimes before). I shower for longer than I need to, and wash my work clothes separately to keep crematorium dust out of the towels and sheets. My wife, Annie, wants to know what it’s like, but in my head it sounds like a fairy tale: the dead come from a magic place called the Silver Doors, from which they’re whisked into boxes or made to drink potions that turn them from yellow to green, then they’re painted pink and purple and powdered, and some are baked in an oven where they are turned into flour by special death-fairies. I am now a death-fairy. Instead of telling her all this, I just use up her hand lotion and watch Werner Herzog movies to cheer myself up.

  Annie and I live in the Wolseley neighbourhood of Winnipeg, known as the “granola belt” for its progressive politics and its high batik-wall-hanging-to-resident ratio. There are two organic grocers at the same intersection, a bakery that sells bread made from grass and spelt muffin-pucks (and awesome whole-wheat cinnamon rolls), and a cobbler who wears an unironic leather apron and fixes Birkenstock after Birkenstock. I came here from Toronto three years ago so Annie and I could live in the same postal code for a change (she’s from Winnipeg), to work at CBC Radio, a government job with a pension. I’d taken a month’s leave to dabble in death-care. Neil and I have an understanding: if I want to stay longer, I can. But that would mean quitting the radio job, and leaning on Annie’s salary (she’s a union lawyer) to keep us fed and watered.

  Winnipeg is a city where neighbours will notice if I park a hearse in front of the house (as opposed to Toronto, where you could park a hearse, set it on fire, and they’ll only complain to the city about the smoke). In February the air is full of ice crystals that you’re expected to breathe. On a map, Winnipeg is the geographical centre of the continent. If North America were an LP record, Winnipeg would be the spindle. It’s also a practical place to die. There are thirty-eight funeral homes here—more funeral homes than Starbucks outlets. Freud would’ve been happy here, as much as Freud ever was. Study the place and you’ll see that as well as being a rusty railway hub, the Chicago of Canada, Winnipeg is a hub for the uncanny return of the repressed, in particular the forgotten-but-never-gone dead.

  From 1918 to 1934, Thomas Glendenning Hamilton, a doctor and member of the Manitoba Legislature, conducted secret scientific experiments into the existence of life after death, by logging and photographing hundreds of seances. The glass-plate pictures he took, of spinning tables and mediums with ectoplasm flying out of their noses, are in the archives of the University of Manitoba. The pictures are chilling (even if the ectoplasm, that wet, sticky, snotty manifestation of otherworldly spirits, looks like cheesecloth), and for a time, Winnipeg was known as the “ectoplasm capital of the world.” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes represented modern man’s triumph over mystery through the empirical study of physical clues, came to see Hamilton’s seances for himself (and according to one medium’s report, he returned to the city years later, or rather his spirit did, after his earthly death). Local filmmaker Guy Maddin’s first film, called The Dead Father, is a black, neurotic and autobiographical comedy about a man who comes back from the grave, annoyed, in plaid shorts and a golf shirt, to lie down on his dining room table as if it were his funeral bier and pester his family. Maddin has also written about Garbage Hill, a former dump and the only hill in this prairie city, where kids go tobogganing in the winter, only to be surprised by bits of trash and car parts that work their way up through the frost. He claims he once slid down the hill and was speared by a set of deer antlers his own father had thrown away decades before. Meanwhile, east of Garbage Hill, the Red River has been biting away at its banks under Elmwood cemetery, threatening to expose old graves. In 1997, the city had to move 105 caskets before they fell into the muddy water.

  And my first winter in Winnipeg, the newspapers covered the disappearance of a local deejay named Grandmasta Sanchez, who worked at the Village Cabaret nightclub in Osborne Village. Fourteen months he was missing, until they found his mummified body where they’d least expected to: jammed between two walls of the very nightclub where he’d played his last shift. It was determined he’d crawled in there by himself and suffocated (“positional asphyxiation,” police called it), and if not for a recent smoking ban that allowed long-hidden smells to surface, they might never have found him. I’d like to say I was surprised when, a few years later, at a nightclub just down the street from the Village Cabaret, another body turned up, this time wedged into the ductwork (the dead man was presumed to be a thief who hid out until patrons left but got stuck).

  In Winnipeg, the dead and the discarded come back: they refuse to stay hidden.

  Cemeteries and funerals, the way French historian Philippe Ariès sees it, are social constructs to keep nature, the hostile world of worms and decay, separate from a civilized life of flat-screen TVs and microwave chapatis. Look at it this way: we evolved, beautifully, from monkeys into type-A control freaks, with a system (government, laws, religion, organized labour and technology) designed to overcome nature. And for the most part, we pulled it off. There are only two weak spots where chaos sneaks in, wild, wet and savage, reminding us we’re
doomed animals: sex and death. So we devised taboos to deal with the former, to take away its power, and ritual to weaken the chaotic impact of the latter.

  To let off communal steam, we devised orgies, bacchanalia, All Souls feasts; Ariès says that graveyard parties were so common in medieval France that by 1231, the Church councils had to ban dancing, juggling, theatre and mummery in cemeteries under threat of excommunication. Meanwhile, how the two circles of sex and death intersected was the business of poetry and porn, and the subject of apocryphal stories of men who got erections when they were hanged.

  This worked fine until the Enlightenment and later, when we “found ourselves,” pre-California-New-Age-style, and funerals were less about confirming the collective permanence of the social order and more about me me me, which peaked with the Gothic sobfests of the nineteenth century. The Church, which used to own ritual, had to cede to the private sector, which could make up ritual as it went along. The fantasy of redemption and immortality, out of which Darwin was kicking the stuffing, gave way to a marketplace solution to death, the purchase of things: rings and brooches made from the hair of dead loved ones, the memento mori, and burial robes, badges and gloves for the pallbearers (the gloves were to be left on the lid of the casket and buried with it). Neil Bardal says his grandfather sold memorial clothing, pants and dresses and shoes that split at the back for a more comfortable fit (on the corpse); for an extra five dollars he’d squirt an onion into the eyes of the horse that pulled the coach so it looked like the animal was crying. Death got more elaborate and personal. And more private.

  But the dead themselves became a nuisance. Urban cemeteries were thought to be the source of some fusty miasma that made city folk sick, so the dead were segregated to suburban park cemeteries, where families could visit if they had the car fare, bring flowers: the sanatorium model, a kind of refugee facility with nice trees and stonework. The whole puzzle of how we deal with death comes down to that nasty poser: what to do with what’s left behind? Awe of the dead was giving way to modern science’s misguided itchiness about hygiene. People just kept digging holes, farther and farther away from the living. Soon, as Geoffrey Gorer pointed out, the Victorian fussiness over sex and its fascination with death switched places. Sex came panting out of the closet, and death, and all its trappings, went in: it was best managed in the dark, preferably after a few stiff drinks.