Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty

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hot, dense air and the rumbling of the devil’s breath. What looked like puffy silver spaceship lining covered the walls of the crematorium, soundproofing the room and preventing the rumble from reaching the ears of grieving families in the nearby chapel or arrangement rooms.

      The machine was ready for its first body when the temperature inside the brick chamber of the retort reached 816°C. Every morning Mike stacked several State of California disposition permits on my desk, telling me who was on deck for the day’s cremations. After selecting two permits, I had to locate my victims in the “reefer”—the walk-in body-refrigeration unit where the corpses waited. Through a cold blast of air I greeted the stacks of cardboard body boxes, each labelled with full names and dates of death. The reefer smelled like death on ice, an odour difficult to pinpoint but impossible to forget.

      The people in the reefer would probably not have hung out together in the living world. The elderly black man with a myocardial infarction, the middle-aged white mother with ovarian cancer, the young Hispanic man who had been shot just a few blocks from the crematorium. Death had brought them all here for a kind of United Nations summit, a round-table discussion on non-existence.

      Walking into the body fridge, I made a modest promise to a higher deity that I’d be a better person if the deceased was not at the bottom of a stack of bodies. This particular morning, the first cremation permit was for a Mr. Martinez. In a perfect world, Mr. Martinez would have been right on top, waiting for me to roll him directly onto my hydraulic gurney. To my great annoyance I found him stacked below Mr. Willard, Mrs. Nagasaki, and Mr. Shelton. That meant stacking and restacking the cardboard boxes like a game of body-fridge Tetris.

      When at last Mr. Martinez was manoeuvred onto the gurney, I could proceed with the short trip to the cremation chamber. The last obstacles on the journey were the thick strips of plastic (also popular in car washes and meat freezers) that hung from the doorframe of the reefer, trapping the cold air inside. The strips were my enemy. They entangled everyone who passed through, like spooky branches in the cartoon version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I hated touching them, as I imagined that clinging to the plastic were hordes of bacteria and, it stood to reason, the tormented souls of the departed.

      If you got caught in the strips, you would inevitably miscalculate the angle needed to roll the gurney out the door. As I gave Mr. Martinez a push, I heard the familiar thunk as I overshot and slammed the gurney into the metal doorframe.

      Mike happened upon me thunking away, pulling Mr. Martinez back and forth and back and forth and back and forth as he walked by, heading to the preparation room. “You need help? You got it?” he asked, one eyebrow arched significantly higher than the other, as if to say, It’s painfully obvious how much you don’t got it.

      “Nope, I got it!” I replied cheerfully, brushing the bacteria tentacle from my face and heaving the gurney into the crematorium.

      I made sure my response was always “Nope, got it!” Did I need help watering the plants in the front courtyard? “Nope, got it!” Did I need further instructions on how to lather up a man’s hand to slip a wedding ring over his bloated knuckle? “Nope, got it!”

      With Mr. Martinez safely out of the reefer, it was time to open the cardboard box. This, I had discovered, was the best part of my job.

      I equate opening the boxes with the early ’90s stuffed toy for young girls, Puppy Surprise. The commercial for Puppy Surprise featured a group of five-to-seven-year-old girls crowded around a plush dog. They would shriek with delight as they opened her plushy stomach and discovered just how many stuffed baby puppies lived inside. Could be three, could be four, or even five! This was, of course, the “surprise.”

      Such was the case with dead bodies. Every time you opened the box you could find anything from a ninety-five-year-old woman who died peacefully under home hospice care to a thirty-year-old man they found in a dumpster behind a Home Depot after eight days of putrefaction. Each person was a new adventure.

      If the body I found in the box was on the unusual side (think: Padma’s face mould), my own curiosity led me to gumshoe-style investigations via the electronic death registration system, coroner’s amendments, and the death certificate. These bureaucratic necessities would contain more information about the person’s life and, more important, their death. The story of how they came to leave the living and join me at the crematorium.

      Mr. Martinez was not so out of the ordinary as far as corpses went. Only a three-puppy body, I’d say, if pressed to give him a rating. He was a Latino gentleman in his late sixties who had probably died of a heart condition. Raised up under his skin I could see the outline of a pacemaker.

      Legend among crematorium workers holds that the lithium batteries inside pacemakers explode in the cremation chamber if not removed. These tiny bombs have the potential to blow the faces off poor innocent crematorium operators and do damage to the machines. The threat is even greater in the UK, where the operators often do not open the sealed coffins, and just have to go with God and hope they aren’t setting up an unplanned fireworks show. I went back to the preparation room for one of the embalmer’s scalpels to remove it.

      I touched the scalpel to Mr. Martinez’s chest and attempted two slices above the pacemaker in a crosshatch pattern. The scalpel looked sharp, but it did nothing to pierce his skin—not even a scratch.

      It is not hard to understand why medical schools use cadavers to practise operating techniques, desensitizing their students to the process of causing pain. Performing this mini operation, I felt Mr. Martinez must surely be in agony. Our human identification with the dead always makes us feel like the decedent must be in pain, even though the murk in this man’s eyes told me he had long left the proverbial building.

      Mike had showed me how to perform a pacemaker removal the week before, but he had made it look easy. It requires more force with the scalpel than you’d think; human skin is surprisingly tough material. I apologised to Mr. Martinez for my incompetence. After several more unsuccessful scalpel jabs and frustrated noises, the metal of the pacemaker revealed itself beneath the lumpy yellow tissue of his chest. With one quick pull it was free.

      Now that Mr. Martinez had been identified, relocated, and stripped of all potentially explosive batteries, he was ready to meet his fiery end. I plugged the conveyor belt into the retort and pushed the button, which starts the assembly-line process of rolling a body into the machine. Once the metal door clunked closed I returned to the science-fiction dials at the front of the machine, adjusted the air flow, and turned on the ignition burners.

      There is very little to do while a body is burning. I kept watch on the machine’s changing temperature and opened the metal door a few inches in order to peek inside and monitor the body’s progress. The heavy door creaked when it opened. I imagined it saying, Beware of what you shall discover, my pretty.

      Four thousand years ago, the Hindu Vedas described cremation as necessary for a trapped soul to be released from the impure dead body. The soul is freed the moment the skull cracks open, flying up to the world of the ancestors. It is a beautiful thought, but if you are not used to watching a human body burn, the scene can be borderline hellish.

      The first time I peeked in on a cremating body felt outrageously transgressive, even though it was required by Westwind’s protocol. No matter how many heavy-metal album covers you’ve seen, how many Hieronymus Bosch prints of the tortures of Hell, or even the scene in Indiana Jones where the Nazi’s face melts off, you cannot be prepared to view a body being cremated. Seeing a flaming human skull is intense beyond your wildest flights of imagination.

      When the body goes into the retort, the first thing to burn is its cardboard box, or “alternative container” as it’s called on the funeral bill. The box immediately melts into flames, leaving the body defenceless against the inferno. Then the organic material burns away, and a complete change overtakes the body. Almost 80 per cent of a human body is water, which evaporates with little trouble. The flames then go to work on the soft tissues, charring the whole body a crispy black. Burning these parts, the ones that visually identify you, takes the bulk of the time.

      It would be a lie to say I hadn’t had a particular

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