The handle of the door is made of a heavy brushed stainless steel bar, bent and twisted into a kind of "L" shape and affixed to the tinted plate glass in some invisible kind of way. I grasp the handle and pull the door open. A bell ting-a-lings overhead. There is no bell overhead, not in our office, I just imagine one sometimes. I enjoy the irony of the thought.
The owner's stupid dog is here. I hate it for a split second every morning when I see its stupid face. Collins all but bursts into the office through the door which separates the front office from the back bay, refrigeration unit, retorts (3x) and embalming room. Business in the front, party in the back. "Dude," he says through a smile, chuckling, "you've gotta fuckin' see what's going on back there, ha ha. Just classic." If Collins is excited about something, I'm twice as excited. I'm excited once to see that he is so excited about something, and I'm excited again to see what's so exciting back there. It's just such an exciting moment. Really, really exciting. I open the door and step into the back. To my immediate left is the embalming room. The door is open and the light is on. Since it is usually under lock and key, I assume that by "back there" Collins meant in the embalming room. I peek my head around the corner slowly to see our embalmer Cristos. He is a giant man. Every millimeter of six feet four inches and every ounce of two hundred fifty pounds. He is down on one knee, staring at something on the embalming table. Something, due to my vantage point, I have yet to see. "Cristos, what's going on?" I ask. He shakes his head and says nothing. This is going to be good. I like to give myself these grim little gifts, ghoulish surprises to haunt me for the day. I step into the embalming room and as I do so my field of view widens and I am all at once fully aware of the direness of the situation before me. On the embalming table is a human torso, the head still attached, but with no arms or legs. Torso, Human. Part #H97422. A human torso with no arms, and no legs. Just four big gaping holes and one wretched looking face. I am reminded immediately of a video from the film series Faces of Death, wherein a man is drawn and quartered by horses. This is about three to five times worse than that.
The head of the individual has been hastily and incompletely shaven. Patches of hair stand out in several places, adding insult to the overall injury. The arms and legs, all four, have been removed at the joints. What is left are deep, bloodless craters. Beneath the skin a small layer of fat is visible. Beneath the fat, a mess of muscle, connective tissue, arteries and veins. The joint sockets are clearly visible--deep pits of bone and cartilage. I cannot ascertain whether this is the remains of a man or the remains of a woman, as the genitalia have also been removed, giving the whole scene an eerie Plainfield, Wisconsin feeling. The face of the individual is twisted and distorted into a horrifying look of sheer agony. One eye is closed, they other partially open. The eyebrows are raised in painful surprise. The mouth is agape, the neck seemingly strained to pull the jaw open so wide. If this person was not in pain before they died, they surely were after they died. This has led me to believe that there is a physiological body response to pain beyond what your nerves transmit while you are alive. I am certain that this person did not die with such a terrible look on their face. I am certain it came after death, as the scalpel was sunk into the skin, as the knife cut away the tissue, as the saw separated joints. I imagine that with each second under the blades the body of this person twisted almost imperceptibly in painless agony until it reached the terrible state it is in right now. Though I've never seen something quite so utterly awful, I'm barely taken aback, if at all.
"So," I say, interrupting the florescent hum to break the silence, "Hm. What the fuck is this mess?" Cristos stands, sighs a sigh of frustration, puts his hands on his hips and looks at me. "Well," he begins, "we just started getting these goddamn torsos from the procurement agency. They're going overseas so they can do work on them there, dissect them or whatever. Students, you know. But I'm supposed to be embalming them so they don't rot during transport. Only problem is..." he chuckles an uneasy chuckle, "hehe, only problem is this. I don't have a closed circuit to work with. So watch what happens." He moves to the counter and dons a pair of blue nitrile gloves, the kind I find in my pants pockets in twos and fours at the end of every day. He then takes a step to the embalming machine, an antiquated looking thing resembling an oversized blender, one a 50's era housewife might blend cocktails in for all her husband's business associates. It has that sort of look to it. Connected to the machine is a long clear tube about one half inch in diameter, attached to the end is a long, slender, steel wand. This, Cristos picks up from the table and inserts into an incision near the collar bone, deep into the carotid artery. "Ok, watch. This is the problem." he says. He turns the machine to on, turns the pressure up. The machine makes a rapid, quiet ticking noise. I watch for a moment, waiting for something to happen. Slowly, fluid begins to drip from the arteries at the open sites of the limb removals. He pushes the pressure a little higher and the fluid begins to shoot from the openings. He shuts the machine off. "See, this poses a real problem." I suppose it does. "Well, what can you do?" I ask. He replies. "I don't know...I'm about to fill a Sterilite and dip it, haha." "Looks pretty grim, my friend." I respond. He just stands there, shaking his head for a minute. I feel as though I am in some sleuth detective video game, wherein you can only initiate so many lines of dialogue with each individual before you run out, and they just stand there, doing whatever it was they were doing before the character entered the screen. "Okay, good luck," I say as I exit. Back in the front office there are some menial tasks to do, some paperwork to examine, some minor mistakes to correct.
Nearly an hour later, there have been no calls and my office chores are completed. I decide to pay Cristos another visit. I exit stage rear and return to stage embalming room. I laugh a laugh of nerve and shock when I see his solution to the problem. "Hey!" he says somewhat excitedly, "I figured it out! Look!" There are clamps and forceps on every exposed vein and artery in each opening. Easily ten to twenty in each gaping hole. It looks like some Frankensteinian experiment. Some mad scientist's idea of a genius and ground-breaking process. "Watch now!" Cristos says as he takes a couple quick steps toward the embalming machine. He switches it on, rotates the large dial in the center to what looks like 60. 60 or 80, I can't see from here. The machine ticks. Several seconds pass...no fluid comes out. After a few moments he says "Huh? Pretty good right?" "Well, played." I say. "I thought so." he replies. The phone rings. Beepbeepbeep. "Hello?" "Hey, buddy, did you take a look?" It's Collins. "Yes, I did. I'm actually looking right now. Where are you?" "I'm on my way back to the office," he answers, "forgot something." "Okay," I say, "I'll see you in a minute."
Several minutes later Collins enters the front office as he enters every room he's ever entered, scarf around his neck, hair out of place, a bit disheveled. He has a certain wind about him. "Dude," I say through a smile, chuckling, "you've gotta fuckin' see what's going on back there, ha ha. Just classic." "Copy that." says Collins. He storms toward the rear door to the embalming room, swings it open, steps through, shuts it behind him. Through the wood and glass of the closed door I hear him laughing. Just classic.
0 comments:
Post a Comment