Kaipo and I arrived in Mr. Yamasake’s room to find him curled up in the foetal position on his immaculate white hospital bed. He looked like a museum mummy, with taut skin like brown leather. He was less than seven stones, desiccated by disease and old age. Either one of us could have lifted him onto the stretcher with one hand.
“Dang, dis guy’s pretty old, yeah?” Kaipo said, Mr. Yamasake’s age surprising even a veteran of the corpse-transfer beat.
The stretcher Kaipo and I had brought with us was actually a hollowed-out metal cage. We placed Mr. Yamasake inside before covering him with a stainless-steel top, like a lid. A white sheet was draped over the whole operation. Kaipo and I left Mr. Yamasake’s room pushing what appeared to be an empty stretcher.
We rolled into the elevator with regular hospital visitors holding their teddy bears and flowers, none the wiser about the secret corpse in their midst. (The next time you see two full-grown adults moving an unoccupied stretcher in a hospital, think of Mr. Yamasake.) The others got off the elevator long before we did. Kaipo, Mr. Yamasake, and I continued down to the basement.
The hospital presented itself as a positive place of healing with the latest technology and attractive Hawaiian art prints on the walls. Everything—the false stretcher, the secret morgue in the basement—was artfully designed to mask death, to distance it from the public. Death represented a failure of the medical system; it would not be permitted to upset the patients or their families.
Kaipo and Chris from Westwind were kindred spirits in a way: two men of quiet dignity who transported the husks of the recently alive. To them it was a prosaic day job, while to the average citizen theirs was a task both mystifying and disgusting.
The first few house calls for Westwind taught me that Chris was unflappable, even when removing bodies in the cramped, near-impossible conditions of San Franciscan homes. We’d walk up perilous, winding staircases, and Chris would just sigh and say, “Better get the portable.” The portable was a portable stretcher, the kind they use to carry casualties off the field of battle. Chris and I would strap the deceased to that sucker and bring them out on their sides, their stomachs, straight up and down, over our heads—anything it took to get them out to the van.
“It’s just like moving furniture,” Chris explained. “Geometry and physics.”
Chris was equally unflappable in the face of decomposed bodies, overweight bodies, and downright bizarre bodies. By bizarre, I mean like the time we arrived at a home in the Haight District and were escorted into a cold, decrepit basement by a gentleman who had the pointed moustache and clawed hands of horror-movie actor Vincent Price. Propped up in the corner was the dead man, curled up in a ball with a single glass eye gazing up at us. “Well, that’s weird, Cat. Him winking at us? Let’s go get the portable.”
The most important thing about body removal was to never give up. Trite, perhaps, but it was Chris’s mantra. He told a story about a nineteen-stone body located up three flights of stairs in a hoarder house infested with cockroaches. His number-two man that day had refused to even attempt the removal, saying they would never be able to get the person out with just the two of them. “I just lost all respect for him right then,” Chris said. “I hate people who don’t try.”
In our long trips in his van I learned more about Chris, like his single-minded obsession with the two years in the late 1970s he spent working for a tyrannical construction manager in Hawai’i. Some Google mapping showed that during his time in Hawai’i he had lived within a three-block radius of both my newly married parents and a young Barack Obama. (It was easy to construct mundane fantasy scenarios in my head where they were all at the same corner store together or crossing the street at the same stoplight.)
A FEW WEEKS AFTER our trip to the Adamses’, Chris and I took a house call in the Marina District of San Francisco at a fancy home on a busy street. We had been chatting about Hawai’i or the weather or Mike’s brusqueness when we pulled up outside. “You know what I think about, Cat?” Chris said as we grabbed our pairs of rubber gloves “How we’re like hit men. Like the guys in Pulp Fiction. They’re sitting there in the car talking about a sandwich, and then they go blow someone’s brains out. We’re just sitting here in the car chitchatting and now we’re goin’ in for a dead body.”
When we knocked, a dark-haired woman in her fifties opened the door. I gave her a big, sincere smile, having learned at that point that a sincere smile was more effective than faked sympathy.
“I called you hours ago!” she shrieked.
“Well, ma’am, you do know that it is rush hour and we were coming from Oakland,” Chris said in his soothing Chris voice.
“I don’t care, Mom deserves the best. Mom would have wanted everything to be dignified. She was a dignified woman, this is not dignified,” she continued, still shrieking.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, we’ll take good care of her,” Chris said.
We continued into a bedroom to find Mom. As we pulled out the sheet to shroud her, the woman hurled her body over her mother, wailing dramatically. “No, Mother, no, no! I need you, Mother, don’t leave me!”
This is what raw human emotion should look like. It had all the signs: death, loss, gut-wrenching wailing. I wanted to be moved, but I wasn’t. “Guilt,” Chris mumbled under his breath.
“What?” I whispered back.
“Guilt. I’ve seen this so many times. She hasn’t visited her for years. Now she’s here acting like she can’t live without her mother. It’s bullshit, Cat,” he said. And I knew he was right.
The woman finally extricated herself from mother’s corpse, and we were able to get Mom wrapped up and out the door. As we rolled the gurney out onto the busy street, people stopped and stared. Dog walkers halted and yoga moms slowed their baby carriages. They gawked at us as if we were detectives or coroners, pulling a body from a violent murder scene, not two mortuary workers handling a woman in her nineties who had died quietly at home in bed.
There hadn’t always been this scandal surrounding scenes of death. When the bubonic plague swept through Europe in the 1300s, bodies of the victims would lie in the street in full view of the public, sometimes for days. Eventually the death carts would collect the dead and take them to the edge of town, where trenches were dug for mass graves. A chronicler in Italy described how bodies were layered in the ground—bodies then some dirt, bodies, then some more dirt—“just as one makes lasagne with layers of pasta and cheese.”
Today, not being forced to see corpses is a privilege of the developed world. On an average day in Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges in India, anywhere from eighty to a hundred cremation ghats burn. After a very public cremation (sometimes performed by young children from India’s untouchable caste), the bones and ashes are released into the waters of the holy river. Cremations do not come cheap; the cost of expensive wood, colourful body shrouds, and a professional cremationist adds up quickly. Families that cannot afford a cremation but want their dead loved one to go into the Ganges will place the entire body into the river by night, leaving it there to decompose. Visitors to Varanasi see bloated corpses floating by or being eaten by dogs. There are so many of these corpses in the river that the Indian government releases thousands of flesh-eating turtles to chomp away at the “necrotic pollutants.”
The industrialised world has established systems to prevent such unsavoury encounters with the dead. At this very moment, corpses motor down highways and interstates in unmarked white vans like the one driven by Chris. Bodies crisscross the globe in the cargo holds of aeroplanes while vacationing passengers travel above. We have put the dead beneath. Not just underground, but under the tops of fake hospital stretchers, within the bellies of our aircraft, and in the recesses of our consciousness.
It is only when the systems are subverted that we even realise they are there. After Hurricane