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. Post-mortem 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 judgement 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.
WHEN 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 crematorium operator at Westwind Cremation & Burial, a family-owned mortuary. Or a family-owned funeral home. What you call your local death house depends entirely on what region of North America or the UK you live in. 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 defence, 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 tyre 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 ranchera 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 storey, 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 crematorium 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 at the back to a massive warehouse. The roaring was coming from inside this cavernous room—specifically from two large, squat machines sitting proudly in the centre 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,” “crematorium,” “mortuary,” and “funeral.” The reply to my job enquiries—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 woodwork 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 school-girl. In college I dropped the pretense, declared my major as medieval history, and spent four years devouring academic papers