The difference is that when we’re alive, we expel that gas. The dead, lacking workable stomach muscles and sphincters and bedmates to annoy, do not. Cannot. So the gas builds up and the belly bloats. I ask Arpad why the gas wouldn’t just get forced out eventually. He explains that the small intestine has pretty much collapsed and sealed itself off. Or that there might be “something” blocking its egress. Though he allows, with some prodding, that a little bad air often does, in fact, slip out, and so, as a matter of record, it can be said that dead people fart. It needn’t be, but it can.
Arpad motions me to follow him up the path. He knows where a good example of the bloat stage can be found.
Ron is still down by the shed, effecting some sort of gratuitous lawn mower maintenance, determined to avoid the sights and smells beyond the gate. I call for him to join me. I feel the need for company, someone else who doesn’t see this sort of thing every day. Ron follows, looking at his sneakers. We pass a skeleton six feet seven inches tall and dressed in a red Harvard sweatshirt and sweatpants. Ron’s eyes stay on his shoes. We pass a woman whose sizable breasts have decomposed, leaving only the skins, like flattened bota bags upon her chest. Ron’s eyes stay on his shoes.
Bloat is most noticeable in the abdomen, Arpad is saying, where the largest numbers of bacteria are, but it happens in other bacterial hot spots, most notably the mouth and genitalia. “In the male, the penis and especially the testicles can become very large.”
“Like how large?” (Forgive me.)
“I don’t know. Large.”
“Softball large? Watermelon large?”
“Okay, softball.” Arpad Vass is a man with infinite reserves of patience, but we are scraping the bottom of the tank.
Arpad continues. Bacteria-generated gas bloats the lips and the tongue, the latter often to the point of making it protrude from the mouth: In real life as it is in cartoons. The eyes do not bloat because the liquid long ago leached out. They are gone. Xs. In real life as it is in cartoons.
Arpad stops and looks down. “That’s bloat.” Before us is a man with a torso greatly distended. It is of a circumference I more readily associate with livestock. As for the groin, it is difficult to tell what’s going on; insects cover the area, like something he is wearing. The face is similarly obscured. The larvae are two weeks older than their peers down the hill and much larger. Where before they had been grains of rice, here they are cooked rice. They live like rice, too, pressed together: a moist, solid entity. If you lower your head to within a foot or two of an infested corpse (and this I truly don’t recommend), you can hear them feeding. Arpad pinpoints the sound: “Rice Krispies.” Ron frowns. Ron used to like Rice Krispies.
Bloat continues until something gives way. Usually it is the intestines. Every now and then it is the torso itself. Arpad has never seen it, but he has heard it, twice. “A rending, ripping noise” is how he describes it. Bloat is typically short-lived, perhaps a week and it’s over. The final stage, putrefaction and decay, lasts longest.
Putrefaction refers to the breaking down and gradual liquefaction of tissue by bacteria. It is going on during the bloat phase—for the gas that bloats a body is being created by the breakdown of tissue—but its effects are not yet obvious.
Arpad continues up the wooded slope. “This woman over here is farther along,” he says. That’s a nice way to say it. Dead people, unembalmed ones anyway, basically dissolve; they collapse and sink in upon themselves and eventually seep out onto the ground. Do you recall the Margaret Hamilton death scene in The Wizard of Oz? (“I’m melting!”) Putrefaction is more or less a slowed-down version of this. The woman lies in a mud of her own making. Her torso appears sunken, its organs gone—leached out onto the ground around her.
The digestive organs and the lungs disintegrate first, for they are home to the greatest numbers of bacteria; the larger your work crew, the faster the building comes down. The brain is another early-departure organ. “Because all the bacteria in the mouth chew through the palate,” explains Arpad. And because brains are soft and easy to eat. “The brain liquefies very quickly. It just pours out the ears and bubbles out the mouth.”
Up until about three weeks, Arpad says, remnants of organs can still be identified. “After that, it becomes like a soup in there.” Because he knew I was going to ask, Arpad adds, “Chicken soup. It’s yellow.”
Ron turns on his heels. “Great.” We ruined Rice Krispies for Ron, and now we have ruined chicken soup.
Muscles are eaten not only by bacteria, but by carnivorous beetles. I wasn’t aware that meat-eating beetles existed, but there you go. Sometimes the skin gets eaten, sometimes not. Sometimes, depending on the weather, it dries out and mummifies, whereupon it is too tough for just about anyone’s taste. On our way out, Arpad shows us a skeleton with mummified skin, lying facedown. The skin has remained on the legs as far as the tops of the ankles. The torso, likewise, is covered, about up to the shoulder blades. The edge of the skin is curved, giving the appearance of a scooped neckline, as on a dancer’s leotard. Though naked, he seems dressed. The outfit is not as colorful or, perhaps, warm as a Harvard sweatsuit, but more fitting for the venue.
We stand for a minute, looking at the man.
There is a passage in the Buddhist Sutra on Mindfulness called the Nine Cemetery Contemplations. Apprentice monks are instructed to meditate on a series of decomposing bodies in the charnel ground, starting with a body “swollen and blue and festering,” progressing to one “being eaten by…different kinds of worms,” and moving on to a skeleton, “without flesh and blood, held together by the tendons.” The monks were told to keep meditating until they were calm and a smile appeared on their faces. I describe this to Arpad and Ron, explaining that the idea is to come to peace with the transient nature of our bodily existence, to overcome the revulsion and fear. Or something.
We all stare at the man. Arpad swats at flies.
“So,” says Ron. “Lunch?”
Outside the gate, we spend a long time scraping the bottoms of our boots on a curb. You don’t have to step on a body to carry the smells of death with you on your shoes. For reasons we have just seen, the soil around a corpse is sodden with the liquids of human decay. By analyzing the chemicals in this soil, people like Arpad can tell if a body has been moved from where it decayed. If the unique volatile fatty acids and compounds of human decay aren’t there, the body didn’t decompose there.
One of Arpad’s graduate students, Jennifer Love, has been working on an aroma scan technology for estimating time of death. Based on a technology used in the food and wine industries, the device, now being funded by the FBI, would be a sort of hand-held electronic nose that could be waved over a body and used to identify the unique odor signature that a corpse puts off at different stages of decay.
I tell them that the Ford Motor Company developed an electronic nose programmed to identify acceptable “new car smell.” Car buyers expect their purchases to smell a certain way: leathery and new, but with no vinyl off-gassy smells. The nose makes sure the cars comply. Arpad observes that the new-car-smell electronic nose probably uses a technology similar to what the electronic nose for cadavers would use.
“Just don’t get ’em confused,” deadpans Ron. He is imagining a young couple, back from a test drive, the woman turning to her husband and saying: “You know, that car smelled like a dead person.”
It is difficult to put words to the smell of decomposing human. It is dense and cloying, sweet but not flower-sweet. Halfway between rotting fruit and rotting meat. On my walk home each afternoon, I pass a fetid little produce store that gets the mix almost right, so much so that I find myself peering behind the papaya bins for an arm or a glimpse of naked feet. Barring a visit to my neighborhood, I would direct the curious to a chemical supply company, from which one can order synthetic versions of many of these volatiles. Arpad’s lab has rows of labeled glass vials: Skatole, Indole, Putrescine, Cadaverine. The moment wherein I uncorked the putrescine in hi
s office may well be the moment he began looking forward to my departure. Even if you’ve never been around a decaying body, you’ve smelled putrescine. Decaying fish throws off putrescine, a fact I learned from a gripping Journal of Food Science article entitled “Post-Mortem Changes in Black Skipjack Muscle During Storage in Ice.” This fits in with something Arpad told me. He said he knew a company that manufactured a putrescine detector, which doctors could use in place of swabs and cultures to diagnose vaginitis or, I suppose, a job at the skipjack cannery.
The market for synthetic putrescine and cadaverine is small, but devoted. The handlers of “human remains dogs” use these compounds for training.* Human remains dogs are distinct from the dogs that search for escaped felons and the dogs that search for whole cadavers. They are trained to alert their owners when they detect the specific scents of decomposed human tissue. They can pinpoint the location of a corpse at the bottom of a lake by sniffing the water’s surface for the gases and fats that float up from the rotting remains. They can detect the lingering scent molecules of a decomposing body up to fourteen months after the killer lugged it away.
I had trouble believing this when I heard it. I no longer have trouble. The soles of my boots, despite washing and soaking in Clorox, would smell of corpse for months after my visit.
Ron drives us and our little cloud of stink to a riverside restaurant for lunch. The hostess is young and pink and clean-looking. Her plump forearms and tight-fitting skin are miracles. I imagine her smelling of talcum powder and shampoo, the light, happy smells of the living. We stand apart from the hostess and the other customers, as though we were traveling with an ill-tempered, unpredictable dog. Arpad signals to the hostess that we are three. Four, if you count The Smell.
“Would you like to sit indoors…?”
Arpad cuts her off. “Outdoors. And away from people.”
That is the story of human decay. I would wager that if the good people of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had known what happens to dead bodies in the sort of detail that you and I now know, dissection might not have seemed so uniquely horrific. Once you’ve seen bodies dissected, and once you’ve seen them decomposing, the former doesn’t seem so dreadful. Yes, the people of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were buried, but that only served to draw out the process. Even in a coffin six feet deep, the body eventually decomposes. Not all the bacteria living in a human body require oxygen; there are plenty of anaerobic bacteria up to the task.
Nowadays, of course, we have embalming. Does this mean we are spared the unsavory fate of gradual liquefaction? Has modern mortuary science created an eternity free from unpleasant mess and stains? Can the dead be aesthetically pleasing? Let’s go see!
An eye cap is a simple ten-cent piece of plastic. It is slightly larger than a contact lens, less flexible, and considerably less comfortable. The plastic is repeatedly lanced through, so that small, sharp spurs stick up from its surface. The spurs work on the same principle as those steel spikes that threaten Severe Tire Damage on behalf of rental car companies: The eyelid will come down over an eye cap, but, once closed, will not easily open back up. Eye caps were invented by a mortician to help dead people keep their eyes shut.
There have been times this morning when I wished that someone had outfitted me with a pair of eye caps. I’ve been standing around, eyelids up, in the basement embalming room of the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science.
Upstairs is a working mortuary, and above it are the classrooms and offices of the college, one of the nation’s oldest and best-respected.* In exchange for a price break in the cost of embalming and other mortuary services, customers agree to let students practice on their loved ones. Like getting a $5 haircut at the Vidal Sassoon Academy, sort of, sort of not.
I had called the college to get answers about embalming: How long does it preserve corpses, and in what form? Is it possible to never decompose? How does it work? They agreed to answer my questions, and then they asked me one. Did I want to come down and see how it’s done? I did, sort of, sort of not.
Presiding at the embalming table today are final-semester students Theo Martinez and Nicole D’Ambrogio. Theo, a dark-haired man of thirty-nine with a long, distinguished face and narrow build, turned to mortuary science after a string of jobs in credit unions and travel agencies. He says he liked the fact that mortuary jobs often include housing. (Before cell phones and pagers, most funeral homes were built with apartments, so that someone was always there should a call come in at night.) For the beautiful and glossy-haired Nicole, episodes of Quincy sparked an interest in the career, which is a little puzzling, because Quincy, if I recall, was a pathologist. (No matter what they say, the answer never quite satisfies.) The pair are garbed in plastic and latex, as am I and anyone else who plans to enter the “splash area.” They are working with blood; the garments are a precaution against it and all it may bring on: HIV, hepatitis, stains on your shirt.
The object of their attentions at the moment is a seventy-five-year-old man, or a three-week-old cadaver, however you prefer to think of it. The man had donated his body to science, but, owing to its having been autopsied, science politely declined. An anatomy lab is as choosy as a pedigreed woman seeking love: You can’t be too fat or too tall or have any communicable diseases. Following a three-week sojourn in a university refrigerator, the cadaver wound up here. I have agreed to disguise any identifying features, though I suspect that the dehydrating air of refrigeration has gotten a jump on the task. He looks gaunt and desiccated. Something of the old parsnip about him.
Before the embalming begins, the exterior of the corpse is cleaned and groomed, as it would be were this man to be displayed in an open casket or presented to the family for a private viewing. (In reality, when the students are through, no one but the cremation furnace attendant will see him.) Nicole swabs the mouth and eyes with disinfectant, then rinses both with a jet of water. Though I know the man to be dead, I expect to see him flinch when the cotton swab hits his eye, to cough and sputter when the water hits the back of his throat. His stillness, his deadness, is surreal.
The students move purposefully. Nicole is looking in the man’s mouth. Her hand rests sweetly on his chest. Concerned, she calls Theo over to look. They talk quietly and then he turns to me. “There’s material sitting in the mouth,” he says.
I nod, picturing corduroy, swatches of gingham. “Material?”
“Purge,” offers Nicole. It’s not helping.
Hugh “Mack” McMonigle, an instructor at the college, who is supervising this morning’s session, steps up beside me. “What happened is that whatever was in the stomach found its way into the mouth.” Gases created by bacterial decay build up and put pressure on the stomach, squeezing its contents back up the esophagus and into the mouth. The situation appears not to bother Theo and Nicole, though purge is a relatively infrequent visitor to the embalming room.
Theo explains that he is going to use an aspirator. As if to distract me from what I am seeing, he keeps up a friendly patter. “The Spanish for ‘vacuum’ is aspiradora.”
Before switching on the aspirator, Theo takes a cloth to the man’s chin and wipes away a substance that looks but surely doesn’t taste like chocolate syrup. I ask him how he copes with the unpleasantnesses of dealing with dead strangers’ bodies and secretions. Like Arpad Vass, he says that he tries to focus on the positives. “If there are parasites or the person has dirty teeth or they didn’t wipe their nose before they died, you’re improving the situation, making them more presentable.”
Theo is single. I ask him whether studying to be a mortician has been having a deleterious effect on his love life. He straightens up and looks at me. “I’m short, I’m thin, I’m not rich. I would say my career choice is in fourth place in limiting my effectiveness as a single adult.” (It’s possible that it helped. Within a year, he would be married.)
Next Theo coats the face with what I assume to be some sort of disinfecting lotion, which looks a lot li
ke shaving cream. The reason that it looks a lot like shaving cream, it turns out, is that it is. Theo slides a new blade into a razor. “When you shave a decedent, it’s really different.”
“I bet.”
“The skin isn’t able to heal, so you have to be really careful about nicks. One shave per razor, and then you throw it away.” I wonder whether the man, in his dying days, ever stood before a mirror, razor in hand, wondering if it might be his last shave, unaware of the actual last shave that fate had arranged for him.
“Now we’re going to set the features,” says Theo. He lifts one of the man’s eyelids and packs tufts of cotton underneath to fill out the lid the way the man’s eyeballs once did. Oddly, the culture I associate most closely with cotton, the Egyptians, did not use their famous Egyptian cotton for plumping out withered eyes. The ancient Egyptians put pearl onions in there. Onions. Speaking for myself, if I had to have a small round martini garnish inserted under my eyelids, I would go with olives.
On top of the cotton go a pair of eye caps. “People would find it disturbing to find the eyes open,” explains Theo, and then he slides down the lids. In the corner of my viewing screen, my brain displays a special pull-out graphic, an animated close-up of the little spurs in action. Madre de dio! Aspiradora! Come the day, you won’t be seeing me in an open casket.
As a feature of the common man’s funeral, the open casket is a relatively recent development: around 150 years. According to Mack, it serves several purposes, aside from providing what undertakers call “the memory picture.” It reassures the family that, one, their loved one is unequivocally dead and not about to be buried alive, and, two, that the body in the casket is indeed their loved one, and not the stiff from the container beside his. I read in The Principles and Practice of Embalming that it came into vogue as a way for embalmers to show off their skills. Mack disagrees, noting that long before embalming became commonplace, corpses on ice inside their caskets were displayed at funerals. (I am inclined to believe Mack, this being a book that includes the passage “Many of the body tissues also possess some measure of immortality if they can be kept under proper conditions…. Theoretically, it is possible in this way to grow a chicken heart to the size of the world.”)