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 his 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.