The market for synthetic putrescine and cadaverine is small, but devoted.
The handlers of “human remains dogs” use these compounds for training.[8] 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.[9] 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 like 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.”
8
Purists among them insist on the real deal. I spent an afternoon in an abandoned dormitory at Moffett Air Force Base, watching one such woman, Shirley Hammond, put her canine noses through their paces.
Hammond is a fixture on the base, regularly seen walking to and from her car with a pink gym bag and a plastic cooler. If you were to ask her what she’s got in there, and she chose to answer you honestly, the answer would go more or less like this: a bloody shirt, dirt from beneath a decomposed corpse, human tissue buried in a chunk of cement, a piece of cloth rubbed on cadavers, a human molar. No synthetics for Shirley’s dogs.
9
And, alas, most expensive and least well attended. In May 2002, a year after I visited, it closed its doors.