The whole summer, I hardly ever thought about the dead bodies.
My family ran a funeral home in a small town in Ohio for several generations. This all happened when I was 21, in 1985. I was home from Oberlin on summer break, and had agreed to do some work for my father in exchange for spending money. Money wasn’t a problem for the old man–back then running a funeral home in a rich little town was pretty much a license to print money. What he really wanted was for me to take over the family business someday, which was the last goddamn thing I ever intended to do.
I worked out of a makeshift office in the basement, kind of a huge closet where we usually stored cleaning supplies and some tools. All summer the room still reeked faintly of ammonia and the single light, a bulb hanging from the ceiling, cast a jittery, feverish light over some of the office and left the rest in shadows. I had a scarred and chipped wooden desk that my father must have scavenged from somewhere, and on the desk was a Tandy Model 100 computer, which is still the worst and most unreliable computer I have ever used. The desk was also usually full of file folders that were stuffed full of accounts and records and receipts and copies of bills and copies of business letters and my job for the summer was to transfer as much of the paper records to files on the Tandy as I could. It was slow, boring work. Our records were badly organized, I was a terrible typist, and the record-keeping programs we had were absolute dogshit.
To try to add a touch of individuality to the office I’d hung a subway sized poster of The Cure behind the creaky office chair I sat in day after day. I also kept a few porn mags and Vaseline and tissues shoved to the back of one of the drawers.
I had grown up in the death industry, and so I hardly ever thought about the dead bodies (as few as 1 and sometimes as many as 5 or 6) that were stored in refrigerator units in a suite of rooms just down the hall. The bodies would be embalmed and stored in drawers until the funeral. Shortly before the visitation they would be dressed according to the wishes of the family. Until then, they just cooled their heels, so to speak, in big refrigerated doors, usually covered by flimsy blue gowns.
One Thursday I was working very late because I wanted to knock off early the next day to go bar hopping with some friends in Columbus, and probably crash with my friend’s girlfriend’s best friend up there. I reached the point where I was glaring with undisguised hostility at the grey blinking cursor on the pale green screen and I realized I couldn’t enter another keystroke without taking a break. A very particular kind of break. It was the kind of break that started with me sneaking up to my father’s office and stealing a tumbler of the Glenlivet he kept in a crystal decanter on his desk, and that ended with me getting a porn mag and some tissues out of my desk drawer.
I was upstairs snagging a crystal tumbler from the small table in the corner of his office when I heard some banging coming from downstairs, and I was pouring a very generous helping of brown liquor from the decanter into the tumbler when I heard a piercing noise, like an enraged alley cat. Alley cats were pretty common around town and they were quick to anger and quite vocal about it.
I didn’t hear anything else as I made my way back down to the basement and to my office. The door was closed, which registered as a little odd since I almost never closed the door, convinced that at some point in the summer enough fresh air would find its way in to finally get rid of the ammonia smell.
I remember I pushed the door open and stepped inside eagerly, anticipating the whisky and porn. Then I stopped dead in my tracks because there was an old woman sitting behind the desk, in my chair, underneath my Cure poster. She was pale and skinny and wearing a flimsy blue paper gown.
It absolutely couldn’t be Mlidred, but it absolutely was.
Mildred Miller, the town’s richest woman and slumlord from hell, had died the day before. Troy McGowan, her much younger and handsomer husband, her sole heir, had made the funeral arrangements with my father that night. Troy had met her when he was tending bar, and nobody in town doubted for a moment that he was betting on outliving his rich wife by many, many years. Mildred’s body was being stored in a refrigerated drawer just down the hall from my office, waiting to be dressed for the funeral.
Oh fuck were we trying to bury Mildred alive? It used to happen. In Victorian times, people got buried alive often enough that devices were installed inside caskets so you could call for help if you woke up and found yourself in a coffin.
There was no doubt that this was Mildred sitting in my seat: that pallid, mottled complexion; that beak of a nose; and that tight, joyless little mouth which seemed to be frozen in a pursed smirk. She didn’t look very different from the last time I saw her, a week or so earlier when I’d walked past her on Main Street where she was glowering at someone’s little white and brown dog who had begun growling at her. Dogs were known to bark at Mildred as she passed them. Humans usually waited until she was out of earshot before they started to gossip about her, at least.
Is she going to sue us for trying to bury her alive? She probably should.
“It’s about time I got some damn service,” she said. There was something wrong with the way she was talking but I couldn’t quite place it.
“God, I’m so sorry. We thought you were dead! That’s why we were getting ready to bury you,” I said simply and slowly as if explaining a difficult concept to a child, as though she was the idiot and not the doctors, coroner, and third generation mortician who were all happy to try to bury her alive. “I was, you know. I was barely even there. Like, I think a doctor pronounced you dead and I was in the office when Troy and my father finalized the arrangements…”
Her eyes were closed, I realized. The lighting must have been too harsh after all that time unconscious, and then locked in the dark and the cold. I shuddered. Poor woman. Not even ball-breaking slumlord Mildred Miller deserved that.
My left eye was twitching and fluttering a little, and I needed to sit down. I plopped unceremoniously into the chair on the other side of the desk across from Mildred, the chair where clients would sit if I had had any clients.
I wanted to do the only thing I could think of–pick up the phone and call my father. It wasn’t that I trusted him to make things right in some naive way, I just didn’t want to be alone in absorbing Mildred’s full rage.
The chair creaked, threatened to break, but held itself together. I hoped my nerves would be similarly durable.
I grabbed the tumbler from the desk, took a sip, winced, took another sip, and put the whisky back down.
“Your Daddy ripped me off and someone has to make it right.” Her mouth wasn’t moving. It was open in a natural enough way, but there was absolutely no movement as she formed words.
Wait. She was embalmed this afternoon. Her mouth has been wired into place so it doesn’t creep out mourners by flopping around during visitation. Her eyes are glued shut. Her fucking blood has been replaced with chemicals.
I sucked in air, forgot to breathe out, coughed violently and tried to take another huge drink of whisky, spilling most of it on my shirt in the process.
Right in front of her, front and center on my desk, was a piece of paper I recognized all too well–I’d been sending out our invoices and bills all summer. She kept crumbling it up and then smoothing it out, over and over.
“I don’t understand.” And then, after another shallow, tortured breath I repeated “I don’t understand.”
She aimed a bony index finger at the bill and brought it down like the big bomb falling on HIroshima. “How hard is it to understand, boy? This damn bill is highway robbery. Someone better make this right.”
She continued crumbling and smoothing out the paper. I noticed her hands were very strong. “My damn fool of a widower let your daddy skin him alive.”
There was a dead woman sitting in front of me haggling, over her bill.
And my father, I reflected, was home in bed while I was stuck here either in real danger or going crazy or both. This wasn’t the first time his peculiar combination of charm and greed had gotten everybody but him in trouble.
“Yeah well he screws everybody over, just like you do…that’s how you get rich right?” was what came to mind, but it felt like a bad answer so I didn’t say anything. I took another sip of Scotch and found the burn reassuring this time–it made me feel concrete and tangible. The warmth as I swallowed it was a contrast to the damp patch of cold sweat that was spreading under my armpits and across my chest.
I felt a heavy, cold pressure on my chest and a sharp stabbing pain came and went. It felt like being stuck down by a giant pin, pressed against some cold hard surface and wriggling like an insect being dissected. It was one of those moments when the world stops and everything around you is suddenly desaturated of all meaning and you couldn’t think of the word for “pencil” or “paper weight” or “ghoul” if there were a gun to your head. There was a frightful buzzing in my ears and then total silence. And then in the perfect existential silence I swore I heard the wild, wheedling voice of the universe laughing at me.
I was certain everything outside the office had disappeared. There was just the void and this office, the howling void and Mildred and me in this office. And we could never leave. There was nowhere to go. For the rest of time it would just be her demanding for things to be made right and me listening, shaking, unable to even begin to make things right for her. I realized I was crying. I started to scream. This was hell. There were no exits.
And then I was snapped right back to the one reality, obdurate and immediate. Call it an existential slap in the face. And I just sat open mouthed and stared.
“Well are you going to make things right?” she reached for the tumbler of Scotch I had been drinking from, and not for all the money in the world would I have made a move to stop her.
“I…don’t know how.”
“Are you going to make things right?”
“How the hell do I do that you crazy bitch? How can you even see the goddamn bill with your eyes glued shut?” I started to laugh.
She stood up now,and I flinched to feel and smell her stand beside me, leaning over. I was sure she was going to wrap supernaturally strong, icy fingers around my neck and take her payback in blood.
But she was simply pointing at a figure. “When you been doing business as long as I have, sonny, you can just smell a screw job. Lookee here. Five thousand bucks for a coffin? Your daddy knows perfectly well I’d just as soon be buried in a pine box but he jacked poor Troy all the way up to the top of the line. Damn fool. And this here. 1000 for the sermon? I never even wanted a damn sermon and both Troy and your Daddy damn well knew that.” She was going to through the entire bill, line for line, and as boring as the prospects of that were, I was paralyzed with fear at what she would do to me if I moved.
Frustrated enough to scream and scared enough to shit my pants at the same time, I threw up my hands and then reached into my back pocket. “Here you can have all the money in my wallet. Will that make things even?”
I threw down a few bills and some coins. Maybe 20 or 25 bucks total. Mildred laughed a high, shrill mechanical laugh that made me think of the sound of a car engine refusing to start.
Between bursts of cackling she managed to say “Shit, sonny. Can’t you make things right?” And then she slammed her head down on my desk with a loud thud that resounded in the tiny room. When she brought her head back up, to my horror, her mouth was smashed all to hell and although her eyes were still closed and her mouth still immobile I was positive she was trying to grin.
“I got all eternity to get what’s coming to me,” she cackled. And that was it, the terrible insight that colored the rest of my life: there was no afterlife and no wisdom imparted by angels or elders on The Other Side. Only the sempiternal and constant replaying of your strongest urgent until the universe runs out of time.
And then she slammed her bony hands against the table and said again in a low, dangerous voice “Somebody needs to make this right!”
I couldn’t take another second, and I finally realized I always had the option to run. I stood up clumsily, spilling both glasses of booze in the process, and ran, hell for leather, out the door, up the stairs, out of the house. The last thing I heard Mildred say was “You got hooch all over my damn bill! You tryin’ to destroy the evidence?
I didn’t call my father. I didn’t call the cops. I ran home and hid under my covers like I was six. And then…nothing happened. No one ever mentioned any strangeness with the body at the funeral home. The funeral went off without a hitch. My father certainly never gave any indication anything had struck him as odd. I went back to college and never came home for another vacation and definitely did not go into the family business.
A few months after I was back in school, my father dropped dead of a heart attack when he was working late in his office one night. I did always wonder if Mildred had found her way back to the home and up to his office–this time maybe covered in dirt with worms in her mouth and ants crawling all over her insensate flesh. The one thing I was sure of was that this wouldn’t have made things right for Mildred either.