I have a terminal illness, less than three months to live, and an anonymous someone sent me a terrifying email. The body of the email is blank. But attached are screenshots capturing the full text of a Yelp review. I couldn’t find the original online, so I only have the screenshots.
This is what the review says:
“Don’t use Gooserock Funeral Home in Southerville—they did something terrible to my mother! She died (of Powassan if you must know) this past summer and we took her to Gooserock where she had a very nice reception. I have no complaints about the reception. There was a couple of music issues, but that’s probably because my niece was in charge of the iPod. But then I had an appointment the next day with the cremator, who is the funeral home director’s brother.
I had no family left except my stuck-up brother, so I handled everything, and went to the meeting alone. And so I didn’t think much about dressing formally anymore, and I was in black jeans and a black t-shirt with a big image of Karl Marx on it.
The cremator’s name was Carl, or Tony, or something. I only remembered for sure that his last name sounded exactly like ‘Poochy.’ He was big but long-limbed, maybe in his 70s but hale. He looked askance at my shirt.
‘That’s an interesting choice,’ he said. Well that was a little direct, but I didn’t want to be a karen, and he launched so quickly into a spiel I didn’t have the opportunity for much more than introductory pleasantries.
He led me deeper into the basement, past a dimly lit corner stacked with last or next season’s display coffins. He showed me the elevator they used to bring bodies down after a reception and he asked me if I had been in a funeral home before. It was an odd question the day after my mother’s funeral, and I began to wonder if he might not be all there, despite his apparent good health and brisk bearing.
The basement was unfinished concrete and crumbling brick, except where he swept aside a floor-to-ceiling red curtain and gestured me through, into a brightly lit hallway lined with white and sea foam tiles. It led only a short distance, from a carpeted stairwell, down to the cremation viewing room. This was the tiny public area of the basement.
‘We don’t use the viewing room anymore,’ Poochy said. Past another red curtain I could see the crematoria bunched up against the far wall. But he led me away from it, through a brick arch and then a fading red door, which he opened on to the preparation room.
There were slick black aprons hanging next to the door, church trucks, body movers propped against the wall, and two stainless steel tables like you’d see in a morgue—both unoccupied. There were tools strewn across the sink counter too: head blocks, a squat embalming machine, clamps, scissors, scalpels, forceps, rubber hoses, cosmetic kits, and little rope slings that he told me were used to adjust limbs. He seemed to want to show me everything, and lifted something he called a trocar from the sink for me to appreciate.
He said, ‘You’ll learn soon enough—it’s an open secret in our industry. The dead let off a slime that doesn’t come from the body. And it accumulates, especially on silver tools left nearby. This substance, what it really is is ectoplasm. Do you know about ectoplasm?’
No, I said. I had to admit I didn’t. It sounded like something from Ghostbusters maybe?
‘It’s the fluid interface between our world and theirs, kind of a lubricant that lets the substance of the soul squeeze through,’ he said. ‘It really doesn’t have many uses and it tastes terrible.’
I thought: something was very very wrong with this guy. Did he do this to everybody whose family member just died? But then he put his knuckles down on the preparation table and confronted me.
‘I want to talk about your shirt with you,’ he said.
I said okay. I thought maybe he would tell me all about how horrible Soviet communism was.
‘Marx got one thing wrong,’ he said, and then waited for me to ask what it was. I crossed my arms in front of me and gave him my best glare. He was undeterred.
‘Marx was wrong in identifying class struggle as the substance of material history. He was close but he was wrong. He thought society was shaped by the conflict between the workers and capital holders, but that’s not true. The true engine of history is the dialectic between the living and the dead. This forms the real basis for human activity, even human economic activity.’
He abruptly pushed himself off the table. Stray tools clattered and I leapt back because we were staring right into each other’s eyes that whole time. He was almost out of the room when he said, ‘Now, follow me to the crematoria.’
There was already a coffin on the conveyor belt, leading into the cremation oven, which as yet had its door closed.
‘You may be wondering why I brought up Karl Marx again,’ he said, while he wheeled over a high stepladder, like you’d see in a hardware store, and pushed it against the side of the cremator. He climbed up to an iron hatch built into the chimney, and pulled from it a metal cylinder, about the size of a coffee can.
He told me had found a use for the ectoplasm, and that a local metalworker had designed this equipment to his exact specifications. The bottom of the cylinder was open, and I could see some sort of tempered glass ampule suspended inside. But even stranger was the fog of material around it, which was the color of moss.
‘It looks like a liquid or a heavy gas, but it doesn’t act like it. Ectoplasm won’t drip or disperse,’ he said. ‘There’s a grate here, and I just attach an object to it, so it’s submerged in the ectoplasm, and then it collects.’
‘Collects what?’ I croaked.
‘It collects the soul material into whatever object I designate,’ he looked very proud of himself, but as the silence continued his face fell into dismay, as if he were disappointed in my reaction. ‘Don’t you see? It’s a new answer to the central contradiction in human history: why, if there are so many more of the dead, do the living continue to behave as if they are in the pilot seat of history?’
‘That is the question Karl Marx missed, and the answer is because the future has a shape, and I am its shaper. With this,’ he said, and held up the cylinder, ‘I’m reversing the flow of economic activity, and we will no longer pass our surplus to them. And we will push back the empire of death.’
He gestured me over to a heavy metal door, but one so small and in the shadows, and of a similar color as the wall that I hadn’t even seen it over there. ‘I am giving things souls here, and soon, when I make my process public, we will keep all the souls here on Earth. And we will make all things holy. The trees will have souls, the rocks will have souls, an item of your choosing will have a soul.’
He flung open the door with a dramatic flourish and said, ‘This is my room of miracles.’
There were shelves, like bookshelves, but made crudely of unstained lumber. I saw several large rocks, about the size of a brain maybe, and I could see a toy rabbit, one of the hollow velveteen ones that had a bung in the bottom were you could put coins, and then there was a coffee mug—but that was all I saw before Poochy closed it again.
He closed it because of the sound that came from the room. There was only one sound, but in a hundred variations. Everything in the room was screaming, screaming, screaming.
He said they don’t always do that, but I barely heard him. I was suddenly very afraid of him—this wasn’t just some off-putting eccentric. I asked him in a shaky voice if that was my mother on the conveyor belt, ready to be cremated. He looked mortified. He told me he thought I was here for the job interview he had also scheduled for that day.
Poochy didn’t even apologize. Abruptly he walked off, down a half-flight of stone stairs, around a corner and and into darkness. I ended up causing a big scene and the funeral home’s director called the police on me. I would give 0 stars if I could.”
This strange story was so terrifying to me because I think my husband may be trying to capture my soul. I’m in at-home hospice care, and last week he hung a metal cylinder, open on the bottom, above my bed. He said it was a tradition in his culture, but he’s a fourth-generation German from Ohio and the only other tradition he’s ever brought up is the Christmas pickle and egg noodles on mashed potatoes (it’s better than it sounds). At night, the device glows moss green underneath.
But I’m even more scared of the possibility that he’s not trying to collect my soul at all. What if my husband sent that email, and hoaxed that review, and he is only pretending to do this to me in the last weeks of my life?
I don’t know what to do, and I’m not even strong enough to sit fully up and reach the contraption. It dangles above me. And I imagine screaming, screaming, screaming, long after I’m dead.