Death professionals are so cool. In Gary’s view, the ability to do death was what separated the men and women from the boys and girls. Gary was at his Aunt Minna’s apartment the day after his Uncle Ernie died. The undertaker came by to talk about the funeral. Right away he zeroed in on an object that to Gary looked like nothing anyone would ever notice. A cheap plastic soap container, the kind you’d take in your travel bag if you weren’t sure that the place you were traveling to had soap. It was sitting there on the living room credenza with several other objects, all of them similarly undistinguished. A cut glass bowl, a parrot statuette, a couple of pencils, a Walkman, a pack of playing cards, a box of pink Canada Mints. The green soap container was half-obscured by the bowl and the statuette, but the chubby undertaker zoomed in on it like a beam of light. “Is that his teeth in there?” the undertaker asked, in a cheery, matter-of-fact tone - as though he were asking a simple everyday question, such as “if I go out the door and turn left will it lead me to the elevator?”
Aunt Minna, slightly taken aback, replied “why yes, that is his teeth - how did you know it wasn’t just soap?”
“Well I’d better take it then, don’t you think?” said the undertaker. And without batting an eye he slipped the green container with the teeth into the right jacket pocket of his dark suit.
Aunt Minna had brought the teeth back from the hospital along with the Walkman, the playing cards, the Canada Mints, the parrot statuette, a robe, slippers and assorted other personal items that belonged to Gary’s uncle. There hadn’t been much time for tears and final farewells. Minna was too busy scrambling to get those things out of Ernie’s closet and nightstand in a hurry, because the nurses had made it clear that another customer was on the way, rolling down the corridor.
Gary had sat with Aunt Minna in the intensive care room for Ernie’s final hour. Several hours, actually. When Ernie stopped living you could see it right on the monitor. All the constantly changing numbers went into a free fall and froze into a column of zeroes. Two seconds later the nurse flipped off the monitor and it all went dark. Game over.
Gary and his aunt just sat there in a daze, wanting the nurse to turn it back on. All afternoon the drama of Uncle Ernie’s last hours had played itself out as numbers on a screen. Up or down, ahead or behind. Two points up for blood pressure. Three down for oxygen saturation. Heart rate down two - no, up one. Because of the constantly rising or falling numbers, they watched the screen more than they watched Ernie himself, who was on a morphine drip and merely looked asleep. But even on TV with its tight scheduling and expensive time slots, when a big game ends they give you more than two seconds to digest the scoreboard. They have commentary, interviews, instant replays - at least a minute of post-mortems before they cut to commercials and the next show. In the intensive care room, everything just shuts off.
Always polite, Uncle Ernie passed on right before the nurses’ shift change. It flung them into a whirlwind of activity. Shutting down the monitor was only step number one. Then, with incredible speed, they yanked out all the tubes and unplugged all the wires. Gary wondered if they were trying to hide something. One of them stopped and stuck her head out of the room to call out, “we’re sorry,” as Gary and Minna, who was hauling the teeth and all the other items away in her United Savings tote bag, staggered away towards the elevators. The “we’re sorry” had a slightly upbeat curl to it. It was the way you’d spin the phrase if you were telling someone, “drive safely.”
Death professionals are so cool. They have it knocked. They can flip off the monitor, pull a sheet over the customer, drive home, fall in love over spaghetti and wine and come back the next day and do it all over again.
As the undertaker sailed out with the teeth Gary wondered if his hips were going to fit through the door. He was shaped like a giant pear, but he moved fast - very confident - like a tanker going through the Panama Canal for the thousandth time. The captain knows the beam is okay, so full speed ahead and no need to check the sides of the locks. From where Gary sat the undertaker’s passage looked pretty tight, but the hips went through, which probably meant he wouldn’t need a custom-made coffin when his time came. “See you, Bruce,” Minna called after the undertaker, “and thanks.” A minute later, Gary grabbed a Canada Mint and left too. Just like the undertaker he had a job to go back to, and he was beyond late for it. Aunt Minna understood and let him go without sobbing or clinging. She was a tough old lady. Other than Gary she didn’t have a true friend or relative in the world. Not even a cat. Uncle Ernie had been it.
Steering onto the highway Gary had his big insight. It seemed so big he felt it must have been building under the surface for years. All because Gary had made the mistake of studying Nietzsche in junior college. It kept him thinking he was the new Nietzsche, the Nietzsche of our time, just bursting with blockbuster insights. He listened in the car to some news story about tsunami fatalities. As always, on came the Red Cross doctor recounting the devastation and toting up the body count. Now there was a death professional, and a very noble one at that. But Gary suddenly understood there was more to it than he had thought. It wasn’t just a matter of death professionals and life professionals. In this world there were really only two kinds of people. Death people and life people. That includes everybody and you’re either one or the other.
Death people are comfortable with death. They prepare for it and they feel at ease with corpses. Life people are just the opposite. They want to be as far away from death as possible. Without a doubt, death people have the advantage. A huge one. They are on the majority side, and it’s not even close. Starting from the Big Bang, the dead in this universe outnumber the living by a staggering margin.
Aunt Minna was definitely a life person. She did everything possible to keep death at bay. Including not even acknowledging it. When Uncle Ernie turned sick years ago she went on permanent death patrol, fighting off the Grim Reaper twenty-four hours a day. She waged war on Ernie’s pot belly. She refused to let him eat a morsel of food unless she approved it for portion size and nutrient content. During the last two years Ernie was not allowed to even open the refrigerator.
She was denying death right to the point where her husband went into intensive care, refusing to even talk about purchasing a cemetery plot. To Gary this seemed bizarre, even for a life person.
As for this wide undertaker, Bruce …Just from the way he’d pocketed the teeth, just from the way he smiled and moved, Gary considered him to be a death person extraordinaire. The polar opposite of someone like Aunt Minna. Gary figured Bruce was the type who probably owned his own cemetery plot from the time he was old enough to vote. Bought at a discount, no doubt. He pictured Bruce sailing around town with his wide hips, bragging about his plot, about its proximity to tall ancient trees or a water view. Proud of his gravesite the way other people are proud of their second home, their cottage by the lake.
Because he was so deeply a life person himself, Gary was proud to help Aunt Minna out during this dark period. Minna was one of those old ladies who had a license but was definitely not a driver. The day before the funeral Gary called her from the car and said he would be happy to be her wheels for a while. He heard her fighting back a sniffle as they hung up.
The funeral was a piece of work. Even more abrupt than the finale in the intensive care room. For all his chumminess with Minna, Bruce didn’t even show up. His black-suited colleagues patrolling the entrance to the chapel said this was merely routine. The funeral home had many branches and duty had called him elsewhere. Or so they said. They tried to deliver this news in an official manner but only succeeded in appearing shifty. Aunt Minna, who already looked lost, now seemed on the verge of panic. Gary held her arm tight as he could, right through everything. He managed to get her out of the chapel, the black car and the vast cemetery scared but in one piece.
On the next weekend Gary was spending the afternoon having a few pops and browsing the tabs. There were a bunch of them, strewn over the near empty bar. His cell rang sharply, echoing through the tavern. It was Aunt Minna reminding him he owed her a ride. He paid up and hit the road, pushing down all the windows and flooring it to clear the pot cloud from the morning.
While Aunt Minna wheeled a cart around the Super Harvest he sat on a bench by the gumball machine browsing the same tabs. A story stopped him, a local chiller picked up by the nationals. It was the one about the girl found in her half-filled bathtub by those eager EMTs. They took all the vital signs just before dawn and concluded she was dead as a doornail. Her lanky, fun-abused body the color and texture of raw dough. Under orders of the cops they packed her in a body bag, zipped it and dropped it at a funeral parlor. Towards noon, the undertaker entered his back shop and heard something highly unusual.
Breathing.
At which point the undertaker himself turned the color of raw dough, and even on heavy meds he wasn’t right in the head yet - far from it. He was a born mortician, a natural in his field. His brain had been hard-wired for a life among corpses. Seeing the dead come alive was not part of the program. To unzip her and find a heartbeat questioned everything. He told reporters he could still hear the heart thundering so loud it made him hold his ears all night long.
The undertaker getting all this publicity had been a beefy type - but the tab said he was shriveling day by day, sleepless and without appetite. The girl, on the other hand, was back to her old self, drinking, doping and doing.
But as Gary read and then re-read the story he kept picturing the wrong undertaker, not the one shown in the paper. He kept seeing the undertaker from his own life, the one who had come to Aunt Minna’s apartment and swept out with the green container of teeth, sailing away on his broad hips like a ship of death. Gary knew his mind was messing with him and scrambling things. The undertaker in the story was beefy, while the one who pocketed the teeth had those hips, but couldn’t be described as beefy. Yet the moment Gary took his eyes off the newspaper page the undertakers were one and the same. They shared a single photographic image in his mind’s eye.
Loading her groceries into the trunk, Gary asked Aunt Minna if she needed to stop at the Walgreens. Then he found the question he knew was troubling him, way down deep.
“How is it you’re on a first name basis with an undertaker?”
But Aunt Minna had a ready answer. “When you’re my age you go to a lot of funerals,” she said. “We all know Bruce.”
“Next time you go to one, why don’t you tell me. I’ll go with you. That way you won’t have to walk.”
Aunt Minna looked at him as though he were a stranger who had just dropped down from Mars.
“I’ll do nothing of the kind,” Aunt Minna said. “A person your age has better things to do with his time.”
Now there was Aunt Minna being a life person again. Denying and double denying. But in his shoes Gary could feel the shift in the asphalt of the parking lot.
“Maybe yes, maybe no,” said Gary. “Right now what I want to do with my time is bring this stuff up to your apartment. I won’t let you carry a thing. Not a crumb.”
“Well then come up for fruit cocktail,” she said. And they drove in silence from the mall parking lot to the parking lot of her apartment. Gary had the feeling she was thinking about the same thing he was thinking about - how the undertaker with whom she was on a first-name basis had managed to avoid showing up at Uncle Ernie’s funeral.
“Seen Bruce lately?” he said, pushing the heavy glass doors that led to the stone staircase of her apartment house. It was the kind of place completely occupied by even older people than you see staring out the window on motorcoach tours. Small ancient people, small ancient apartments. On average, there was one human per unit. In the entry way there were only about six stone stairs to climb, but even that could be a chore for someone Aunt Minna’s age. After the stairs came an elevator that smelled like a cave and moved as though it had arthritis.
“We only see Bruce when there’s an apartment available, if you know what I mean,” said Aunt Minna, as the elevator creaked and groaned and took forever.
Together they put away the groceries, except for one can of fruit cocktail. She waved him out of the cramped galley kitchen, opened the can and dished some fruit out in two small bowls.
“Stop looking so restless,” she said. “You go and sit down.”
They sat together and snacked without appetite. Gary felt hemmed in. It was the same living room they sat in after the hospital and before the funeral, and nothing in the arrangement had changed. But today everything seemed smaller - the couch they were sitting on, the space between the four living room walls. He felt enlarged and clumsy, unable to avoid the corner of the credenza. It kept getting in the way of his elbow every time he lifted his little tarnished teaspoon.
After the fruit cocktail, Gary took a Canada Mint, just as he had on his previous visit. As he put the box back in its place on the credenza he noticed Aunt Minna following his hand intensely, even blinking at the exact moment the Canada Mint box landed on the wood veneer of the credenza surface, making the faintest thud. The thought occurred to Gary that the box was back in its family; reunited with the other objects Aunt Minna had dutifully toted home from the hospital. From what he remembered of his visit that day nothing had moved even a millimeter. The Walkman, the playing cards, the pencils and the parrot statuette were all in their places, and now the Canada Mints had gone to its place and rejoined them.
For several moments, the two of them, Gary and Aunt Minna, sat on the couch with their empty bowls and said nothing. They simply watched the objects and sank into the silence around them, taking comfort in the fact that nothing had moved and nothing had changed. The objects were fixed in time and space like tiny planets, and they had quietly assumed identities of significance. They had become more than household items; they had become memorials to Uncle Ernie: the last objects he cared about before he passed on. As the Canada Mint dissolved in Gary’s saliva he knew there was much more to what he tasted than sugar and food dye, and that he should think twice before taking another one.
The light dwindled and slipped out of the room as the afternoon wore on. After a time Gary became aware of a sound enveloping the gray silence, the kind that sneaks up on you and takes over, like summer rain.
It was Aunt Minna weeping.
“I shouldn’t have let him have them,” she said. “They belong here, right here with everything else.”
Gary handed her his napkin.
“Aren’t I being silly?” She wept and sniffled. “Over a set of false teeth.”
Gary didn’t know what to say. But he so agreed with her. Without the green plastic container something vital was missing from the credenza. Something important about Uncle Ernie’s life and final hours.
“I couldn’t even tell if they were in his mouth, could you? It’s not like they had him smiling in there.”
Gary remembered the quick funeral and the coffin. Open and shut. He wasn’t aware of any teeth either. He stared at the credenza and agreed with Aunt Minna that something was wrong. There was a void. It was as though one of the little planets had been ripped from the sky.
Aunt Minna dabbed at her eyes with Gary’s napkin. “The least they could have done is bring the container back.”
Gary thought of the wide undertaker scooping the green container into that hip pocket of his. Here one moment, gone the next.
“He had those teeth for forty seven years of his life,” Aunt Minna said.
As Gary remembered it, the green of the container was nearly identical to the green on the wing of the parrot statuette. His mind clicked on this like the shutter of a camera.
And that was the moment Gary decided to go looking for this Bruce and do him some serious damage. It wasn’t even a decision. It was a plea from the credenza. He heard it again just as the last sliver of light left the room. It was steady, like breathing.