John Reiss was a tall stout mortician with a pink complexion and a friendly manner. His wife had said, 'He's wonderful with bereaved relatives - he just calms them down, I don't know how he does it.' He was soft-spoken and precise, interested in his work - interested particularly in embalming - and proud of the fact that corpses were sent to him from all over Central and South America. Like many other Zonians he was a member of the Elks' Club, the V.F.W., the Rotary, but his mortician's interest perhaps made him more of a joiner than most: a mortician is a public figure in America, like a mayor or a fire chief, and the Zone was a version of America. But Mr Reiss was also a member of the local barber shop quartet, and there was in his voice a kind of melodious croon, a singer's modulation, a mortician's concerned coo.
'To start off with,' said Mr Reiss in the Coffin Room, an instructional whisper in his voice, 'here we have the coffins themselves. If you were a local employee you got this coffin.'
It was a plain silvery steel coffin, with unornamented handles, a buffed metal box the length of a man and the depth of a horse trough. It was shut, the lid fastened. It was difficult for me to see this closed coffin and not to feel a distinct uneasiness about what it might contain.
'And if you were an American you got this one.'
This one was bigger and a bit fancier. There were rosettes on the side and simulated carving on the corners of the lid, some romanesque scrollwork, leaf clusters and the sort of handles you see on doors in Louisburg Square in Boston. Apart from the foliage, and the size, I wondered whether there was any other difference between this coffin and the silver one.
This is much more expensive,' said Mr Reiss. 'It's hermetically sealed, and look at the difference in the colours.'
Of course, this one was goldy bronze, the other was silver. They matched the status of the deceased. It was a racial distinction. From about the turn of the century until very recently, race was expressed by the Panama Canal Company not in terms of black and white but by the designations gold and silver. The euphemism was derived from the way workers were paid: the unskilled workers, most of them black, were paid in silver; the skilled workers, nearly all white Americans, were paid in gold. The terms applied to all spheres of life in the Zone; there were gold schools and silver schools, gold houses and silver houses, and so on, to gold coffins and silver coffins, the former hermetically sealed, the latter - like the silver house - leaky. So, even in his casket, the canal employee could be identified, and long after he had turned to dust, the evidence of his race lost in decay, his remains could be disinterred and you would know from the hue ofthat box whether the grit in that winding sheet had once been a white man or a black man. It must have been some satisfaction for the Company to know that, however evenly the grass covered these graves, the colour line that had been the rule in schools and housing (and even water fountains and toilets, the post office and cafeterias), was still observed beneath the ground.
'Nowadays,' said Mr Reiss, 'everyone gets this good coffin. That's why the mortuary loses money. These things cost an awful lot.'
Upstairs was the Receiving Room. There were refrigerators here, and on the wall of the bare flint-grey room the large steel drawers that most people know from the morgue scenes in movies, the floor-to-ceiling arrangement that resembles nothing so much as stacks of oversized filing cabinets.
Mr Reiss's hand went to one drawer. He balanced himself by gripping the handle; underneath it was a labeclass="underline" a name, a date.
'I have a man in here,' he said, tugging as he spoke. 'Died a month ago. We don't know what to do with him. From California. No family, no friends.'
'I'd rather you didn't open that drawer,' 1 said.
He pushed it gently and released it. 'No one wants to claim him.'
It was cold in the room; I shivered and noticed my skin was prickling with gooseflesh.This was the coldest I had been since leaving the sleet storm in Chicago.
'Shall we move on?' i said.
But Mr Reiss was reading a new label. 'Yes,' he said, tapping another drawer. 'This is a little boy. Only six years old.' His fingers were under the handle. 'He's been there since last June - anything wrong?'
'I feel chilly.'
'We've got to keep the temperature down in here. What was I saying? Oh, yes,' he said, glancing at his hand, at the label, 'he's going to be here until next June. But he'll be all right.'
'All right? In what sense?'
Mr Reiss smiled gently; it was professional pride. 'I embalmed him myself- he's all ready to go. Well,' he went on - and now he was speaking to the drawer, 'just to make sure, I look at him about once a month. I open him up. Check him over.'
'What do you see?'
'Dehydration.'
On our way to the Cremation Room, 1 said, 'For a minute, I thought you were going to open one of those drawers back there.'
'I was,' said Mr Reiss. 'But you didn't want me to.'
'I think I would have keeled over.'
That's what everyone says. But it's something you should see. A dead person is just a dead person. It happens to everybody. Death is one of the things you have to accept. It's nothing to be frightened of.' This was obviously the tone he adopted with the bereaved; and he was convincing. I felt ignorant and superstitious. But what if it had frightened me? How to erase the image of a death-shrunken six-year-old from my mind? I was afraid that, seeing it, I would be scared for the rest of my life.
The Cremation Room was hot: the air was stale and dusty and I could feel the heat across the room from the furnaces, which were larger versions of the old coal burners of my childhood. The heat had reddened the iron doors and they were coated with fine powder. Shafts of sunlight at the windows lighted tiny particles of dust which the hot air kept in turbulent motion.
'The reason it's so hot in here,' said Mr Reiss, 'is because we had a cremation just this morning.' He went to the side of one of the furnaces and jerked open the iron door. 'Local fellow,' he said, peering in. He pushed at some white smouldering flakes with a poker. 'Just ashes and a little bone.'
There were two aluminium barrels near the furnaces. Mr Reiss lifted the lid of one- an ash barrel. He reached in, groping in the ashes and took out a fragment of bone. It was a dry chalky hunk of splinters, bleached to sea-shell whiteness by the heat and dusted with grey biscuit-flakes of ash; and it had a knob on the end, like a prehistoric half of a ball-peen hammer.
'These are just odds and ends mostly.'
'That looks like a femur.'
'Good for you,' said Mr Reiss. 'That's what it is. How'd you know that?'
'I'm a failed medical student.'
'You shouldn't have failed - you certainly know your bones!' Mr Reiss closed his hand on the bone and squashed it like a cookie, reducing it to crumbs: / will show you fear in a handful of dust. 'We get a lot of amputations. This was a whole leg.'
He dropped the dust back into the barrel and clapped crumbs from his hands. I looked into the barrel and saw scorched safety pins and scraps of mummified cloth.
'There's a teaching hospital next door. They send us things to cremate. After the lessons are over. They're in terrible shape - brains removed, all cut open and dissected. Hardly recognize some of them.'
There were no other people in these mortuary rooms, no live ones. The emptiness, the absence of voices and furniture, made it seem like a mausoleum, and I had the feeling I had been locked in, sealed up with this soft-spoken guide who treated coffins and dehydrating corpses and friable thigh bones with an ordinariness that chastened me and made me wonder if perhaps in his casual way he was successfully concealing some horror from me. But Mr Reiss was saying, 'We're losing money hand over fist - because of the pay-grades. The hardware and coffins are so expensive we can't even cover our costs. The local workers are getting those real nice- ah, here we are,' he said, interrupting himself at the threshold of another empty room, 'the Embalming Room.'