There were four sloping sinks in the centre of the room, and beneath them rubber hoses draining into the floor. There were grey marble slabs as well, arranged as tables, and two ceiling fans and a strong odour of disinfectant.
'We've been asking for air-conditioning for years,' said Mr Reiss.
'I can't imagine why,' I said. 'It's quite cool in here.'
He laughed. 'It's about eighty degrees!'
Strange: I was shivering again.
'But they won't give it to us,' he said. Those fans aren't enough. It can get pretty smelly in here when we're working.'
'I've been meaning to ask you what you call the corpses,' I said. 'Do you ever refer to it as "the loved one"? Or the body, the victim, the corpse, or what?'
'"The loved one" is what they say in books,' said Mr Reiss. 'But they're just exaggerating. People have a lot of funny ideas about morticians. Jessica Mitford - that book. She didn't go many places. We're not really like that. "The remains" - that's what we usually call it.'
He stepped to one of the deep sinks and went on, 'We put the remains on the table here and slide it into the sink. Then we raise an artery. The carotid's a good one - I like the carotid myself. Drain it completely. Blood goes all down there, through the pipe' - he was speaking to the sink and using his hand to indicate the flow of the blood - 'into the floor. Then - see that hose? - we fill it with embalming fluid. It takes time and you have to be careful. It's harder than it looks.'
I was mumbling, making notes with frozen fingers. I said I thought it was interesting. Mr Reiss seized on this.
'It is interesting! We get every type in here. Why, just recently,' he said, beating his palm on the embalming sink in emphatic excitement, 'a bus went off the bridge - you know the big bridge across the Canal? Thirty-eight people died and we had them all, right in here. Boy, that was something. Planes, car crashes, drownings, murders on ships, people who get mugged in Colón. Take a murder on a ship passing through the Canal - that's real tricky, but we handle it. And Indians? They drink and then they try to paddle their canoes and they drown. We get every type you can mention. Interesting is the word for it.'
I had gone silent. But Mr Reiss remained by the sink.
'I've been down here in the Zone for eleven years,' he said, 'a mortician the whole time.' Now he spoke slowly and wonderingly, 'And you know what? I've had something different every single day. Want to see the Autopsy Room?'
I looked at my watch.
'Golly,' he said, looking at his own. 'It's past one o'clock. I don't know about you, but I'm real hungry.'
The Elks kitchen was shut. We went to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2537 and, ordering chop suey and iced tea, Mr Reiss said, 'But there's no comparison with the States service-wise. You don't get the attention here that they offer there. In the States you get a real nice service and big cars and a little ceremony. Here, all we give you is a hearse.'
'And an embalming,' I said.
'I've always been interested in embalming,' he said.
The chop suey came, a large helping of wet vegetables, a dish of noodles. There were very ifew other diners in the V.F.W. cafeteria, but, clean and dark and air-conditioned, it was like any post in America. I asked Mr Reiss how he had become a mortician.
'Usually, it's a family-type business. Your father's a mortician, so you become one, too. So I'm very unusual in a way - my family wasn't in the business.'
'Then you just decided, like that, to be a mortician?'
Mr Reiss swallowed a mouthful of chop suey and patting his lips with his napkin said, 'I always wanted to be a funeral director - as far back as I can remember. Know something? It's the earliest memory I have. I must have been about six years old when my old granny died. They put me upstairs and gave me candy to keep me quiet. They were liquorice things in the shape of hats - derby hats and Stetsons. Well, I was upstairs - this was in Pennsylvania - and I started yelling and I said, "I want to see Granny!" "No," they said, "keep him upstairs, give him some more candy." But I kept yelling and they finally gave in and let me come down. My cousin took me by the hand and we went over to Granny in her casket. See, they had the funerals in houses then. When I saw her I asked all sorts of questions, like "How do they do it?" and "Who did this?" and so forth. I was real interested. And I decided then what I wanted to be - a funeral director. When I was nine or so I was sure that's what I wanted to be.'
I could not help imagining a classroom in Pennsylvania, and a curious teacher leaning over a quiet pink-faced boy, and asking, 'Tell me, Johnny, what do you want to be when you grow up?'
Inevitably, our talk turned to the Canal Treaty. I asked what would happen to him and the Gorgas Mortuary if the Treaty was ratified.
'I think we'll be all right, whatever happens. I don't know what's going to happen about the Treaty, but if they take us over I hope they keep us on. Most of us love this Canal, and we do a good job at the mortuary. I think they'll just rehire us. Everyone's worried, but why? They can't run the Canal without us. And I'm real interested in staying here.'
That night I was invited to a dinner. 'You're going to have to sing for your supper,' the host said. I asked him what I should talk about. He said it didn't matter very much - perhaps something about writing?
'No matter what you say,' he said, 'the only thing they're really interested in is what you think about the treaty.' I said it was my favourite subject.
I talked to the assembly of Panamanian writers and artists about The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. No one had read it and so it was like speaking about a book which had just appeared, a candidate for the best-seller list, as fresh and full of news as a spring morning in Boston. They listened with rapt attention to the plot, the sequence of atrocities, the muffled music of the thrilling ending; and they looked at me with the near-sighted commiserating expressions I had seen on the faces of my students in faraway lecture halls, as I attempted to explain how, with such clever knots and loops, Poe had made of such stray pieces of string such a convincing hangman's noose.
'I am interested to know,' said a fellow afterwards, at question-time, 'what your position is with regard to the Panama Canal Treaty. Would you mind telling us?'
'Not at all,' I said. I said they were welcome to their opinion of the Zonians, but that they could easily underestimate the sentiment Zon-ians had for the Canal. It was not an age when people were very attached to their jobs, but the Zonians were proud of the work they had done and were dedicated to the running of the Canal. No amount of Panamanian nationalism or flag waving could compare with the technical skill it took to get forty ships a day through the Canal safely. I admitted that Zonians were fairly ignorant of Panama, but that Panamanians had little idea of the complexities of life in the Zone and the sort of fervour Zonians had.
This view brought smiles of disagreement from the audience, but, as no one challenged me, I went on to say that in essence the Canal Zone was colonial territory, and that one could not really understand any colony unless he had read Frankenstein and Prometheus Bound.
Over dinner, Í talked with an elderly architect. He also wrote stories, he said, and most of his stories were satires about the Chief of Government and Commander of the National Guard, General Omar Tor-rijos. What did Torrijos think of his stories? He had wanted to ban them, said the architect, but this was impossible because the stories had won a literary prize.
I said, There are people who think that Torrijos is a mystic.'
'He is a demagogue, not a mystic,' said the architect. 'A showman-very astute, but full of tricks.'