Most people don't realize how many different chemicals cmbalmers use, but the first thing that catches your eye is not how many there are, but how many different colors they are.
Each bottle—the formaldehyde, the anticoagulants, the cauterants, the germicides, the conditioners, and others—has its own bright color, like fruit juice. The row of embalming fluids looks like the syrup flavors at a sno-cone stand. Margaret chose her chemicals carefully, like she was choosing ingredients for a soup. Not every body needed every chemical, and figuring out the right recipe for a given corpse was as much an art as a science. While she worked on that, I let go of the head and picked up the scalpel. They didn't always let me make incisions, but if I did it while they weren't watching, I could usually get away with it. I was good at it, too, which helped.
The artery Margaret had pulled out would be used to pump the body full of the chemical cocktail she was making; as they filled the body, the old fluids, like blood and water, would be pushed out the exposed vein and into a drain tube, and from there into the floor. I had been surprised to find out that it all just goes into the sewer system, but really—where else would it go? It's no worse than anything else down there. I held the artery steady and cut slowly across it, careful not to sever it completely. When.the hole was ready, I grabbed the canula—a curved metal tube—and slipped the narrow end into the opening. The artery was rubbery, like a thin hose, and covered with tiny fibers of muscle and capillary. I laid the metal tube gently on the chest and made a similar cut in the vein, this time inserting a drain pipe, which connected to a long coil of clear plastic tubing that snaked down into a drain in the floor. I cinched tight the strings Margaret had looped around each vein, sealing them shut.
"That looks good," said Margaret, pushing the pump over to the table. It was on wheels to keep it out of the way, but now it took its place of honor in the center of the room while Margaret connected the main hose to the canula I'd placed in the artery. She studied the seal briefly, nodded at me in approval, and poured the first chemical—a bright orange anticoagulant to break up clots—into the tank on top of the pump. She pushed a button and the pump jerked sleepily to life, syncopated like a real heartbeat, and she watched it carefully while she fiddled with the knobs that controlled pressure and speed.
The pressure in the body normalized quickly, and soon dark, thick blood was disappearing into the sewer.
"How's school?" Margaret asked, peeling off a rubber glove to scratch her head.
"It's only been a couple of days," I said. "Not a lot happens in the first week."
"It's the first week of high school, though," said Margaret. "That's pretty exciting, isn't it?"
"Not especially," I said.
The anticoagulant was almost gone, so Margaret poured a bright blue conditioner into the pump to help get the blood vessels ready for the formaldehyde. She sat down. "Meet any new friends?"
"Yeah," I said. "A whole new school moved into town over the summer, so miraculously I'm not stuck with the same people I've known since kindergarten. And of course, they all wanted to make friends with the weird kid. It was pretty sweet."
"You shouldn't make fun of yourself like that," she said.
"Actually, I was making fun of you."
"You shouldn't do that either," said Margaret, and I could cell by her eyes that she was grinning slightly. She stood back up to add more chemicals to the pump. Now that the first two chemicals were on their way through the body, she began mixing the true embalming fluid—a moisturizer and a water softener to keep the tissues from swelling, preservatives and germicides to keep the body in good condition (well, as good as it could be at this point), and dye to give it a rosy, lifelike glow. The key to it all, of course, is formaldehyde, a strong poison that kills everything in the body, hardens the muscles, pickles the organs, and does all of the actual "embalming."
Margaret added a hefty dose of formaldehyde, followed by thick green perfume to cover the pungent aroma. The pump tank was a swirly pot of brightly colored goop, like the slush machine at a gas station. Margaret clamped down the lid and ushered me out the back door; the fan wasn't good enough to risk being in the room with that much formaldehyde. It was fully dark outside now, and the town had gone almost silent. I sat on the back step while Margaret leaned against the wall, watching through the open door in case anything went wrong.
"Do you have any homework yet?" she asked.
"I have to read the introductions of most of my textbooks over the weekend, which of course everybody always does, and I have to write an essay for my history class."
Margaret looked at me, trying to be nonchalant, but her lips were pressed tightly together and she started blinking. I knew from long association that this meant something was bothering her.
"Did they assign a topic?" she asked.
I kept my face impassive. "Major figures of American history."
"So .. . George Washington? Or maybe Lincoln."