When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,36

thing for her to have, let alone say. “It’s Oriental,” she told me. “I think the Chinese invented it.”

I am not a terribly physical person. Helen wasn’t either. We’d never hugged or even shaken hands, so it was odd to find myself rubbing her bare shoulder and then her back. It was, I thought, like stroking some sort of a sea creature, the flesh slick and fatty beneath my palms. In my memory, there was something on the stove, a cauldron of tomato gravy, and the smell of it mixed with the camphor of the Tiger Balm. The windows were steamed, Tony Bennett was on the radio, and saying, “Please,” her voice catching on the newness of the word, Helen asked me to turn it up.

The Monster Mash

The thing about dead people is that they look really dead, fake almost, like models made of wax. This I learned at the medical examiner’s office I visited in the fall of 1997. While the bodies seemed unreal, the tools used to pick them apart were disturbingly familiar. It might be different in places with better funding, but here the pathologists used hedge clippers to snip through rib cages. Chest cavities were emptied of blood with cheap metal soup ladles, the kind you’d see in cafeterias, and the autopsy tables were lubricated with whatever dish detergent happened to be on sale. Also familiar were the songs, oldies mainly, that issued from the blood-spattered radio and formed a kind of sound track. When I was young, I associated Three Dog Night with my seventh-grade shop teacher, who proudly identified himself as the group’s biggest fan. Now, though, whenever I hear “Joy to the World,” I think of a fibroid tumor positioned upon a Styrofoam plate. Funny how that happens.

While at the medical examiner’s office, I dressed in a protective suit, complete with a bonnet and a pair of Tyvek booties. Citizens were disemboweled, one right after another, and on the surface I’m sure I seemed fine with it. Then at night I’d return to my hotel, double-lock the door, and stand under the shower until all the soap and shampoo were used up. The people in the next room must have wondered what was going on. An hour of running water, and then this blubbery voice: “I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do.”

It’s not as if I’d walked into this completely unprepared. Even as a child I was fascinated by death, not in a spiritual sense, but in an aesthetic one. A hamster or guinea pig would pass away, and, after burying the body, I’d dig it back up: over and over, until all that remained was a shoddy pelt. It earned me a certain reputation, especially when I moved on to other people’s pets. “Igor,” they called me. “Wicked, spooky.” But I think my interest was actually fairly common, at least among adolescent boys. At that age, death is something that happens only to animals and grandparents, and studying it is like a science project, the good kind that doesn’t involve homework. Most kids grow out of it, but the passing of time only heightened my curiosity.

As a young man, I saved up my dishwashing money and bought a seventy-five-dollar copy of Medicolegal Investigations of Death, a sort of bible for forensic pathologists. It shows what you might look like if you bit an extension cord while standing in a shallow pool of water, if you were crushed by a tractor, struck by lightning, strangled with a spiral or nonspiral telephone cord, hit with a claw hammer, burned, shot, drowned, stabbed, or feasted upon by wild or domestic animals. The captions read like really great poem titles, my favorite being “Extensive Mildew on the Face of a Recluse.” I stared at that picture for hours on end, hoping it might inspire me, but I know nothing about poetry, and the best I came up with was pretty lame:

Behold the recluse looking pensive!

Mildew, though, is quite extensive

On his head, both aft and fore.

He maybe shoulda got out more.

I know nothing about biology either. The pathologists tried to educate me, but I was too distracted by the grotesque: my discovery, for instance, that if you jump from a tall building and land on your back, your eyes will pop out of your head and hang by bloody cables. “Like those joke glasses!” I said to the chief medical examiner. The man was