Revised mortician vignette

"Where's your aria this morning?" I asked the singing mortician as he leaned out of his red car in his dull scrubs to put on his new and very white tennis shoes. To be fair, he only sang once that I heard, and that was to test the valley's acoustics. Tariffs came up. Then "it's in the prophecy; man's rule is going to end. It's larger than people," he said. Didn't answer my question about what comes next, though I agreed with him that civilization might be ending. (See _Life After Doom_.) In general chemistry, he'd wondered why they were learning about other people's theorems; why was he paying for that? He's just paid $800 for new tires, but they came with "free" road service and tire rotation.

 

"EMTs used to be able to tell a person's condition by look and by feel; now they need their cell phones for everything." He wandered into a story about a young man in the back of a limousine during a wedding who offered to share the music from his phone. No one heard it. Turns out he had his headphones on. When he was an EMT, the mortician said, they were sent to Florida to learn reflexology; you can tell so much by examining someone's feet. As he pointed to his red Mercedes, he noted how much people get caught up in their things. Nothing matters during an emergency. Doesn't matter who you are.

 

One evening in NYC they picked up a homeless guy and then a judge, who was in cardiac arrest. There they were, next to each other in the ER, and the homeless guy had been there so much he knew exactly what treatment he needed. The judge died. All that training, the mortician exclaimed, and he died next to a homeless man. 

 

A woman called to say her baby was in distress. His team and lots of police descended on the building where the elevator wasn't working. So they climbed lots of steps, got past the mother, looked in all the rooms. "Where's the baby?" It was her son, as big as the mortician, he said, seated on the couch with a tummy ache.

 

I noted that Lilith was utterly fascinated by the smells there at the top of the hill, where the chapel and the morgue are. "Lots to smell up here," he said. "Chemicals, bodies." He had his shoes on and stood up. Leaned on the roof of his car, said that he was tired. Lilith and I headed down the hill. A man was trimming the royal palms from his perch over his large equipment. Another man in a cart kept his eyes on him. A spotter, I thought.