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downtown Knoxville and the mountains.
She tapped her finger on a small glass disk set into the door, no bigger than
the security peephole in the front door of my house.  You can watch through
there if you want, she said,  but you won t be able to see much. Mostly just
flame. She reached for a glowing green button labeled PRE-IGNITION, and I put
one eye to the little window. A jet of yellow flame, roughly the size of the
Olympic torch, blossomed from the hole in the roof of the furnace and
flickered downward, flaring outward when it hit the lid of the box. Within
moments the cardboard began to burn and the flame spread.  Okay, I heard
Helen say,  now I m going to switch on the combustion burner. The bloom of
yellow flame suddenly turned blue and filled the entire upper portion of the
chamber. I watched, mesmerized, as the cardboard collapsed, revealing the
contours of the frail body. And then, for a brief moment before flame and
smoke obscured my view altogether, I saw the withered flesh catch fire, and
somehow it struck me as a cleansing, even a holy thing.  Ashes to ashes, dust
to dust, I heard myself whisper. It was an impromptu benediction from an
unlikely source  me, a doubt-filled scientist who dealt daily in death 
given to a total stranger, a man I had never seen before, and whom no one
would ever see again.
After a moment I stepped back and turned to Helen. She was watching me
closely, I noticed, and she seemed slightly embarrassed when I caught her
looking. It was as if she knew she d intruded on some private exchange.  Funny
thing, I said.  I see bodies all the time  I actually burned a couple of
corpses last week as a research experiment  but this was different. This was
a person. She nodded. I could see that she understood what I meant and that
I d eased her embarrassment by what I d said.
 Do you want to see the  after version now? She pointed at the other
furnace, and I stepped four feet to the right. She opened the door, and I felt
a blast of heat as the door slid down. A human skeleton was laid out in
perfect anatomical order on the concrete floor. The bones were grayish white
and brittle-looking, completely calcined. Except for the skull, which had
rolled to one side and cracked into several large pieces, and the rib cage,
which had caved in like the timbers of a shipwreck, the bones remained intact
and in their original positions.  I couldn t have laid it out better myself,
I said.
She smiled.  Most people think that when a body s cremated, it comes out of
the furnace as cremains, she said.  They have no idea that it s still a
recognizable skeleton. She reached in with a gloved hand, pulled out a
humerus from the upper arm, and gestured with it.  I always find it
fascinating to look at the skeletons, she said.  Every one is different. This
one, for example, was a very large woman. About three hundred pounds. I had to
really watch the oven temperature on her.
I thought for a moment.  Because of the fat?
 Right. I learned my lesson on that a long time ago. About six months after I
started working here, I had a huge guy come through  he weighed five hundred
pounds at least and barely fit in the furnace. This was late one afternoon in
December, a few days before Christmas, and it was getting dark around five
o clock. Well, about thirty minutes after I got him going, one of the guys
from the place across the street came knocking on the door, asked me if I knew
my exhaust stack was red hot. I went out to look, and it was glowing cherry
red.
 A five-hundred-pound body s going to have two or three hundred pounds of fat
on it, I said.  That s gonna make one heck of a grease fire once it melts and
ignites.
 You can say that again, she said.  I came running back in and checked the
temperature gauge. Normally these furnaces run at sixteen to eighteen hundred
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degrees. That guy pushed it up to nearly three thousand. I m just lucky the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]