The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015

by Adam Johnson

  As a result, when this paper was published, a short related article ran in the Associated Press and spread around the Internet. The AP story included a slide show set at FACTS, featuring images of Kate standing in the field with the anonymous woman’s now-skeletal remains. But this time the subject of the study, the woman in the journal, was no longer anonymous: she was identified as Patricia Robinson, placed on-site at FACTS on November 19, 2009. In the first week after being placed, deliberately without a cage, two vultures had been spotted consuming her eyes; thirty-seven days after placement, the day after Christmas, the swarm arrived; by December 27, she had been skeletonized.

  Her children recognized her skull by its gold teeth.

  It was Jim, in San Francisco, who’d spoken briefly on the phone with the AP reporter and, perhaps not realizing the quick turnaround of the piece, did not tell his siblings about the article before its publication, or the fact that he’d given the writer permission to identify their mother’s remains by name. So when Ted, in Austin, was scanning headlines online one morning, he came across an item about the San Marcos facility and discovered the slide show. He saw a photo of a skull in the grass and he knew, before reading the captions, that this was his mother: he could see one of her gold molars.

  Perhaps surprisingly, his immediate reaction to the photos, and the details of the research—scientists “captured the vultures jumping up and down on the woman’s body, breaking some of her ribs”—was one of pride. “Just the amount of damage done to the body—it was hours, literally hours, and it was clean,” he says. “It was just this huge amount of unthought-of information.” In his enthusiasm, Ted posted a link on Facebook saying, “Hey, look! Mom got eaten by vultures! Awesome!”

  In a third-grade classroom at her elementary school, Mary was online and saw the note from her youngest brother. She clicked on the link—and had a typical Robinson family reaction: “I was like ‘Oh, cool! They’re talking about her!’” Then she saw the pictures. “And it was ‘Oh, there’s Mom’s face! There’s her teeth! Oh, there’s her ribs! Oh, wow.’”

  Mary was deeply hurt when her friends and colleagues at work were unable to relate to her excitement at the news. “I have just hit revulsion, revulsion, revulsion—and it’s very lonely and hard. This is awesome—but it’s so out-of-the-box, there’s no paradigm. That’s your mom? What?”

  As the link spread to the rest of the siblings, their experience was the same: the painful feeling that, outside of the family, there weren’t many people they could share their decision with. “The people that I know,” says Carl, “most of them were like, ‘That’s really weird,’ and ‘That’s just gross. How could you leave your mother to lie out in the cold rain?’ So I didn’t talk to a whole lot of people about it.” In the middle of a culture that is in denial of aging, never mind death, the body farm at San Marcos is one of the only places in America where death is literally splayed out in front of us, laid bare in a field, undeniable—and it makes most people very uneasy.

  However shocking it is to the mainstream American sensibility, deliberate excarnation (or de-fleshing) is also a practice with a history—a spiritual practice sometimes referred to as “sky burial.” After death, the bodies of many Tibetan Buddhists are partially flayed and left exposed on a mountaintop for birds and animals to consume. The Parsis of India, a Zoroastrian population clustered around Mumbai, place their dead atop Towers of Silence to be picked clean by vultures. And certain Native American tribes once left their dead on elevated platforms to be excarnated. While the AP article revealed that many Americans are deeply unsettled by body-farm donation (no great surprise), its outing of the vulture study also exposed an unexpected, if rarefied, desire in this country: FACTS began receiving calls from potential donors requesting to be consumed by vultures. It made religion-specific sense when a little-known Zoroastrian group in Texas reached out, proposing that FACTS build a similar facility on their property. (The researchers politely declined.) But at this point, more than two years later, these inquiries make up about one in three of the calls FACTS receives about donation. “They usually say, flat-out, ‘I want to be eaten by vultures,’” says Sophia Mavroudas, who coordinates with donors. “Some are interested in Tibetan sky burial—but we’re here, in this country,” so the body farm is the next best thing.

  Within a week of Patty’s “placement,” the sprawling Robinson clan—four of the five siblings, along with their spouses and girlfriends and some of the kids—decided to drive to San Marcos to visit Patty. “It was not a sad trip for any of us,” says Jim. “The kids ran around looking at stuff. It was more of a celebration than anything else.”

  Michelle gave them a tour of the lab, showing them how the skeletons are filed and stored in boxes. She told them their mother’s number (D10-2009), and pointed out the pin designating her placement in the field on an aerial map. “So when your mom’s done, we’ll bring her in,” she said. The outdoor facility, with its rows of cages, remained off-limits. “There was no desire, either,” Mary says, “to go out to look at that.”

  I see what the Robinsons did not: how a body, like their mother’s, is received and placed on the grounds. It happens unexpectedly, on Wednesday morning. “There’s going to be an intake,” Kate announces—and the group is ushered into the lab by a grad student named Hailey. Looking around, I now notice that nearly the entire class is female, in ponytails and college-casual clothes that give a person the look of having just rolled out of bed or off an elliptical machine. In spite of their age, they seem mostly un-phased by the events about to take place. I, on the other hand, feel legitimately unprepared.

  Hailey, in signature forensics cargo pants, her brown hair tied back, leads us to the intake area: an open space by a rolling service door where another student will soon pull up in the “body truck” with the latest donation. “Just to warn you guys,” she says, “this person has started to marble—I don’t know to what extent.”

  “And for those of you who have not seen a body except in decomposition, prepare yourself,” Michelle adds. “You’ve all worked on graves with a person in it, but this is a very fresh person.” “One thing I always keep in mind,” says Kate, “is that this person donated themselves, or their family donated them—so it’s a nice thing.”

  The truck arrives, someone opens its back doors, and we see it: the white plastic body bag. Since FACTS receives remains before the official medical examiner’s report is completed, there’s often a delay between the donation and a complete understanding of cause and circumstances of death—meaning that each body bag may contain some very real surprises. All we know at the moment is that this specimen was just retrieved, in its immediate post-mortem state, from a funeral home in Houston.

  Now clad in blue surgical gloves, booties, and plastic smocks, four grad students load the heavy cargo onto a collapsed gurney in the center of the space. The undergrads readjust their position in the room, clustering and re-clustering according to their individual levels of bravery.

  “This is D25-2014,” Hailey announces. “Our twenty-fifth donation this year.” She turns to the others: “Okay, go for it.”

  They unzip the bag.

  D25-2014, it turns out, is a fifty-seven-year-old white man with a handsome, grizzled, mountain-man sort of face. He has curly white hair and a beard, an oversized belly, and skin that has started to turn an oxidized green around his neck and along his right side. Some reddish “purge” fluid has pooled at the bottom of the bag, having leaked from the body. Hailey, pretty cool and no-nonsense, talks the first-timers through this: “Sometimes, when they die and they’re kept in a cooler for a long time, they start to turn green. He’s starting to change, to decompose. The cooler slows down the process, but it doesn’t halt it.”

  While the others position and measure the body, Hailey takes the standard photos—of each limb and the face, including a shot with the lips pried open to display the teeth. They check for any medical devices to remove, from catheters to colostomy bags.
They take nail and hair samples, allotting clippings to other research institutions, and a DNA sample from the purge by his feet. When one woman adjusts his head, a red trickle runs from his nose and mouth, and I can see her tense up for a moment: the unexpected movement is a reminder of just how recently he was alive. Finally, they tag each arm and wrist with the assigned donation number: from this moment on, D25-2014 will no longer be referred to by his name in life.

  At this point, I realize how quickly I’ve already adjusted to the shock of the dead: the trembling I felt in my stomach when they unzipped the bag has now mostly left me, and I’ve almost, almost stopped noticing the smell of cadaver. Though I’m not easily unsettled, to learn this about myself must count as a minor revelation: how rapidly I can recalibrate what repulses me—an ability taken for granted as a basic skill by many of the people in this room. I also realize that I’ve drawn a large measure of my comfort, my staving-off of total, primal panic, from the group reaction to rotting human flesh—which here, in this very particular place, remains one of calm appraisal.

  In the parking lot, the students reorganize and hop into various pickups and SUVs, creating a caravan to follow the body truck out into the field. D25-2014 will be placed in a newly cleared area under some trees, to see what different results the shade might produce. The bag is unloaded, buckled to the gurney, and rolled over bumpy terrain to the designated spot: a bed of dry leaves under a cluster of oaks, where the students set down the bare corpse. The sight of a man laid out so neatly on his back, naked, in nature, makes me feel as if we’re sneaking up on an older hippie taking a nap—until, of course, the volunteers step forward, in their gloves and booties, and flip him onto his stomach, planting his face in the leafy dirt. Hailey now photographs him again from this angle: too tricky to pull off indoors without a mess.

  Once he’s turned onto his back again, leaves still clinging to his body (Hailey asks a volunteer to wipe off his face), we can see the flies converge. One of the older male students decides to explain this to me. “What they’re doing is they’re laying eggs: they’re going to the mucous membranes—the nose, the mouth, the genitals—or where there’s a cut or an open wound. We can come back tomorrow and you’ll see: on the eyes, the mouth, and so forth, there will probably be maggots. It’s amazing.”

  Someone hammers a wooden stake into the ground close to the head, with his number written on it in thick magic marker, and a cage is placed over him, granting some order to his new natural state. Then we simply walk away, leaving D25-2014 in the clearing, a palace for the flies.

  Nearly the same things happen to the human body during decomposition, whether in the open or underground in a carefully sealed box: variables aside, we decay. But perhaps what prevents some of us, given the choice, from excarnating the body of a loved one, rather than embalming and sealing her in a casket, is how human decay plays out in our minds. In one scenario, total chaos, the elements allowed their full range, scavengers allowed to freely tear and consume and toss things around; and in the other, an elegant, abstract box, a theater, a contained stage on which decomposition can take place, allowing us the illusion of some control. The results may be the same, but the decision hinges on how well those of us left behind can live with the imagining of it all.

  Two months after his death, I meet Bill.

  He lies on his back, under his cage, in the rough and weedy grass, his head turned over his right shoulder—probably turned that way by the natural course of events, the flow of his bodily fluids, the movement of the large families of maggots that would have taken up residence there in his first few days outside. Right away, I notice his salt-and-pepper beard, and his hair: long for a man, but cut blunt at the ends, with a practical purpose—not to be worn that way. It’s stained with his body’s with his body’s enzymes: the strands are now as rust-colored as the grass beneath them, the color of damp earth. While most of him has thoroughly browned, the warped, wrinkly skin of his chest and his sunken abdomen have turned a golden, buttery color from their own fat. Each arm and thigh, now tough as leather, is collapsed like an accordion; and his genitals are gone. Strangely, but typical here, his feet are almost completely intact, and it seems unusually intimate, even under the circumstances, to see them bare without his knowledge—like catching a glimpse of the fleshy underside of someone’s feet when they’ve yanked the sheets up in their sleep.

  The anger that had defined Bill, and the night terrors, and the strain held in his body from years spent weaving through land mines, and the necessity of sitting with his back to the wall wherever he went—all that is gone, has leaked (or so it seems) from his guts and innards, through his back and his buttocks and the backs of his thighs, into the grasses, and the tension of living has stunted the plant life. The only taut thing left of him now is his casing of skin, mummified by the Texas sun into a husk shaped like a man, and the shape of his skull, just starting to peek out from where the skin has split open at the back of his head. The body itself, the core of it, is deflated, like all the others here, making it easy to imagine that the essential soul stuff has escaped, leaked out or drifted upward. And maybe it has. But what becomes certain here is this: that weeks ago the flies arrived and laid their eggs, and the maggots were hatched and began to feed, and ants and beetles arrived to feed on the larvae, and the blood decomposed, marbling the skin, and decay bloated the belly, only to puncture it. And now, two months into the inevitable, the remaining skin has hardened, making a shell for the continuing rot inside.

  I can say that I’ve met Bill—but this is not Bill. It is no longer him. This is the remainder of the man, the epilogue we usually cut from the hero’s narrative, the precise stuff Elaine’s brain does not let her imagine. But on these sixteen acres in San Marcos, this process is laid out in the open, observed and annotated calmly by a rotating cast of young students, people just beginning their adult lives. In driving through five miles of ranchland and swiping a card to pass through the fences, you enter a world in which the naked dead are accepted, and rot is all right, and the only ceremonies needed to protect us from the fact of death are those provided by science.

  Of course, there is a limit to what any of us can handle—including the Robinsons, who all plan to donate themselves. Seeing their mother’s completely de-fleshed skull online was okay for them, something they could digest. It was even exciting. But clicking through to the journal article itself, complete with photos of her recently dead body being scavenged by vultures, was more than they could, or wanted to, endure. This is the line they must draw to prevent themselves from losing their minds. Mary wishes she could un-see it.

  “I don’t believe it hurt her, my mom, when vultures were eating her body. I don’t believe she was in there—I believe more that she’s kind of floating around.” But in seeing the time-lapse photos, she says, “It was, ‘Oh, that’s Mom’s body.’ And it wasn’t bones. And that was very, very, very hard. Traumatic. Like, I can freak myself out if I flash back on that picture in my head. Seeing her bones just filled me with love. Seeing her body, in the field, with the necrosis starting on the arms, and her midsection bloated, and her double chin, and her long, lanky legs—that is a haunting image. I don’t believe she is still in that body, but she looked like my mom. So I never went back to that link again.” To see someone you know intimately in a state of rot, that prolonged, viscous disappearing act after death, is too much—but somehow their bones are easier to handle, once the memory of decay has been rubbed out of them with a toothbrush.

  Mary holds onto the notion that her mother is, in some ways, still around. “Because I think that we are energy. And when we die, our souls go up and they get mixed up up there. Ted said, ‘Oh, you mean like a soul soup?’ Yes! I believe in soul soup! We die and our soul, our spirit, our energy, is just mixing around up there, and then a handful comes out and goes into a new person. So I definitely feel her around. And talking about these things that were found out because of her, she’s out in the world again.” When her mother
died, Mary says, “I wailed on my hands and knees, banging the floor and saying ‘No, no, no!’ I cry easily—all the kids at school are used to it.” Back home from Austin, “it sounds silly, but I danced in the yard and I prayed. I pushed energy out my chest.”

  When Mary tells me this, I am struck again by the nature of mourning: no matter what kind of rituals we subscribe to, it’s an improvisation, an aid, a brace. Most people find some consolation in knowing that others in their culture take part in the same rites when someone they love dies—but it’s only a small comfort. And what we’re left with is the stubborn sense of how peculiar mourning is, how little we know about what we’ll need when a parent or brother or fiancé dies. And sometimes what’s needed most of all, to make the loss less vivid, is the passage of time, like the blanching of bone. In a letter that Mary makes sure to copy and send to me, Patty herself wrote:

  For some reason, knowing tomorrow won’t be so bad doesn’t make today pass any faster. In my experience. But that awful day was Monday, and now it’s Friday and I don’t remember how bad I felt. Now that is a genuine blessing, because I do remember how bad I hated all the misery I can’t remember.