Mary Roach - Stiff

“See the skin on his fingertips there?” says Arpad. Two of the dead man’s fingers are sheathed with what look like rubber fingertips of the sort worn by accountants and clerks. “The liquid from the cells gets between the layers of skin and loosens them. As that progresses, you see skin sloughage.” Mortuary types have a different name for this. They call it “skin slip.” Sometimes the skin of the entire hand will come off. Mortuary types don’t have a name for this, but forensics types do. It’s called “gloving.”

“As the process progresses, you see giant sheets of skin peeling off the body,” says Arpad. He pulls up the hem of the man’s shirt to see if, indeed, giant sheets are peeling. They are not, and that’s okay.

Something else is going on. Squirming grains of rice are crowded into the man’s belly button. It’s a rice grain mosh pit. But rice grains do not move.

These cannot be grains of rice. They are not. They are young flies.

Entomologists have a name for young flies, but it is an ugly name, an insult. Let’s not use the word “maggot.” Let’s use a pretty word. Let’s use “hacienda.”

Arpad explains that the flies lay their eggs on the body’s points of entry: the eyes, the mouth, open wounds, genitalia. Unlike older, larger haciendas, the little ones can’t eat through skin. I make the mistake of asking Arpad what the little haciendas are after.

Arpad walks around to the corpse’s left foot. It is bluish and the skin is transparent. “See the [haciendas] under the skin? They’re eating the subcutaneous fat. They love fat.” I see them. They are spaced out, moving slowly. It’s kind of beautiful, this man’s skin with these tiny white slivers embedded just beneath its surface. It looks like expensive Japanese rice paper. You tell yourself these things.

Let us return to the decay scenario. The liquid that is leaking from the enzyme-ravaged cells is now making its way through the body. Soon enough it makes contact with the body’s bacteria colonies: the ground troops of putrefaction. These bacteria were there in the living body as well, in the intestinal tract, in the lungs, on the skin—the places that came in contact with the outside world. Life is looking rosy for our one-celled friends. They’ve already been enjoying the benefits of a decommissioned human immune system, and now, suddenly, they’re awash with this edible goo, issuing from the ruptured cells of the intestine lining. It’s raining food. As will happen in times of plenty, the population swells.

Some of the bacteria migrate to the far frontiers of the body, traveling by sea, afloat in the same liquid that keeps them nourished. Soon bacteria are everywhere. The scene is set for stage two: bloat.

The life of a bacterium is built around food. Bacteria don’t have mouths or fingers or Wolf Ranges, but they eat. They digest. They excrete. Like us, they break their food down into its more elemental components. The enzymes in our stomachs break meat down into proteins. The bacteria in our gut break those proteins down into amino acids; they take up where we leave off. When we die, they stop feeding on what we’ve eaten and begin feeding on us. And, just as they do when we’re alive, they produce gas in the process. Intestinal gas is a waste product of bacteria metabolism.

The difference is that when we’re alive, we expel that gas. The dead, lacking workable stomach muscles and sphincters and bedmates to annoy, do not. Cannot. So the gas builds up and the belly bloats. I ask Arpad why the gas wouldn’t just get forced out eventually. He explains that the small intestine has pretty much collapsed and sealed itself off. Or that there might be “something” blocking its egress. Though he allows, with some prodding, that a little bad air often does, in fact, slip out, and so, as a matter of record, it can be said that dead people fart. It needn’t be, but it can.

Arpad motions me to follow him up the path. He knows where a good example of the bloat stage can be found.

Ron is still down by the shed, effecting some sort of gratuitous lawn mower maintenance, determined to avoid the sights and smells beyond the gate. I call for him to join me. I feel the need for company, someone else who doesn’t see this sort of thing every day. Ron follows, looking at his sneakers. We pass a skeleton six feet seven inches tall and dressed in a red Harvard sweatshirt and sweatpants. Ron’s eyes stay on his shoes. We pass a woman whose sizable breasts have decomposed, leaving only the skins, like flattened bota bags upon her chest. Ron’s eyes stay on his shoes.

Bloat is most noticeable in the abdomen, Arpad is saying, where the largest numbers of bacteria are, but it happens in other bacterial hot spots, most notably the mouth and genitalia. “In the male, the penis and especially the testicles can become very large.”

“Like how large?” (Forgive me.)

“I don’t know. Large.”

“Softball large? Watermelon large?”

“Okay, softball.” Arpad Vass is a man with infinite reserves of patience, but we are scraping the bottom of the tank.

Arpad continues. Bacteria-generated gas bloats the lips and the tongue, the latter often to the point of making it protrude from the mouth: In real life as it is in cartoons. The eyes do not bloat because the liquid long ago leached out. They are gone. Xs. In real life as it is in cartoons.

Arpad stops and looks down. “That’s bloat.” Before us is a man with a torso greatly distended. It is of a circumference I more readily associate with livestock. As for the groin, it is difficult to tell what’s going on; insects cover the area, like something he is wearing. The face is similarly obscured. The larvae are two weeks older than their peers down the hill and much larger. Where before they had been grains of rice, here they are cooked rice. They live like rice, too, pressed together: a moist, solid entity.

If you lower your head to within a foot or two of an infested corpse (and this I truly don’t recommend), you can hear them feeding. Arpad pinpoints the sound: “Rice Krispies.” Ron frowns. Ron used to like Rice Krispies.

Bloat continues until something gives way. Usually it is the intestines.

Every now and then it is the torso itself. Arpad has never seen it, but he has heard it, twice. “A rending, ripping noise” is how he describes it.

Bloat is typically short-lived, perhaps a week and it’s over. The final stage, putrefaction and decay, lasts longest.

Putrefaction refers to the breaking down and gradual liquefaction of tissue by bacteria. It is going on during the bloat phase—for the gas that bloats a body is being created by the breakdown of tissue—but its effects are not yet obvious.

Arpad continues up the wooded slope. “This woman over here is farther along,” he says. That’s a nice way to say it. Dead people, unembalmed ones anyway, basically dissolve; they collapse and sink in upon themselves and eventually seep out onto the ground. Do you recall the Margaret Hamilton death scene in The Wizard of Oz ? (“I’m melting!”) Putrefaction is more or less a slowed-down version of this. The woman lies in a mud of her own making. Her torso appears sunken, its organs gone—leached out onto the ground around her.

The digestive organs and the lungs disintegrate first, for they are home to the greatest numbers of bacteria; the larger your work crew, the faster the building comes down. The brain is another early-departure organ.

“Because all the bacteria in the mouth chew through the palate,” explains Arpad. And because brains are soft and easy to eat. “The brain liquefies very quickly. It just pours out the ears and bubbles out the mouth.”

Up until about three weeks, Arpad says, remnants of organs can still be identified. “After that, it becomes like a soup in there.” Because he knew I was going to ask, Arpad adds, “Chicken soup. It’s yellow.”