Diener: A Novella

Of course with the loose skin of a floater, stretching the skin is not the problem. Most often the skin is too loose, and you have to take it in as though you were a tailor at Joseph A. Bank "taking in" a cheap suit.

You will need the technical prowess of a plastic surgeon to ensure that the stiches are fine enough that they will not be noticeable under the caked makeup (most deceased grandmas looks like nineteenth century whores at their open-casket funerals anyway). But a diener generally has to do a lot more sewing than a plastic surgeon does, so this is no problem. You then suture the skin over the scalp, face, neck, ribs, spine and crotch of the skeleton.

Take care to line up the nose and lip fragments. The eyes are less of a problem. You can pop them in later.

If you're lucky, the stiff will be a decapitation, and you will be able to pull the facial skin and scalp vertically off the beloved's neck and skull. Then when you're ready, you can pull the skin back over the skull and neck as if it were a ski mask (or should that be "terrorist mask" at this point in our cultural devolution?). If you're not lucky, you can always resort to a do-it-yourself decapitation. Most of us postmortem guardians have resorted to this trick at one time or another.

Also, if the deceased parts his hair in the middle as Comedy Central's Jon Stewart does, you've got to be careful to line up the front and back end of the part as best you can. This was a major problem for the Apaches. If you brought back a scalp that was parted in the middle, the tribe would generally not give you credit for it when it came time to count coup, as they would often claim that it was the scalp of a woman or an old man.

Your conditioning should also include speed training, which most American exercise programs do not. A runaway fully rejuvenated stiff (of which more later) can generally run a hundred meter dash in 15 seconds flat. If a reanimated corpse has a 40 meter head start, to catch up with it in 20 seconds, you're going to have to be able to run a hundred in just about eleven and a half seconds. Of course, you can do what our ancestors did with large prey and just run after it for hours, until it's spent. But if you let the stiff get too far out of the containment area, you may have a few witnesses to deal with in one way or the other. And you do not want the other. So if a fleet-footed stiff gets out, you are going to need to be the diener equivalent of Usain Bolt.

Of course, a reanimated floater doesn't get any further than she could have waddled if she were still in her prime. A lot of time, the sheer effort is sufficient to rip her back into two halves, given the sheer mass that must be contained by her skin, which was never designed to be a weight-bearing organ. Then you've got the right half and the left half of the floater crawling in different directions, each with just one arm and one leg (and one eye and half a motor cortex for that matter). Then you've got to grab each half by the ankle and drag it back down into the grave. This hardly ever happens, as only an idiot would rejuve a floater. There's just no upside with that, as the organs are waterlogged and partially vacuumed up. That's why there is basically no market for floater tissue, unless you count the skin fetishists, and most of them are probably living in the basements of their mothers' houses, with pockets no deeper than the funds required to purchase their next double meat Whopper with cheese and fried onion rings.

MARKETING YOUR FLOATERS

However, there are a few twisted skin connoisseurs out there who would give their right arm for a L-Z Boy recliner upholstered with pulsating skin that maintains a constant temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit through out the year. Fat chance of that trade. It's going cost you more than an arm and leg for such a chair, literally. You're going to have to spring for the floater, the whole floater and nothing but the floater (of course not counting the internal organs). Hell, we can make a whole sofa in addition to some scrawny-ass recliner out of a floater's skin.

Throw in a few muscles and ganglia and you've got yourself a matched set of massaging furniture. All you've got to got to do is untwist the E-Z open cap once a week, bleed some of the fluid out, and pour in a warmed quart of Carnation Instant Breakfast Essentials Complete Nutritional Drink (laced with stem cells of course, as discussed later). This is a small price to pay for a week of sensual pleasure and warmth (our dermal furniture covers come prepackaged with neural programs to ensure a Happy Ending whenever you crash face down on the couch). Your neighbors and friends may also enjoy a little ride on the couch once in a while. Be forewarned that some of these people may become upholstery-addicted, and it may be tough to keep them from becoming a nuisance. If this is the case, just give them a tall, cold glass of Shady Pines Amygdala Cola. This will induce a mild case of dermatophobia. In some cases this may become so strong your nuisance guests attempt to strip off their own skin with their fingers. If several such cases develop in your immediately vicinity, Shady Pines skin and neural grafts are DNA-scrambled, so that no suspicion with fall upon you or, Heaven help us, upon Shady Pines.

You will be amazed at how much the perpetually warm human skin of Shady Pines furniture will save on your utility bills. To save even more, you could get our Chloro-Sofa, which includes photosynthetic genes to extract energy from the electric lights you already use throughout the day. Using a variety of photosynthetic pigments, we can make your furniture any of the beautiful colors of fall leaves.

Many Shady Pines furniture purchasers soon find that they have no need for their current spouse or simply no longer have their current spouse. This too will cut down on your costs, unless of course your spouse is the primary breadwinner in your family. If so, Shady Pines upholstery may not be for you.

But I digress again.

If you cannot use the Dr. Denton approach described above, you will have to stitch the skin into gloves and booties around the beloved's skeleton fingers and toes. Be forewarned that the talus bones and the index metacarpals require precision work, especially if the deceased loved one will be expected to crawl his or her own way out of the grave under their own steam in the middle of the night and then run to report for duty at our very own underground abattoir, conveniently located right between the Our Lady of Uncounted Sorrows Hospital and our own humble Shady Pines Funeral Parlor. This practice literally saves us an arm and a leg on transportation costs and eliminates the questions that would be raised if we were to run hearses around town in the middle of the night.

The sewing of the gloves must be done very subtly, as many mourners in an open coffin ceremony will glad-hand the deceased as though they were politicians running for county commissioner and the stiff was a swing voter. Also, you do not want the skin to peel off the bones if one of the mourners gives the corpse one last high five in recognition of their high school football prowess (and you wouldn't believe the things that some of these grieving motherfuckers can do). That would be discomforting for all concerned, and might close down Shady Pines for as much as year before it could reopen under a new name (perhaps "Bones R Us?").

By now you may have already gathered that we directly market body parts to consumers, although we are careful not to mention their origins in our advertisements on Crazy Boris's Late Late Show of Horrors, which regularly features scenes of dismemberment and may not be suitable for younger viewers (or older viewers with more than three marbles still rattling around in their skulls). Hair and fingernails can be very profitably sold as rhinoceros horn, as both just consist of keratin. For that matter we often sell human cartilage as ground shark's fin. If we expand into pet funerals as I have long argued we should, we could market Great Dane testicles as tiger balls. Hell, we could convince many veterinarians to sell us fresh 'nads right out of the "fixing" process. That ought to drive the Chinese mad (not that they aren't already).

I know that a lot of pet owners continue to hang on to their "fixed" canine companions' discarded testicular orbs, apparently hoping that they may one day reunite Fido's body parts in a magnificent mausoleum and make him ready for the Great Resurrection that awaits us all on the Day of Judgment. (See Pope Francis' recent ruling that dogs can go to heaven. As for you cats, forgetta'bout it.)

But with the right coin, you can pry any mourner's gripping fingers off of their dear pet's extracted testicular orbs.

I'm pretty sure this traffic in body parts is one of the reasons we hear a lot of talk about moving the morgue at Our Lady of Uncounted Sorrows a little closer to the ORs. Who knows how many usable fresh organs we might be able to get our hands on if the walk was only 80 feet rather than the length of two football fields? It would be pretty easy to grease some starving surgical resident's green-rubber-sheaved palm to look the other way. Lot of money there, that's for sure. Hell they could even share in the profits, those poor bastards who have run up hundreds of thousands in medical school debt, while currently receiving the pay of a third-grade classroom teacher.

A few decades ago, scientists estimated the worth of a human body as less than a dollar. The good people at DataGenetics estimate that the market value of the atomic elements in a human body alone is $160. The even better people at the Finance Degree Center estimate the price for a human body and all its parts in the black market as $45 million. Pretty good profit margin I say (especially when we are sticking the stiff's beloved family with exorbitant funeral costs}. It's no wonder that few people make it from the morgue to the grave with their bodies intact.

In the old days, to a get a floater's body ready for the big show (i.e., funeral), all you needed to do was to fill the skin out nicely. If the floater's internal organs were pureed during the centrifugation process, we simply injected the organ sauce at appropriate places into the guest's body with an extra-jumbo hypodermic needle. However, this practice all too often results in a face that is too liquid for most mourners' tastes. We tried pureed rat meat, which would be killing two birds with one stone (i.e., health inspections and funereal aesthetics), but the results were not much better, and many mourners with fur allergies broke out in rashes and hives. This just led to more rumors about an unchecked murine infestation at Shady Pines.

Finally, some genius proposed using silicone instead of actual meat. However, the aesthetic results were no more favorable in inanimate corpses than they were for such luminaries as Michael Jackson, Cher, and the aforementioned honorary Kardashian Bruce Jenner. Also due to the viscosity of silicone, whenever a mourner pats the cherished loved one on the cheek, a rather noticeable pool of ripples passes over the countenance of the dear departed. When these waves are partially reflected off the cherished family member's skull and collarbone, a set of standing waves can form on the client's face. This can transform the skinny face of a timid accountant into a Neanderthal's mug of protruding brows, cheekbones and lips, to an extent that many of the dear departed's relatives and friends may question the identity or even the species of the deceased's mortal remains.

STEM CELLS TO THE RESCUE

Then some genius out there got the fancy idea of extracting a tissue sample from the loved one's cheeks or (more revoltingly) urethra, converting some of the cells into pluripotent stem cells and injecting them back into the patient. As the reader of this journal is no doubt aware, pluripotent stem cells are capable of giving rise to a variety of tissues and organs. These weren't just any pluripotent stem cells, but cells engineered to possess long flagella (like the wriggling tails of a human sperm or a tadpole) as well as additional mitochondria to provide extra energy (remember that these cells have to operate in a dead body and thus in the absence of oxygenated blood). These cells then migrate throughout the body and differentiate into new cells appropriate for their location (e.g., neurons for the stem cells reaching the brain, blood cells in the bone marrow, muscle cells in the biceps, and skin cells in the face).

These wandering stem cells were a spectacular success, even though most people now regard them as the seed of the Devil himself. When injected properly, they colonize the loved one's entire body, bringing a rosy glow to the departed's cheeks, filling out the loved one's face, pumping up the honored guest's muscles, in many cases bringing a smile to the beloved corpse's countenance that surpasses the usual death rictus popularized by the twice-aforementioned honorary Kardashian Bruce Jenner.

These stem cells even regenerate the subject's internal organs. They also raise the corpse's temperature, sometimes to a disconcerting degree. Mourners are sometimes shocked by the relative warmth of the skin of these soon-to-be Meet St. Peter contestants. We just tell them that we keep the cadaver in a specially-heated chamber to keep the loved one's flesh fresh. Somehow most of them accept this explanation, although any child past the age of three knows that the best way to achieve this is to freeze the meat and then reheat it in body-sized microwave. By the way, don't try this at home, but if you do, please use the low setting. You would not like the results if you use a higher setting (just think of the movie Gremlins).

Another thing you have to watch out for is corpse desiccation or at the very least dry, flaky skin and chapped lips. Over the counter remedies such as Chapstick and skin moisturizers are powerless to heal the heartbreak of postmortem psoriasis and seborrhea that results from the deceased's failure to drink and the resulting dehydration. The dead are notoriously stubborn and will aggravatingly refuse water even when it is politely offered to them.

You do not want the loved one falling apart into dust like a poorly-excavated mummy of some Egyptian pharaoh when a dear guest pats it on the cheek or administers an old-fashioned back slap in congratulations to the semi-liquidified loved one for being in the vanguard of departure from this often troubling mortal realm.

There are even cases on record where a psychotic mourner will try to administer the Heimlich maneuver one last time in a futile last-ditch attempt to dislodge that pesky chicken bone that got stuck in obese Grandma's rapidly devouring gizzard. Hell, some rookie coroner has probably already mounted and hung said bone as a trophy on his office wall. However, generally such a wet-behind-the-ears medical examiner will quickly grow jaded at such minor demonstrations of his medical acumen and perspicacity (I know these words mean the same thing, but I rarely get to use them in view of the minimal academic skills of millennial physicians). A novice medical examiner will gradually learn to bide his time and wait for trophies of more major accomplishments (e.g., the skull that bears the Operating Thetan Tom Cruise's still-glistening and grinning teeth).

Thus, there is no way to bring Granny back. (Or is there? Read on.)

In view of most corpses' impolite refusal to accept the complexion-saving gift of water, the only way to hydrate such a stiff is to get out the old OXO turkey baster, shove it down the loved one's throat and squeeze the bulb as hard as you can. This will get the water down the protesting client's esophagus, but even that is not sufficient to ensure that patient's extremities get hydrated. That's why we usually have to get out a vacuum cleaner, although they don't usually call it that but rather a "PROBE" (which stands for Post-Rectal Offal and Bowel Extraction" device). Then you shove it up the dear one's darkest and hopefully virgin passage and hit the "High" button. This will totally hoover out the contents of the client's stomach, ileum and colon. This is just like a refreshing new age colonic cleansing at a health spa for the patient, although for us dieners located at the other end of the process, the results are somewhat less spa-like. A PROBE treatment will also pull the water through the stomach and down through the lower digestive tract, which keeps the patient's body hydrated enough to support the regeneration process. Also, the whipping of the stem cells' flagella can propel them more effectively in the newly fluid environment. Many patients' hearts are already slowly beating at this point.

SHOW ME THE MONEY

By now you have surely guessed that the main reason for these maneuvers is to keep the cherished one's organs fresh and alive so that they will get top dollar on the transplant black market. As they say in our business, money talks, while religious bullshit walks. Of course, most of us dieners never see the money, aside from our raised hourly rates, which are basically "hush money," as we all had to sign nondisclosure agreements in order to be eligible for the higher pay.

We can harvest the organs right after the client's death or even after they have been interred. Some of them are still warm a full seven days after burial.

There is even sporadic evidence that we are doing much more than just keeping their organs healthy, viable and warm.

The first thing we ever heard about a strange report regarding one of our own guests was the time that the dear deceased grandfather of three children, Happenstance E. Collins, ripped out a wicked fart just before Father John O'Malley closed his coffin door for the procession over to the Happy Endings Graveyard. The stench was enough that many mourners hightailed it for the olfactory sanctuary of their own cars and the procession to the graveyard, much to the consternation of the owners of the Shady Pines' Relics of the Saints Gift Store and Mausoleum.

And gases are by no means the only only thing the dead can expel from their bodies. Happenstance Collins' exhibition of almost superhuman flatulence was poor timing for sure, but such events are by no means unusual. Corpses often release trapped gases, usually in the form of belches that would repel even the most jaded and hard-nosed of police cadaver dogs. Sometimes they will even speak a word or two before collapsing back into the cadaver file drawer or coffin. Sometimes they are capable of much more complex behavior. In fact, a fair number of them prove to be alive and crying out for someone, anyone, to get them out of the cadaver drawer. I can't begin to tell you how many living people I have helped out of cadaver drawers. I still get Christmas cards from many of them.

No one is likely to forget the projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea of the Reverend Loquacious P. Diddy, as he was being put to rest in his own church down in Hoochiekoochie Parrish just outside of New Orleans back in '09. Almost every pane of the stained glass windows in the good Reverend's church had to be precisely replaced after the Reverend's Guinness-certified record-breaking act of human expulsion.

As to be expected, many of the non-deceased incontinent and acid-reflex-plagued contestants protested loudly to the Guinness committee that the competition should be restricted to the living. However the Reverend Loquacious P. Diddy's living descendants pleaded that the man of cloth deserved this final honor, especially considering the fact that he was generally excoriated in the media after his followers sold their every last possession in order to join the Reverend in his vigil on Mount Jambalaya, where the righteous man of cloth had proclaimed that the world would be destroyed by an immense, demonic entity taking the form of a resurrected roadkill armadillo who would devour the world to avenge for mankind's pollution of the Earth, unless his churchly minions demonstrated the same faith in God in that a Labrador retriever invests in his psychopathic owner.