Glue the eyes shut.
That’s what I do first. If not, you’ll always see them.
I was moving his body when I heard loud, cracking sounds from his neck, like dry twigs breaking off the stem of a tree. Then his eyes popped open. Nearly gave me a heart attack, that one. Suicide, they’d told me. I wonder what drove him to kill himself. I don’t get many who die by suicide.
If you ask me what I do for a living, I’ll tell you I make people look good, better even; and that’s not a lie. I think of myself as a magician. I’m good at my job. No one tells me otherwise. My subjects would, if they could. But they can’t. The day they do will be my last day doing this job. The next time you see me, I will be at the refuse dump under the bridge in Surulere, eating refuse, muttering incoherent words, my body blackened from dirt and the sun, and my clothing – if I’m wearing any – torn and filthy.
I sometimes think about that. When you do what I do, you think about many things. You think about how you landed in the beauty industry, you think about the many faces you see, frozen like a mask, a lot of that. Beauty industry. I coined that term when a girl came in here. She was about five, maybe six. About the same age my sister was the last time I saw her four years ago. The girl had scars on her body from razor slashes her step-sister left on her. When her mother saw her later, she placed her hand on my shoulder and cried. I hoped her daughter looked better.
Besides, the little girl didn’t complain. I told you I was good at my job, didn’t I?
If you ask me how people look when they’re dead, I would tell you the only difference is in their fingernails. That’s it. Their hands. It’s the only difference between the rich and the poor.
The nails, they never lie. The neatly clipped, buffed, and short ones tell you how rich the person was. Proof of hands that never had to shovel away dirt from their front door or lift head pans on construction sites. Hands whose labour amounted to signing papers with fountain pens, curling around champagne flutes, and perhaps even stroking a dog or a cat, or both. Hands acquainted with the smooth feel of steering wheels, not the rough, sun-scorched handles of a wheelbarrow.
But the mask never lies too. There’s a mask that the bodies wear when they bring them in. The masks on their faces all look the same. That’s why I can’t describe what each of them looks like. They all look the same. I’ve seen that mask too many times not to recognise it.
Of course, I dream about them. But not in that creepy way you’d think. I dream of the bodies not any more than a swimmer dreams of swimming or a pilot dreams of floating in the air. Some of them I remember, certainly. When I first started this job, some victims made my feelings twist this way and that, making me wish I could have prevented their deaths. They were the ones I remembered for the longest. The ones that made me buy some ogogoro just so I could sleep and not wake in the middle of the night. But not anymore. They’re just bodies to me. Not someone’s dad, or someone’s wife of twenty-something years, or an iconic founder of something I don’t know, or care much about. I no longer have to leave the light on when I sleep. I sleep just fine. I’m not heartless, though. Some of them still tear me up inside. They once brought in a family that died in a fire. Their burnt bodies looked like dancers caught in a jerky dance they would never get out of, like they were caught when the music stopped. I haven’t eaten smoked fish since then. Never have, probably never will. Their burnt bodies reminded me of smoked fish you see those women sell in Ketu, their soot-blackened bodies scaly and twisted.
It’s not all that bad though. I once made a boy look better, his mother crying and holding me like I’d raised him from the dead. “He looks so peaceful, I can almost see him in the Lord’s hands,” she’d said. For her sake, I hope he made it there.
I don’t want to embalm bodies forever. But I can’t leave. Death has no schedule. It shows up when you least expect it. There’s always someone who needs beautifying, and not on a 9-5 schedule too. They’re trapped in death’s mask, and I’m right there with them. But I’m alive. Yet, I’m there. With them.
But I don’t want to keep doing this job. It’s no fun being around people who won’t talk back to me or my neighbours looking at me like I’ve grown a second head. It’s like they think I’m death’s messenger or something. What I do isn’t exactly what my neighbours want to hear after long, weary days when they gather on the long benches and drink ogogoro from Iya Moshood’s shop. What I would say isn’t what they would like to hear. I can’t blame them. But Sileola understands. We often sit at the back of the hospital on our break and smoke cigarettes. She tells me the craziest things about her patients. I tell her about my bodies. We’re a crazy pair, I tell you. One who preserves life and one who preserves death.
“We should be enemies then,” she said, laughing.
“Enemies?” I tap my cigarette ash into a mug. “Think about it. We’re a team.”
She doesn’t mind that I smoke. She does too, on occasion. She says she started when reading anatomy in medical school got too tasking for her. I don’t know about any of that. I started this job when old Dr James didn’t have an assistant and I was loafing about in the hospital, doing odd jobs until I took over when he went back home to his family in the East.
She reflected on it for a moment. “In a way, we are.”
One day I’ll be on someone’s gurney. I wonder how I’ll look like. I hope they avoid my rookie mistake and close my eyes first.
Sometimes I picture random people lying prone, their bodies rigid, and their eyes closed in death’s mask. I can’t help it. It comes to me the way you blink your eyes. Maybe I’ve been doing this job for too long. I stumbled into it, anyway. Just like the way people stumble into death. I can’t stumble out, for sure. I’ll have to leave of my own accord. But I like the peace and quiet here. The bodies never complain, never talk back, never have any requests. I watched Shawshank Redemption and I saw Brooks Hatlen hang himself a few weeks after struggling to live outside of a prison. Institutionalized, that was the word used to describe his frame of mind. I guess you can say the same for me. I’ve grown so accustomed to death’s stillness; I can’t stand life’s chatter. I couldn’t stand Oyeyemi’s babble. She always wanted to talk all the time. She said I was too quiet for her. And that I stared into space too much, like I was seeing ghosts. When she couldn’t stand it, she threatened to chop off my hands if I brought them near her body again. People watch too many horror movies, I tell you. That’s why my neighbour once asked me if a body ever got up to talk to me. It’s like asking a banker if a huge pile of money glows and sparkles when it’s left alone in the vault. It’s also why Iya Moshood never allows her son to receive the biscuits and change I squeezed in his hands. I’ve stopped trying to give him anything.
I won’t say I hate my job. After all, it keeps me fed and puts a roof over my head. I won’t say I hate it, even though it chased my girlfriend away. She blamed everything on my job. I wouldn’t blame her. If I had a kid, I wouldn’t want her to marry a man who does what I do too. I wouldn’t want her to be with a man who had to drink on some nights because he can’t fall asleep, or one who spends his days being so close to death.
But there are some days I hate. Isn’t that just like any other job? I hate the days I have to dress people who were killed because they couldn’t mind their business well enough from one insanity that happened between area boys in the streets. Or the days I see people that suffered stab wounds from their spouses. The babies are the worst. The stillborns and the toddlers – measles, pneumonia, you name it. Sometimes I’m happy they ran right back to heaven and won’t have to do what I do. Or deal with parents who treated them like chores.
When you do what I do, you think of the many ways people end up here for me to beautify. I’ve seen it all. You name it – old age, disease, car accidents, domestic murder, even a few suicides. There was a woman who dashed in here when her husband died. A really pretty lady, the kind that could make you consider parting with both your legs to be with her. She beat on her husband’s chest as if trying to wake him up, her cries giving voice to her anguish.
Two weeks later, Dr Sileola told me he was poisoned.
By his wife.
Sometimes I chuckle when I think about how much death forms a part of my life. It’s an irony, isn’t it? Or a paradox. I can’t remember which. I dropped out of school the night my father clutched his chest one evening, the veins on his face standing at attention like soldiers on a parade ground, trying to force out a weak cry that never made it past his throat. When the rent got too expensive for my mother, she took my sister and went down to Mokola to stay with her family. I only see them every other Christmas. I spent a while roaming about Lagos doing odd jobs until I took this job several years back.
That little girl with razor slashes on her body reminded me of my sister. The last two times I went to Mokola, I didn’t see her. She was away at boarding school. I want to see her again before she gets too grown-up for me to recognise easily. And see my mother before she ends up in a beauty clinic too.
I’ll have to leave this job.
I’m sure I’ll find something similar in Mokola.
Like I said, people always need me.
