An exact replica of a figment of my imagination: a memoir by Elizabeth McCracken

At first there was nothing, and then the most funereal person I have ever seen in my life walked by, a Gallic Boris Karloff. He wore a white dress shirt. His shoulders had a sorrowful hunch. His dark overhanging eyebrows looked carved from granite, like tombstones, monuments to worry. Of course he had something to do with the morgue: he couldn’t have gone into anything but a funerary profession. Maybe this was the family face, and the family business, and who could say whether it was evolution or destiny or an acceptance that one’s face is one’s fortune, or misfortune.
    “That’s the screws,” said Edward.
    “What?”
    “That’s the sound of them screwing the lid down,” and then I could hear the dim sound of a turning power tool. That was good. It meant we didn’t have to wait much longer.
    Of course Boris Karloff turned out to be the hearse driver. I couldn’t understand a single word of his French, he mumbled so apologetically. The hearse was a plainish station wagon. He gave directions to the cemetery. Edward seemed to understand him.
    We followed the car, a threadbare funeral procession. At every rotary the cemetery was marked, but we checked the map anyhow. What could be worse than to lose sight of our boy now?
    In the middle of the cemetery, Boris Karloff pulled up in front of a building that housed both the crematorium and a few chapels for funerals. He shook our hands and directed us inside. The building had the timeless feel of an institutional edifice constructed in good taste, with no heart. It might have been erected in 1952 or 1977 or 2005. The funeral director greeted us. We said our name, we said we were the R-Vays, and he indicated with his hand the direction to walk.
    At every turn of the hallway was a sign with the international line drawing of a martini glass, the kind that indicates airport cocktail lounges, underscored with an arrow, though if you followed them you got only as far as a vending machine for bottled water. There was another funeral going on that day, for a grown-up, and we walked against the current of mourners who seemed to be taking it all very well.
    The director brought us into our chapel.
    I am sorry, he said, for the size of the room, but it is all we have.
    The size of the room was vast, appropriate for the service of someone very famous, or very friendly, or very old, someone who could attract mourner after mourner. Surely they should have put the other funeral here, I thought, but maybe they weighed the possibilities and decided: to put fifty people in a room meant for two hundred is sadder than putting two people there.
    This way, said the funeral director, and he brought us to the front, where the casket had been set on a cabinet. We had seen the casket only in a catalog at the funeral home by the hospital. The director said, I will leave you for a moment.
    “It’s too big,” I said when he’d gone.
    “I know,” said Edward, looking at the room yawning out behind us. It upset him. “If I were my father, I’d complain — ”
    But I’d meant the casket. A brass plate had been fixed to the top: Pudding Harvey, 2006 . I wondered how caskets came. I mean how they were sized. We’d chosen the cheapest casket, the cheapest urn. Now we touched the wood very tentatively. What age was this meant for? For a child, surely, not a baby, and it made me sad that he, who had so little to his name, was lying inside such a big, empty, dark space. I didn’t like to think of where he was in there, at the top, at the bottom, but I wondered. It should have fit him.
    It would be burned too, of course, with the brass plate.
    Again we had to nod at a French stranger and say, Yes, that’s fine, you may carry him away now. The cremation itself would take some time. We sat outside at a distance from the building and smoked cigarettes. After a while we realized we were sitting in the patch of land reserved for the scattering of remains, and we moved. At another time in our lives we