Elegy Hotel
They gave bereavement coordinators like me studio apartments on the top floors of the elegy hotels. Some of my colleagues had naive ideas about saving the world, but really we were just glorified bellhops for the mountains of Arctic plague victims awaiting cremation, for the families who wanted to curl up in a suite beside the corpses of their loved ones and heal. On any given day, the deceased from local hospitals lined the basement halls in biohazard bags, waiting to go through the three-part preservation process: sterilization, embalming, and our antibacterial plasticizing treatment. This bought families time to say goodbye while our crematoriums struggled to keep up with the demand. The job wasn’t rocket science and the pay didn’t suck if you could stomach it. For the nearly three years since the elegy hotels opened and cornered the funerary market, I had kept my head down, barely speaking about my past, carting bodies from the California king beds to the oven. But three months ago, my golden-boy science-fair brother showed up in the hotel lobby to invite me to dinner and to discuss our mother. I assumed his plan was to guilt me into coming home.
My mom and brother were already waiting when I arrived at the Lucky Fin on Fisherman’s Wharf, one of the last seafood places still open in San Francisco. Each table was contained inside its own little plastic bubble latticed with fairy lights, a throwback to earlier plague days, the fear that it was airborne. Many public spaces now kept these around for the ambiance.
“Here’s my other boy,” my mom said as I entered the bubble. She had a breathing tube running across her nose and wheezed after she spoke. Her frail skin hung from her frame like a shawl.
“It’s good to see you, Mom,” I said.
I remembered this same pinched look too well, the way she’d bite her lip when my father yelled at me over dinner as a teenager. I’m just disappointed. We’re trying to help you, she’d say after lecturing me for my grades or for getting into fights. She’d tell my father to let it go, that I knew what I’d done, though sometimes, for weeks afterward, she’d float through the house, avoiding me, handing me my dinner without a word.
“And what will the great Dr. Bryan Yamato be having this evening?” I asked my brother as I sat down. He glared at me for a moment before handing me a menu.
“The abalone can’t be beat here,” he said. “This place is famous for it.”
I ordered the halibut with summer squash, a Manhattan, and took the last remaining oyster on the table while my brother stalled, sharing the details about the renovations on his house in Vegas, where Mom had been living the past couple of years, and some science project of his having to do with black holes that seemed wholly superfluous considering the world was being sucked up into its own asshole. Oh, and did I know his daughter, Petal, had just started junior high and was learning to ride a horse? And that his son, Peter, was learning how to play the electric guitar? No, of course I didn’t.
“And Dennis, you’re working at one of those death hotels now,” Bryan said. “Isn’t that right?”
“Few years now. They don’t have employee of the month or anything, no bonuses or stock options, but I’m doing okay. I’m the manager of two floors.” Of course, the floors in my charge, the econo-rest rooms, had never been renovated and still retained the building’s faux-Victorian aesthetic. Even in a hotel for the dead, life gave me scraps. Floral wallpaper peeled at the corners, a large water stain skirted the carpet of the broken ice machine, a growing colony of gum wrappers dotted the hall.
“Manager?” my mom said incredulously.
“Yep.”
“And what do you do, exactly?” Bryan asked.
“A little of everything, really. Part host, part mortician, part concierge. I take care of our customers’ needs,” I said. “Including the dead ones.” In the lobby of the hotel there’s a rack of literature—brochures and books on the grieving process, the services we and our affiliates provide. The covers are always ill-chosen and decades-old stock photos: A few depict people strolling through Golden Gate Park, laughing at god knows what. One just has a man in a neon tracksuit holding a Walkman over his head as if in victory. Life will go on. Room service is available until midnight. Outside delivery and catering should be arranged with Golden Dragon or Buca di Beppo. Dial 9 for maid service. Dial 8 for the on-call mortician. I always hide a bottle of Jim Beam and an emergency joint in the dryer of a defunct laundry room, so I can sneak away when the questions of the bereaved become too much— Excuse me, but my husband seems to be leaking. Does the hotel have erotic films for rent? But how can you be sure my sister isn’t contagious anymore? Of course, at the lower price point, I didn’t have it half as bad as the other floor managers with their bougie customers. Before the state started offering economy packages at a discount, finding bodies in the bay or in Golden Gate Park wasn’t uncommon. Most people were happy to be able to responsibly dispose of their loved ones at all.