by Vincent Lam
“At first it was Karl’s hand on my knee as he explained the periodic table. I didn’t think much of it, although it felt strange—he’s my cousin, after all.”
When she wrote her first perfect exam paper and showed it to Karl before showing her father, he pecked his lips on hers. It was brief initially, but the congratulatory kisses became longer and slower. In the wetness of lips, Ming could see Karl’s weakness in his desire, and began to enjoy this power at the same time that she began to enjoy the kisses. Physical pleasure did not do away with her habit of rinsing and spitting ten times (she counted) immediately after Karl’s departure, or the “letters to self” detailing why she was a filthy slut. She discarded these in the garbage at the bus stop on her way to school. One afternoon before she wrote her entrance exams for Dunning Hall Girls’ Academy, Karl told Ming that he was busy, and might not be able to tutor anymore. Terrified of losing her new academic success, Ming pleaded with him to make time for her, and he agreed to come over that afternoon. She had begun to pretend while they were kissing that they weren’t really cousins, that she was adopted, or he was. That day, she didn’t stop his hand when it slid up her leg, underwear tight at the waist with his strong hand pulling on it. Although this was frightening, she was more scared of losing him, and she liked it that he fumbled, that he wasn’t sure where to go. Later, when he slid the condom off, it looked exactly like a snake shedding its skin. Only then did it occur to her that he had been prepared, that he had brought a rubber. Ming told her parents that she wanted to become a doctor, which was also Karl’s ambition. Pleased, they doubled their severity in urging her to study.
Karl was accepted into medicine in his third year of biology. To celebrate, there was a twelve-course family banquet, the pan-fried lobsters sizzling and turning on the Lazy Susan. Ming’s uncle proclaimed a generation of success, with Ming as the next doctor. She learned of Karl’s failed second-year application from his sister, who whispered of this shame to her. Karl was a whirlpool of family approval whom Ming increasingly feared and hoped to imitate. He dated, and she was jealous. He told her that what they had between them was a special thing, and she tried to believe this.
In Ming’s last year of high school, Karl went away for a month of rural training, and Ming felt cleaner and lighter. She aced chemistry without his help. When he returned, Ming told him that she didn’t need his tutoring anymore. Karl threatened that he could influence her medical school application. He said it with such bravado that she recognized that this was not the first of his lies. The study sessions ended.
Now, Karl was doing his surgical residency in Toronto, and they avoided each other at family gatherings. He had put his hand on her breast once this year, in an upstairs hallway during a birthday party, and she had threatened to scream.
It was four-fifteen in the morning.
She said, “You thought I was so perfect.”
“You seem to have everything under such control.”
“I cultivate that notion. I used to stand in front of the mirror and call myself slut, bitch. Not out loud—I was afraid someone would hear, so I mouthed the words. I felt like I deserved to be called names. Then Karl told me how good I was when we did what he liked, and when I brought home my grades my parents were happy and proud.”
“You were a kid. How could you know what to do?”
“That idea should absolve me, except it also takes something away. I looked forward to seeing him, although he was my nightmare. I got stuck. If I don’t recognize that I enjoyed certain things, even the sex, then I was a stupid lump. No. I was there and made decisions, but was I coerced? Of course. I got things, but only some of them were what I asked for. These thoughts go round and round. You know how I distract myself? I study. Every last little detail, and it fills my head. Karl taught me how to study for marks—how to write all these stupid tests—and now I forget myself by stuffing my head full.”
There was quiet, and then after a little while Fitzgerald said, “You know I love you.” Again silence, and then, “I might as well say it.”
“It may be the same for me, but I’m afraid of it.”
At seven in the morning, when she woke up, Ming realized that she had not asked Fitzgerald whether he was coming to Toronto. Ming’s father delivered her to the train station, the long line of travellers snaking under the black maze of girders. She saw Fitzgerald buying a ticket at the booth. Her father, for whom Fitzgerald was an invisible telephone threat, was oblivious as Fitz walked past them toward the end of the line. At the platform, Ming’s father squeezed her and told her how much honour she would bring to the family if she succeeded. Ming boarded, and sat alone until she had waved her father goodbye. Only then did she find Fitzgerald. At nine-thirty, the soft clanking rhythm of the iron wheels on the joints of the track came quicker and closer as the train escaped Ottawa’s southern suburbs. Exhausted from the sleepless night, Ming grasped Fitzgerald’s hand, and rested her head in the cleft between his shoulder and chest, amazed at the way the sides of their bodies fit together. It was a physical relief for them to touch. He kissed the top of her head and, as she fell asleep, Ming breathed in deeply this sweetly unfamiliar warmth.
TAKE ALL OF MURPHY
THE THREE STUDENTS STOOD BESIDE THE WRAPPED body lying on the metal table. They all wore clean, new laboratory coats that still had creases down the arms and over the breast pockets from being folded and stacked in a box. These white coats were the same size, even though the wearers were of varying build. All three medical students were size medium, but differently framed. Ming had her cuffs rolled up twice.
They had come in from the hot early afternoon of an autumn day, a remnant of summer. They had entered the basement by an unmarked inner staircase, and then approached the lab through a plain, combination-locked door. There were fourteen dissection rooms, eight tables per room, three students assigned per table, checking the tags to find their cadaver, whispering and shuffling like white-coated ghosts in the basement anatomy lab. No windows. Instead, a dry fluorescent light flattened every surface.
“You want to go first?” asked Ming.
“I don’t mind,” said Sri.
“Me neither,” said Chen, holding the blade hesitantly between his thumb and second and third fingers.
“Well, to me, it doesn’t matter,” said Ming. “What about you?” she asked, turning to Sri. When he paused, she said, “If it’s a problem for you I’ll start the cutting.”
To Sri, Ming seemed both overly eager and fearful regarding the task, and Sri did not want their dissection to begin with this mix of emotions. Sri felt only fear, which he believed was a better way to begin this undertaking, and so he said, “I’ll start.” He gripped the blade handle firmly.
“Not if you don’t want to,” said Chen, seeing Sri’s discomfort. “I can.”
“I’ll start.” Sri shifted closer.
That morning, they had been briefed in the lecture theatre by Dean Cortina: “A few of you might be upset initially. You may temporarily excuse yourselves if necessary. In any case, I would rather you be a bit emotional than, shall we say, overly cavalier. Keep in mind that distasteful incidents regarding cadavers have, in the past, resulted in expulsion.”
She reminded them that there was to be no eating or drinking in the dissection rooms, although snacks could be consumed in the anatomy museum as long as it was kept tidy.
“I think it’s easier if you hold it like a pen,” said Ming. When Sri said nothing, she added, “All I’m saying is that if you hold it like a…. Well, never mind, suit yourself of course, it’s only that—”
“Just let me do it,” said Sri. “Let me stand there.” He moved to stand where Ming was, without waiting for her to make way. She shifted, avoiding collision. Ming and Chen were quiet.
Sri began to cut the cotton wrap, a stringy damp net, discoloured yellow in its folds. It smelled tough. First he cut downward like when you lean with the first finger on a boned meat. This dented it, but the fabric was swelli
ng inwards instead of giving. He turned the scalpel upward, and lifted the edge of the fabric to slip the blade beneath it. He sawed back and forth, and the threads twisted when severed.
“What about scissors?” whispered Chen.
Dr. Harrison, their anatomy demonstrator, appeared at their table, congratulated them upon entering the study of medicine, and said, “This fine cadaver is your first patient. Dignity and decorum are crucial. You must be mindful of this gift you are given, and treat your patient nobly.” He paused. “Nobility. You may give him…or her?” Harrison checked the tag. “Ah, him, a name if you like. Or not. That’s up to you. No frivolous names. Questions? No? Very well. Continue, then.” All of this he managed to say with his hands crossed neatly in front of himself, and then he was at the next table, nodding seriously.
The fabric now open, Ming took scissors and cut it wider in a quick, impatient motion, spreading the fabric up to the neck and then down to the navel. The damp skin of the cadaver’s chest was a shocking beige within the yellowed fabric.
“There,” said Ming.
“Are you going to do it?” said Sri, not offering the scalpel. He hadn’t moved, and she had leaned across him to open the swath of cloth.
“I was just trying to help, you know, get things going.”
“I already said I’ll do it.”
“As you prefer.”
Sri now held the scalpel like a pen. He looked at the manual. The manual was very particular, and Sri wanted to follow it with clarity. The incision should begin at the top of the sternum, extend downward to the xiphoid. A central incision, it read. Ming opened the fabric, pulled it to either side, the nipples purple on the rubber-cold skin. Still not moving, Sri stared at the manual’s exact instructions. There was a dotted line drawn from the top of the sternum in the illustration, an arrow pointing toward the navel but stopping short of it. Sri straightened the veil, covered the nipples. He gripped the scalpel hard, like a dull pencil.
“Right down the middle,” said Ming. “Like a zipper. But if you’re going to take forever—”
Sri grabbed the scalpel handle like a stick and buried the short, triangular blade in the midline of the chest. Flesh gripped the blade, and through the handle Sri felt its texture—thick and chalky. Steel scraping on sternum. Sri thought of a beach—of writing with a stick in hard sand thrown halfway up from the tide, with the water not far away. Through his knuckles, Sri felt fibres tearing. The cadaver’s flesh pulled hard at him now. Halfway there. It ripped at Sri, to cut this skin. He tore it, forced his way through. He pulled open the cotton shroud. This old, wrung-out chest with small lopsided man-breasts. Above the left nipple were four tattooed hearts in purple, the shape of the designs twisted by the skin’s movement through its years. A clean, jagged tear through the centre—the sternum white beneath. Sri was amazed by the pale ivory of this man’s bone.
The three of them stood erect at the shining cold table. The man now lay slightly unwrapped. The cloths wound around themselves up and over his neck, then tenderly wrapped the face. They had been told the heads would all be shaved. The table was indented, and the indentation traced down to a hole between the feet. The hole opened into a spout over a bucket so fluids could escape as they ran down the table. On the steel was the man-form in soaked cloth. His chest was gashed now. The chest was not shaved but thick with cold hair. Hair parted now by one crooked stabbing cut that peeled open the front.
“Good job, Sri,” said Chen.
“Feels funny.”
“I guess it’s my turn.”
There were eight dissection tables in the room. Whispers shuddered up from the floor as the familiar touch of skin became distorted. One hushed voice: Haven’t we all seen bodies before? At another table, one student held the cloth up while the other two cut at it. All of the students wore new lab coats, which they had been told they would need to discard once the dissection was done.
One day when Chen was in Dean Cortina’s office to discuss student loans, she said to him, “I remember my dissection group. Oh, what year, I don’t want to tell you. I remember some comments that were made…regarding dissection material. You see, in my time it was all people from the jails or found dead in fights or ditches. No identification and so forth. What you would call bad people. Yours are different, all volunteers. Elderly, upstanding citizens mostly. Ours were young people with fast lifestyles. Virile, some might say. Although I guess it’s really no different once they’re cadavers.
“Anyhow. I remember some guy saying, ‘Wow look at this one, what a broad.’ I didn’t like that, you know, I didn’t think it was right. On the other hand, I remember we dissected a big man. Muscular, built, and someone called him an ox…as if to say what a powerful man, a big strong man. So they called him an ox. Vernacular to be sure, but it was out of respect and to say he must have been impressive. I thought that was all right. I didn’t like someone saying ‘what a broad,’ though. What was he looking at? That sort of sexual appeal was not the right way to think. I spoke up, oh certainly I did, I said to this guy who was laughing, ‘You wouldn’t like a man calling your sister a broad.’ He was angry. He was pissed off and he said, ‘My sister is alive so shut up.’”
Dean Cortina laughed. “So I said, ‘It’s not cool to call your sister a broad because she’s alive?’ Boy, he was upset.”
Chen didn’t know quite how to respond, so he agreed in a polite and very general way, and left without resolving the issue of his student loan.
On the day the ribs were cut to get at the organs, the room shrieked with hand-held rotary saws. Bone dust—it was in your hair, on your lips afterwards.
“Smells like barbecue,” shouted Ming.
Sri leaned off the saw, held it, still buzzing, in front of him, and regarded Ming as if amazed at her. As if about to speak. Instead, he diverted his eyes from her and said, “Where’s the manual?”
Chen walked out quickly, his hand over his mouth, almost running. When he came back he was red and wet in the face, his hair pushed back and damp. “I’m fine. Are you finished cutting?”
The chest opened to show the heart’s chambers, where the great vessels now lay at rest. These sinuous vessels coursed to the lungs, and splayed into the organs and limbs. The lungs were fringed with the gritty black of tobacco.
“Aren’t there people who fill their dead with stones,” murmured Chen, “and sink them to the bottom of the sea?”
“You’re thinking of concrete boots. Gangsters did that.” Ming didn’t look up as she peeled away a strip of fat.
“No, after they die naturally. As a burial ceremony. They take out the heart and lungs and fill this,” he patted the inside wall of the chest, “with stones so the body sinks.”
“What do they do with the organs?” asked Ming.
“I can’t remember that part. Who are they?” He turned to Sri.
Ming also turned to Sri, “Do your people do that?”
“We burn them.”
“Must smell,” said Ming.
“What do you think?”
“I guess it smells. Like cutting bone. Like—” she laughed, “forget it.”
Sri said little for the rest of the lab time, and his quietness spilled uncomfortably over the other two, so that all three worked in a thick silence for the rest of the day. Cutting through layers, spreading tissue, saying only what was necessary.
Sri changed all of his clothing at the lab. Many people kept a shirt or coveralls in their lockers for dissection, but Sri changed everything—his underwear, his socks—in the men’s room. Always in a stall, preferably with no one else in the washroom. That day, he heard footsteps come into the bathroom a moment after he had taken off his shirt. He kept still, a reflex. The footsteps were not followed by running water, or the hissing of urine on porcelain. He waited.
“Uh—Sri? Is that you, Sri?” It was Chen.
A pause. “Yeah.”
“You’re cool, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Great. I�
��m glad. Ming’s got a tough exterior. Right? All bluff, you can see that.”
“I said I’m cool.”
“I’ll see you, then.”
No footsteps.
Sri crossed his arms, his naked chest prickling in the concrete block basement. “It’s fine, Chen. Thanks for asking.”
“Right. See you.”
Footsteps, the squeaky door.
When they started the dissections, there were bright mornings to come in from, and warm afternoons to go out to after the day’s work. As the weeks passed, they entered the basement on cooler mornings with a hesitant light, and departed into a fading golden afternoon. The leaves swelled with colour until they became too heavy with the intensity of reds and oranges and fell to the ground. Each day, more human anatomy was exposed, more of the organs lifted from their shy hiding places into their first glimpse of light. It was as if the actual daytime no longer existed. Night was just ending as the students arrived in the morning, just beginning as they left. The daytime of sun had been replaced by the fluorescent-bathed, whitewashed-concrete daylight of the basement, as the inverted parts of bodies were given belated and temporary glimpses of light.
Sri proposed that they name their cadaver Murphy. A dignified but comfortable name, he argued. Ming refused to use any name. Chen took neither side, suggested that each do as they please. Sri referred to “Murphy’s aorta, Murphy’s kidneys.” Ming made a point of saying “the cadaver’s aorta, the cadaver’s kidneys.”
Beneath the shield of diaphragm, the liver and spleen were wet and heavy. There was a stickiness to the smell where the formalin had seeped into hepato-cytes and gelled the lobes of the liver into a single pungent mass.
One day the bowel tore. A line of shit squirted onto Ming’s coat. It smelled like formalin, an acidic sweetness, and another smell. She wiped it off, leaving a mark, finished tracing the mesenteric circulation, and laughed when she threw the coat into the garbage. “I wanted a new coat anyhow,” she said. The cuffs of her fresh coat were again too long, and soaked up fluids until she rolled them back. It became easier to dissect, as over the days the cadaver became more fragmented and the pieces more separated from one another. There was less to pry apart—it was more detail work now.