by Vincent Lam
They unwrapped one arm from the wrist upward. The hand was wrapped separately. Ming held up the arm, holding the hand as if in a victory grasp. Along the flat back of the forearm was a lightning bolt tattoo—once straight lines, now soft arcs. Each branch of the lightning bolt underlined a word: one Golden, the other Flash. Chen rolled back the moist, yellow gauze. Above the elbow was a ring of small figures: crosses? No, airplanes. In addition to the thumbprint-sized fuselage and wings were the remnants of little propellers, now faded into age spots and the creases of oldness. Above the airplanes in official type was tattooed RCAF—17th Squadron. Above this was a Spitfire with an open shark’s jaw. The tail of the Spitfire was ajar due to a thick scar across the fuselage that had been sewn shut dirty, long ago. The ring of airplanes stood wing to wing on the front of the arm above the elbow, and then there was a gap on the inside of the arm.
“Go, killer,” said Ming triumphantly. Then, when they looked at her, “All those planes. He must have shot them down. You’ll have to call him Lieutenant Murphy.”
“A pilot?” said Chen.
“There’s some planes missing,” said Ming. “He didn’t get enough to go all the way around.”
Sri touched the tattooed arm. “I guess the war ended.”
“It’s good they started the tattoos from the outside,” said Ming.
Chen bunched up the gauze and snipped it. He continued to unroll, revealing a rich and delicate crucifix within a heart, large over the hump of shoulder. In gothic letters under the crucifix: The Lord Keeps Me—Mark 16. The gauze was off the arm. Ming opened the manual.
“Okay, so down here, and then across.” She pointed with the blunt edge of the blade.
“Mark. From the Bible, right?” said Sri.
“It’s one of the four books in the second half,” said Chen.
“What is that part?”
“Um…I don’t know. The overview is simple: Jesus died on the cross to save us, rose from the dead after three days. As for Mark 16…”
“It must mean something,” said Sri.
“I’ll look it up for you,” said Chen.
“Why don’t we cut around it?” Sri’s small finger traced one arm of the cross. The cross expanded to curve across each side of the arm with its faded blue wrought ironwork.
“The manual shows,” Ming said, “to cut here.”
“It is a shame,” said Chen, “to cut this apart.” The manual’s illustration advised an incision directly over the tattooed arm.
“We can easily cut around.” Sri spun his scalpel in the fingers of one hand, which he often did until someone reminded him, or he remembered, that it was not a pen.
“What are you going to do,” said Ming, “save this?”
“It’s bad luck,” said Sri. “Cut around here.” He traced the ornate heart with the handle of his scalpel.
“It’s a nice cross,” agreed Chen.
“You guys.” Ming didn’t look up. She traced the incision lines on the arm. “It’s not going to work. Don’t you want to see the bicipital groove?”
“You should respect a man’s symbols,” said Sri. “My mother told me that. Look at his arm. These are his symbols.”
“Don’t your people burn the corpses anyhow?” said Ming, grabbing the tattooed arm.
“He’s not my people.”
“Let’s get on with it.”
“But that’s not the point,” said Sri.
“So what’s the point? You afraid of lightning bolts?”
“I’m not afraid of you.” He twirled the scalpel nervously, met Ming’s stare.
“Why don’t you cut around,” said Chen, breaking their locked eyes. “Then dissect the subcutaneous layer? It’ll be the same.”
Dr. Harrison was an origami man. In his room of eight tables, they first learned how to make paper boats.
“Let me show you how to tuck in the corners so that it’ll be tight and waterproof,” he said. Each day in the lab, after dissection, came the origami.
“All right, my friends, I hope you’ve learned well and are ready to set your knowledge free.” Each day, every student had to select a page from the lab manual, cut it out carefully at the spiral binding, and fold it into that day’s paper figure. After the boats came paper frogs. Then the paper balls you needed to blow into. They were advised to choose a clean page. They learned that it was easy to make swans after knowing how to make a boat, if you had the trick.
“If you want to take more than one page out of your manual, you may do so,” Dr. Harrison said. “Of course, I may test you on that page. Only anatomy manual origami is allowed.” It was understood that you should make notes before removing a page. You had to take out at least one page.
The swans were hung over the cadavers with twine, and if you forgot something you could look up and see whether it was printed on the wing of a twirling swan.
Halfway through the semester, the days were ending earlier. The sky turned blood to black in the late afternoon. Sri and Chen came in from a dinner break—veggie dogs. Ming didn’t take breaks, instead munched granola bars in the museum section of the basement. They had to stay late because it was the evening before the anatomy midterm. Most of the class was still in the basement, and Sri and Chen found Ming rummaging through the bags of body parts, searching. She explained the situation to them, frustrated but not apologetic.
“What do you mean you lost the right side of the head?” Chen asked quietly.
“No, I didn’t exactly lose it. It’s simply not where I left it,” said Ming.
“You put it in the head bag?” asked Sri.
“Anyway, we’ve got the left side. We can look at someone else’s right.”
“The exam’s tomorrow,” said Chen. The right and left halves of the head had been dissected differently, and the parts needed from the right had been removed from the left.
“Just think for a second. Are you sure you left it here?” asked Sri, fingering the bag that contained the left half of the head.
“I’m sure. I covered it. I sprayed it. It was right here.”
“You’re always in such a rush,” said Sri. “Maybe if you slowed down…. You know how long I spent dissecting those cranial nerves?”
“I bet someone took it,” said Ming.
Sri replied, “Right. Make up a story. You were looking at it, so it was your responsibility to put it back. With the rest of Murphy.”
“Who made you boss? And he’s not a Murphy,” said Ming. “Probably someone borrowed it—it’ll turn up.”
“You lost the head,” Sri whispered, leaning forward and looking at Ming, “and I named him Murphy.”
“It’s only half. And I did not lose it. I left it right here. It’s not where I left it. That’s not ‘losing’ it.”
“Obviously you don’t care,” said Sri.
“Just study it from the manual.”
“I made the cranial nerve page into a swan,” said Chen. He rested his latex-gloved hands on the table.
Ming said, “Should have chosen a different page.”
At two in the morning, only Sri and Chen were in the lab, sitting over the borrowed right half of a head. All the other tables were covered in sheets, and sprayed with the fresh pungency of formalin.
“You know she won’t apologize, but you probably should,” said Chen.
“Why?”
“Because we’ve still got the pelvis and legs to do. It’ll be better if you make peace.”
“This is very bad.”
“Sure, you guys are upset, so just smooth it out.”
“It’s not just her. Losing half his head is bad. And why did she insist we cut through Murphy’s cross and heart?”
“She follows the book, Sri. She reads it, she does it.”
“My mother told me you should respect a man’s symbols. We should have cut around the cross. Did you look up that Mark thing?”
“Sorry, I forgot. What was it again?”
“Mark 16.”
“I’
ll check it for you. Did your mother say anything about losing half a head?”
“Never came up.”
They looked down at the open half-head they had only been able to study after midnight when another group had finished with it. Ming had decided to study from the anatomy atlas. “Ready for tomorrow?”
“Ready as ever, I guess,” said Sri.
“I guess we’re done here. Hungry?”
“Kind of. I need something filling to help me sleep.”
“Let’s go.”
In the night, walking under blowing elms, they smelled themselves more clearly, their skin sticky in the armpits and elbows. In the creases of their hands. In the washroom of Nona’s, while the round lady heated their calzones, Chen washed his face with his hands, and the more he washed the more that odour seeped from between his fingers and under his nails. Under the low-wattage light, he used the tepid water and hard soap to wash his hands raw.
After the midterm, Sri went to Dean Cortina and asked to switch to a different group. He said, “One of my partners is great but I have a communication problem with my other colleague.”
“The course is almost over, and we can’t change the groups. I’m glad you said colleague because that means you think like a professional. Take this as your first professional challenge,” said Dean Cortina. “I remember my anatomy group, and I don’t want to tell you how many years ago.” She sat back in her big chair. “We had a communication problem. Men are odd about penises. They don’t want to talk about them but they secretly believe them to be very important, perhaps sacred. So we got to the penis on our cadaver, and the men wanted to skip it. ‘We’ll look at the book,’ they said. ‘No way,’ I said, ‘we need to see the inside of the penis.’ Corpus spongiosum, all that jazz. Besides, the poor guy’s body was lying there. A big man, powerful, and it would have been a shame just to let it go to waste. What did we do? We talked. We talked like professionals, and I saw that it was this one guy’s turn to dissect, and there was no way that this man was going to cut up a penis. So I said, ‘What if I do it?’ and I did it, and I think we all understood the issue better. Does that help?”
Sri couldn’t think of anything to say. He thanked Dean Cortina and left her office.
When they got to the penis, there was no problem or hesitation. It was Ming’s turn to cut, and she went right through it with one long arc of the scalpel, so that was all there was to it. She said, “You guys okay?”
“Sure,” said Chen.
“Someone want the testicles?”
Both Chen and Sri declined politely, and so Ming did the rest of that day’s dissection—producing a fine display of the epididymis and the spermatic ducts.
Late after the final exam, some of the class was still at the upstairs patio bar of The Paradise. Many of Dr. Harrison’s group were there, setting liquor-doused paper napkin swans alight in blue bursts. It was their private party, and they were trying to stay warm beneath the stars, helped by flame-ringed overhead heaters that smelled like burp. Someone had vomited on the toilet seat in the men’s room and then simply closed the stall door, so now there were lineups for both washrooms. Others sat in booths, and in a far corner Sri had just bought Ming a vodka tonic. He was feeling good about himself for having bought the drink, and she was feeling big for accepting it.
She said, “Guess what, I found the right side of the head. It was in the bag with the omentum.” Ming couldn’t remember exactly how it got there, but of course no one had looked at the omentum before the midterm and so she recently had found it while studying for the final, looking for a kidney. Then she remembered she must have put it there. A moment of inattention, she explained.
“Where is it now?” asked Sri.
“Still there.”
“With the omentum?” The omentum attached all the intestines into a fan-shaped sheet. “Why didn’t you put it with the head?”
“I don’t know. The bag wasn’t handy, I guess.”
“You guess. So you just left it with all the guts and everything,” said Sri. “I’ll have to go get it.”
“What?”
“I’m gonna go get it,” he shouted. No one turned to look, in the way that drunk people do not notice each other as being out of the ordinary.
“You’re all screwed up,” said Ming quietly. “Do you dream about your Murphy?”
“Me? You should have nightmares, the way you treat him.”
“Hello? Dead? Remember? I don’t have dreams, because I don’t have hang-ups about the stupid corpse.”
“You—”
“You what?” said Ming. “You don’t like that? Corpse? Piece of Murphy meat?”
“You’re just such a—”
“Just say it. What am I? You want to say it. Call me a name, go ahead and relieve your repressed little self. Say it.”
“No. Let’s just stop. No.”
“Go for it, pick a name. Bitch? Witch? Name your name.”
“I didn’t say anything, you’re picking the words now.”
“You’re such a wimp, I have to call myself names just to clarify what you think of me,” said Ming.
Chen was pushing sideways through the falling dancers. He arrived in time to hear Ming say to Sri, “Just fuck off. See, I can say what I think.” She stalked off, weaving across the floor.
“You guys,” said Chen to both of them but now just to Sri.
“It was better for a minute. Believe it or not. I bought her a drink. Then she told me she found the head. Okay, but she didn’t put it back! I can’t believe she just misplaced it like that, like it doesn’t matter, and then she didn’t even put it with the other half? It’s with the omentum.”
“How many have you had?”
“My mother told me that alcohol can build and then burn bridges between people.”
“Your mother.”
“Well, it’s done now. I’m gonna go get the head.”
“Aw…Sri.”
“I gotta get it, put it back on.”
“Whaddya mean, come on, wait—”
Already walking away, Sri said, “I gotta go—”
“Hey, wait.” Chen, still holding a beer, went down the stairs after his friend.
In the anatomy lab, Chen summarized the story: “Yeah, I looked it up for you. Mark 16. So after Jesus is crucified the women go to wash and prepare Jesus’ body with spices. On the road they realize they won’t be able to move this huge stone door in front of the tomb. But when they get there, surprise! The door is open and there’s no body. Don’t be scared, says the shining angel who’s there. Jesus has risen, so tell the disciples that he will comfort and lead them. The women are scared. Jesus appears to Mary. She tells people about seeing him, but they think she’s crazy, so he has to keep on showing himself to people until they’re convinced. Anyhow, Jesus says that things are really going well, and all his people will do incredible, wonderful things, and be protected even from drinking poison. He says that his followers will be healers by putting their hands on people. Then he goes to heaven to sit with God.” Chen put his beer down next to Murphy.
“Is that really what it says?” asked Sri.
“Roughly. I looked it up, but I am paraphrasing.”
“It’s good stuff.”
“You still want to put the head back on,” said Chen.
“Yeah.”
They unwrapped the stump neck and took the left side of the head from inside the chest where they had left it to keep it moist. They found the right side in the omentum bag, and the right and left sides didn’t match up exactly anymore because of the dissection. They put the two pieces on top, and Chen could see that Sri wasn’t happy, so he wrapped some gauze around the neck to hold things in place.
“He’s a bit dry.”
“Needs a drink. Bless you, Murphy.” Instead of taking the formalin spray bottle, Sri took the rest of Chen’s beer and poured it gently and slowly from the lips to the open belly.
“You don’t drink, do you?” said Chen.
> “Not usually.”
“You have a knack for it.”
“Why do you think Murphy chose Mark 16?” Sri closed his eyes. “It’s a weird passage. Is that the end of the Jesus story?”
“I guess a pilot would have figured there wouldn’t be a body left for anyone. Nothing left for his girlfriend, or mother. Maybe Mark 16 made him feel better about that.”
“He was wrong,” said Sri, bowing his head, his arms stretched to the usually shining table now dull with the running of liquid. Beer dripped into the bucket between Murphy’s feet. “He’s here for us.”
Sri wound a strip of yellowed fabric up the neck, pulled it tight over the chin so it wouldn’t bunch, then softly over the eyes, and the coldness of the eyelids vanished under the cloth. Murphy’s hair had continued to grow for a little while after being shaved, and Chen held up the stubbled head so Sri could work. Sri wound the fabric around the top of the skull, and tied it onto itself snugly with a slipless knot under the angle of the jaw. Sri stood back and noticed that the tip of the right ear protruded. He tugged gently at a fold of cotton and settled it around the ear, where it would stay.
HOW TO GET INTO MEDICAL SCHOOL, PART II
MING’S PARENTS THOUGHT THAT SHE VOLUNTEERED at the Ottawa Children’s Hospital on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. Both she and Fitzgerald were there on Mondays and Tuesdays, but on Wednesdays neither of them went to the hospital. Instead, they went to the ski hill that was abandoned for the summer, where they would not encounter their classmates or Ming’s cousins, and spread a blanket in the tall grass whose blades glinted in the flat light. The sun pulled sweat out of them, and there was a humid adhesion of skin on skin. When it became too hot, they put on their clothes and walked in the shade of the woods. A ski chalet had burned to the ground during the winter, and when they walked past it Fitzgerald kicked at the charred pieces of wood.