by Anthony Youn
Twenty minutes later, seven sweaty veterans of the shopping cart sit jammed into a booth for four—Tim, Ricky, James; Daisy, a sexy dirty-blond first-year who snuggles up to James between slugs of her beer; Shelly, a dark and edgy beauty with a hive of crow-black hair; and Daisy’s boyfriend, Clark, a refrigerator repairman built like a refrigerator himself, who is either blind-drunk or literally blind because he doesn’t seem to notice Daisy nuzzling James five feet away. Behind us, a DJ dressed as Uncle Sam spins a series of disco hits. Tim, as he will for the next four years, plays host. He refills our glasses from a recently landed pitcher.
“But Clark,” Ricky says, patting a beer bubble dry on his lip with his index finger extended from a ridiculously long brown European cigarette, “how do you know if you need to clean out your motor or replace your fan? Or, God forbid, replace your whole fridge.”
“Oh, you would be shocked how many people do that. They’re ignorant. All you gotta do is vacuum out the dust. Takes you five minutes. But some less reputable servicepeople will try to talk you into buying a brand-new unit.”
“That’s obscene.” Ricky slurps his beer, shoots a starlet eyelash flicker across the table. “If you blew the dust off my unit, I would not complain.”
Tim chokes. I cough. I glance at Daisy.
“So how long have you two been going out?” Tim says.
“About a year.” Clark leans forward. Tim, Ricky, and I lean in to hear him, nearly knock heads. “Tonight’s the night.”
“For what?” I say.
Clark slides a small velvety box over to me. He raises an eyebrow, a conspirator’s signal.
“Open it,” Shelly says. Husky voice. Vampira looks. I think I’m in love. I pop open the lid on the purple box. A sparkly engagement ring twinkles at us.
“Man,” Tim says.
“Wow,” I say.
“Balls,” Shelly says.
“You’re asking Tony to marry you?” Ricky says, circling his lips into a hurt pout.
“You might be better off,” Tim mutters as James and Daisy start snuggling again.
“I’m so jealous,” Ricky says.
“We worked out a plan,” Clark says. “I’m gonna support her through medical school. Once she’s a doctor and in her own practice and whatnot, I’ll take care of the kids. Stay-at-home dad and all that. Fine by me.”
“You’ve given this a lot of thought,” Tim says, then under his breath, into his glass, “How long you give this marriage?”
I shrug. “A week.”
“So, guys, about tomorrow,” Shelly says, done with Daisy and her thick-as-an-icecap refrigerator repairman. She swivels her body toward me. We’re close enough for a kiss. Our knees touch. One more drink and I might snatch Clark’s ring and propose to her. “I’m freaking. I’ve been reading ahead in anatomy—”
“Wait, I didn’t quite catch that, loud in here,” Ricky says. “Did you say you’ve been reading ahead?”
“Well, yeah,” Shelly says, her face flushing the color of Tim’s bike. “It’s medical school, it’s competitive? By the way, did you guys take biochemistry?”
“When you talk that way, you make Tony hot,” Tim says.
“I’m serious. Tony, did you?”
Not sure how to play this. I want her. I want her bad. I want her now. The four beers have made me horny and bold and hopeful and horny. What I say to Shelly in the next five seconds will determine our entire future.
When in doubt, lie. Lie. Lie if you want to get off the bench and into the game.
I can’t.
“Biochem? Let me think. Biochem. Yes. Yes, I did.”
“Damn it.”
Lips an inch from mine, withdrawn. Knees formerly brushing mine, gone.
“Crap. Everybody’s taken biochem but me. My idiot counselor gave me the worst advice. What a moron. He told me to take p-chem instead. How is that gonna help me in medical school? I’m so fucked. You guys have all had biochem, so you’ll coast through first year. I’ll have to study twice as hard, which puts me at a total disadvantage for honors. It is so unfair.”
Our booth goes silent. Clark pokes the inside of his beer glass with his plastic stirrer. Even Daisy and James unclench to listen to Shelly rant.
“I don’t really remember anything from biochem,” I say, trying to reconnect my knees to Shelly’s. I stretch my legs so far under the table that my chin is practically resting on my plate. “You’ll be fine, Shelly.”
“Yeah, right.” She catches James and Daisy staring at her. “Did you two take biochem?”
In unison, they nod.
“Fuck.” She flies from the booth, her black hair bouncing as she streaks out of the diner.
“Beware of that species, my friends,” James says. “We call her and the rest of her kind gunners. They live to shoot you down and kill you.”
“I thought she was hot,” I say.
Ricky flicks the ash from his European cigarette into Shelly’s abandoned glass. “Don’t despair, Anthony, there are so many more where she came from.”
“That was a perfect example of my luck with women over the period of time I call my so-called life.”
“That’s about to change,” Ricky says. “Trust us.”
“Really? I look at you two, and I don’t know why, but I’m doubtful.”
“That’s hurtful,” Tim says. “You are going to be deluged. First of all, I have a way with women. James and I have a gift.”
I roll my eyes.
“Second, Ricky gets tons of great women. Most of them he doesn’t want.”
“He’s gay. You’re gay,” I say to Ricky.
“I am.”
“What am I missing?”
“I’m a chick magnet,” Ricky says, lighting another foot-long cigarette. “I attract crowds of smart, funny, hot women. They assume I’m safe. They assume wrong. I will cross over. I will slum. If I can’t find a warm bed with a penis, I’ll take a chance in the Bermuda Triangle. As a last resort.”
“Not your default position.”
“No. I close my eyes and pretend. I say a boy’s name to myself. Oh, Tony. Oh.”
Tim and I lose it. Ricky flicks his ash into the dregs of the pitcher, which, for some reason, breaks us up even more. The three of us are laughing so hard that we never see Clark make his way toward the center of the dance floor.
“Excuse me. May I have your attention, please.”
“Oh, God.” Daisy. Who at the moment is latched onto James. She springs back, lands on the vinyl booth with a loud smack. The room goes silent as a midterm.
“I know classes start tomorrow, so tonight feels like the perfect time for something special,” Clark says.
He lowers his freezer-sized frame to one knee, the velvet box cupped in his palm.
“Babe, I know we talked about holding off for a while, maybe until winter break, but hell, sometimes love can’t wait. Daisy? Where are you? Will you marry me?”
We all gasp. I feel as if I’m watching the shower scene in Psycho for the first time. My throat seizes up.
“Shit,” Daisy says.
“Timing, huh?” James says.
Fingers grip my forearm. Ricky’s.
“I’m light-headed,” he says, fanning himself with his napkin. “The vapors. Bring me the vapors.”
“Shit,” Daisy says again.
I can’t watch. I lower my head into the laminated eyes of Calvin Coolidge.
The rustling of our tablecloth. Footsteps. An even louder communal gasp. An “Awww.” Tentative, scared applause. A slurred drunken “Yeah!” The applause grows more confident and builds. I lift my head. Daisy, hands clasped behind her back like a little girl, curtsies slightly in front of Clark and says, “Yes, Clark, I will marry you.”
He rises to his feet and they hug. He twirls her around. Her high-beam stare hits our table like a floodlight to the face.
AT TWO A.M., beneath a soft drizzle, Tim and I, our heads spinning as much from the loopy night as from our five beers each, loc
k up our bikes and jog for shelter in the monastic gray lobby of Owen Hall. Because of the tapping of the slight rain mixing with the whirring inside my head, I’ve kept quiet for the last half hour. In fact, I feel overwhelmed. In eight hours, my new life will begin. A new life that feels as if it belongs to someone else. This night has whirled around me. I have known Tim, James, and Ricky for a week. Impossible. I have known them forever. They’re godsends, angels, family.
“We never got to answer the question,” I say to Tim a step away from the elevator.
“What question?”
“From orientation. Why do you want to be a doctor?”
Tim yawns, elbows the up button.
“Well?” I say.
“What?”
“Why do you want to be a doctor?”
“You really want to know?” Tim taps his fingers on the outside of the elevator door. “All the clichéd reasons. I want job security. I want to meet women. Doctors are cool. Chicks like cool guys. I become a doctor, I have a better chance of meeting someone hotter than if I work at Subway. I don’t want to end up in a completely soulless job, like stockbroker. I wouldn’t mind a nice house, a good car, and money in the bank. I want my parents to be proud of me. And, strange as it seems, I actually like helping people.”
The elevator bangs to the floor; the doors sigh, rattle, and pull apart. We get in, and I thumb separate buttons to deliver us to our separate floors. We ride up in silence. The elevator opens at the second floor. Tim slouches out, mumbles over his shoulder, “Meet you for breakfast. We’ll go over to biochem together.”
“Deal. ’Night.”
“’Night.”
The doors vibrate, grunt, begin to close. Before they bang together, Tim’s fist punches into the narrow space between them, forcing them open. He stands in front of me. “What about you?”
“I want to contribute to society and heal the sick.”
“Ha-ha.” Tim doesn’t crack a smile. “Now the truth.”
I kick at something imaginary in the elevator carpet. I’m stalling. “Okay.” I pick my head up and fix my eyes on him. I’m overcome with a surge of sadness.
“The truth is, Tim,” I say, “I don’t know.”
6
A Show of Hands
I see dead people.
Eighteen bodies covered with plastic, lying on gurneys. An occasional toe protrudes to verify that beneath the shiny black tarp, a dead person lies.
I smell dead people, too.
Or at least the thick chemical stench of formaldehyde, tearing at my eyes and packing my nose, enough liquid preservative in here to float a yacht. The smell rises from the bodies and from a dozen large clear plastic bins—similar to the type you find at IKEA—lining the back wall of the lab, some stacked on top of each other. The bins contain body parts and organs, all of them cataloged, numbered, and labeled.
We sit at desks in an adjacent classroom, the eighteen bodies lurking behind us, lying in wait. In my lab coat I feel like Igor, the mad scientist’s assistant, but in reality I’m sitting in anatomy class, by reputation the most furiously intense class we will take in first year, maybe in all of medical school, especially since our section is taught by the infamous Dr. Gaw, the most ruthless, unforgiving professor who has ever lived. If you believe in reincarnation, Dr. Gaw has returned from her previous life as Attila the Hun in the form of an eighty-five-year-old nightmare who lives to terrorize us. She walks as erect as a pencil, her skeletal face a frozen fanged scowl resting atop one throbbing purple vein. According to our school catalog, Dr. Gaw has won awards, a trophy case full. To this day I can’t imagine how.
According to Billy, our go-to second-year consultant, who hooked up with a first-year from another orientation group and is now all smiles and helpful when we see him, anatomy is even more of a bear than biochemistry, which, even though I aced it going away at Kalamazoo, is right now kicking my ass. I try to explain this to Shelly. I tell her that med-school biochem is a lot different than college biochem, and I’m happy to share my notes or study with her—my one final feeble attempt to get us alone, where we might resume rubbing our knees together in the hope of progressing upward—but she turns out to be not only a gunner but a first-class ass kisser as well, a lethal double threat, the kind of medical student who takes no prisoners, plays every angle, murders every exam, laughs at every teacher’s joke, lives for extra credit, hangs out with professors before and after class, and along with a cabal of other gunners and ass kissers, scores invitations to their homes for brunches and barbecues and even gets hired to babysit their children. I give up on Shelly. She’s not my type. My type defined as any woman showing a vague interest in me.
At our first class, Dr. Gaw hands out equipment, including latex gloves, goggles, and what I really want, nose plugs, which I stuff into my nostrils, hoping to at least partially deflect the stench. The nose plugs don’t help, so except for gloves, I go commando. I figure I might as well get used to the smell. I’ll have to, if I ever do become a real doctor. Most of the other first-years wear as much protective covering as possible. One guy, a gunner, shows up on the second day of anatomy wearing a hazmat suit. The whole ball and tackle. Goggles and ventilation mask. Dr. Gaw says nothing, but I think I see her scowl flutter, and I imagine her dropping Hazmat’s grade.
Tim and I scramble to find seats together. Tim, I’ve learned by now, has exactly zero mechanical aptitude. A week into medical school, we’ve eliminated the possibility that he will ever become a surgeon. He struggles to pull on his gloves. This first day, I face him and yank them on for him. Once they’re secure, I turn back and find Dr. Gaw standing over me. She reeks of formaldehyde. She holds a moist body part in one bony gloved hand.
“Dr. Youn.”
How the hell does she know my name?
“Yes, Dr. Gaw?”
“Which valve of the heart am I holding?”
Am I glad she said heart. I thought she was holding a liver. I take a shot. “Mitral valve?”
“Congratulations.” Do I detect a trace of a Nazi accent? “This is the aortic valve.” She spits the words at me. “You have the deductive ability of a monkey. I pity your future patients, Dr. Youn.”
She limps away.
Tim whispers, “If it makes you feel any better, I thought it was the small intestine.”
Dr. Gaw suddenly materializes in front of Tim. Where did she come from? It’s as if she stepped out of a fog.
“Do you have something to add to the class, Dr. O’Laughlin?”
“Me? No. Not at all. Not at the moment.”
“I assumed as much. If you have any reasonable hope of passing this class, I would suggest that you and Dr. Youn refrain from talking and joking and making fools of yourselves. Oh, and a helpful suggestion. As doctors, you will find it useful if you can distinguish the heart from the small intestine.”
I’m shaken. I’ve never found myself in such unfamiliar territory. Academically—from elementary school through college—I have always excelled. I’m the school scholar, the student hotshot, the freaking valedictorian. Within seconds, Dr. Gaw has trashed all that. To her, I’m the class idiot.
I’m left with two choices. I can shrink away. Or I can bounce back.
It takes me two seconds to decide.
I am going to dominate anatomy.
Starting tomorrow.
Today I’d like to disappear.
MOMENTS LATER, WITH Dr. Gaw in the lead, we tour the anatomy lab, gunners and ass kissers fanning around her like a rock star’s entourage. The rest of us hang back. I stay as far away from her as I can. We stop first at the gurneys.
“As you may have heard, most medical schools assign a specific cadaver to a small group of students, and they spend their entire first year dissecting and learning its anatomy. Often they form a peculiar attachment to their cadavers, even giving it a name. Bob. Heidi. Adolph.”
She pauses suddenly. Her bottom lip quivers. Perhaps she’s lost her train of thought. Or perhaps, hopeful
ly, she’s having a stroke.
“We don’t do that. The bodies here have been prosected. Which means, Dr. Youn, that they have been dissected in advance by faculty and students in the elective dissection course.”
She seems fine. Damn it.
“These bodies are intact so that we can study the head, neck, muscles, nerves, blood vessels, and so forth together.”
She whips the tarp off one body, leaving the head covered. The abdomen is exposed, and all the nerves and blood vessels have been tagged by blue index cards with names and arrows pointing to internal structures.
“That is such a clever method,” Shelly says.
“I agree,” Dr. Gaw says. “Especially since I devised it.”
I’m positive Shelly didn’t pull that out of her ass. She must have researched Dr. Gaw in order to have this information locked and loaded.
“Of course, it was some years ago. But there has never been any reason to change.”
“If it’s not broken, why fix it?”
“Indeed, Dr. Burkhart.”
She beams at Shelly. Shelly flashes back a We are so connected, after this let’s go for manis and pedis smile. She’s good. I can’t stand her.
“Our gross-anatomy course will cover the entire human body, one system at a time. We will study the head and neck in one of the last sections, so for most of the course, the bodies will be displayed with their faces covered. For the next three weeks, we will study the abdomen and all its vital organs. Questions?”
Why does she look at me? I brace myself. Here it comes. Another sarcastic crack establishing once again that I am the class dunce.
“Good.”
I’m spared.
“Each body part that I point out to you today will be on your lab practical exam in three weeks.”
An undercurrent sweeps through the room. Gunners whip out notebooks. Scribbling commences. The word exam gets my attention, too. I decide to change position. I step forward to get a closer look. I move casually, furtively, outside Dr. Gaw’s line of vision. In fact, I walk behind her.