by Anthony Youn
“Dr. Youn, you’ve decided to join us. Astonishing.”
Eyes in the back of her head. It’s official. She’s a ghoul.
Dr. Gaw, her back to us, gunners practically Velcroed to her, approaches the plastic bins at the far end of the lab. She taps the first container with a bony finger. “Inside these containers, you will find individual body parts for you to examine. This one”—she passes her palm over the top—“contains hearts. The one next to it contains livers. The next one, kidneys. And so on. Each container has a label stating which parts belong in it. If you take a body part out, please be sure to put it back and into the correct bin.”
She whirls on us, a bony finger extended like a witch’s wand. “Do not even consider taking a body part home with you. That will be grounds for expulsion.”
I expect Dr. Gaw to warn me by name here. Hell, I expect her to frisk me to see if I’ve sneaked a kidney under my shirt. Instead she settles for a hairy-eyeball stare. It’s enough to make me perspire.
“Take a few moments now and familiarize yourself with the various bins. And then we will begin our study of the abdomen.”
She lays the word out—ab-do-men—as if it’s part of a satanic feminist curse.
I start for the bin farthest from the gunners, stop, retrieve Tim. He waves me away. He looks a little under the weather.
“Let’s check out the lungs, maybe toss around a liver.” I grab Tim’s elbow, attempt to steer him toward a bin in the back. “Body parts. Organs. This stuff fascinates me.”
“You go. Enjoy.” He leans over, steadies himself against a desk. His complexion darkens, turns green, the color of a fairway.
“You all right?”
“Never better. Have I mentioned that I’m a tad squeamish?”
“You’re a klutz, you’re squeamish, and Dr. Gaw hates me. We have this class wired.”
“Score.”
“You want some water?”
“No, I’ll just puke and pass out and I’ll be fine.”
He lowers himself, head aimed down, lands with a thud at a desk. He rummages through his backpack, pulls out a towel, and presses it against his head. He smiles sickly. “You might want to move back in case I go projectile.”
I give him a thumbs-up and peel out toward the plastic bins at the back of the lab. I find myself walking in the gunners’ wake.
“I heard that last year someone stole a spleen, took it home to study,” an ass kisser whispers to Shelly. “Smuggled it out in her backpack. Never got caught. Aced the exam.”
“That rocks,” Shelly says, wheels turning.
That rocks? These people are insane.
I veer off on my own, start with the bin marked liver. I move on to heart and lungs. I cruise from bin to bin, taking mental inventory of the contents. That bin, number three. Packed with hearts swimming in formaldehyde. The next one, lungs. Filled to the top. The one after that, overflowing with livers—
Then it hits me.
These are human organs. They belonged to actual people. People who cared enough about helping others to donate their organs so I—all of us—could learn to be a doctor.
I stop at the last bin against the wall.
It’s open.
I look down and see a pile of severed hands.
Dozens of hands.
Floating in a pool of preservative.
I look at these hands, the hands of strangers, hands that appear to be reaching out to each other.
I stare at these hands. I feel suddenly as if I’m somehow invading these people’s lives. I feel like an intruder. I did not expect this. I suspected that I would have a strong reaction when we study faces. I’m afraid that I will become too attached, too emotional. Doctors need to be detached, right? Impersonal. What is more personal than our face?
Our hands.
We use our hands for everything—to touch, to write, to build, to play, to cook, to clean, to feed, to feel, to guide, to caress, to love. Our hands serve us as extensions of our minds and our hearts.
I look at these floating hands, at the fingers, the fingernails, the bones, the knuckles, and I picture them as the hands of fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, children, best friends, loved ones, the hands of people who once had thoughts, opinions, hopes, and dreams. These are anyone’s hands. These are everyone’s hands. They could be my hands.
I feel myself drifting off. I’m no longer here. I’m no longer in this classroom and anatomy lab. I’ve entered a different state of mind. I feel small and mortal and humbled and grateful. Deeply grateful.
And I feel that I have been given a gift and that I have a mission and a responsibility. I feel obligated to the people who gave us their hands.
I lift my head from the bin of hands. Across the room, Dr. Gaw’s piercing purple eyes puncture my gaze. For the first time I don’t care about her. I don’t care what she thinks or what she says. I don’t care if she doesn’t like me and never will. I don’t care about her at all.
Then something happens that I never could have predicted or imagined.
The old witch smiles.
7
Nerd Room
We live in the Nerd Room.
The Nerd Room looks nondescript, even benign. Long and rectangular. Filled with thirty study cubicles. Creamy walls. Beige wall-to-wall carpet. Overhead fluorescent lighting that hums soothingly and rarely flickers. No windows to distract. No music pumped in. No-talking policy, which we ignore. Great location. Adjacent to the medical-school student lounge that’s loaded with good stuff—cracked and broken-in leather couch, basic cable, snack machine with the good candy, soda machine, Ping-Pong table, and a communal desktop computer that runs fitfully and often freezes due to the countless viruses that have infected it because of the amount of porn certain students keep downloading. I won’t mention names (Tim, Ricky).
Tim, Ricky, James, Daisy, and I descend on the Nerd Room every Friday night. Except for bathroom breaks, meal and snack interludes (none lasting over fifteen minutes), an occasional furious full-contact game of Ping-Pong to blow off steam, the periodic make-out session—I don’t participate; nobody does except for James and Daisy, who recently broke off her engagement to refrigerator repairman Clark—we never leave the Nerd Room. Crashing on the carpet in our soul-sucking cubicles, we sleep haphazardly and infrequently. We emerge from the Nerd Room Monday morning, blinking, sweating, smelly, irritable but prepared, primed to do battle against Dr. Gaw’s brain-shrinking, minutiae-laden gross-anatomy exams, or the weekly brain-crushing biochemistry tests that have already made Shelly pull out sections of her own hair, or the brain-teasing pathology open-book tests that Professor X seduces you into thinking will be a piece of cake but in fact have been designed to terminate you.
Overall, medical school means study. And then study some more. And when you finish all that studying, you will definitely feel the need to study.
I first studied in my dorm room. The stench of simmering khrua gling and boiling larb accompanied by the constant flushing of my neighbor drove me away. I tried then to study in the library, but I found myself distracted by the high volume of cute coeds roaming the stacks. I moved to the local coffeehouse, but I found myself distracted by even more cute coeds, some of whom worked there. Not only couldn’t I study, but I spent a fortune on espresso drinks just so I could get a closer look at them, not to mention the time I wasted thinking up clever pickup lines, none of which I found the courage to try.
Once I commit to the Nerd Room, I feel both at home and in a low-level state of constant panic. I’m home because this is where my new family resides. By now the four of us guys have become inseparable and growing closer with each passing study hour. I imagine our closeness compares in some ways to that of a platoon in a foxhole. There are similarities to war—the stress, the fatigue, the physical exhaustion, the mental exertion, and the fear of getting blown away, in our case not by an enemy (unless you count Dr. Gaw) but by the constant barrage of exams.
I also find that I have to learn a new way to
study. Throughout high school and college, I applied a simple shotgun approach. I memorized every bit of information in the assigned chapters in our textbook as well as every note I took, going over and over it as many times as I needed until I had everything down cold. I can’t do that in medical school. There is too much material to comprehend and absorb. I have to adjust my technique. I have to learn to isolate what’s most important. As the hours in the Nerd Room whip by and I realize I have too much material to cram into my head in the time left before the Monday-morning exam, I panic. Well, first I freeze, then I panic. And then I despair.
“How are we supposed to learn all this stuff?” I moan to Tim as we scarf candy bars and wash them down with warm Mountain Dew. “There’s not enough time.”
“I know. It sucks.”
“Plus, all this junk food. I’ve put on about thirty pounds.”
“I can see. You’ve really ballooned up.”
I halt my Snickers bar halfway to my mouth. “Now I don’t feel like eating this.”
“I’ll eat it.”
I slap the remains of my candy bar into Tim’s waiting open palm. He two-hands it into his mouth. He smacks his lips, chews.
“We’re all in the same boat, you know,” he says.
I wait for him to finish what I realize was my lunch.
“We’re all crazy, dude. We’re all obsessive-compulsives. They know it. That’s why they make every course pass-fail. To take the pressure off.”
“So why do I feel so much pressure?”
“How should I know? You gonna finish your soda?”
Before I can say yes, he snatches my Mountain Dew and chugs what’s left. He burps and slaps me on the back.
“Good talk,” he says.
SLEEP-DEPRIVED, ADRENALINE pumping, sugar-charged, head down, locked in, I blast through the eight o’clock Monday-morning anatomy exam. I attack those one hundred multiple-choice and two essay questions like a warrior. A wounded punch-drunk warrior; still, a warrior. I destroy that test. I bolt out of the exam room, high, confident, proud. Within minutes, I second-guess every answer. I’m sure I messed up at least twenty and I’m positive I forgot a third essay on the back. Overhearing Shelly and her gunners shrieking, “So easy!” doesn’t help. I stagger back to Owen Hall, tumble into my room, crash completely clothed onto my unmade bed, pass out, wake up after dinner, shower, open a bottle of AXE or whatever the latest cologne I bought promising that women will swarm all over me and lock their legs around me until I cry for mercy, put on a gallon of the stuff with a roller, change into my best “playa” outfit, hop on my Huffy, and meet Tim.
In med school, Monday night is party night, and so we will, either at the USA Café or at James’s off-campus apartment. When it comes to women, James is miles ahead of Tim and me. Well, miles ahead of me. A month in, and he already has a girlfriend. A girlfriend who dumped her fiancé for him. Plus, James has gone out with other women. More than two. Doubling my output. My hope is that he’s convinced Daisy to invite a pack of her friends, attractive, smart, funny, willing friends, ones whose lives will not feel complete unless they hook up with me.
Tim and I arrive on our Huffys, each of us balancing a six-pack of Molson on our handlebars. Not as easy as it sounds. On the way, we swerve constantly and miraculously avoid crashing into each other. Inside, the party has begun without us. We pass around the brews. Scope out the talent. Nothing yet. In the living room, seven early arrivals dance the shopping cart. Bunch of posers. I’ll show them how later.
Tim peels off, honing in on a less than gorgeous coed who’s thumbing through James’s CD collection. He winks at me before he leaves. You have to admire the guy. I wish I had half his guts. I’d kill for a quarter of his confidence.
I shuffle over to the snack table, inhale a handful of nachos. Ricky, in Hawaiian shirt, Bermuda shorts, and flip-flops, lands at my side. He frowns, a stricken look on his face. “What is that smell?”
Takes me a minute. “Oh, it’s my new cologne.”
“It smells like ox urine.”
“Really? Maybe I should wash it off.”
“I didn’t say it was a bad thing.”
“And you are familiar with the smell of ox urine how?”
“Oh, Anthony, the places I’ve seen.”
A party of three enters, two hot unfamiliar women, undergrads, flanking a preppie jock type.
“Excuse me,” Ricky says, ogling the jock. “My date’s here.”
He moonwalks toward the trio. The preppie guy laughs. I make eye contact with one of the hot undergrads.
“Mine, too,” I say to myself.
I PITCH A shutout. Both of the hot new arrivals drool when I announce that I’m a med student. I lose one when I go into a little too much detail about my jaw surgery. The other bails when I rave about my mother’s cooking. I get them back momentarily when we go hip to hip in the “Achy Breaky” dance. I wow them with my moves. They laugh, they swoon, then the dance ends and they leave. I pound one beer, then another. I’m halfway through beer three when Tim and the not so gorgeous coed come out of a back bedroom. His hair’s flying all over, and she’s wearing his baseball cap sideways. I drop onto the floor, slide my back into the wall. I hold up my beer and toast Tim and this evening’s winner.
“I want you to meet somebody.” Tim to the coed, who wriggles into her coat. “This is Tony, my best friend and the coolest guy I know.”
“Hey,” I say, reaching out my hand. I look at Tim and see a blank stare. Clearly, he doesn’t know her name.
“Ingrid,” she says, squeezing two of my fingers.
“Ingrid,” I repeat. “Exotic.”
“Danke. Are you a med student, too?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Are you going to be a heart surgeon, too?”
The look of astonishment that slams onto my face, followed by my uncontrollable howl of laughter, causes Tim to practically shove Ingrid out the door. He sticks his head back inside. “Hey, Youner, you mind wheeling my bike home?”
“Yes, I mind. It’s a giant pain in the ass. Wheel your own damn bike home, dude.”
I don’t say this. Another beer or two and I might.
“No problem. You two have a good night.”
That’s actually what I say.
“Thanks, man. I owe you. Later.”
He whispers something to Ingrid that cracks her up. And then they’re gone.
How does he do it?
James, I get. James has movie-star looks. Young Redford. A Jonas brother. Handsome and vulnerable. We once went on a road trip to Toronto. We heard they had some crazy little women there, and I wanted to get me one. Particularly in this one bar, the Easy Rider or something. We walk in, order drinks, lean back against the bar to check out the scene, and a blond, blue-eyed Kate Hudson wannabe walks straight up to James and starts making out with him. No hello, no buy me a drink, no nothing. Just bang. Mouth to mouth. Tongue to tongue. Tonsil to tonsil. Stunning. Can it be just looks? Can looking like a movie star be all you need? I kind of look like a tall Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid. So far that hasn’t been a big plus.
Tim has it going on, too, but in a different way. He has a gift. He doesn’t discriminate. He goes after women he knows he can get. And if he’s horny, he goes all out. He once drove from Philly to Saratoga to hook up with an easy girl he knew from high school. Nine hours for seven minutes of pleasure. You have to admire that. I guess. And Tim refuses to take no for an answer. He’s got the tenacity of a used-car salesman. I mean this as a compliment.
I need help. I want to be Tim’s wingman. I think about my turning point.
A week ago.
Friend of mine tells me about a party off campus. Frat party. Invitation-only. Bouncers at the door. My friend happens to be the president of the fraternity, so we have an in. He doesn’t invite us officially, but I convince Tim that we’re solid enough to crash.
We park our Huffys a block away. We’ve learned by now that riding up on our bikes juggling six-pa
cks on our handlebars reduces our cool factor by at least half. I can’t afford to lose that much.
We hear the party before we see it. Loud, out of control, a future visit from the cops a guarantee. We turn up the street and see people spilling out of the house, filling up the porch, packing the sidewalk. We slide and squeeze our way to the front door. Two linemen blockade the door, shaved heads glinting in the moonlight. “We’re full. We’re not letting anyone else in.”
“Seriously? But I’m friends with Kal.”
Bouncer one pats a stomach the size of a barrel. “So am I. Like I said, the party’s full.”
“But we’re medical students.” Tim. Insistent, whiny, annoying.
“Medical students?” A female voice. Slurry. Sexy.
“Absolutely.”
“Over here.”
We follow the voice to the right of the porch. A girl, sorority type, way out of my league, Tim’s, too, hangs out of a first-floor window. She waves. Her long wild hair swishes. “Come on. We’ll let you in.”
Another girl fills the window. They extend their arms. Tim and I clasp their hands like we’re rock climbers and pull ourselves inside. We tumble onto the living room floor. A shriek, giggles, beers slapped into our hands. Cigarette smoke fills the room. The two girls who let us in laugh, sip fresh beer from glasses, grin. Dimples everywhere. Expensive white teeth. Hair for miles. Smoldering.
“Med students, huh?”
“Yeah,” Tim says.
“Cool,” Knockout One says.
“I always wanted to marry a doctor.” Knockout Two, licking and slurping the foam off her beer.
“We’re not doctors yet,” I say, my glasses steamed up, blinding me.
“Hahaha.”
Tim elbows me a shot in the ribs. I double over. My beer sloshes.
“You guys get high?”
Knockout Two produces a pipe, starts packing it.
“Uh, nah, thanks,” I say.
Tim hits me with a look that says, I will kill you if you screw this up.
“You don’t indulge?” Knockout One. She pouts, allows a whole bunch of hair to fall over one eye. I follow her hair down and get a glimpse of her body. We’re talking Penthouse hot. She shakes her head at Knockout Two, who makes Knockout One look like a troll. Tim is going to kill me. I expect him to torture me first.