Jacob can’t argue this, and for a full minute there is only the sound of Adam chewing lettuce. He pokes a fork at his salad. “I saw Lorenzo down at the Iron Horse last night. Hear you’ve got some bones in the basement.”
Jacob sighs. “I hope Lorenzo doesn’t talk himself out of a job. But yeah, a bunch of them. I’m hoping you can come take a look. The crew that found them wants us to call the coroner.”
Adam smiles. “McTeague? He’s a moron.”
“A moron who likes his picture in the papers.”
“And you don’t want the papers in on this.”
“Hell, no.”
“Why not?” Adam leans back in his chair. “It’s the school’s dirty little secret. We ought to come clean.”
“Are you crazy? We’re in the middle of a capital campaign, Adam. It’ll send our donors flying.”
Adam waves a hand toward the bodies arrayed down the long room. “These are the only donors that count.”
“I’m not going to argue abstractions with you, Adam. These guys are crucial, yes, but they don’t pay our salaries.” In spite of himself, Jacob has allowed his voice to rise. “It’s not pure, I know it, but it’s necessary. PR is the dirty work that keeps the machine running.”
Adam sets his fork down and takes a paper bag out of a desk drawer. He pulls a plum from it and offers it to Jacob. Jacob shakes his head. Adam takes a bite from the plum and looks at Jake for a long moment as he chews slowly. “All right, Jake. I’ll help you with your dirty work. I’ve already got an idea of what’s down there, though. You know the full history of our august institution?”
Again Jacob shakes his head. “Some of it. I heard about it all through school. Everybody did. I figured it was just rumors, like a ghost story.” There had always been folklore concerning medical students and cadavers and always would be; the morbid symbiosis was as old as the profession itself, a way to maintain the precarious balance between the ghoulishness of anatomy and the higher purpose it served. Five or six years ago, a pair of anatomy students had dressed their cadaver in a suit and sunglasses and left him propped up, sitting, in the waiting area of the emergency room. Tad Bowling and his partner, Jacob remembers. They’d been expelled that very day. But they had all laughed, the students. There was a weird callousness about it, the way you had to set the boundaries between yourself and your cadaver—as though it weren’t human anymore. How else could you pop the pelvis like a wishbone, split the nose, saw the jaw off a fellow human being? He remembers, though, that until this week the basement door of Johnston Hall has always been padlocked.
“No rumors, no ghost story. The dissecting room was in the current registrar’s office until the turn of the century. I figure when they finished with the bodies for the course, they just took them downstairs and buried them. Quietly. Public perception, you know.”
Jacob ignores the jab. “Not too bad, so far.”
“No. If that was all, you could call the coroner yourself. But from what I’ve heard, they were all black. The cadavers. Deceased slaves before the war and freedmen during Reconstruction. Not good enough to be seen as patients but fine for anatomy subjects.”
Jacob thinks of the old photograph in his office. The dark face in the back flashes in his mind, featureless.
“You’re sitting on a powder keg over there. Have been for more than a century.” Adam stands up and stretches, his massive biceps bunching under the sleeves of his T-shirt. “Yeah, I’ll help you with your dirty work, Doctor Thacker. But first I want you to help me with a little of mine.”
THE HOLDING TANK is a giant cylinder of polished stainless steel, and Jacob and Adam have to climb a set of perforated metal stairs on its circumference to reach the top. This room is off-limits to the medical students, and for good reason: as shocking as the sight of dozens of dead bodies in the dissecting lab might be for the new student, seeing them afloat in a thousand gallons of formaldehyde would be worse.
A week before, this tank was full of the naked bodies, floating vertically in the preservative and crowded close on one another. Now that Adam has set most of them out for the incoming class, their ranks are thinned. A few leftovers are all that remain, their scalps just showing above the surface. Their hair is cropped close to the skull when they are processed, so the tank reveals a half-dozen crew-cut scalps poking from the viscous liquid, most of them gray-stubbled, bobbing in the formaldehyde like a new genus of bad apples. “Players,” they had called them back in school, Jacob remembers.
“I’m looking for the thin female,” Adam says. “Should be the best demonstrator I’ve had in years. Beautiful musculature.” He takes a last bite from the plum as he manipulates the grapple over the tank like the grab-a-toy game at a fairground. Jacob winces as its tines close around a head. A body comes up out of the liquid, its face set in a grimace and streaming formaldehyde, and Adam lowers it back gently. “Wrong one.”
Jacob looks toward the ceiling. “Meant to tell you I met with your former colleague this morning.”
“Washburn?”
“The one. He’s a son of a bitch. Black-market organ sales? I could hardly believe it.”
“He was a bad hire. Never had a proper respect.”
“He’d have taken the school down with him if he could.”
Adam settles the grapple over a head and lowers it onto the dome of the skull. “Yep. That’s why I turned him in.”
Jacob is stunned by this admission—the whistleblower rules allow for complete anonymity—but is glad that Adam feels he can confide in him.
“There she is.” The cadaver is younger than Jacob expected; small wonder that Adam has given her his top spot for the fall semester. Beyond her prunish hands and the sullen droop of her breasts, she appears to have been a woman in vigorous middle age.
“I think I’ll call her Beatrice. Does she look like a Beatrice to you? It seems fitting.”
“It is. We named our man Henry. Not very imaginative, I know. I used to have dreams of old naked Henry climbing off the table and chasing me with a scalpel.”
“Yep, the revenge nightmare. There’s the old guilt. Grab a pair of gloves and help me get her on the gurney, will you?”
Jacob steps down the stairs, pulls two latex gloves from a box on the wall, and tugs them on as he waits by the gurney. Adam lowers Beatrice to him, the body revolving slowly with the grapple, still dripping formaldehyde, in a slow-motion pirouette.
“Put her facedown, Jake.”
Jacob takes hold of the ankles and tugs on the legs until the toes are aligned near the foot of the gurney. Adam lowers the head and Beatrice’s body meets the metal slab an inch at a time, knees to chest.
“Grab the head, please, so I don’t drop her on the face.” He does as he is told, careful to keep his shirtsleeves clear of the grapple’s tines. He can feel Beatrice’s short hair bristling under the latex. As the grapple rises again he turns the head to lay the face on its side. Beatrice’s watery brown eyes are open, looking through him.
Adam springs down the steps and pushes the gurney out into the lab. Jacob almost has to trot to keep up. “Want to try your hand again?” Adam says over his shoulder. “See if you’ve still got it?”
Jacob is beginning to remember that a little of Adam’s eccentricity goes a long way. He is ready to get out of this basement. Whether Adam cares to acknowledge it or not, the world moves at a different pace aboveground. “I’ve got a crisis brewing, Adam. Don’t have the time.”
“Ah, time. I’m disappointed, young apprentice. You’ve forgotten the great philosophical lesson of the anatomy lab. Time is all you have. Take a look around. If this isn’t a sight to keep time in the proper context, I don’t know what is. These people are out of time. You have plenty.” He brandishes a scalpel at Jacob. “First step is the incision,” he says, handing it over. “Proceed.”
With a sigh, Jacob takes the scalpel and leans close to the back. But not too close; he remembers well the hazard of cadaver juice spurting into a mouth or an eye.
He makes three long incisions through the skin, as if to carve the partial outline of a box on Beatrice’s back. The cuts are bloodless. This is the first time in years he has even thought to make a cut without a hemostat and gauze at hand. But God, the feel of the scalpel in his hand.
“Step two: reflect the skin from the posterior musculature.”
“Is a buttonhole okay?”
“Absolutely.”
He carves a quarter-sized hole in the skin below the neck and pushes it through. With a finger through the flesh, he joins forefinger and thumb and pulls the skin away as though drawing down a very reluctant window shade. The tissue parts with a wet sucking sound. Beatrice’s musculature is indeed remarkable. The latissimus dorsi are well formed and even, looking under this exposure like a pair of wings spanning the shoulder blades. He pulls until the flesh is stripped away down to the end of the incisions and lays it over the buttocks, the flap of skin draped over Beatrice’s posterior like a miniskirt.
“Well done,” Adam says. “Your half of our barter is completed. Glad to see you’ve still got a light touch.” He picks up a ketchup bottle from his desk and sprinkles phenoxyethanol on the corpse before covering her with a sheet. He tucks the corners in under the shoulders almost tenderly.
“Great. When can you come?”
“No time like the present.”
Jacob knows he should acknowledge the lesson from his old teacher. “Thank you for making the time.”
“Not a problem. What have I got to lose by changing my day? Flexibility’s the key to life, Jacob. It’s why I’m such a happy fucking camper.”
NOONTIME RUSH IS in full swing at the Hub. Waitresses jostle their way through throngs of doctors and lawyers and politicians who have crowded into the narrow alley-shaped café during the hour-long break from clinic, court, and legislature. With the combination of its prime downtown location and its venerable meat-and-three menu, the Hub has been a Columbia institution since the fifties. And it looks it: the paneled walls are covered with the autographed photos of governors and football coaches, its acoustic tile ceiling sooted dark brown from the exhaust of forty years of deep-fried lunches. Jacob has arrived in time to secure a coveted booth underneath the scowling face of Joe Morrison, who had written in black marker on his photo, “Best meatloaf in Dixie.” Above Coach Morrison, the ceiling fan spins lazily enough for Jacob to study the quarter inch of dust accumulated on each of its blades.
The cowbell over the front door clangs again and Jacob looks up to see McMichaels making his way in, pausing at every table to exchange a handshake and a few words, stopping longest at those tables where legislators sit huddled and cabalistic. When he finally slides into the booth across from Jacob, he is still nodding and smiling at diners across the room. A waitress appears at the table instantly, although Jacob has been there for nearly ten minutes without so much as a nod from the waitstaff.
“Afternoon, dean,” she says as she spreads paper napkins and beat-up silver on the Formica tabletop. “Tuesday special is country-fried steak.”
“With gravy?”
“If you want it.”
“I do, June,” he says, and takes a long look at her. “When are you going to run away with me, June-bug?”
June only rolls her eyes. Jacob gives her his order, including fried okra at the dean’s insistence. Once she is gone, he leans closer to the dean, though the din in the Hub probably makes it unnecessary.
“We’ve got a situation,” he says.
“No, we don’t,” the dean says, spreading a napkin in his lap. “I sent Jake Thacker in to handle it, and I know it got handled right. I’d bet good money that Internal Review Board meeting went off without a hitch. Washburn signed those resignation papers, I know, Jake, because I sent the right man to do the job.”
“He signed the papers.”
Now McMichaels leans over the table, grinning. “I hope you roasted him a little.”
Jacob would like to tell him so, but it had been Washburn, imperious as ever, who had very nearly done the roasting. Even with the entire Internal Review Board ringed around him at the closed meeting—and Kirstin Reithoffer chairing the proceedings in her stern Austrian manner—Washburn had refused to buckle until the very end. From the outset he had challenged Jacob’s presence, snorting when Jacob said he was there in an advisory role.
“I don’t see how you have any advice worth contributing,” Washburn said. “The rest of us here, you will note, are scientists.”
“Doctor Washburn, you are a scientist who has been found selling cadaver organs to research interests for personal profit. Whatever title you claim, the man in the street—the taxpayer—would call that graft and corruption. Even those of us who fall short of scientific status can see the serious breach of medical ethics you’ve committed. The dean sent me here to see that you don’t wind up in legal custody and disgrace the school any further.”
“Disgrace,” Washburn spat. “You speak of disgrace, with your record.”
Jacob had been rising before he realized it, but felt the cool hand of Kirstin Reithoffer on his chest. Reithoffer had taken over then, and within a half hour Washburn had signed the confidentiality papers that severed all his ties to the Medical College of South Carolina, banished to a future in chiropractic science for all Jacob cared.
The dean is still looking at Jacob expectantly. “He got a little of what he’s due,” Jacob says. “We took his lab keys and sent him packing.”
June is back now with sweet tea and their lunch, everything balanced precariously on her suntanned arms. The dean thanks her and digs in.
“You did the right thing, Jake. Remember, I’m a holistic man. Got to maintain the health of the entire organism. If a part is bringing down the whole, away it goes.” He holds a speared piece of fried okra aloft on his fork, regarding it as though it were a rare diamond. “Trans fats. They’ll kill you quick, but damn, it’s worth the trip, isn’t it?”
“Right. But Washburn’s not the situation I mean. Bowman’s crew found bones in the cellar yesterday.”
“Medical waste, sure. It’s an old building.”
“More than waste. Bones. They’re human. Adam Claybaugh and I took a quick look this morning. Most of them show signs of dissection. We found a skull with a trepanation in it.”
“How many of them?”
“Can’t say yet. Some are still partly buried, but Adam thinks maybe remains of forty or more. We found an infant still mostly intact. Pickled in an old whiskey barrel.”
McMichaels seems to have lost his appetite. “Why didn’t you tell me this yesterday?”
“Couldn’t get past your entourage.”
“You tried the house?”
“Twice. Two messages.”
“Ah. The help.” McMichaels waves a hand in the air as though swatting at something. “God, God,” he says. “We’ll have to keep a very tight lid on this.”
Jacob forks a piece of baked catfish into his mouth. Baked, the menu claims, but it is swimming in butter. “We will. There were three on the crew. I know one of them. I’ll talk to him. Bowman’s too dumb to think much about it so long as he’s billing us by the hour.”
“Good. Put them all to work on something else—painting, whatever. Keep Bowman happy and don’t miss a payday.”
“Jim, did you know about the basement?”
McMichaels mops at the splatter of gravy on his plate with a roll. “Back in the day, we used to sneak down there at night in the fall. Halloween. A little hazing ritual, back before the school was coed. Harmless kid stuff, letting off steam. But I saw some of it, yes, and I should have had it taken care of before we called in the physical plant.” The dean’s eyes have gone distant. “For fuck’s sake, Jacob, why were they digging down there?”
McMichaels takes another bite of steak and pushes his plate away. “It would be a shame if this came out. We’ve done so much good work, so much. People wouldn’t understand. Those were good men, Jacob, no matter how that basement may have look
ed to you today.”
“It didn’t look too much different from Washburn to me.”
“You’re wrong about that. Standards were different then.”
Jacob shrugs. He knows that the public would not see the distinction. Anyway, the dean is rising to leave.
“What about the bones?”
McMichaels rests a big hand on Jacob’s shoulder. “I need you to take care of it for me. We need for it to go away.”
Slowly, Jacob nods. The hand pats his shoulder. “I’m behind you a hundred percent.”
Then he is gone, making his way toward the door, stopping again at tables occupied now by recently arrived customers. Before McMichaels has made it out the door, Jacob realizes he has left him with the check. When June shows up again, he slides his corporate AmEx card across the table.
June shakes her head. “Don’t take credit cards, honey.”
OUTSIDE THE HUB, Jacob pauses on the sidewalk, the tinny sound of the restaurant’s cowbell echoing in his ears. The day is humid but otherwise clear, and the scorching concrete of the sidewalk throws back the sunlight as brightly as bleached bone. He checks his watch and decides to squeeze in an hour at the school’s archives.
He can feel the sweat threatening to soak through the armpits of his coat by the time he rounds the corner onto Pendleton Street and his destination comes into view. Beaupre Hall, despite its august name, is an ugly bunkerlike building that looks squat even at its height of four stories, a nightmare of poured concrete built in 1966—a low point from Columbia’s architectural dark ages. So long as its air conditioning is blowing full-steam, though, he will register no complaint.
He takes the elevator to the top floor, fanning himself with his portfolio as the elevator climbs. The doors open to the mortuary hush of the archives, and he steps out onto the deep carpet directly in front of the curator, Janice Tanaka, whose desk faces the elevator doors as though in preparation for an attack from those quarters. She looks over the top of her glasses and her eyes seem to narrow when she recognizes Jacob.
The Resurrectionist Page 5