Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost

by David Hoon Kim

  You and the others have already tried turning the body over. Who would’ve thought a lifeless body could be so slippery, so elusive? The four of you—Frédéric and Aurélie on one side, you and the art student on the other—barely managed to keep the body from sliding off the table’s stainless-steel surface, dangerously slick with fluids. It almost felt as though the body were resisting you, pitting its will against yours. Eyes still smarting from the formaldehyde, you realized, for the first time, that the cadaver is female.

  What did Aurélie say earlier? We got lucky. She wasn’t trying to make a joke, but Frédéric—or Fréd—laughed anyway. You understood that she was referring to the cadaver’s overall condition more than anything else. At the nearby tables, the bodies are all visibly older, transformed in unexpected ways by the preservation process, which has robbed them of pubic hair, for example, but left untouched other areas of the body. You wonder if the heads, which are hidden beneath several layers of gauze, to be removed when you get to dissecting them, are also hairless. Yours died more recently, that much is obvious, and the limbs haven’t yet completely lost their stiffness—or at least that’s what you blamed for your difficulty in turning the body over. But a newer body means better organs with more color to them, easier to tell apart than the uniform gray mess typical of an older specimen. The chemical agents haven’t yet had time to dry out muscles into strips of jerky and turn organs into shriveled husks, or, worse, liquify them into a chemical slurry. Normally, only the research surgeons are allowed to have such fresh cadavers. Like Aurélie said, you got lucky.

  Your gaze at that moment is drawn to the art student, whose name you’ve forgotten. The École des beaux-arts is down the street from the medical school, and he’s taking the anatomy course as part of some sort of project. That’s when you notice that he’s not wearing gloves. Did he have any on earlier, when you were all trying to move the body? Strictly speaking, there’s no rule about gloves in the lab, but most choose to wear them, for obvious reasons. He is staring down at the cadaver, and you are struck by his pallor, which almost makes him resemble a corpse himself. Despite the refrigerated air of the lab, you can’t see his breath, and you continue to watch him from the corner of your eye, waiting for him to exhale.

  Suddenly, like a switch turning, the room is filled with sounds and movement. The monitors have come to life, moving briskly between the tables, stopping at each group and verifying names on a clipboard. The prof has arrived at last, unnoticed in the confusion. He strides past you without a glance, leaving in his wake the unmistakable scent of the outside air he’s brought in with him. On the whiteboard, he begins to write out a list of the principal nerves and vessels to look for and identify.

  “Your first incision,” he intones, still writing on the whiteboard, “will be along the medial line of the thorax…”

  By now, everyone is busy with the cadavers. Fréd asks, “What are we going to do?”

  “We’ll have to start with the back,” Aurélie says, frowning. “Or maybe the legs. There are some structures of the inguinal region that extend into the anterior—”

  “What do you think?” Fréd says, turning to you. “Didn’t you say that anatomy was your specialty?”

  You find it hard to ignore the veiled challenge in his tone. He fixes you with a pointed expression, defying you to prove him right. At the orientation, you said only that you had an interest in anatomy, nothing more. You did not say, for example, that you have dreamt of cutting into a human body since you were a little girl. It has nothing to do with a desire to kill; death is the furthest thing from your thoughts. On the contrary, it is when you really like someone that you want to know what she looks like on the inside. As a child, you sought out the inner workings of things, starting with the alarm clock that you took apart one afternoon when you were seven. It was the sight of the little gears, the coiled springs, all crammed together and yet so perfectly imbricated, that sent a nameless excitement through you. Was it the excitement of looking at something you weren’t meant to see? Your parents, initially worried about your lack of interest in normal girl things, then mollified by what they took to be a scientific temperament, were ultimately disappointed when you made no effort to put the clock—or anything else you opened up—back together. They didn’t understand what you felt, and you didn’t know how to explain it to them. It was, in the end, a drawing of a hand that opened your eyes to what had been around you, all along. The summer before your final year of lycée, you were wandering aimlessly through the streets of Arles on the day of the open-air market. The Grande Fête was a few days away and you could feel the familiar tension, the repressed energy. At one of the bookstalls you picked up a tattered tome at random to flip through the pages. You recall the paving stones beneath your feet tinted pink by the late-afternoon sun. And that’s when you saw it. Since then, there have been others—the pelvic cross-section from the Topographisch-anatomischer Atlas with its cutaway view of the femur and loops of bowel, like a nineteenth-century CT scan; or the intertwining rivers of blue and red defined by the silhouette of an invisible heart in Jean-Marc Bourgereau’s diagram of the left and right coronary arteries—but it was the anonymous drawing you stumbled across, of a hand cut open to reveal a glimpse of muscles, vessels, ligaments, that you always came back to. In bed, at night, you gazed up at your own hand and told yourself that what you couldn’t see was far more interesting, and infinitely more complex, full of unseen possibilities, than the bland exterior you knew every day. You found it hard to believe that an arm, a shoulder, or the flayed face of an Albrecht von Haller engraving could contain such structural multitudes. Even now, when you have a spare moment, you like to go to the big university library and leaf through anatomy atlases in the cavernous reading room. There are, of course, Vesalius and Rohen and Gray, but your love has always been toward less-known anatomists, in particular Hortense de Gaulejac, your favorite.

  “Someone,” Fréd says, “has to make the first cut.”

  “I’ll do it,” the art student says.

  “Blaise, is it?” Fréd says, and you remember him at the orientation asking, Pascal or Cendrars? Blaise, with a felt marker, draws the lines along which the first incision will be made. He is still not wearing gloves. His movements are deliberate, even a little impatient; all the same, there is something practiced and familiar about them—he’s done this before, you think. You see him rest his fingers briefly against the cadaver’s back, where the spine is, the little gesture at odds with the cold efficiency with which he traced the incision lines. He chooses a scalpel from the drawer under the dissection table and bends down once more over the cadaver. As he starts to press the point of the blade into the skin, you are overcome by a pang of—is it possible?—jealousy. It should be you making the first cut. The thought, as brief as a spark, surprises you. A vein at his temple twitches. He puts down the scalpel.

  “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  Abruptly, he turns away from the table. Heads go up as he makes his way between the cadavers. “After all that foreplay with the felt marker,” Fréd says, shaking his head, “he’s the first to crack.”

  You look down at the cadaver and see that he didn’t even pierce the skin. You pick up the scalpel and place the blade to the line that he drew. The skin is surprisingly resilient, giving way only reluctantly. Liquid seeps out, and for a moment it’s as if the blade were cutting into your own flesh. You finish the incision and attempt to peel back the slippery, viscous skin, but it’s impossible. Then the prof is there with a pair of scissors, which he uses to snip off a corner from the incision you just made.

  “Now the flap can be pulled back more easily,” he says.

  Aurélie, as if on cue, reaches in with small, dainty hands to loosen the connective tissue and detach the subcutaneous layer from the muscles. The prof commends her on her technique. She has good fingers, he says, and would make an excellent surgeon. He walks away before Aurélie can stammer a reply. You stare at the little triangle of skin t
hat the prof cut out, lying on the table, unnoticed, next to the body it came from.

  * * *

  That night, you have dinner with Bérengère at a Japanese restaurant near Opéra, not the kind of place you had in mind after a dissection lab, but Bérengère loves sushi, and she is usually the one to choose where the two of you eat when you dine together. She is eight years older than you and is no longer a student, but spends her days in the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where she hires herself out to students your age, shopping for groceries and taking lecture notes on their behalf. She works for an agency that liaises with the various faculties in and around Paris. It’s a trend that originated out west, in Rennes and Nantes, among the students there, before spreading to other metropolitan centers. It’s also how the two of you met, near the end of your first year of medicine.

  You’ve already described to her the dissection room, the stainless-steel tables with their advanced drainage systems, the stench of formaldehyde. (At your place, you took a shower, changed your bra and underwear, but you can still smell it, on your fingers, on your face.) The only thing you leave out is the cadaver itself. You don’t tell her it’s the first naked body—the first naked female body—that you’ve seen up close, other than your own. Bérengère listens to you while eating, unfazed, and it’s one of the things you like about her. You describe to her the other members of your dissection group: Aurélie, who obviously sees herself as the group leader; Fréd, who is everything Aurélie is not; and the art student, Blaise. You don’t know what to make of him, you tell Bérengère as you attempt to pick up the piece of eel on your plate with your chopsticks. You’re not all that fond of eel, but it’s the only cooked fish among the sushi.

  “Maybe”—she lays down her chopsticks across her empty plate—“he’s a necrophile. Maybe that’s why he left the room when he did: to relieve himself in the toilets.”

  “I remind you that we’re eating.”

  “Speak for yourself.” She has a way of wrinkling her nose and her upper lip when she smiles that you’ve never been able to imitate. “So—this art student, what does he look like?”

  She tends to ask this when you express any kind of interest in someone of the male sex, and it bothers you more than you think it should. As a result, you don’t do a very good job of describing him, fumbling over details, leaving out others. You are telling her about his strange immobility—like someone looking at an object visible only to himself—when you notice a change in Bérengère’s expression. You ask her if she’s OK, and she laughs, a funny little sound, then says:

  “I was thinking about a student in one of the classes I modeled for.”

  “Oh?”

  “Not that I’m saying it’s him or anything, but…”

  Bérengère, before you met her, was an artists’ model at the École des beaux-arts.

  “He had this way of staring at me … It really gave me the creeps. Like he was seeing something that—how can I put it—that he knew wasn’t really there. I can only imagine what his drawings were like. A part of me wanted to take a look; at the same time, I didn’t want to know.” She motions for another demi of Asahi. “It seems silly now, but I had nightmares about it.”

  “Is that why you quit?”

  “I quit because the rooms were never heated, even in winter.” She is rummaging inside her purse for her cigarettes and you can’t see her face. “Besides, I wasn’t going to do it forever.”

  * * *

  Bérengère doesn’t know about your feelings for her, though you’ve come close to telling her more than once. Early on, you gave her an aperçu of your formative years—summers in the Camargue, the Grande Fête, the crowning of the Queen of Arles—and recounted, with appropriate flourishes of irony, the epiphany in the open-air market responsible for your love of old anatomy manuals, the changement de cap from Literature to Science and the subsequent decision to study medicine in Paris. You even told her about Hortense de Gaulejac, a student of Françoise Basseporte like Marie Biheron, another female anatomist. Unlike Biheron and her anatomical wax models, Hortense left nothing behind, nothing that could be attributed to her by name. She was a woman, and women were ignored when they were right and ridiculed when they were wrong. Better to remain anonymous and let the work speak for itself. It was, after all, a love of the work that drove her to do what she did—all the scientific texts she translated or supervised drawings for, which were published under the sole names of the male surgeons, physiologists and anatomists who thought of her as an esteemed colleague, if not their equal. It is not known how many times she did this, inserting herself into the work of others—the addition of a paragraph on mercury chloride as a preventive agent against rot in an essay about bacteria, for example, or the inclusion of a female skeleton among the plates of an anatomical atlas—which makes the most rudimentary of bibliographies a challenge, if not an altogether impossible task. Nevertheless, you plan to attempt just that for your third-year thesis next year. Hortense de Gaulejac is the reason you came to Paris, you who could have remained in the south, where your parents and friends are. You could have chosen Montpellier or Marseille, where the tables in the dissection room are porcelain rather than stainless steel. Instead, you chose Paris for its medical library, the third largest in the world, and for its manuscript archive, the largest in France.

  “All because of a hand you saw in an anatomy book?”

  “In a word, yes.”

  “You really think she used her own hand as a model?”

  “If the drawings she made of the clitoris are an indication…” You had just told Bérengère about the drawing table, the mirror hidden behind a velvet cloth. “They were never published, and found among her papers after her death. Even when the clitoris was finally allowed in nineteenth-century textbooks, it was cut along the frontal plane like the penis—not transversally, as it should be to show all of the internal organs.”

  “No kidding.”

  You had bumped into her at a party in the basement of the Maison du Brésil. A chance encounter. You were there with some med students who lived nearby, in one of the other residence halls of the Cité U. It was she who recognized you first. During a particularly busy week, you’d hired her to do your grocery shopping and water your plants.

  “The anatomist. We meet again.” You could see that she was a little drunk. With slow, languorous movements, she loosened her scarf, revealing what was hidden underneath. Freshly tattooed along the length of her neck—the skin a little swollen along the edges—was a pair of intertwined serpents, one red and one blue, which made you think immediately of the internal jugular vein and the common carotid artery. The soft, vibrant colors called to mind the drawings of Jean-Marc Bourgereau, who writes in his Traité de l’anatomie du coeur humain: “[The] carotid splits into two branches in the thorax, at the fourth cervical vertebra, but until then it runs as a single artery, diverging from the internal jugular on the left side of the body, approaching and often overlapping it on the right side.”

  You were flattered that she remembered you, among the countless faces she saw on a daily basis, hiring herself out to a student clientele numbering in the hundreds, if not more, though you weren’t drunk enough to think it meant anything. In fact, you weren’t really drunk at all; you never had more than a beer at these parties, and you rarely finished it by the end of the night. So you were in complete possession of your senses when the two of you, along with others heading home, crossed the street to catch the RER, the last one of the night. You found out she lived in the Goutte d’Or, near the boundary of Barbès, on the other side of the Seine. The train started to slow as it approached Saint-Michel, and you were deciding whether to switch to the métro or walk the rest of the way to your apartment when she leaned towards you and, with a smile, invited you to her place. Before you could stop yourself, you asked her how you would get back home. You saw her nod, as though recognizing the wisdom of your remark, and that was that. You’ve told yourself since then that no
thing would have come of it. For one thing, she wasn’t into girls. And yet. In those dead morning hours after emerging from another troubled dream, you can’t help but think: If you’d said yes? And: Why didn’t you?

  * * *

  The room is filled with the sound of electric saws cutting into bone. The rib cage is being removed today. It’s time for the lungs and heart, but your body is still stomach-down on the table. None of you have had the courage to move it after the last, disastrous attempt. The prof has suggested a laminectomy, which involves removing part of the spinal column. “A lot harder than the ribs,” Fréd says, half muffled by the face mask, though it is Blaise wielding the saw with its wide, stout blade. Perhaps to make up for his previous failing, he volunteered to do the cutting himself—with one of the manual saws, no less—surprising you all. Before the lab, standing behind a tree, you watched him smoke a cigarette in front of the main building. The dark, bruised-looking skin under his eyes made his face appear even more pale. At one point, bringing the cigarette to his lips, he marked a slight pause, a hesitation, like someone remembering something. What if it really had been him in one of the classes Bérengère modeled for at the Beaux-Arts? You weren’t sure what you were looking for until you saw it, the familiar red outline through the pocket of his shirt. Chesterfields, Bérengère’s brand. You wonder if it means anything. The other night, after the sushi restaurant, Bérengère had stepped into a tobacconist’s (she’d misplaced her pack) and returned empty-handed (they didn’t have her brand). Now you stare at Blaise’s forehead, near the hairline, where the effort of the saw is causing a vein to stand out in relief. Beads of sweat dot his brow. Fréd shouts words of encouragement, no doubt glad to have someone else doing the grunt work. Aurélie is holding a pair of scissors, ready to cut away any stray tissue. Little bits of cartilage, like gnarled roots, fly off the blade as Blaise moves the saw back and forth over the vertebrae. The air is thick with bone dust, and Fréd makes a comment about poisonous aerosols. You imagine the walls of Blaise’s room covered with drawings of Bérengère naked as you help Aurélie tear off strips of bone and tissue. The dura mater is the first superficial layer, a protective coating as thick as your finger. Before it can be cut, the spinal ligament along the posterior wall of the spinal canal must be excised, along with the dural sac, whose protective membrane Aurélie carefully slices through with a knife, revealing the arachnoid mater.