The Dismantling (20 page)

O
VER
and over, Simon had rehearsed the story in his head, preparing for when he would finally tell his father the truth. He would need to begin, he'd decided, on the evening before the first classes of the first semester. On the Great Lawn in Central Park, the matriculating class spread out across six baseball diamonds, bats slung over shoulders, gloves tucked under arms. The late August air thick as mud, coolers of beer stashed behind the backstops. Simon leaning against the dugout fence, learning names: Anita, Dan, Rakesh, Liz, Levi. His classmates in baseball caps, tube socks, faded T-shirts, the names of their colleges and high schools emblazoned across their chests in flaking letters.

At the bar afterward, Simon shared the end of a long table with a girl—a woman, really; she was older than him—wearing a T-shirt that read “I
BX.” This was Katherine Peel. She'd just moved to Manhattan from Yonkers; sharp and sarcastic and unimpressed, she was going to be a trauma surgeon. They went up to the bar to refill their pitcher, but Katherine decided she wanted whiskey instead, so whiskey is what they had. They sat at the bar and drank. She told him she'd grown up in the Bronx, and when he asked what neighborhood, she told him Riverdale, “but not the part you're thinking of.” She said she'd been a nurse after college, before doing her premed courses at Pace. She peppered her speech with hospital jargon Simon didn't know, but he didn't want to appear callow, so he kept nodding and frowning and mumbling agreement.

A few drinks later, the other students began to drift out of the bar. Some slapped Simon's shoulder as they passed, and he felt an absurd sense of accomplishment for remembering their names. Allison, Pria, Jeff. These were to be his classmates. A looseness spread through his limbs. He smiled at Katherine, who was talking about witnessing her first open-heart surgery, the cracking of the rib cage. She paused, smiled back at him. He wondered how he appeared to her, whether he seemed like the kind of person who made friends easily, picked up girls in bars, traded one girlfriend for the next. He wondered if, instead, she could tell how private and constricted his life really was, whether that was in fact what she found appealing. Because he could see that she liked him, that she wanted to know more about him. He thought—he hoped—maybe it was a case of two damaged people recognizing the wound in each other, the way damaged people sometimes do. The skin of her throat was white as milk, a red blush creeping above the collar of her shirt; her smile was crooked, provocative, crimson lipstick like blood on snow. One drink more and they stood, Katherine grabbing his arm. He offered to take her home, but she told him she could make it alone. He helped her catch a taxi, and her lips brushed against his cheek as she slid into the backseat. As he walked uptown, to his new apartment on York Avenue, he was too high on the possibilities of this next phase in his life to be disappointed that she'd left without him. From the fourteenth floor, he looked out over the river and then south, down along the avenue. He thought he could see his old building, where he and his father and Amelia had lived before moving to the Rockaways, but he couldn't be sure he was looking at the right one.

The next morning, after listening to the semester's opening lecture, he stood with the rest of the students in a long, low-ceilinged hallway in the basement of the medical school. At the end of the hall, behind a set of steel double doors, waited the anatomy lab. He could already smell the formalin, sick and sweet and chemical. The professors opened the doors and the students filed into the large square room. Eighteen rolling metal tables were laid out in rows. On each table rested a white body bag and numbered placard. The odor of formalin pushed against Simon's face, like a soaked rag held to his mouth. He found his assigned table. His three dissection partners for the duration of the semester were stationed there already, and he saw that Katherine Peel was one of them, her black hair tied up in a bun, her eyes red and hooded. The other two, a boy and a girl, blond and fresh faced and looking very young, exuded an air of horrible competence. Katherine leaned her mouth to his ear, her breath smelling of synthetic mint layered over alcohol: “You were supposed to be at the next table. I switched the placards. Thank me later.”

One of the circulating professors unzipped their bag. The torso and legs were swaddled in beige cloth, the hands, feet, and head wrapped in gauzy white material over which clear plastic had been fixed in place with rubber bands. The professor pulled aside the cloth covering the cadaver's left arm, baring the skin from wrist to shoulder, then folded the cloth to expose the clavicle and the swell of a small breast. The skin was a noncolor: not quite white, not quite gray, not quite green. Smooth, unwrinkled—a young woman's arm, slim and hairless. Simon watched as the professor made the first cut, a shallow H at the rounding of the shoulder. The professor peeled back the skin with his gloved fingers, naming the revealed layer of greasy, yellowish tissue—the fascia—before sweeping it away to show the striated muscle underneath.

The four of them took turns with the scalpel, scissors, forceps, probe, and their fingers—mostly their fingers—picking their way through the structures of the woman's upper arm. This was a necessary task, and Simon was going to perform it as best he could. He looked across the table at Katherine. Her mouth was pressed flat; sweat beaded on her forehead. She held the dissection manual, reading the instructions aloud as Simon peeled the skin away from the bicep and dropped it into the tissue bucket at the foot of the table. The skin clung to his glove, and he shook his hand until it slid away and puddled at the bottom of the bucket. Katherine broke off in midsentence, handed the manual to one of their partners, and walked out of the room. Simon stopped, his scalpel poised above the cadaver's arm. He asked if he should go after her. There isn't time, the blonds said, we're behind already.

During their lunch break, he found Katherine eating a tuna sandwich in the cafeteria. She told him she'd needed to vomit, so that's what she went and did. One of the professors had found her in the hallway, she said, and tried to get philosophical. He told her it was normal to be upset by what they were doing; anybody in the lab who wasn't disturbed by it was the one with the problem. He said it would get better with time. She told Simon they'd had a nice moment, she and the professor, but what he didn't know was that she wasn't upset at all, she was just really fucking hungover. She laughed as she told Simon this story, as though to actually be disturbed by dissecting a cadaver would be ridiculous.

That evening they continued their work on the woman's upper arm. When they were finished, they sprayed a wetting solution on the flesh before rewrapping the torso. Simon zipped up the body bag, and as he pulled the zipper over the woman's wrapped head, he wondered what her face looked like, how she died, who she'd been.

The next week they moved on to the hands, removing the plastic bags and unwrapping the gauze. The woman's nails were painted black. The coverage was uniform, without chips or scratches, as though she'd just applied a fresh coat. Katherine cut down the center of the palm, drew a line across the base of the fingers, bisected each digit. The palm skin was thick and difficult to slice, and Katherine replaced the blade on her scalpel four times before finishing the cut.

After the arms came the thorax, the seat of the heart and lungs. They removed the cadaver's breasts from the chest cavity, along with the surrounding skin. The blonds took turns sawing through the ribs, bone dust curling into the air. When the work was done, they lifted the rib cage free of the body. Her lungs were mottled: she'd been a smoker. Simon felt a spasm of kinship. He held the woman's heart in his hands in the deep-basined sink, flushing the clotted blood and formalin out of the arteries.

Late at night, high above York Avenue, Simon twisted in his bed, from sleep to wakefulness and back again. He rolled over onto his stomach and flung out his arm, and his hand landed in a nest of fascia, yellow and clingy. He rolled over onto his back and sank down into heavy water, his hands and feet and head wrapped in thick plastic. He opened his mouth to breathe, the plastic clinging to his tongue. The smell of formalin filled his nostrils. This smell now followed him everywhere, no matter how hard he scrubbed his fingers and scalp in the shower. It was in his clothes, his skin, his hair, his saliva, his sweat. It filled his mouth; it was his air. He opened his eyes and his cadaver was lying in the bed next to him. She rested on her back, her chest cavity emptied out, the wet red walls glistening in the dim light that seeped around the blinds. Her face was covered in black plastic. He reached out and tore the plastic away. Underneath was a layer of gauze, which he unwrapped with difficulty, the gauze clinging to the damp skin. He pulled away the last of it, and it was as he knew it would be: it was Amelia, of course, it was his sister as he'd seen her in the Queens County Morgue, staring at him, open mouthed and dead eyed.

He told nobody about his dream. It didn't occur to him that other students might be having dreams of their own; if they were, they weren't telling anybody about them either.

 • • • 

S
ometime in November, he missed his first lab. He couldn't say why he didn't go. When his alarm rang that morning, he was already awake. He had an hour to shower, eat, and walk ten blocks to the facilities, but he felt as though a giant hand were pinning him against the mattress. After the lab had already begun, he forced himself to get up and walk over to the window. He raised the shade onto a brilliant morning, onto the glittering river. He stood by the window for half an hour, then got into the shower, the water scalding hot, the smell of formalin and cigarettes rising from his body.

He attended the following day's lab. He read aloud from the manual as the blonds disentangled the cadaver's thigh muscles. The book was slippery with formalin residue and bits of fascia. The cadaver's knees were dimpled; her toenails were painted black to match her fingers, but here the paint was chipped. Katherine asked why he'd missed yesterday's lab. He shrugged, said he overslept. But he missed another lab the following week, then a third, a fourth.

One night, over Thanksgiving break, he left the library after midnight and crossed the street to the hospital. He took the elevator down to the basement. He ignored the lockers of scrubs in the hallway, because who the fuck cared, the smell was coming home with him anyway. He pressed his electronic ID card against the sensor. The lock released. He opened the door and flipped on the lights, and it was as though it were the first day of dissection, eighteen white body bags resting on eighteen steel tables, as though nothing had yet been done to these cadavers—no, these
corpses
, because that was what they were, corpses, “cadaver” just a pretty word for a disinfected corpse.

He found his table and unzipped the body bag, letting it fall away from the woman like a chrysalis. He pulled off the moistening cloth, and there she was, her torso opened and emptied, her heart and liver and lungs stuffed into a garbage bag tucked against the soles of her feet. Katherine and the blonds had moved down her legs, exposing a tangle of tendons and muscles and nerves. He reached out his gloveless hands and turned her left leg to the side, and he saw that they had excavated the back of her thigh and calf as well, leaving the fat worm of the sciatic nerve running down the middle of a nest of ropey tissue. They'd stopped just above her ankles. Against his bare fingers her skin felt cold and greasy, the texture not unlike that of an uncooked chicken thigh. It was these kinds of metaphors—metaphors of meat, of animal flesh—that he had tried until now to suppress, because that was what he was supposed to do, but he didn't care anymore, he was sick of pretending.

You were supposed to think of your cadaver as a human being, because that would instill in you a proper respect for that human being's dead body as you tore it to pieces. But you were not supposed to think too much about your cadaver as a human being, because then you might wonder if she would like what was being done to her body if she could somehow see it now. Then you might imagine that she
could
see it, that she was watching you and your partners run scalpels and scissors through her skin, pull apart her muscles and organs with your hands. You might wonder about your cadaver's life, about what series of events had led to this terminus on your dissecting table. You might start to think of her as an individual with a past and a family and the collection of desires and fears and prejudices that we call a personality. You might start to see other people—people you know, people who are still alive—on the dissecting table, and you might start to see your cadaver freed from the table, outside the lab, taking the place of the living who surround you on your walk to and from the hospital, on your ever rarer visits to restaurants and shops and bars. This might happen first in dreams and then, later, in waking life. And if—as everybody else in your class seems to have less and less trouble determining the appropriate level of humanity, of humanness, to attach to their cadavers—instead you find yourself moved in the opposite direction, more and more uncertain about whether you were slicing open the belly and anus and vagina of a dead woman or a mere piece of meat, then you might find yourself standing in the anatomy lab, alone at one in the morning, caught between the need to uncover your cadaver's face and fear of what might happen if you do.