Face Day
A different elevator goes down there, clanging and metallic, room enough for a small crowd. The lockers start to smell, within the week, of formaldehyde staining the white coats. Soon Agnes has trouble recalling what it was like, to be new to the vast, cool basement, to approach the steel casket and wait for its opening.
Sixteen cadavers, heads and hands wrapped in ovals of white gauze. The one for Agnes’ group is a woman. Toenails longer than seems decent. Ashen nipples flattened by the casket lid against deflated breasts.
They don’t have to cut; graduate students are paid to do that work. They only need to look and touch and name. Nothing resembles the illustrated diagram. There is dye in the arteries and veins, but much of the body is dull and confluent, the colour of raw chicken. What Agnes likes is the precision of the language. Supraclavicular; over the bone that moves like a key.
Dissection, their History of Medicine professor has said, is a rite of passage, and now Agnes finds there are rites within the rite, in unexpected locales like the forearm, a dense bundle of muscles and tendons. It becomes a thing to be able to recite them. To tug on one, predicting which joint in which finger will move.
Remembering not to scratch her face, or adjust her ponytail, or reach into her jeans pockets, Agnes tries to lift the sodden heart or liver without frigid fluid trickling up her wrist. Two afternoons per week, there are mandatory sessions, led by tutors and the lab director. Then self-directed study in the evenings; it was an easier atmosphere. Confident students instruct others in the lab—some know the muscles well because of working out, flexing to show the biceps tendon in vitro. A classmate taking an arm from the cooler of severed limbs, tapping a friend on the shoulder.
There was a scandal, decades earlier; a prank with stolen limbs in the old building’s lobby. But some of the measures taken then persist. So the students receive a short biography of the body, to instill respect. Agnes’ group is studying a woman of seventy-three who taught elementary school and loved hiking, baking and her cat Pluto. They don’t give the medical history or cause of death, since there is value in reading the cadaver’s clues. For example, in the woman, there is no longer an appendix.
Agnes is relieved to she is doing alright, meaning she doesn’t throw up or faint or cry. After a while, her appetite is fine, even, right after. She goes out for wings with her group, and finds them comfortable to be with in the downtown streets and in the pub, even the ones very different from her usual friends, due to their ritual in the basement, their immersion in difficult material. Each of them, distinguished by it, a gleam on the skin that must be visible to others.
Almost half of the tenants in her building are medical students. There is always someone to walk home with. Her apartment is sparsely furnished because she likes the feeling of a monastic space: books, computer, and notes. Her yoga mat–she can study in certain positions. The campus, concrete crowding the copper dome, is visible from her balcony. It’s warm and the door should be open, but from her neighbor, smoke and, if Agnes ventures out, conversation drifts in.
Every week, the cadavers have been cut in a new way. In the lectures, there is frantic writing, labeling the line drawings on the handouts. They start with the thorax, learning to call the armpit the axilla, envisioning breasts as comma-shaped, the route of lymph. Then, downstairs, the parts have been opened and separated. The cadavers slowly get messier, harder to reassemble into sleeping humans.
The supervisor, with a white moustache and growling voice, circles the tables. Get in there, Agnes hears him say to the handful of wallflowers. So you can point at the stomach, but what about texture and weight? Don’t be afraid to learn with your hands.
Only one student passes out. It happens near the double doors, goes unseen by most others who are crowded around the bodies. A low-voiced wildfire passes between tables as he gets dragged to the hallway. There is laughter, which bothers Agnes. They are supposed to be compassionate.
On the phone, to friends at home and her family, she mentions the passing out, and also the biography of her body, but she is careful not to describe the cadaver. It’s to avoid revulsion, and also there is a new loyalty of some kind; she hesitates to say that in this profession, this good work she has chosen, there is a cooler full of severed arms.
There are other subjects: histology, biochemistry, and molecular genetics. But anatomy feels closest to medicine, because it is essential to surgery, and people have entrusted their bodies, even if inert. The real substance, the knowledge that will give Agnes the ability to help, will come after the first semester.
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