<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Sixteen cadavers, heads and hands wrapped in ovals of white gauze. The one for Agnes\u2019 group is a woman. Toenails longer than seems decent. Ashen nipples flattened by the casket lid against deflated breasts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
They don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2014some know the muscles well because of working out, flexing to show the biceps tendon in vitro<\/em>. A classmate taking an arm from the cooler of severed limbs, tapping a friend on the shoulder.<\/p>\n There was a scandal, decades earlier; a prank with stolen limbs in the old building\u2019s lobby. But some of the measures taken then persist. So the students receive a short biography of the body, to instill respect. Agnes\u2019 group is studying a woman of seventy-three who taught elementary school and loved hiking, baking and her cat Pluto. They don\u2019t give the medical history or cause of death, since there is value in reading the cadaver\u2019s clues. For example, in the woman, there is no longer an appendix.<\/p>\n Agnes is relieved to she is doing alright, meaning she doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2013she can study in certain positions. The campus, concrete crowding the copper dome, is visible from her balcony. It\u2019s warm and the door should be open, but from her neighbor, smoke and, if Agnes ventures out, conversation drifts in.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t be afraid to learn with your hands.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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. The leaves yellow. Agnes gets along with everyone, but has made two particular friends. They\u2019re also from other cities, too far to go home for a weekend. They study together at the library, eat cafeteria salads. When enough is enough they go out to whatever the class is doing, a martini bar or Meds-Law mixer. One of them starts dating a law student.<\/p>\n Sometimes real patients come to the lectures. They sit on the stage while their doctor presents their case, and then they answer questions from the students. There is a man who has survived a major heart attack. You think I was clutching my chest? he says. No, I was saying to my wife, I sprained my shoulder. Thankfully, once upon a time she was a nurse. Another day, a woman with the butterfly rash of lupus, or still another, a man paralyzed in a fall.<\/p>\n The cadavers grow increasingly dissembled, and they smell worse. There is a question around the face. The face is coming in their lecture notes, with the hidden, hollow antlers of the sinuses. But will it really be unwrapped and cut? There are students with friends in upper years who say yes, but there is also a contingent claiming it\u2019s impossible at this stage of decay. The lab director grumbles the question away, says focus on the pelvis, that is what you have.<\/p>\n Agnes and her friends are out in the thumping cluster of undergrad bars. It is a Thursday, meant to be an early night, but there is a second-year student who is getting interesting. Agnes is slightly drunk and can\u2019t decide how much of it is him and how much the status of being ahead of her in the program. They lean on a tall, round table, shout in each other\u2019s ears.<\/p>\n She thinks about him on the walk home and there is a lightness in her belly. She is remembering his nose against her hair. In her unlit kitchen, drinking a glass of water, she hears a knocking that has urgency and apology in it, and her heart thumps. Agnes glides to the door\u2019s porthole, breath held, but she finds a globular version of her neighbour, face a sweating moon.<\/p>\n It\u2019s very sobering. Agnes has a doctor mode even without the training. She calls the ambulance and rides in the back holding the neighbour\u2019s hand, and in Emerg she explains what she can of the tests. The doctors are cheerfully instructive. They decide to keep the neighbour in for observation, and when at first daylight the resident shows Agnes how to write an admissions note, sleep seems entirely beside the point.<\/p>\n Agnes goes home for a shower and then to class. In the anatomy lecture, they cover the neck and face. She follows along, sips coffee from a huge Styrofoam cup. By midday she has trouble staying upright. Her statements come out in slow motion. There is no recourse; she has to sleep. That evening, one of the friends calls and says they did the face in lab. She says the faces were quartered like those folded paper thingies that you open and close you know in grade school with numbers and fortunes written inside. She is speaking pretty loudly as if it was not a normal day.<\/p>\n On Saturdays, the lab is officially closed, but Agnes goes down the different elevator, walks the hallway alone. The doors are unlocked, but no one is there. Agnes opens her group\u2019s casket; the face is back in the gauze cocoon. Agnes wants and does not want to see it. She doesn\u2019t want to meet the divided face, but she needs to know the parts for the exam.<\/p>\n Then a mechanical roar erupts from the side room, where the director\u2019s workshop and office are. Agnes approaches the doorway. She sees him standing at the foot of a table with a cadaver on it. It is a new one, naked and intact from head to toes. He is standing between the legs, holding them like wheelbarrow handles and efficiently, almost carelessly, pushing the crown of the head into a spinning saw. A small arc of debris falls to a plastic tarp. He has earphones on, and goggles and a plastic mask.<\/p>\n Agnes backs away from the door. The loud sound is both outside and inside of her. There are lots of things she can get used to very quickly. The dead body, and that it has a face, and the bits of bone and pulp, and the smell of death. The idea that there is nothing wrong, that this is the thing she has seen, and even if she speaks of it, she couldn\u2019t say that anything was wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1059,"parent":148,"menu_order":6,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-620","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=620"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/620\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1024,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/620\/revisions\/1024"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/148"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue14\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nHer neighbour, short and maybe seventy, with fluffy red hair, forgets that Agnes is not a doctor. She demands advice\u2014a few times in the lobby, leaning on her cane, but also through the metal panel between balconies. It starts with, \u201cYou there?\u201d The neighbour has both diabetes and arthritis. Agnes tries to deflect the harder questions, promises to look others up in her textbooks. Even in the face of unreasonableness, it frustrates her to have to repeat that she doesn\u2019t know. Right now, she wants to say, we\u2019re working backwards; taking someone apart. She is in pieces without a cure.<\/p>\n