Her neighbour, short and maybe seventy, with fluffy red hair, forgets that Agnes is not a doctor. She demands advice—a few times in the lobby, leaning on her cane, but also through the metal panel between balconies. It starts with, “You there?” 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’t know. Right now, she wants to say, we’re working backwards; taking someone apart. She is in pieces without a cure.
The leaves yellow. Agnes gets along with everyone, but has made two particular friends. They’re 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.
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.
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’s impossible at this stage of decay. The lab director grumbles the question away, says focus on the pelvis, that is what you have.
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’t 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’s ears.
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’s porthole, breath held, but she finds a globular version of her neighbour, face a sweating moon.
It’s very sobering. Agnes has a doctor mode even without the training. She calls the ambulance and rides in the back holding the neighbour’s 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.
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.
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’s casket; the face is back in the gauze cocoon. Agnes wants and does not want to see it. She doesn’t want to meet the divided face, but she needs to know the parts for the exam.
Then a mechanical roar erupts from the side room, where the director’s 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.
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’t say that anything was wrong.
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