“Hey, wait.” Chen, still holding a beer, went down the stairs after his friend.
In the anatomy lab, Chen summarized the story: “Yeah, I looked it up for you. Mark 16. So after Jesus is crucified the women go to wash and prepare Jesus’ body with spices. On the road they realize they won’t be able to move this huge stone door in front of the tomb. But when they get there, surprise! The door is open and there’s no body. Don’t be scared, says the shining angel who’s there. Jesus has risen, so tell the disciples that he will comfort and lead them. The women are scared. Jesus appears to Mary. She tells people about seeing him, but they think she’s crazy, so he has to keep on showing himself to people until they’re convinced. Anyhow, Jesus says that things are really going well, and all his people will do incredible, wonderful things, and be protected even from drinking poison. He says that his followers will be healers by putting their hands on people. Then he goes to heaven to sit with God.” Chen put his beer down next to Murphy.
“Is that really what it says?” asked Sri.
“Roughly. I looked it up, but I am paraphrasing.”
“It’s good stuff.”
“You still want to put the head back on,” said Chen.
“Yeah.”
They unwrapped the stump neck and took the left side of the head from inside the chest where they had left it to keep it moist. They found the right side in the omentum bag, and the right and left sides didn’t match up exactly anymore because of the dissection. They put the two pieces on top, and Chen could see that Sri wasn’t happy, so he wrapped some gauze around the neck to hold things in place.
“He’s a bit dry.”
“Needs a drink. Bless you, Murphy.” Instead of taking the formalin spray bottle, Sri took the rest of Chen’s beer and poured it gently and slowly from the lips to the open belly.
“You don’t drink, do you?” said Chen.
“Not usually.”
“You have a knack for it.”
“Why do you think Murphy chose Mark 16?” Sri closed his eyes. “It’s a weird passage. Is that the end of the Jesus story?”
“I guess a pilot would have figured there wouldn’t be a body left for anyone. Nothing left for his girlfriend, or mother. Maybe Mark 16 made him feel better about that.”
“He was wrong,” said Sri, bowing his head, his arms stretched to the usually shining table now dull with the running of liquid. Beer dripped into the bucket between Murphy’s feet. “He’s here for us.”
Sri wound a strip of yellowed fabric up the neck, pulled it tight over the chin so it wouldn’t bunch, then softly over the eyes, and the coldness of the eyelids vanished under the cloth. Murphy’s hair had continued to grow for a little while after being shaved, and Chen held up the stubbled head so Sri could work. Sri wound the fabric around the top of the skull, and tied it onto itself snugly with a slipless knot under the angle of the jaw. Sri stood back and noticed that the tip of the right ear protruded. He tugged gently at a fold of cotton and settled it around the ear, where it would stay.
HOW TO GET INTO MEDICAL SCHOOL,
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MING’S PARENTS THOUGHT THAT SHE VOLUNTEERED at the Ottawa Children’s Hospital on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. Both she and Fitzgerald were there on Mondays and Tuesdays, but on Wednesdays neither of them went to the hospital. Instead, they went to the ski hill that was abandoned for the summer, where they would not encounter their classmates or Ming’s cousins, and spread a blanket in the tall grass whose blades glinted in the flat light. The sun pulled sweat out of them, and there was a humid adhesion of skin on skin. When it became too hot, they put on their clothes and walked in the shade of the woods. A ski chalet had burned to the ground during the winter, and when they walked past it Fitzgerald kicked at the charred pieces of wood.
Ming received an acceptance letter from Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine in July, and her parents put a down payment on a small condominium north of Bloor Street that backed onto a treed ravine. Her family held a banquet and called her doctor, but Fitzgerald did not attend. In Ming’s home, he had been a faceless voice on the telephone and now was even less present. During summer holidays there was no studying, and therefore no excuse for him to call. Wednesday was their day. The Wednesday after the banquet, as they walked to find a picnic spot, Ming told Fitz that she hadn’t enjoyed it without him.
He said, “Why do you sound so happy, then?”
“Don’t you want me to be? My family is happy for me.”
“You’ve achieved what they wanted. Another family success.”
A deer crossed the ski run, nervous in the open, sniffing up and down the hill. They stopped walking, and the deer crossed their path and then folded into the woods. Ming said, “We were having a perfectly nice day until now.”
“I’m sorry,” said Fitzgerald. “You deserved a party. You did it.” He reminded himself to be only happy for her, but felt that his exclusion from the celebration entitled him to possessiveness.
“Getting an acceptance seemed like such a big deal. Now I’m mostly just tired and relieved.”
One hot, grasshopper-buzzing day at the beginning of August, Ming and Fitzgerald sat at the top of a steep ski slope, swinging in a green metal lift chair. They had once decided to have no romance, and they now referred to that as the “strange phase” of their relationship. A few months later, when they travelled to Toronto for Ming’s medical school interview, they had decided that it was dishonest to deny that they were in love. On that trip, they held each other but slept in separate hotel beds, and agreed that there should be no sex. For Ming, this would be too close to her anger at Karl. Three weeks later, after this prohibition had been put aside upon Ming’s initiative, they conceded that since they had become lovers there was no point in discontinuing a natural enjoyment between two people in love. Now, they sat facing down the hill, without the retaining bar of the ski lift chair. They ate cheese sandwiches and drank iced tea. Ming told Fitzgerald that she could not imagine loving anyone else, now that she had found someone to be honest with.
He said, “That’s why people get married.”
“You think so?” she said, drinking from the silver flask. “Aren’t there lots of reasons, both good and bad?”
“Why don’t we get married?”
“The circumstances are not ideal,” she said.
“But are they ever, for anyone?” said Fitzgerald. Ming was moving to a different city in three
