He was pissed off and he said, ‘My sister is alive so shut up.’”
Dean Cortina laughed. “So I said, ‘It’s not cool to call your sister a broad because she’s alive?’ Boy, he was upset.”
Chen didn’t know quite how to respond, so he agreed in a polite and very general way, and left without resolving the issue of his student loan.
On the day the ribs were cut to get at the organs, the room shrieked with hand-held rotary saws. Bone dust—it was in your hair, on your lips afterwards.
“Smells like barbecue,” shouted Ming.
Sri leaned off the saw, held it, still buzzing, in front of him, and regarded Ming as if amazed at her. As if about to speak. Instead, he diverted his eyes from her and said, “Where’s the manual?”
Chen walked out quickly, his hand over his mouth, almost running. When he came back he was red and wet in the face, his hair pushed back and damp. “I’m fine. Are you finished cutting?”
The chest opened to show the heart’s chambers, where the great vessels now lay at rest. These sinuous vessels coursed to the lungs, and splayed into the organs and limbs. The lungs were fringed with the gritty black of tobacco.
“Aren’t there people who fill their dead with stones,” murmured Chen, “and sink them to the bottom of the sea?”
“You’re thinking of concrete boots. Gangsters did that.” Ming didn’t look up as she peeled away a strip of fat.
“No, after they die naturally. As a burial ceremony. They take out the heart and lungs and fill this,” he patted the inside wall of the chest, “with stones so the body sinks.”
“What do they do with the organs?” asked Ming.
“I can’t remember that part. Who are they?” He turned to Sri.
Ming also turned to Sri, “Do your people do that?”
“We burn them.”
“Must smell,” said Ming.
“What do you think?”
“I guess it smells. Like cutting bone. Like—” she laughed, “forget it.”
Sri said little for the rest of the lab time, and his quietness spilled uncomfortably over the other two, so that all three worked in a thick silence for the rest of the day. Cutting through layers, spreading tissue, saying only what was necessary.
Sri changed all of his clothing at the lab. Many people kept a shirt or coveralls in their lockers for dissection, but Sri changed everything—his underwear, his socks—in the men’s room. Always in a stall, preferably with no one else in the washroom. That day, he heard footsteps come into the bathroom a moment after he had taken off his shirt. He kept still, a reflex. The footsteps were not followed by running water, or the hissing of urine on porcelain. He waited.
“Uh—Sri? Is that you, Sri?” It was Chen.
A pause. “Yeah.”
“You’re cool, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Great. I’m glad. Ming’s got a tough exterior. Right? All bluff, you can see that.”
“I said I’m cool.”
“I’ll see you, then.”
No footsteps.
Sri crossed his arms, his naked chest prickling in the concrete block basement. “It’s fine, Chen. Thanks for asking.”
“Right. See you.”
Footsteps, the squeaky door.
When they started the dissections, there were bright mornings to come in from, and warm afternoons to go out to after the day’s work. As the weeks passed, they entered the basement on cooler mornings with a hesitant light, and departed into a fading golden afternoon. The leaves swelled with colour until they became too heavy with the intensity of reds and oranges and fell to the ground. Each day, more human anatomy was exposed, more of the organs lifted from their shy hiding places into their first glimpse of light. It was as if the actual daytime no longer existed. Night was just ending as the students arrived in the morning, just beginning as they left. The daytime of sun had been replaced by the fluorescent-bathed, whitewashed-concrete daylight of the basement, as the inverted parts of bodies were given belated and temporary glimpses of light.
Sri proposed that they name their cadaver Murphy. A dignified but comfortable name, he argued. Ming refused to use any name. Chen took neither side, suggested that each do as they please. Sri referred to “Murphy’s aorta, Murphy’s kidneys.” Ming made a point of saying “the cadaver’s aorta, the cadaver’s kidneys.”
Beneath the shield of diaphragm, the liver and spleen were wet and heavy. There was a stickiness to the smell where the formalin had seeped into hepato-cytes and gelled the lobes of the liver into a single pungent mass.
One day the bowel tore. A line of shit squirted onto Ming’s coat. It smelled like formalin, an acidic sweetness, and another smell. She wiped it off, leaving a mark, finished tracing the mesenteric circulation, and laughed when she threw the coat into the garbage. “I wanted a new coat anyhow,” she said. The cuffs of her fresh coat were again too long, and soaked up fluids until she rolled them back. It became easier to dissect, as over the days the cadaver became more fragmented and the pieces more separated from one another. There was less to pry apart—it was more detail work now.
They unwrapped one arm from the wrist upward. The hand was wrapped separately. Ming held up the arm, holding the hand as if in a victory grasp. Along the flat back of the forearm was a lightning bolt tattoo—once straight lines, now soft arcs. Each branch of the lightning bolt underlined a word: one Golden, the other Flash. Chen rolled back the moist, yellow gauze. Above the elbow was a ring of small figures: crosses? No, airplanes. In addition to the thumbprint-sized fuselage and wings were the remnants of little propellers, now faded into age spots and the creases of oldness. Above the airplanes in official type was tattooed RCAF—17th Squadron. Above this was a Spitfire with an open shark’s jaw. The tail of the Spitfire was ajar due to a thick scar across the fuselage that had been sewn shut dirty, long ago. The ring of airplanes stood wing to wing on the front of the arm above the elbow, and then there was a gap on the inside of the arm.
“Go, killer,” said Ming triumphantly. Then, when they looked at her, “All those planes. He must have shot them down. You’ll have to call him Lieutenant Murphy.”
“A pilot?” said Chen.
“There’s some planes missing,” said Ming. “He didn’t get enough to go all the way around.”
Sri touched the tattooed arm. “I guess the war ended.”
“It’s good they started the tattoos from the outside,” said Ming.
Chen bunched up the gauze and snipped it. He continued to unroll, revealing a rich and delicate crucifix within a heart, large over the hump of shoulder. In gothic letters under
