Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures. Vincent Lam
Sri replied, “Right. Make up a story. You were looking at it, so it was your responsibility to put it back. With the rest of Murphy.”
“Who made you boss? And he’s not a Murphy,” said Ming. “Probably someone borrowed it—it’ll turn up.”
“You lost the head,” Sri whispered, leaning forward and looking at Ming, “and I named him Murphy.”
“It’s only half. And I did not lose it. I left it right here. It’s not where I left it. That’s not ‘losing’ it.”
“Obviously you don’t care,” said Sri.
“Just study it from the manual.”
“I made the cranial nerve page into a swan,” said Chen. He rested his latex-gloved hands on the table.
Ming said, “Should have chosen a different page.”
At two in the morning, only Sri and Chen were in the lab, sitting over the borrowed right half of a head. All the other tables were covered in sheets, and sprayed with the fresh pungency of formalin.
“You know she won’t apologize, but you probably should,” said Chen.
“Why?”
“Because we’ve still got the pelvis and legs to do. It’ll be better if you make peace.”
“This is very bad.”
“Sure, you guys are upset, so just smooth it out.”
“It’s not just her. Losing half his head is bad. And why did she insist we cut through Murphy’s cross and heart?”
“She follows the book, Sri. She reads it, she does it.”
“My mother told me you should respect a man’s symbols. We should have cut around the cross. Did you look up that Mark thing?”
“Sorry, I forgot. What was it again?”
“Mark 16.”
“I’ll check it for you. Did your mother say anything about losing half a head?”
“Never came up.”
They looked down at the open half-head they had only been able to study after midnight when another group had finished with it. Ming had decided to study from the anatomy atlas. “Ready for tomorrow?”
“Ready as ever, I guess,” said Sri.
“I guess we’re done here. Hungry?”
“Kind of. I need something filling to help me sleep.”
“Let’s go.”
In the night, walking under blowing elms, they smelled themselves more clearly, their skin sticky in the armpits and elbows. In the creases of their hands. In the washroom of Nona’s, while the round lady heated their calzones, Chen washed his face with his hands, and the more he washed the more that odour seeped from between his fingers and under his nails. Under the low-wattage light, he used the tepid water and hard soap to wash his hands raw.
After the midterm, Sri went to Dean Cortina and asked to switch to a different group. He said, “One of my partners is great but I have a communication problem with my other colleague.”
“The course is almost over, and we can’t change the groups. I’m glad you said colleague because that means you think like a professional. Take this as your first professional challenge,” said Dean Cortina. “I remember my anatomy group, and I don’t want to tell you how many years ago.” She sat back in her big chair. “We had a communication problem. Men are odd about penises. They don’t want to talk about them but they secretly believe them to be very important, perhaps sacred. So we got to the penis on our cadaver, and the men wanted to skip it. ‘We’ll look at the book,’ they said. ‘No way,’ I said, ‘we need to see the inside of the penis.’ Corpus spongio-sum, all that jazz. Besides, the poor guy’s body was lying there. A big man, powerful, and it would have been a shame just to let it go to waste. What did we do? We talked. We talked like professionals, and I saw that it was this one guy’s turn to dissect, and there was no way that this man was going to cut up a penis. So I said, ‘What if I do it?’ and I did it, and I think we all understood the issue better. Does that help?”
Sri couldn’t think of anything to say. He thanked Dean Cortina and left her office.
When they got to the penis, there was no problem or hesitation. It was Ming’s turn to cut, and she went right through it with one long arc of the scalpel, so that was all there was to it. She said, “You guys okay?”
“Sure,” said Chen.
“Someone want the testicles?”
Both Chen and Sri declined politely, and so Ming did the rest of that day’s dissection—producing a fine display of the epididymis and the spermatic ducts.
—
Late after the final exam, some of the class was still at the upstairs patio bar of The Paradise. Many of Dr. Harrison’s group were there, setting liquor-doused paper napkin swans alight in blue bursts. It was their private party, and they were trying to stay warm beneath the stars, helped by flame-ringed overhead heaters that smelled like burp. Someone had vomited on the toilet seat in the men’s room and then simply closed the stall door, so now there were lineups for both washrooms. Others sat in booths, and in a far corner Sri had just bought Ming a vodka tonic. He was feeling good about himself for having bought the drink, and she was feeling big for accepting it.
She said, “Guess what, I found the right side of the head. It was in the bag with the omentum.” Ming couldn’t remember exactly how it got there, but of course no one had looked at the omentum before the midterm and so she recently had found it while studying for the final, looking for a kidney. Then she remembered she must have put it there. A moment of inattention, she explained.
“Where is it now?” asked Sri.
“Still there.”
“With the omentum?” The omentum attached all the intestines into a fan-shaped sheet. “Why didn’t you put it with the head?”
“I don’t know. The bag wasn’t handy, I guess.”
“You guess. So you just left it with all the guts and everything,” said Sri. “I’ll have to go get it.”
“What?”
“I’m gonna go get it,” he shouted. No one turned to look, in the way that drunk people do not notice each other as being out of the ordinary.
“You’re all screwed up,” said Ming quietly. “Do you dream about your Murphy?”
“Me? You should have nightmares, the way you treat him.”
“Hello? Dead? Remember? I don’t have dreams, because I don’t have hang-ups about the stupid corpse.”
“You—”
“You what?” said Ming. “You don’t like that? Corpse? Piece of Murphy meat?”
“You’re just such a—”
“Just say it. What am I? You want to say it. Call me a name, go ahead and relieve your repressed little self. Say it.”
“No. Let’s just stop. No.”
“Go for it, pick a name. Bitch? Witch? Name your name.”
“I didn’t say anything, you’re picking the words now.”
“You’re such a wimp, I have to call myself names just to clarify what you think of me,” said Ming.
Chen