Contest winner Sarah Egelman has lived in New Mexico, New York and Seattle. She is a professor at a
community college teaching religious studies and humanities and writes
book reviews on the side. She likes octopuses and really really hates
onions. She blogs at Citizen Beta.
Absolute Dissection 401
Susan had heard cryptic mumblings about Dr. Ebie’s
lab for years. Maybe even as early as
freshman orientation. At first she assumed these tales were meant to scare the
underclassmen, to weed out the faint of heart.
But, every semester as AD 401 drew nearer her anxiety grew. It grew because now she knew that even if
exaggerated strange things (perhaps horrific, perhaps fantastic) happened in
that lab. And now, here she was in her
final semester of medical school, hand on the doorknob, and she felt like she
was going to throw up.
Over the last few years Susan had succeeded in all
her lab and dissection classes. She
earned a reputation for fearlessness and a steady hand. It didn’t matter what she was cutting apart,
she was thrilled to do it. She longed to
be charge of an actual surgery cutting and cauterizing and plunging her hands
up to her wrists in viscera. Medicine,
surgery in particular, was her calling, her vocation and she was pulled to it
with a seemingly mystic fiery drive.
Absolute Dissection 401 met twice a week from 9 am
to noon on the top floor of Blucher Hall.
In fact, the entire floor, the third, of Blucher Hall seemed to have
been reserved for Ebie’s lab. No one
could recall it being used for any other purpose, therefore the physical space
of AD 4001 was as mysterious as the curriculum.
And, while Susan and her classmates wondered about the lab equipment they
would have access to in this holy of holies, it was the curriculum that kept
them up at night in anticipation.
After Susan opened the door on the first day and her
eyes adjusted to the dim light she found an otherwise ordinary, if cavernous,
room. Filled with the usual assortment of
objects and the usual lab tables, even the usual lab smells, she found it at
once a comfortable place. But, Ebie was
another story. Short with thinning
silver hair and piercing blue eyes almost buried in his round face, Ebie had
thick and bright red lips. He wore, that
day and nearly every day, a tweedy wool suit and scuffed but expensive looking black
leather shoes. On first glance he was
ugly but as he lectured, pacing back and forth, his voice echoing through the
lab, his frightening intelligence and strange charm transformed him into an
almost handsome figure.
The first cadavers were shared. There were about ten
for the thirty or so students. Dr. Ebie
seemed less interested in their command of anatomy—it was assumed they knew all
that already. He wasn’t even concerned
with their dissection skills---they had been working on them for years. He was, it seemed, concerned with their eye
for defect. Quickly the students
realized each cadaver had some physical anomaly though it wasn’t necessarily
was killed them. A grotesquely enlarged
lymph node, an atrophied spleen, a deformed uterus, a parasitic twin…While fun
and interesting, students, including Susan, began to wonder what all the fuss
about AD 401 was about. Ebie had a knack
for procuring odd corpses and an entertaining manner but that hardly seemed
cause for the strange reputation of the class.
A second cadaver was assigned to each student individually
near the end of the term. This, Susan thought, was what made AD 401 unique
then! Her own body!
Monday morning Susan drank too much coffee and
cursed her shaking hands. She found her cadaver, marked with her name, in a
back row of the lab near a grimy window, the sun straining to shine in. She took a sharp intake of breath and drew
back the sheet. On the table was the
body of a young woman not more than thirty years old though because of the
slack muscles and lack of body fluids it was hard to tell. She had medium length brown hair, perhaps
once shiny and wavy but now dull and pulled tightly from her face. She was, or had been, short but full figured,
heavy through the hips. Susan began to
think of names for her in the med school tradition but stopped short. The only name that came to mind was Susan.
Susan. The body didn’t look much like
her. Or, maybe there was a resemblance. Something in the brow, the
cheekbones. Something familiar to Susan
having looked at herself so closely in mirrors. Shaking her head, trying to
clear her thoughts and steady her hands Susan decided the name Jane, as in Doe,
would have to do.
Waiting for Ebie’s instruction, for suddenly Susan
felt unsure, she noticed a ragged and simplistic heart tattooed about Jane’s
left breast. The heart, though really
comically childish, weeping shaky black tears, appeared sinister to Susan. Finally she heard Dr. Ebie’s voice entreating
her to begin. Her told her this dissection was hers and hers alone. She was free to approach it as she saw fit he
only asked her to be as complete and thorough as humanly possible. Susan was
relieved to make the first cut, her eyes and hands focused on the skin of the
chest and abdomen and away from Jane’s face.
Her work progressed as expected. Her thoughts were only a bit cloudy and she
found herself moving to the rhythm of her own name: Susan Susan Susan Susan Susan
Susan Susan Susan SusanSusanSusansusansusansusansusan. Her back began to ache and her hands cramp
and she caught a glimpse of the clock.
It didn’t seem possible but she had been at it most of the day. The sun
moved from the window and the room grew cold and colder. She was vaguely aware of other students,
heard the scrapings of instruments, the squeak of shoes and occasional soft
moans. Just as she registered the
passing of time and the pain she was in, Ebie was behind her.
“Susan,” he said.
“Susan, this class is called Absolute Dissection for a reason. Your dissection must be absolute.”
For a reason she could not name Susan would not turn
to meet Ebie’s eyes. Instead with hands
still moving inside Jane she listened.
“Absolute and complete,” he continued. “Absolute.
All parts examined. Yes, examined
but also known. You must dissect all of
her, know absolutely all of her.”
Susan bent forward and reached. Her scalpel continued to cut. Deeper and deeper she went until she felt
Jane’s spine sever under the thin blade.
It gave way like butter and moved itself aside for Susan’s hands,
wrists, arms. Through the last layer of
skin she went and through the cold metal table.
The floor was next and Susan cut though the horizontal parts of Blucher
Hall. Head down but not at all dizzy
Susan cut her way through the thawing ground under the building and through the
underground pipes. Soon the earth was
hers to know and she cut through the geologic strata passing worms and insects
and eventually fossils and she swam easily through pools of oil. Steadier now her hands grew warm as the
planet’s magma swirled around her and still Ebie spoke behind her.
“On Susan.
Move on. Keep going. You must know
her but first take her apart. What is
she made of? Who is she? Who is she, Susan? Who is she? Susan! She was but still is. She still is. Who are you? Who are you?”
In a moment she was back through the earth’s crust
but on the other side of the world, breaking through with a satisfying
crack. A crack like knuckle bones, like
broken bones, like sharp smacks. The sky
was blue and purple, bruised and tender and she slashed through it slicing
clouds and slicing into the atmosphere. The
air grew thin, like the last gasp of a choke.
But, there were no hands on her throat and even Ebie’s voice faded to a
low rumbling like very very distant thunder.
Space was dark and cold and Susan’s body was dark and cold uprooted from
the world and beginning to spread thinly across the universe. Those familiar stars, gazed at out shattered windows, the place Jane, the place Susan sent all those futile prayers, all was
gas and freezing and vast distance and sheer vastness. Jane was so vast and Susan was the vastness
and Jane was Susan or maybe they were nothing.
Now they were nothing as all cells broke into atoms and all atoms
separated and there was nothingness or perhaps almost nothingness and Susan was
dissected, broken into bits that meant nothing.
She was scattered over everything and it lasted a moment, a moment one
lifetime short of eternity.
There was a voice.
Susan came together. The stars receded and the cold receded and even
some splinters of pain were gone, pulled out, but still throbbing. She was pulled back together not just by the
voice but by a decision not quite her own but, as she thought about it over the
following years, not quite something cosmic or metaphysical. The decision was a fact that had
paradoxically always existed and that was that and there she was by the grimy
window in the back row of the third floor lab of Blucher Hall. She was alone in the room, the sweat under
her arms and across her hairline already drying into a salty crust. She was alone but okay finally. Alone, finally okay and finally put back
together. With just the ghost of pain, like the spot where splinters are
removed, throbbing just a little bit and then no longer.
Susan was not superstitious but even when she got
the name tag from the hospital she didn’t try it on, pin it to herself, until
she pinned it to her new lab coat on the first day of work. Residency behind her she was on her own as a
surgeon. But the tag weighed heavily,
pulled at the lab coat which rubbed against her sweater which irritated her new
tattoo. After a couple hours she ducked
into the bathroom. It was a dirty
bathroom in a dirty hospital. She
shrugged off her coat and pulled up the sweater. She found the tattoo, a painstakingly rendered
human heart, inflamed and weeping out the open wounds. The heart wept blood and pus and a clear
shining liquid. The heart wept. Susan remembered: fear and screams and
bruises and blood. She remembered dark
windows glittering with the sunrise. She
remembered a violent yet loving slashing of the world and her own breast
carved, stitched and carved again. Jane’s
carved breast and her own inked. The ink
leaked, the heart wept. Susan wept.
She heard thunder in the distance.
