Doctors (15 page)

He then motioned them all to gather around a table in the front row, where the broad, graying chest and abdomen of a male corpse had been undraped.

The face and neck remained wrapped in cloth, giving the impression that “George” (as the professor had chosen to call him) was having an eternal facial massage. Some of those watching half expected—feared—that the dead man would suddenly cry out in pain—for Lubar was holding a scalpel just above the cadaver’s neck, poised to attack.

His hand moved swiftly, piercing the body in the jugular notch, about half an inch deep. Like a railway conductor, he rattled off the names of the stations through which his instrument was passing: “epidermis, dermis, subcutaneous fat, superficial fascia, deep fascia, muscle—”

And finally the soft tissue outer wall was breached.

He had run the scalpel downward, a motion that had “unzipped” the skin—which had become as stiff as wax paper. For a moment the instructor paused to draw breath.

Then from a leather case that held what looked like a collection of shiny carpenter’s tools, Lubar withdrew a sharp serrated knife and plunged it into the incision he had made at the top of the breastbone. The grating sound made the beholders wince as if their own chests were being sawed open.

The professor once again launched into a rapid burst of anatomical patter, all the while slicing the sternum: “manubrium, xiphoid process, intercostal muscles, thoracic nerves—” Then suddenly, with a snap, the rib cage split open like a cracked walnut, laying bare the innermost engine of human life: the heart. And, embracing it, the lungs.

The students pressed forward for a better look. And as they
did, there was the sound of a balloon being deflated—as a body slumped to the floor. All eyes turned to the first casualty of their Medical School education. Sprawled on the floor, looking whiter than the cadaver, was Maury Eastman.

Barney bent over to revive his fallen comrade-in-arms. From above he heard Lubar’s unruffled reassurance, “Don’t worry, it happens every year. If he’s still breathing, carry him outside and let him get some fresh air. If he’s not, put him on a table and we’ll dissect him.”

By the time Barney and a muscular classmate named Tom had lugged Maury halfway to the door, he was already regaining consciousness. “No, no,” he protested feebly, “take me back. It’s just something I must have eaten at lunch.…”

Barney glanced at Tom as if to say, Let’s stand him up. As soon as Maury was reasonably steady, they abandoned him to rush back to watch the demonstration.

Lubar gave them a rapid tour of the thoracic cavity—the great vessels of the heart, the thymus gland, the esophagus, sympathetic trunks, and vagus nerve—one of the longest electric wires, extending from the head all the way to the kidneys.

For the students, it was like viewing a faded photograph of the organs they had only seen in vivid color illustrations. All that had once been red and pink and purple was now pallid gradations of gray.

Suddenly Lubar interrupted his own commentary and asked, “What’s wrong here?” He gazed from face to face as each student strove to avoid eye contact with him. Finally, he was obliged to appoint a volunteer.

“You.” He pointed at the one pupil who seemed too polite to glance away. “What’s the matter with George here?”

Hank Dwyer began to stammer, “I—I don’t understand, sir. I mean, everything is wrong—his body isn’t functioning at all—I mean, he’s
dead.
”

There were suppressed titters. Not of mockery, but of relief at not having been chosen. They all knew they would have said more or less the same stupid thing.

But Lubar did not denigrate the reply. “Yes,” he continued without a trace of irony, “I’d agree that’s starting from first principles. But did you notice anything out of the ordinary, Mister—?”

“Dwyer, sir.”

“Well, Mr. Dwyer, did you also note that the gentleman was only forty-four when he died? What do you think brought
him to such an early end? Do those lungs appear normal to you?”

Dwyer leaned over and took a closer look. The smell of formalin at such proximity was sickening. But he saw what he was intended to see. “His lungs are pretty shriveled up—and they seem awfully black.…”

“Which means he was either a coal miner—or a heavy smoker. That blackness is carbon. Do you notice anything else, Mr. Dwyer?”

“There’s a lump on his left lung—kind of white and gooey.”

“Like marshmallow, you might say,” Lubar added with a slight grin. “When you get to Pathology, you’ll find those boys always talk in metaphors of food. Anyway, you’ll also note the kind of salt-and-pepper effect on the other lung. The marshmallow’s the primary carcinoma. And the grains of salt are metastases—newly established colonies from the principal malignancy. So if any of you want to commit suicide slowly, you can puff your way to heaven at an early age—just as this man did.”

There was a chorus of murmurs around George’s bier. Some, still unpersuaded of their mortality (or the American Cancer Society’s report), thought, It won’t happen to
me.
I just smoke two or three a day—except maybe at exam time.

“All right,” said the professor, “now you can all go back and open up your own hearts.”

“What shall we call him?” Barney asked as he and his partners nervously undraped their cadaver.

“How about Leonardo?” Alison Redmond proposed. “I mean da Vinci’s anatomical drawings are as good as anything in
Gray’s
—and he did them in 1487. In fact, he was a pioneer in the use of undershading to get the three-dimensional effect.”

“Fine,” Bennett agreed, “I’ll go with Leonardo. Those drawings are magnificent. And dissection was probably not even allowed in his day.”

“Of course the Italian Renaissance was a rare exception,” Alison lectured on. “Leonardo actually dissected a body himself in 1506, probably thanks to his friend, Professor Marcantonio della Torre—”

“Okay, okay, Alison,” Barney interrupted, to put a tourniquet on her verbal hemorrhage. “You’ve made your point. Why don’t we get to the nitty-gritty. Who wants to do the first slice?”

Alison and Bennett both volunteered.

“Well, so do I,” Barney asserted, “but why don’t we just say ladies first.”

“You don’t have to be patronizing, Livingston,” Alison retorted with undisguised hostility. “I’m as good as any man or I wouldn’t be here.”

“I don’t doubt that for a second,” Barney replied. “In that case, let’s draw straws.”

“Sounds fair to me,” Bennett commented. “Only who’s got straws?”

“We can use some of my fags,” said Alison, withdrawing a half-empty pack of Gauloises from her pocket.

“It’s better than smoking them,” Barney commented sarcastically.

“My body is my own,” she countered.

“Sure, sure,” Barney said in halfhearted apology.

They were interrupted by the voice of Professor Lubar.

“Please note how I’m holding the scalpel.” He was grasping it like a cello bow and making the pronating motion they were intended to imitate. “Try and enter the skin at a ninety-degree angle. Make it swift but light because I want us to study the layers of skin, subcutaneous fat, fasciae, and muscles on the way down. So just cut down to the top of the pectoralis major.”

Barney, who had drawn the winning cigarette, imitated Lubar’s grasp of the scalpel as best he could. He was just mustering the courage to make an incision when Alison inquired, “Do you want to look at the book before you cut?”

“No, thanks, I’m an ex-jock. We all know where the ‘pecs’ are.”

All three were feeling the tension now.

“Okay, Barney,” Bennett whispered in uneasy encouragement. “Go for it.”

Barney hesitated for a millisecond. Until he realized that many of his classmates were already at the task. Indeed, at the very next table he saw Hank Dwyer cross himself and then swiftly move his scalpel downward. He wanted to look away, but knew Alison was studying him intently.

He lowered his hand and pierced Leonardo’s parchment-dry flesh just below his neck. It felt like cutting into a crunchy autumn apple.

There was no blood. In a way that made it easier. It helped to make Leonardo seem less human—more like a waxen facsimile of life.

“Well done, Barney,” murmured Bennett Landsmann at
the very same time that Alison, on her own initiative, reached across the chest and with surgical tweezers began to fold back the skin and clamp it.

“God,” she muttered under her breath, “this is the slowest table in the room. Get with it, you two. The guys over there are already down to the muscle.”

Bennett took a quick glance to the right and then quickly corrected his partner. “Simmer down, Alison, they’re only at the axillary fascia.”

“What makes you so sure?” She challenged him in a surprised tone that seemed to insinuate that Bennett had done something treasonous—like take the course before.

But his response was merely to hold up their anatomical bible and say sweetly, “It’s all right here in Dr. Gray, ma’am.”

Sensing that it would be wise to keep the peace, Barney held out the scalpel and said, “Here, Alison, you cut. Ben and I will just take notes.”

She took the knife and without another word began dissecting with a deftness and speed that would have been the envy of a senior surgeon.

“God, Barney, you absolutely reek.”

It was three hours later and the anatomists, emotionally and physically exhausted, shuffled from the room.

“To be frank, Castellano, you don’t exactly smell like a rose yourself.”

“I know. I’d like to find a washing machine and stick my whole body in for an hour or two.”

“Thank God for the smell,” he confessed. “It knocked me for such a loop that I barely noticed I was slicing someone’s body.”

Just then the doors to the adjoining laboratory opened and another group of classmates emerged from their first session. Among them was Grete Andersen.

“Hey, Castellano,” Barney whispered, “did you ever ask Grete why she didn’t show?”

“No. She wasn’t there when I got back and I went right to sleep.”

“Oh,” said Barney, reliving his disappointment. “I guess she probably just forgot or something. I’ll go and ask her myself.”

“Frankly, I think she’s bad news,” Laura cautioned. “As my mother said when I was five and tried to touch the burners on the stove, ‘
Cuidado, te quemaras.
’ ”

“Don’t worry,” he replied complacently, “I’m too cool to get scalded.”

Just then the subject of the debate came up and joined them.

“Hi, Barney,” Grete said breezily. “How did you and your body get along?”

Shit, can’t this girl say
anything
that doesn’t have a sexual connotation?

“Fine, fine,” Barney answered. And then, as casually as possible, “I—uh—missed you last night.”

“Oh yes, Barney, I’m really sorry about our not being able to get together. But I was—well, I guess waylaid is the best way of putting it—by this professor—”

Waylaid or just laid? Barney mused to himself.

“—and by the time I got up to my room, I had this terrible headache. I tried to call you—”

“That’s okay,” he replied. “We’ll just make it another time, that’s all.”

“The sooner the better,” Grete replied enticingly. But she could tarry no longer. For Professor Robinson, her Anatomy teacher, was striding by and Grete suddenly remembered some questions she had forgotten to pose to him. She excused herself and dashed down the corridor, with Barney’s eyes riveted on the spectacular movements of her gluteal muscles.

Laura watched him watch Grete and quipped, “I think that formalin has gone to your brain. Let’s get these smelly clothes off and take a shower, huh?”

Barney was still distracted. “Christ, would I give anything to see Grete in the shower.”

“Okay, Livingston,” Laura answered sarcastically, “I’ll take Polaroid pictures and give them to you for Christmas.”

Barney had grown up with a religious belief in the unfailing efficacy of Lifebuoy soap. But dammit, he had been scrubbing for what seemed like fifteen minutes and instead of his body smelling like Lifebuoy, his soap was smelling like formalin!

“I’m gonna be here forever,” he complained half aloud.

“It’s like Sophocles’
Philoctetes
,” said a voice in a nearby shower stall.

“Explain the obscure reference,” Barney shouted, anxious to take his mind off his odor.

“I’m surprised at you, Barn, I thought you knew your classical mythology cold,” Maury Eastman answered. “Philoctetes was this Greek hero in the Trojan War who had a wound that
was so smelly his buddies couldn’t stand it. So they took him away and dumped him on a desert isle. But then a big-time prophet told them that without Philoctetes—stench and all—they would never take Troy. So they took him back. Pretty good allusion, huh?”

“Not really, Maury—because around here
everybody
stinks.”

Back in the room, Barney stuffed his clothing into his trunk, determined to use the same garb for Anatomy as long as possible. But though he put on completely fresh garments and had carefully washed his hair, the formalin remained everywhere, floating above him like a malignant halo.

The odor had the paradoxical effect of bringing the freshmen together—for the simple reason that no one in the cafeteria would sit anywhere near them.

“How much of that stuff are we supposed to remember?” asked Hank Dwyer. “I mean, do you think it’ll be enough if we can just recognize the major muscle groups?”

“This isn’t kindergarten, Dwyer. You’ve got to know every one of the three hundred named muscles, their origin, insertion, and action. Not to mention the two hundred and fifty ligaments, the two hundred and eight bones—”

“Goddammit, Wyman,” Barney snarled, “we’re in no mood to hear you tell us how stupid we are. If you don’t shut up, we’ll bring you up to the room and dissect you for practice.”

Barney forced himself to study till nearly eleven. Then he called over to the girls’ wing to see if Grete might be persuaded to have a quick cup of coffee. Laura answered.

“Hi, Castellano, can I speak to Grete?”

“If you can find her. I haven’t seen her since before dinner. Should I leave a message that her horny admirer phoned?”