The Anatomical Shape of a Heart(19)

“Of course.”

“Well, then. This”—he pulled back the sheet—“is Minnie.”

I’d seen a lot of preserved specimens and even owned a few in small jars, but I’d never actually seen a dead human body.

It was more unsettling than I’d expected.

Minnie was stiff and nude, a white woman with brown hair, who, Simon informed me, was nineteen when she died. Her skin was thicker than I’d expected, her face mottled and wrinkled like a pickled egg. Her torso was split down the center, skin and muscles splayed, ribs removed, heart visible. And her inner arm was sliced from wrist to elbow, buttery, fat-covered skin spread like angel wings around the muscles and veins.

I thought the dissected areas would be red and vibrant, but her insides looked more like ash-pale rotten meat, glistening under the surgical light.

“Mark sprayed her down before he left. They tend to dry out if they’re exposed to air for too long, but you should be okay for a couple of hours. The chemical smell takes some getting used to. Sometimes it helps to take a break. Bathroom and soda machine is just outside those doors to the left. No food or drink inside here, obviously.”

Was he freaking kidding? Who could eat in front of this?

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, playing it cool. “Thanks.”

“Shout if you need anything. Whenever you’re ready to leave, just give me a heads-up so I can wrap Minnie back up for the night.”

He patted me on the shoulder before striding away toward his group, who were watching some surgery video on one of the monitors and comparing what they saw on-screen to the body in front of them.

I stared down at Minnie’s gaping wounds, trying not to breathe.

This was no frog.

My mind tried to make sense of what lay in front of me. Why had she died? An accident? Disease? For all I knew, she had a happy life before this. Maybe she was someone’s girlfriend. She might’ve been a star college student. Maybe she was talented singer. Or an artist, like me.

And now she rested here, exposed. Enduring an immeasurable kind of humiliation, with her breasts cut away and her bushy pubic hair and her heavy thighs on display for everyone to judge. Just a body for students to cut up for practice. To be scrutinized. Studied.

Drawn.

It felt … wrong. Simon said he got his roommate’s permission to “use” Minnie, like she was a possession. Did she know it was going to be like this when she signed herself over to the Willed Body Program? Did she figure she’d be doing her part to maybe one day save others’ lives by helping to educate these future doctors? That one of the researchers here might run tests on her liver and discover a medical breakthrough?

And I wondered how I fit into this. Whether I was doing her more harm than good by being there. Or maybe it didn’t even matter.

If it didn’t, I wasn’t sure why I was so upset.

But there I was, the girl obsessed with anatomy, on the verge of sobbing over the corpse of a woman I never knew.

If this was what I wanted to do with my life, this medical illustration, then I’d better get used to it. Because I’d have to take anatomy classes in grad school—maybe even in a lab similar to this one.

I did my best to disconnect and turn off my emotions, and then spent as long as I could setting up my drawing pad on the music stand, twisting and pinning up the braids at the back of my neck. And when it came time to sketch, I decided to stick to her dissected arm; it was easier than peering inside the hole in her chest.

The students at the other end of the room talked in the background, calling out Latin words, naming muscles. I hummed a stanza from one of the classical pieces that played on a loop in Alto Market, repeating it again and again as my pencil moved over the paper. I sketched loosely, then tightened my lines. Measured. Erased. Redrew.

I treated it like a punishment. Something to survive. And I did: no breaks, no running in the hall for clean air, no whining. If Minnie could endure my inspection, I could do my best work as quickly as possible.

When eight o’clock came, I closed my sketchpad and packed it up inside an oversize red bag. I set everything back where it was, and I waved to Simon, signaling him that I was leaving. He raised his arm, holding up a scalpel in one glistening rubber glove. I absolutely could not be anywhere near him.

So I rushed out the rear door.

The restroom was filled with chatty grad students, who were filing in from a another classroom down the hall. I quickly washed my hands, ignoring the numbness in my fingers and the growing buzzing in my ears, and I left.

By the time the elevator dinged on the first floor, I was gasping for breath. Someone asked me if I was okay. I just put one foot in front the other and ran through the front door, into the approaching twilight that was trying to outrace the evening fog rolling in off the Bay.

My lungs were going to explode. They were going to burst inside my chest, and then I’d end up on one of those rolling stainless-steel tables, just like Minnie. And someone could dissect me and study my rotting tissue while they made plans to meet other students for crepes in Cole Valley after class.

I lunged off the sidewalk and barely made it to the safety of the building’s shrubbery before I vomited.

My red bag slipped to my wrist as I braced one hand on the brick, head lolling, mind flipping through all the images of Minnie I’d been holding at a distance. They circled and penned me. Fell on me like football players piling up after a tackle.