by Jenn Bennett
“Did you come by two days ago?”
“Yep. But hey, not my fault you weren’t here. That’s stated on the online form.”
Don’t think he realized I couldn’t have cared less. “What is it?”
“No idea.” He handed me a digital board to sign.
“Who sent it?”
He twisted his head around to read the board. “Uh, blank. That means the client wants to remain anonymous.”
“What if it’s a bomb or something?”
“It would’ve gone off already. Can you please sign?” he said irritably. “I’ve got other deliveries.”
I signed and exchanged the board for the brown box. He stuck around like he was waiting for a tip. I quietly backed up and shut the door in his face.
The box was about the size and shape of a loaf of bread. My name and address were printed on a small label, along with some other stickers from the bike service. I put my ear to the box and listened. No ticking. I shook it. Nothing rattled. So I sat down on the couch and unwrapped it.
Inside the paper was a plain corrugated box, and inside that, bubble wrap. I unrolled it, and a wooden object fell into my hand.
It was an articulated artist’s mannequin—you know, the poseable kind, standing on a base. Except this one didn’t have a smooth, blank spool for a head and flat disks for hands and feet. It was intricately carved with all the major muscles and tendons. Parts of the body were stained darker than others, and the eyes were painted glass.
It was extraordinary.
A small tag hung from a string tied to the leg. It read: CUSTOM MADE FOR YOU. HAND-CARVED AND DESIGNED IN-HOUSE. TELEGRAPH WOOD STUDIO. BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
“Whatcha got?” Heath hung over the back of the sofa. “Whoa. Who sent this?”
“I have no idea. But get this—” I told him all about Mom’s weird phone call that night as he inspected the mannequin. “It was sent by a local messenger, but look at the tag. It was made in Berkeley.”
“Oh, Bex.”
“What?” When Heath didn’t answer right away, I panicked. “What? Tell me!”
“Dad just moved to Berkeley a couple of months ago.”
That couldn’t be right. “He’s somewhere in LA—Santa Monica.”
“What did the address label say?”
My heart thumped as I showed him the crumpled paper. “No return address. Just Beatrix Van Asch. This is what the bike messenger note on the door was all about.”
Heath sighed, sat on the sofa arm, and slid down into the cushion next to me. “I saw an envelope in the kitchen trash when I was I tying it up. It had Dad’s name and Berkeley on the return address, so I dug through the garbage—”
“Gross.”
“—until I found a card. One of those ‘We’ve Moved!’ deals. Dad was informing Mom that he and Suzi had moved to Berkeley.”
“Are you kidding? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“If Mom didn’t tell us, I figured she didn’t want us to know. And big deal. So he’s closer now, who cares?”
“And sending me extravagant gifts? Is this to make up for not paying child support? What the hell?”
“I don’t know, Bex. But the bike messenger note on the door was left on your birthday, so I guess he remembered. Damn sure didn’t remember mine.”
We both sat there staring at the mannequin for a long moment before I shoved it back into the box. “If that was the person Mom was talking to on the phone, she said she’d throw away anything he sent.”
“All I know is, if you’re planning to keep it, you better hide it.”
“Don’t tell her,” I warned. “I mean it. Do not tell Mom.”
He mimed zipping his lips.
I unzipped them and gave him a quick thank-you peck. Part of me wanted to tell him about Jack, but if I really was the only one who knew Jack’s secret, it felt like a betrayal to share it—even with Heath. So instead, I said, “Guess who just won a golden ticket to Wonka’s Cadaver Dissection Lab?”
* * *
If you make the decision to will your body to the university, you get two funerals: one when you die, and then a second after you’ve been dissected and used for research, when you’re cremated and given a small ceremony by the students. This is what Simon Gan told me after he handed me a clip-on visitor’s pass and provided a brief tour of the need-to-know areas of the anatomy lab and classrooms, which were clustered on the top floors of the same campus building where I’d originally met with Dr. Sheridan.
Lean and handsome, Simon had a quiet, smart-guy vibe. He was a local grad student from the Inner Richmond district, which is basically the real Chinatown—not the Grant Avenue Chinatown for tourists. He was kinder to me than he had to be, which took off some of the nervous edge. I wanted to ask him if he knew why Dr. Sheridan had changed her mind, but he was in a rush to get me settled and move on to his own work, so I just listened.
The actual lab with the bodies—the Operating Room, as Simon affectionately referred to it—was on the top floor, and it looked like a long, airy medical bay on a spaceship. Everything was white and gray, with vibrant submarine-yellow doors. Cameras snaked from the ceiling alongside bright lights on long, curved necks, and big LCD screens hung next to wipe boards and rolling medical monitors. Six life-size teaching skeletons—just like my own Lester, only these weren’t missing their arms—stood sentry along the walls.
But the stars of the show were the bodies, which reclined on rolling gray metal tables, all of them covered by white plastic sheets. Just vague shapes. The effect was so sterile and cool there might’ve been anything under there—bricks, clothes, CPR dummies. But the faint odor of formaldehyde told me otherwise. Some of the bodies remained in the lab for an entire year—kind of crazy. But there was a state-of-the-art ventilation system, and the unpreserved bodies were kept in a refrigerated room nearby.
Simon briefly introduced me to his study group, who, like him, were all wearing blue hospital scrubs. I felt like a sore thumb in jeans and my glow-in-the-dark Mütter Museum T-shirt—that’s the museum in Philadelphia that has all the preserved anatomical specimens, medical anomalies, and antique medical equipment—but Simon didn’t seem to notice.
“We’ll be working at the north end of the room,” he said as he walked me to the other end of the lab. “So I thought maybe you could draw on the south end.” He stopped in front of a white sheet in the last row of tables and pointed to one of several metal stands, the kind used to hold sheet music. “You can adjust this and use it for drawing on, if you need to. And here’s a stool. The mirror can be angled, if you need to get a magnified view from above.”
“Great.”
“We’re protective of our bodies—we get assigned one to study for months at a time. The one I picked out for you is assigned to my roommate, and I got his permission for you to use her. I opened everything up for you, and I’ll take care of it when you leave.” I had no idea what that meant, but I nodded. “With this in mind, I just ask you to be respectful and not touch or move anything on or near the body.”
“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 thick, 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 a 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.
Racing footfalls slapped against cement as someone approached, and before I could gather the strength to look up, a familiar voice lured me back to the present.
9
Jack pulled me away from my pile of mortification and into the lengthening shadow of a nearby tree.
“Sit,” he instructed, taking my red bag as my shoulders slid down the bark.
Pinpricks radiated through my hands and feet, and my head was still buzzing. He asked me a question, but I couldn’t concentrate on the words. Was I crying, or were my eyes watering from throwing up? I wasn’t sure.
The next thing I knew, Jack was squatting next to me and giving me instructions. “Slow breath in through your nose, long breath out of your mouth.” He repeated it several times until I finally got the hang of it. “That’s it. Keep it up.”
Slowly, slowly, the buzzing finally stopped. The world inflated back to normal size, and right in the center of it blinked Jack’s big brown eyes.
“You with me?” he asked in a voice edged with concern.
I nodded and wiped my face on my coat sleeve. My mouth. So gross.
He uncapped a half-filled plastic bottle of water he’d been holding. “I don’t have any exotic diseases, promise. Swish and spit, preferably over there.”
I leaned as far away as I could and rinsed my mouth. A couple of students striding down the sidewalk gave me the stink eye. Great. Hope they weren’t with Simon’s group.
I rested awhile, eyes trained on the grass in front of me, until my stomach stopped cramping and I felt somewhat normal. He stared at me the entire time, but he didn’t say anything. I was sort of thankful for that.
I finally gulped down more water and held up the bottle. “Guess this is mine now.” My voice sounded scratchy. Throat hurt, too.
He shifted out of his squat and sat back in the grass, balancing his elbows on his bent knees, and handed me the cap.
“Thanks. Where’d you learn that breathing trick?”
“Years of meditation. Works, right?”
It really did. I tried a few more repetitions, just to be safe. “Why are you here?”
“If you keep posting vague hints about where you are, I’m going to look for you.”
“Is that a threat?”
“Yes.”
I pretended to be annoyed, but truth be told, I wanted him to find me.
Jack crossed his arms over his knees. He was wearing faded olive-drab jeans and the vintage black leather jacket. Just under the jacket’s sleeve, carved wooden beads encircled his right wrist, along with a crisscrossed stack of braided-leather bracelets and cords. “You want to share what brought all this on?” he asked.
“Bad shellfish.”
He squinted his disbelief. “Must’ve been really bad to make you cry like that.”
“What do you want me to say? I’m a big coward, okay?” I sagged against the tree and sighed. “I’d never seen a dead body before. Not a human one, anyway. Unless you count mummies in the de Young Museum.”
“Not the same.”
I appreciated the reassurance, but the whole thing was humiliating. “Go on—tell me how I made fun of you for being squeamish about dissecting a fetal pig, and now here I am, falling apart.”
“Are you kidding? My eighth-grade teacher died when I was fourteen—that was the first dead body I saw. I bawled my eyes out in front of the entire funeral home when I saw her in the coffin. Then I did exactly what you did in the bushes back there, only I did
it all over one of the standing floral displays. All my classmates were there, and my ball-less display of emotion spread around school like wildfire. Took me a year to live that down.”
“I think you’re exaggerating to make me feel better.”
“I’m not, but is it working?”
I took another swig of water. “Besides, it’s different. This is what I thought I wanted to do with my life. And I can’t illustrate how the lungs function if I can’t even look at lungs. It’s not like I can draw from other people’s illustrations.”
“Why not?”
“Do you think Albrecht Dürer copied other artists’ work? No. And if I want to be great, I need to be able to draw directly from the source.”
He didn’t respond, but I was too frustrated with myself to elaborate any further. Besides, he was an artist, right? He had to understand. So why did he look so damn grave? Or maybe it was disappointment. Not sure what he had to be—
Oh.
“I’m such an idiot,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”
“Why?”
I gestured toward the anatomy lab. “Because you ‘fixed’ this for me. I don’t know exactly what you did, but I’m thinking it couldn’t have been easy.”
He shrugged with one shoulder and waved it away with the flick of a wrist. “I’m more worried that everything I try to do for you turns to shit.”
“It really does, doesn’t it?” I was only joking, but he groaned, so I whapped him on the shin with the water bottle. “If you think a few tears and some upchucked pretzels are going to stop me from coming here twice a week, you don’t know me.”
He didn’t smile, but his shoulders relaxed, and a few moments later he templed his fingers together, looking cheerfully devious. “Know what you need?”
“A stronger stomach?”
“Next best thing. Mint.”
“Umm…”
He dug out his phone and tapped the screen a few times. “An inbound N train is ten blocks away. You feel okay to walk to the stop?”
“With you?”
“That was sort of the idea, yeah.”
