Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost

by David Hoon Kim

  “Pouah,” Fréd says. “What’s that smell?”

  Aurélie turns to him with dripping hands.

  “No, no. This is different. You smell it, don’t you?”

  You are not sure why you lie to him. Does it have to do with the fact that he put you on the spot the first day of lab? Is that why you do it, why you tell him you coated your nostrils with Vaseline and can’t smell a thing?

  “Look,” Aurélie says, her voice almost a whisper. “The cerebrospinal fluid.”

  She is pointing to the liquid inside the arachnoid, which rises and falls like a cushion when she presses down on the tissue.

  “It’s what they drain during a lumbar tap,” she says, as though the reason for her enthusiasm should be obvious.

  You recognize the arachnoid from woodcuts and engravings depicting the vibrant, pulsing beauty of black tendrils caught in a gossamer film. But the arachnoid, the real one, is beautiful in a way you couldn’t have predicted, and you feel the thrill of having something so pristine and perfectly preserved laid bare, something that has never been seen, much less touched, by anyone before you.

  The last few incisions are easier, surprisingly enough—the body is no longer resisting the advances of your scalpels, it seems. Cut and pull away the arachnoid mater, uncovering the pia mater beneath, the deepest of the meningeal tissues. Pull away the pia mater, and there it is at last. A slender, fragile mass lined with vessels and nerves. The spinal cord. Every heartbeat, every muscular contraction and skin sensation, an entire life’s worth, passed through its depths. You had to break through bone and tissue with a saw and chisel to get at it, but here you are at last.

  A moment later, Fréd is holding aloft the stringy bundle like a barbaric trophy, waving it around and repeating a line from a movie you don’t know. A peculiar sort of sadness washes through you.

  * * *

  It is Fréd who suggests going out for drinks afterwards. He knows a place not far from the school. The successful dissection has put him in an exalted mood, transformed him into Bernard Kouchner, all of a sudden. Aurélie, too, seems changed, even laughing at one of Fréd’s remarks, which she usually ignores. “Are you coming?” she asks you, and then, possibly sensing your hesitation—you saw yourself staying behind to be alone with the body—she adds, “Even Blaise agreed to join us. Come on!” She holds your gaze a second longer than expected, and in that moment you understand that your absence would leave her alone with Blaise and Fréd. Your respective roles within the group have by now established themselves, and there is little doubt, in your mind, that you and Aurélie are the most competent half, the ones most willing to dissect. This also puts the two of you in competition with each other, to a certain extent, and not only because you and Aurélie are both girls.

  The café, it turns out, is one you’ve been to with Bérengère, and popular with students. Not surprisingly, it is packed at this hour. You spot a couple leaving as you arrive, and you are leading the others to the vacated table when you realize that one of the pair is Bérengère. (She sometimes likes to have a drink before going home.) The guy with her is noticeably younger, stylishly dressed, a thick red scarf wound around his neck. She doesn’t seem surprised to see you, greeting you with a kiss on each cheek and introducing her male friend. The others have caught up to you by now and you reluctantly introduce them to Bérengère. When you come to Blaise, you watch for her reaction as you say his name. Her expression doesn’t change, but you see her flinch ever so slightly, the hint of a tremor below her right eye. As for Blaise, there is nothing to show that he recognizes her at all—if it was really him. The others are walking past you, and Bérengère leans in and says, “I’ll call you,” before she, too, moves on with her companion into the night. Even after she’s disappeared from view, you can feel the hotness of her smoky breath sweetened by the alcohol.

  The mood at the table is boisterous, mostly thanks to Fréd, though the propitious timing of your arrival at the café is not lost on anyone. Your table, carved directly from the trunk of a tree, has a peculiar, vaguely human shape. At the center is a hole, an irregularity in the grain, more like a small crevice, its walls worn smooth over the course of years. Throughout the evening, the four of you—while talking, as an idle gesture, in moments of distraction—take to inserting a hand, or what will fit, into the crevice. You almost succeed, but in the end it’s Aurélie who is able to fit her entire fist inside, and from this she conjectures that a human heart might fit as well. A human heart, after all, is about the size of a fist. “More like your fist,” Fréd corrects her, laughing, “is the size of a human heart.” Aurélie’s parents are both psychiatrists in Rouen; at the moment, she is leaning towards cardiology or anesthesiology, and is thinking of doing her third-year thesis on reduced subcutaneous lidocaine efficacy in red-haired patients as a result of their higher-than-average sensitivity to pain. All of this she told you at the orientation, but tonight she goes on to admit that her childhood dream was to be a concert pianist. Alas, her hands were always too small. Like someone who’s revealed too much, she interrupts herself and asks the rest of you for your reasons. Immediately, Fréd says that he has no idea what he wants to specialize in. He came to medicine on a whim after failing to get into the École normale supérieure, which he considers a great stroke of luck, as it would only have led him down a path of privilege and complacence. From his tone, he still appears to be mulling over the failure. Somehow, you are not surprised to learn that he is a normalien raté. (The Sorbonne is full of them.) You in turn tell them about Arles, about your first months in Paris, when you didn’t know anyone. The long solitary walks you took, sometimes until the straps of your sandals dug into the skin around your ankles. You don’t mention the flayed hand, Hortense de Gaulejac, or your desire to cut open a human body.

  “The ones who hide it the best enjoy it the most.” Fréd finishes his beer. “Don’t you agree, Blaise?”

  Blaise shrugs and mutters into his glass. There is a silence, an awkward break in the rhythm.

  Fréd leans forward. “I didn’t quite catch that.”

  “I told you I was working on a project.”

  Fréd nods, impatient. “Yes, but I’d like to know more about this project of yours. I’m sure the girls here are also curious.”

  You again imagine Bérengère in that drawing class, exposed to his gaze, week after week. Fréd turns away, already losing interest. That’s when Blaise says, “It’s about death.”

  “Pardon?” Aurélie says.

  “Love and death. How death changes love. If the person you love dies. Or you’re in love with someone who’s dead.” He stares at Fréd until Fréd looks down at his drink. “Then everything changes. The way you love changes.”

  Though he hasn’t glanced at you once since he started talking, you can’t help but feel that, somehow, his words are for you and you alone.

  “I wonder,” Aurélie says, “is it possible to love someone who’s dead?”

  Blaise looks up. “What?”

  “I mean,” she says, slowly, “if your love only flows in one direction—because the dead, obviously, can’t love you back— is it still love?”

  “If it’s not love, then what is it?” You hadn’t meant to say this out loud. You hadn’t meant to say anything at all.

  Aurélie nods. “Good question. I suppose I never gave it much thought before.” She smiles brightly. “It’s an interesting project, Blaise. I don’t quite understand how it relates to the dissection we’re practicing in lab, all the same.”

  “I think he might have feelings for our cadaver,” Fréd says. “Maybe he’s even given her a name.”

  “So did the table next to ours,” you point out, but Fréd goes on as though you hadn’t spoken:

  “We’ve opened up her arachnoid and touched her spinal cord, but we still don’t know her name.”

  “I think,” Aurélie says, “it’s better that ours doesn’t have one.”

  “She has a name,” Blaise says, staring
not at Aurélie but at you, across the table. “You just don’t know it.”

  And you do? you want to ask, but Fréd—already drunk—is going on about the advantages and inconveniences of being with a dead person. On the one hand, she won’t disappoint you, cheat on you or lie to you; on the other hand, you have to put up with the smell.

  “Oh God,” Aurélie says. “Not this again.”

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed it too. I know I can’t be the only one.” He looks around the table. “We should be honest with each other. Isn’t that why we’re here? There’s no reason not to speak our minds.”

  Aurélie looks wary. “Now what are you talking about?”

  Blaise is fingering the hole in the middle of the table, and somehow he must have cut himself because you notice blood underneath his fingernail. Seemingly oblivious, he continues to scrape away at whatever he’s found. Without thinking, you reach out and stop him by putting your hand over his, and he looks up, surprised, utterly bewildered by your presence.

  “We can’t keep dissecting the back forever,” Fréd says. “Sooner or later, we’re going to have to turn the body over.”

  * * *

  On the train home, you choose the rear, though there is no shortage of available places. The evening rush is over, and the compartment is almost empty. You are not sure why you touched his hand. You remember thinking, at the time, that the blood under the fingernail wasn’t his but—ridiculously enough—from the table itself, as if the latter were alive, wounded by Blaise. You shake your head. Fréd is right about one thing: sooner or later, the body will have to be turned over.

  Several rows away, sitting with her back to you, is a woman whose blouse has an oval-shaped opening, closed off by a single button at the nape. From the back, with her long reddish hair, she could be mistaken for Bérengère. Even her skin is pale like Bérengère’s, in contrast to your olive complexion and dark-brown hair. But Bérengère has never worn her hair piled up in a precarious, sloppy bun held in place by chopsticks. You stare at the area between the omoplates—the only exposed piece of skin—and imagine yourself making the necessary incisions: short, superficial strokes using the tip of the scalpel …

  You must have dozed off. Bérengère’s pale copy is gone, and you are alone in the wagon. You sniff the back of your fingers: the smell is still there, her smell. Suddenly, the wagon seems too small, too empty. You get off a station early. The night air feels nice, and you let it fill your lungs as you inhale, deeply, slowly. In the interior courtyard of your building, walking past a mobylette parked in the passageway, you notice something draped across the seat. A solitary glove. Above you, someone is watching television with the window open. Indistinct voices, a door opening loudly and slamming shut.

  At that moment, you are traversed by the idea that the glove was left there for you, and you admonish yourself, Petite folle va, as you sense movement out of the corner of your eye: a shadow stepping silently back into the shadows. You take a few steps, then stop. Did you really see something? You tell yourself it must have been a reverberation from the light in the courtyard.

  * * *

  The following week, you are as surprised as you’ve ever been when you arrive at the dissection room to find the body lying faceup. No one can say how it happened. The body was like that when the others got here, Aurélie informs you after taking you aside. For once, she seems at a loss. She looks around and says, “I think it was Blaise. Two nights ago, I decided to review some structures on my own, and met him on my way up the stairs. I think he spends more time in there than me. But when I open up the cadaver, it’s like he didn’t touch anything inside. This time, I noticed that, well, the spinal cord was missing. I was going to tell the prof, I really was. Then I thought that it might reflect badly on our group. Besides, by that point, we’d already finished with the back.” She looks embarrassed. “So I said nothing.”

  “It could have been one of the monitors,” you say, carefully.

  “You mean,” she says, “as part of a hazing ritual?”

  “Possibly.”

  Back at the table, you avoid looking at Blaise. Instead, you study her body, which you feel you are seeing for the first time. It reminds you of a child’s body, though you know she is not a child. Was, you correct yourself. Her breasts are not deflated like those of the other female cadavers, with their sunken gray nipples. Her hips are like an adolescent’s, though she must have been around your age. Just above the navel is the mark left by an incision where the formaldehyde was injected. You wonder how her body must have once looked, before the chemicals transformed and denatured it, before the blood was drained through the right jugular vein.

  “Hey,” Fréd says in wonder, pointing. “Pubic hair. Our cadaver has pubic hair.”

  Beneath the gauze, her face is nothing more than a vague silhouette. No longer turned away, the body seems just as distant and impenetrable.

  There is a lot of catching up to do. The other groups have finished with the thoracic region and moved on to the abdomen. Some are even starting on the inguinal region. There is an urgency in the room, like it’s a race and you are in last position. The sense of accomplishment enjoyed at the café is a far-off memory. You wonder how you’re going to locate all the veins and arteries and nerves written down by the prof. Removing the rib cage requires, once again, the use of a saw. This time you opt for the electric, and grimly take turns with it, all the while trying to ignore the smell, more noticeable than even a week ago—an organic, earthy tang commingling with the chemical sharpness of formaldehyde. The last is Blaise, who backs away from the table.

  “We all have to do it,” Fréd says.

  “I’m sorry,” Blaise says, looking away. “I really am.”

  In the end, the three of you keep going until you are able to pry away the ribs. You’ve started to take out the right lung when Aurélie stops you. She points to the dark smudges covering most of the lung’s mottled surface in dense, overlapping clusters.

  “Gross pulmonary lesions,” she says. “Symptomatic of acute hypothermia.”

  “She froze to death?”

  Aurélie nods. “It’s hard to be sure, though, without examining the subject further. If I could reach the liver, or the gastrointestinal—”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Fréd asks. “Do I have to say it? Our cadaver is rotting. The smell is only going to get worse.”

  “So what are you suggesting?” Aurélie says.

  “We need to ask for another cadaver.”

  “Out of the question.” She says this as if the decision were hers alone to make.

  “If we do that,” you say, “we’ll lose all the work we’ve done.”

  “As it is,” Aurélie goes on, “we’re behind the other groups.”

  Fréd turns to Blaise. “Do you have any feelings about this at all?”

  “She was a smoker,” Blaise says, so quietly you’re not sure if the others heard him. That’s when you see it, what Blaise all this time has been staring at—what the removal of the right lung has uncovered. Even then, it takes you a moment to take it in—a dense, febrile thing, nestled against the remaining lung. Her heart. Aurélie says something about the phrenic nerve near the hilus, but you’re not listening. When she leans down with the scalpel, you grab her arm without thinking.

  “Eh oh! Careful!”

  It’s impossible to say what you’re looking for as you halfheartedly push aside the pericardium. The sense of propinquity you felt a moment earlier—like a voice faintly calling your name from another room—is gone. All you can hear is Aurélie next to you, her breathing small and measured: the smell is starting to get to her, too.

  “That’s it,” Fréd says. “I can’t take this anymore. I’m going to tell the prof.”

  “Please,” Aurélie says, all authority gone from her voice, “you can’t.”

  “If you go to the prof,” you say, “we’ll have to tell him what you did.”

  He’s already started to walk away. No
w he stops, turns and walks back to the table. “What did you say?”

  “I know you took the spinal cord. We all saw you playing around with it. Isn’t that right, Aurélie?”

  The expression on Aurélie’s face is one of incredulousness; but she nods, hesitantly.

  Fréd is looking at you with outrage. “What are you talking about? What spinal cord?”

  “The one you stole.”

  Even as you say this, you feel a strange little warmth in the pit of your stomach. Fréd slowly, wonderingly, shakes his head. “What is it with all of you?” He turns to Blaise, then back to you. “You have a thing for our little cadaver too, is that it?”

  He laughs, unpleasantly, and walks away without another word. You watch him leave the room.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have done that,” Aurélie says in a small voice.