a pen. He looked at the manual. The manual was very particular, and Sri wanted to follow it with clarity. The incision should begin at the top of the sternum, extend downward to the xiphoid. A central incision, it read. Ming opened the fabric, pulled it to either side, the nipples purple on the rubber-cold skin. Still not moving, Sri stared at the manual’s exact instructions. There was a dotted line drawn from the top of the sternum in the illustration, an arrow pointing toward the navel but stopping short of it. Sri straightened the veil, covered the nipples. He gripped the scalpel hard, like a dull pencil.
“Right down the middle,” said Ming. “Like a zipper. But if you’re going to take forever—”
Sri grabbed the scalpel handle like a stick and buried the short, triangular blade in the midline of the chest. Flesh gripped the blade, and through the handle Sri felt its texture—thick and chalky. Steel scraping on sternum. Sri thought of a beach—of writing with a stick in hard sand thrown halfway up from the tide, with the water not far away. Through his knuckles, Sri felt fibres tearing. The cadaver’s flesh pulled hard at him now. Halfway there. It ripped at Sri, to cut this skin. He tore it, forced his way through. He pulled open the cotton shroud. This old, wrung-out chest with small lopsided man-breasts. Above the left nipple were four tattooed hearts in purple, the shape of the designs twisted by the skin’s movement through its years. A clean, jagged tear through the centre—the sternum white beneath. Sri was amazed by the pale ivory of this man’s bone.
The three of them stood erect at the shining cold table. The man now lay slightly unwrapped. The cloths wound around themselves up and over his neck, then tenderly wrapped the face. They had been told the heads would all be shaved. The table was indented, and the indentation traced down to a hole between the feet. The hole opened into a spout over a bucket so fluids could escape as they ran down the table. On the steel was the man-form in soaked cloth. His chest was gashed now. The chest was not shaved but thick with cold hair. Hair parted now by one crooked stabbing cut that peeled open the front.
“Good job, Sri,” said Chen.
“Feels funny.”
“I guess it’s my turn.”
There were eight dissection tables in the room. Whispers shuddered up from the floor as the familiar touch of skin became distorted. One hushed voice: Haven’t we all seen bodies before? At another table, one student held the cloth up while the other two cut at it. All of the students wore new lab coats, which they had been told they would need to discard once the dissection was done.
One day when Chen was in Dean Cortina’s office to discuss student loans, she said to him, “I remember my dissection group. Oh, what year, I don’t want to tell you. I remember some comments that were made … regarding dissection material. You see, in my time it was all people from the jails or found dead in fights or ditches. No identification and so forth. What you would call bad people. Yours are different, all volunteers. Elderly, upstanding citizens mostly. Ours were young people with fast lifestyles. Virile, some might say. Although I guess it’s really no different once they’re cadavers.
“Anyhow. I remember some guy saying, ‘Wow look at this one, what a broad.’ I didn’t like that, you know, I didn’t think it was right. On the other hand, I remember we dissected a big man. Muscular, built, and someone called him an ox … as if to say what a powerful man, a big strong man. So they called him an ox. Vernacular to be sure, but it was out of respect and to say he must have been impressive. I thought that was all right. I didn’t like someone saying ‘what a broad,’ though. What was he looking at? That sort of sexual appeal was not the right way to think. I spoke up, oh certainly I did, I said to this guy who was laughing, ‘You wouldn’t like a man calling your sister a broad.’ He was angry. He was pissed off and he said, ‘My sister is alive so shut up.’”
Dean Cortina laughed. “So I said, ‘It’s not cool to call your sister a broad because she’s alive?’ Boy, he was upset.”
Chen didn’t know quite how to respond, so he agreed in a polite and very general way, and left without resolving the issue of his student loan.
On the day the ribs were cut to get at the organs, the room shrieked with hand-held rotary saws. Bone dust—it was in your hair, on your lips afterwards.
“Smells like barbecue,” shouted Ming.
Sri leaned off the saw, held it, still buzzing, in front of him, and regarded Ming as if amazed at her. As if about to speak. Instead, he diverted his eyes from her and said, “Where’s the manual?”
Chen walked out quickly, his hand over his mouth, almost running. When he came back he was red and wet in the face, his hair pushed back and damp. “I’m fine. Are you finished cutting?”
The chest opened to show the heart’s chambers, where the great vessels now lay at rest. These sinuous vessels coursed to the lungs, and splayed into the organs and limbs. The lungs were fringed with the gritty black of tobacco.
“Aren’t there people who fill their dead with stones,” murmured Chen, “and sink them to the bottom of the sea?”
“You’re thinking of concrete boots. Gangsters did that.” Ming didn’t look up as she peeled away a strip of fat.
“No, after they die naturally. As a burial ceremony. They take out the heart and lungs and fill this,” he patted the inside wall of the chest, “with stones so the body sinks.”
“What do they do with the organs?” asked Ming.
“I can’t remember that part. Who are they?” He turned to Sri.
Ming also turned to Sri, “Do your people do that?”
“We burn them.”
“Must smell,” said Ming.
“What do you think?”
“I guess it smells. Like cutting bone. Like—” she laughed, “forget it.”
Sri said little for the rest of the lab time, and his quietness spilled uncomfortably over the other two, so that all three worked in a thick silence for the rest of the day. Cutting through layers, spreading tissue, saying only what was necessary.
Sri changed all of his clothing at the lab. Many people kept a shirt or coveralls in their lockers for dissection, but Sri changed everything—his underwear, his socks—in the men’s room. Always in a stall, preferably with no one else in the washroom. That day, he heard footsteps come into the bathroom a moment after he had taken off his shirt. He kept still, a reflex. The footsteps were not followed by running water, or the hissing of urine on porcelain. He waited.
“Uh—Sri? Is that you, Sri?” It was Chen.
A pause. “Yeah.”
“You’re cool, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Great. I’m glad. Ming’s got a tough exterior. Right? All bluff, you can see that.”
“I said I’m cool.”
“I’ll see you, then.”
No footsteps.
Sri crossed his arms, his naked chest prickling in the concrete block basement. “It’s fine, Chen. Thanks for asking.”
“Right. See you.”
Footsteps, the squeaky door.
When they started the dissections, there were bright mornings to come in from, and warm afternoons to go out to after the day’s work. As the weeks passed, they entered the basement on cooler mornings with a hesitant light, and departed into a fading golden afternoon. The leaves swelled with colour until they became too heavy with the intensity of reds and oranges and fell to the ground. Each day, more human