“Show me how you dissect a body,” she says.
“So that’s your secret fetish,” he says.
C-2 is supine. She reaches for his hand in the dark and uses it to draw a Y-shaped line from under each breast up to the sternum and then the throat. “Is this how you begin?”
“That’s if you’re performing an autopsy, searching for a cause of death. A dissection isn’t only about how someone died, it’s about how someone lived. The bodies arrive in two shrouds, one for the body, the other for the head.”
He covers her with the sheet.
“The medical students have never seen a dead body before. We ask them to remove only the body shroud. A couple of students always break down.”
He slides the sheet off her.
“We ask them to roll the body prone.”
He rolls her over.
“We start with the back, the most impersonal part of the body, to help the students adjust. We make a series of cuts, divide the back into four equal sheets of skin.”
He draws, very lightly, a line from the base of her skull to her buttocks, another from scapula to wing. He draws a third and fourth along the lateral edges of her body from under her armpits to her hips.
“We lift off the skin.”
“Is there blood?”
“No blood. They’ve been embalmed, a light embalm, just a little formaldehyde. Next we move to the upper arm and shoulder.”
He rolls her supine again, and lifts her arm, folding it gently behind her head.
“The armpit is ticklish because it’s one of the most sensitive places on the body. All the sensations in our fingertips must pass through it on their way to the brain.”
He draws a line along the path of those sensations.
“Next we examine the hand.”
He lifts hers and traces its bone structure.
“My students get very emotional when they first examine the hand. A hand, in its own way, is as personal as a face. Some of the hands are still wearing nail polish. It’s the first time my students truly realize it is a human being.”
He puts down her hand.
“It’s time to open you up,” he says.
“Do you crack the chest?”
“No, we saw the bones laterally, remove the sternum with ribs in one unit.”
“What do you see first?”
“The lungs.”
“Not the heart?”
“The heart is buried in the mediastinum, enclosed in a sac of fluid to keep it safe while it pumps. The heart is only attached to the sac’s posterior wall by veins and aortas. They anchor the heart to the body while allowing it a lot of flexibility to move around, like a dog on a leash. Otherwise, it might wander off.”
After he finishes with her heart, he wants to have sex again. She knows he can’t accept that there is no future for them beyond this room. At fifty-two, she has a different kind of sexual power than she had at twenty-four. She doesn’t like this new kind of power one bit, but she also can’t get enough of it.