The Last Day of Cadaver Lab

Holly Romero

Word Count 1852

My job was to hold Claudia’s head firmly between my hands and not flinch while Tom worked the hand saw. He steadied the blade below her nose, clear of the thin upper lip, and got to work. It was the last day of cadaver lab, and while the rest of my team backed away, gloved hands held up in surrender, I volunteered. As the saw kept up its steady rhythm back and forth, grinding its way through the roots of her upper teeth, I began to understand why everyone else had hesitated. It wasn’t so much the sight of it, or even my complicity, it was the sound gnawing the air, making my hands vibrate, my molars ache. Bone reduced to pulp and wet dust, Tom’s right bicep bulging with effort as his left hand clutched the top of Claudia’s head to help steady her.
Eight teams worked on eight unpreserved cadavers in an anatomy lab weirdly housed in a strip mall, next to a locksmith somewhere in downtown Phoenix, the frigid and fetid air in the cinder block cooler a sharp contrast to the burning desert heat outside. Our professor, Tom Myers, insisted we name each body to make the instruction easier. “Head over to John and see how his lungs show signs of disease.” But also as a nod of respect. They came to us as mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters with a lifetime of experience; it seemed only right to honor that with a name, even if it was made up.
Yet, after days of dissection and the mopping up of fluids, I was the only team member who wanted to deal with the head and face. At least my scalpel and I didn’t have to fight for elbow room as I slowly peeled the epidermis, the subcutaneous fat layer off her cheeks, the taut forehead providing a bit of a challenge. Tom explained the sequence: first we decapitate her at C1 and dissect away the top two cervical vertebrae, and then once the head is separate and upright, we can use a small circular saw to remove a cap of cranium.
I wanted to see Claudia’s brain, hold it, slice it into sections because I had always assumed the brain was the seat of our shared humanity, where the essence of human experience lay nestled: the hippocampus, amygdala, prefrontal cortex, even the animal parts like the brain stem or what we call the lizard brain. It was like being given a sneak peek into the mysteries of the universe, and I yearned to be awestruck and humbled. Never has an organ stumped so many scientists who’ve tried to tease out the mechanics of how 86 billion neurons interact with 100 trillion connections. The smell of rotting meat and my aching arms, thrumming with effort, were not going to discourage my curiosity.

Once, I married a man for his brains. My mother introduced us and because she’s one of the smartest women I know, I trusted that. Every year, she offered up a Christmas family dinner to the ER crew at her hospital, and that year, she was particularly proud of her haul, which included a Hispanic surgeon; all her dreams were coming true. Her daughter was single and in her thirties, and time was running out. He had a girlfriend of course, also a surgeon, but my mom didn’t care; she was a woman on a mission.
Grudgingly, I nodded my approval over tamales, and posole, and menudo. Here was someone I’d never have to carry, he was so much smarter than me. I’d long made peace knowing I was never the girl you’d take to the prom. I was the girl you paid to do your homework. Our romance began that night and spilled over into the next day when he showed up at my door, car packed with all his belongings, having come clean to his girlfriend. We were engaged a week later.
During that year-long engagement, while we both finished graduate school, Tim and I took a trip to Hawaii. The pilot announced over the speaker a mathematical game to pass the time over the Pacific. It was one of those algebra stories I used to find incredibly frustrating: “Why would I ever need to know this?” Well, apparently, it was to grow up and win a free bottle of champagne while flying economy class.
The problem was something like, “If the plane is going X miles an hour and the windspeed is Y, and the distance to the destination is Z, at what time will the plane be exactly halfway to Honolulu?” Tim downed his ginger ale and used the cocktail napkin to work out the math. It took him less than a minute. Then he signed my name at the bottom and handed it to the flight attendant, who gathered the guesses and passed them up to the cockpit. His estimation was only off by a minute; not even the pilot could believe it as he crowed my name to great applause. Talk about sexy. Tim was so smart he didn’t even need to take credit, brains to spare.
Years later, when our marriage began to fall apart, I came home from work to find Tim disassembling the telephone that hung on the kitchen wall. His father, Jose, was dying even though we never said those words. Although Jose loved all three of his sons, Tim, who followed his dad’s path and became a surgeon, was the one he held at arm’s length. Or, more likely, Tim held himself at arm’s length from pretty much everybody, including me.
For a moment, in the golden light of dusk, he looked temporarily stumped, his smooth hands flat on the kitchen table, each circuit, each wire carefully laid out like a manufacturer’s schematic, I had to ask even though I knew. “What are you doing?”
“I just talked to my dad,” he said, never looking up. “But I could barely understand a word he said. Something’s wrong with the phone.”
I stepped behind his chair and gently placed my hands on his shoulders, “I don’t think it’s the phone, honey.”
He shrugged off my hands and kept working, sorting, and digging to find the solution. “I know it’s here somewhere. The problem. I can fix it.”
But he couldn’t. Fix it. Weeks later, Jose slipped into a coma, Tim by his bedside reading him newspaper articles detailing his own fame and fortune, the inventions, the patents, the scientific breakthrough in robotic surgery. Finally, he’d made his dad proud.
I joined the family for the funeral a few days later. Nobody met me at the airport or sent a car. “You figure it out,” Tim said before hanging up. Didn’t even ask for the flight number. I had the address and a handy change of clothes so I could arrive with a bit of my dignity intact, knowing that I was already an ex-wife. Fortunately, a gentleman, an executive for Toys R Us who’d sat next to me on the cross-country flight, offered up his car and driver and even discreetly hopped in the front seat so I could use the backseat to slip into a black dress.
Months later, sobbing in my brother’s arms, “I don’t understand what happened,” he held my face in his hands, forcing me to meet his eyes. “It’s because you don’t have a gunshot wound to the chest. Or a rare cancer. You can’t be fixed. Because you’re not broken.” It took a minute for me to realize he wasn’t mocking me but offering up a kindness, a hint of grace. This was the same bear hug of a brother who, years before, walked Tim out to the car after a family dinner where he’d snapped at me, “Shut up. Don’t be stupid.” When I asked my brother what he’d said to him to make our drive home so quiet, all he gave me was, “I just told him that my 20 years working at the penitentiary had taught me a thing or two about revenge. And how it often never leaves a mark.”

Finally, Claudia’s head came off. That horrible grinding, sawing sound halted. I unclenched my eyes, not realizing I’d even shut them. “Hand me the circular saw,” Tom said, pointing with his chin. When the cranial cap finally came off, he tipped the head towards me to have a look. Pudding. Rice pudding. THAT was the brain? Anticipating my disappointment, Tom shrugged, “Remember, these are unpreserved cadavers, no formula or gel. Once the positive pressure leaves the body, the organs collapse.” He swirled it around, “And just become soup.”
“I need a moment,” I said while Tom gently returned the cap to the skull. I ripped off my mask and gloves and tossed them in the trash, hung up the lab coat, and threw my whole body against the outside door. Air. Despite the menthol rub under my nostrils, I needed to breathe something other than week-old flesh.
I wasn’t sure which was harder, the brain’s lack of presence on the last day or that shocking moment on the first day when we unpacked Claudia from the body bag. Too many years of watching Six Feet Under made me think she would arrive neatly laid out, her quiet hands resting on her chest, her face peaceful. But no. She was balled up on her left side, tangled in a thin blue nightgown and sloppy diaper, her mouth stretched open in a rictus of terror. Or resignation. Or simply a last reach for air. I gasped when I saw her, not expecting a person. It was a most uncool reaction in anatomy lab. Scientists don’t freak.
Outside, in front of the strip mall, ran a narrow band of grass and trees. I headed for the shade and lay down, careful to check for dog poop first. Looking up through the branches, trying to slow my breathing, I saw the pathway of bronchioles, the leafy outline of each puffy alveoli. I filled my own lungs to capacity and held my breath just to feel the fullness of myself and the life behind me as well as ahead. It was one of my weird talents — holding my breath for an impossibly long time — that, and hyperextending my elbows so completely, observers always shrieked.
The cell phone in my back pocket beeped. A text. From a kind, big-hearted man with rough hands and muddy boots who called me pumpkin. “See you tomorrow. When’s your flight? I’ll pick you up.”
I smiled. It reminded me of a spirited argument with my bear hug brother who, after too many beers, was trying to convince me the best was yet to come, that the concept of “true love” was a fact that could not be denied, even though it could not be proven using math or dissected on a steel slab. My retort was the same as it ever was, “There’s no science to back that up.”
And that, he said raising his pint in my direction, is the best part.
At last, I exhaled.

Holly has worn many hats yet never tires of transformation. From newspaper crime reporter and magazine marketing director to university creative writing teacher and small town yoga therapist, she loves how words make the world. Happiest hiking and kayaking near her home on the Oregon Coast, her long-term goal is to own a pack of huskies. Until then, she plans to continue traveling to countries near and far, always curious, often content, in any language.