Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures (6 page)

“With the omentum?” The omentum attached all the intestines into a fan-shaped sheet. “Why didn't you put it with the head?”

“I don't know. The bag wasn't handy, I guess.”

“You guess. So you just left it with all the guts and everything,” said Sri. “I'll have to go get it.”

“What?”

“I'm gonna go get it,” he shouted. No one turned to look, in the way that drunk people do not notice each other as being out of the ordinary.

“You're all screwed up,” said Ming quietly. “Do you dream about your Murphy?”

“Me? You should have nightmares, the way you treat him.”

“Hello? Dead? Remember? I don't have dreams, because I don't have hang-ups about the stupid corpse.”

“You—”

“You what?” said Ming. “You don't like that? Corpse? Piece of Murphy meat?”

“You're just such a—”

“Just say it. What am I? You want to say it. Call me a name, go ahead and relieve your repressed little self. Say it.”

“No. Let's just stop. No.”

“Go for it, pick a name. Bitch? Witch? Name your name.”

“I didn't say anything, you're picking the words now.”

“You're such a wimp, I have to call myself names just to clarify what you think of me,” said Ming.

Chen was pushing sideways through the falling dancers. He arrived in time to hear Ming say to Sri, “Just fuck off. See, I can say what I think.” She stalked off, weaving across the floor.

“You guys,” said Chen to both of them but now just to Sri.

“It was better for a minute. Believe it or not. I bought her a drink. Then she told me she found the head. Okay, but she didn't put it back! I can't believe she just misplaced it like that, like it doesn't matter, and then she didn't even put it with the other half? It's with the omentum.”

“How many have you had?”

“My mother told me that alcohol can build and then burn bridges between people.”

“Your mother.”

“Well, it's done now. I'm gonna go get the head.”

“Aw…Sri.”

“I gotta get it, put it back on.”

“Whaddya mean, come on, wait—”

Already walking away, Sri said, “I gotta go—”

“Hey, wait.” Chen, still holding a beer, went down the stairs after his friend.

 

In the anatomy lab, Chen summarized the story: “Yeah, I looked it up for you. Mark 16. So after Jesus is crucified the women go to wash and prepare Jesus' body with spices. On the road they realize they won't be able to move this huge stone door in front of the tomb. But when they get there, surprise! The door is open and there's no body.
Don't be scared,
says the shining angel who's there.
Jesus has risen, so tell the disciples that he will comfort and lead them.
The women are scared. Jesus appears to Mary. She tells people about seeing him, but they think she's crazy, so
he has to keep on showing himself to people until they're convinced. Anyhow, Jesus says that things are really going well, and all his people will do incredible, wonderful things, and be protected even from drinking poison. He says that his followers will be healers by putting their hands on people. Then he goes to heaven to sit with God.” Chen put his beer down next to Murphy.

“Is that really what it says?” asked Sri.

“Roughly. I looked it up, but I am paraphrasing.”

“It's good stuff.”

“You still want to put the head back on,” said Chen.

“Yeah.”

They unwrapped the stump neck and took the left side of the head from inside the chest where they had left it to keep it moist. They found the right side in the omentum bag, and the right and left sides didn't match up exactly anymore because of the dissection. They put the two pieces on top, and Chen could see that Sri wasn't happy, so he wrapped some gauze around the neck to hold things in place.

“He's a bit dry.”

“Needs a drink. Bless you, Murphy.” Instead of taking the formalin spray bottle, Sri took the rest of Chen's beer and poured it gently and slowly from the lips to the open belly.

“You don't drink, do you?” said Chen.

“Not usually.”

“You have a knack for it.”

“Why do you think Murphy chose Mark 16?” Sri closed his eyes. “It's a weird passage. Is that the end of the Jesus story?”

“I guess a pilot would have figured there wouldn't be a body left for anyone. Nothing left for his girlfriend, or mother. Maybe Mark 16 made him feel better about that.”

“He was wrong,” said Sri, bowing his head, his arms stretched to the usually shining table now dull with the running of liquid. Beer dripped into the bucket between Murphy's feet. “He's here for us.”

Sri wound a strip of yellowed fabric up the neck, pulled it tight over the chin so it wouldn't bunch, then softly over the eyes, and the coldness of the eyelids vanished under the cloth. Murphy's hair had continued to grow for a little while after being shaved, and Chen held up the stubbled head so Sri could work. Sri wound the fabric around the top of the skull, and tied it onto itself snugly with a slipless knot under the angle of the jaw. Sri stood back and noticed that the tip of the right ear protruded. He tugged gently at a fold of cotton and settled it around the ear, where it would stay.

 

HOW TO GET INTO MEDICAL SCHOOL, PART II

MING'S PARENTS THOUGHT THAT SHE VOLUNTEERED
at the Ottawa Children's Hospital on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. Both she and Fitzgerald were there on Mondays and Tuesdays, but on Wednesdays neither of them went to the hospital. Instead, they went to the ski hill that was abandoned for the summer, where they would not encounter their classmates or Ming's cousins, and spread a blanket in the tall grass whose blades glinted in the flat light. The sun pulled sweat out of them, and there was a humid
adhesion of skin on skin. When it became too hot, they put on their clothes and walked in the shade of the woods. A ski chalet had burned to the ground during the winter, and when they walked past it Fitzgerald kicked at the charred pieces of wood.

Ming received an acceptance letter from Toronto's Faculty of Medicine in July, and her parents put a down payment on a small condominium north of Bloor Street that backed onto a treed ravine. Her family held a banquet and called her
doctor,
but Fitzgerald did not attend. In Ming's home, he had been a faceless voice on the telephone and now was even less present. During summer holidays there was no studying, and therefore no excuse for him to call. Wednesday was their day. The Wednesday after the banquet, as they walked to find a picnic spot, Ming told Fitz that she hadn't enjoyed it without him.

He said, “Why do you sound so happy, then?”

“Don't you want me to be? My family is happy for me.”

“You've achieved what they wanted. Another family success.”

A deer crossed the ski run, nervous in the open, sniffing up and down the hill. They stopped walking, and the deer crossed their path and then folded into the woods. Ming said, “We were having a perfectly nice day until now.”

“I'm sorry,” said Fitzgerald. “You deserved a party. You did it.” He reminded himself to be only happy for
her, but felt that his exclusion from the celebration entitled him to possessiveness.

“Getting an acceptance seemed like such a big deal. Now I'm mostly just tired and relieved.”

One hot, grasshopper-buzzing day at the beginning of August, Ming and Fitzgerald sat at the top of a steep ski slope, swinging in a green metal lift chair. They had once decided to have no romance, and they now referred to that as the “strange phase” of their relationship. A few months later, when they travelled to Toronto for Ming's medical school interview, they had decided that it was dishonest to deny that they were in love. On that trip, they held each other but slept in separate hotel beds, and agreed that there should be no sex. For Ming, this would be too close to her anger at Karl. Three weeks later, after this prohibition had been put aside upon Ming's initiative, they conceded that since they had become lovers there was no point in discontinuing a natural enjoyment between two people in love. Now, they sat facing down the hill, without the retaining bar of the ski lift chair. They ate cheese sandwiches and drank iced tea. Ming told Fitzgerald that she could not imagine loving anyone else, now that she had found someone to be honest with.

He said, “That's why people get married.”

“You think so?” she said, drinking from the silver flask. “Aren't there lots of reasons, both good and bad?”

“Why don't we get married?”

“The circumstances are not ideal,” she said.

“But are they ever, for anyone?” said Fitzgerald. Ming was moving to a different city in three weeks, and they had come together in halting lunges, preceded by a mutual denial of their deepening attraction. Instead of discouraging Fitzgerald, these events made it seem even more important to make and extract a commitment. “You just said you couldn't imagine loving anyone else. Let's hold on to that. We'll get married.” He took her hand.

“Fitz, it's something for later.”

“Then later. Put it this way: could you think of marrying anyone else?”

“Right now, no, I can't,” she said, putting her other hand over his.

“These connections happen only once. We can't throw it away because of the problems around us. Later is fine, but let's commit to our feelings now.”

“You'll be a good husband,” she said. Ming took his arm, sat closer, and looked across the landscape of hills cut in a strange way into ski slopes. She had not yet told her parents about him, and said that she needed to wait until she had moved away from home. “It's stupid, but I wish you were Chinese. They'll threaten to disown me. That happened to my sister.”

“But that would just be a pressure tactic, to make you choose between me and them.”

“They won't, ultimately. In the end, they can't lose me. I don't think so, anyhow.”

“What happened with your sister?”

“She broke up with her boyfriend.”

“Oh.”

“But that was different. I only met him once. It wasn't serious, I'm guessing.”

The five-hour drive from Ottawa would give her the distance she needed in order to tell her parents, said Ming. She spoke with the assumption that Fitzgerald would be admitted to medicine in the following year. This was easier for her to say, and he said “if” while she said “when.” He did speak as if he would move into her condominium. Ming suggested that he might have to live on his own for a little while.

She said, “My parents did buy it and everything.”

“You could move out. We could get an apartment, so it would be our own place.”

“Or something.”

 

At the end of August, Ming's parents moved her to Toronto. They filled her freezer with white plastic containers of ginger beef, sesame chicken, and other favourites of Ming's. Fitzgerald took the train to Toronto on the same day that Ming's parents drove back to Ottawa. The night before Ming's first day of medical school, he said, “Now you'll tell them?”

“I'm tired,” she said. “Right now, I need to be on my own, plant my feet.”

“It should be easier, now that you're far away.”

“You don't get it, do you? That it won't ever be easy.” She turned away in bed.

“I just said easier.”

In September, Fitzgerald returned to Ottawa. At first, he and Ming were both anxious to speak every evening. They fantasized about travelling, about being together, about when Fitzgerald would visit. During the school day, they anticipated these fantasies—which became satisfying in themselves. By October, Ming's class was dissecting the abdomen, and she suggested that they speak every second night.

“The volume of information is overwhelming,” she said.

“But I'll miss you.”

“Do you realize I've been cutting apart human bodies for the last month?” said Ming. The first rite of medical school was the anatomy lab, the opening of skin into the organs.

“You mentioned that,” he said.

She described the dissections on a daily basis. She complained that one of her dissection partners, Sri, was a sentimental wreck who couldn't even cut open an arm, who did nothing but slow her down. Chen, her other partner, was tolerable. Every minute was important, she said, and she had realized that she was spending too much time on the telephone. “I didn't learn the thorax well enough, because you need me too much. How much do we have to talk? Human anatomy is important—it's for real now.” Whenever Fitzgerald mentioned her classmates she corrected him, because they were “colleagues.”

“Right.” Fitzgerald wondered whether his biology and biochemistry lectures were no longer real—perhaps they were only the means to an end. He had previously enjoyed the ideas and concepts but now, even as he became more obsessive about the details and patterns of facts, he hated knowing that his marks were soaring as a result of Karl's study methods. He tape-recorded lectures, applied a meditative attention to details and trivial facts. His weekly time sheet was crammed with reading, eating, listening to tapes, memorizing, and working on medical school application packages. He worked with a desperate and fastidious zeal, imagining that each A+ brought him a step closer to Ming. One night, Fitzgerald told her that he wished they could stop studying, and instead could lie in the grass at the ski hill. Ming reminded him that achieving the last twenty marks required twice as much effort as getting the first eighty.

Fitzgerald said, “Another saying from Karl.” Ming's cousin Karl's systematically mind-numbing method of achieving near-perfect scores was Ming's lesson for Fitzgerald.

Ming was silent.

It was the first time Fitzgerald had mentioned Karl. Until now, only Ming had ever brought Karl into their conversations. Fitzgerald had often thought of Karl while being coached in study techniques by Ming, and he knew that Ming had to push Karl out of her mind when they were in bed. He did the same, but had not
told Ming of this. He said, “Sorry, that just came out. I've been studying too much.”

“I'm showing you how to get into medical school. Isn't that enough? Is it my fault that Karl taught me how to do it?”

Fitzgerald felt his heart beating. He said, “It's as if his shadow is on me when I'm studying.”

“Well, you've never met him so you can dismiss your excess of imagination. I've got his shadow on me, and one of us is enough.”

“I guess learning is learning. Sorry.”

After his midterms in October, Fitzgerald asked Ming when he should visit.

She said, “There's no good time. Only less bad times.”

“When will you tell your parents?”

“Now that I miss them, it's hard to hurt them.”

“Then you're glad to be away from me.”

“No. But it is a relief to be further from our secret.”

“And easier to study your anatomy and your dissection than to face our relationship, our problem.”

“You have this amazing belief that things have something to do with you,” she said. “Don't you see? I have to be as committed to renal anatomy as I am to us.”

In the first week of November, Ming told Fitzgerald that she and Chen had gone out for dinner in October. He lived in the same building. Occasionally, she said, they grabbed a quick bite after class.

“We're nothing more than colleagues, but I wanted to mention it. I wasn't going to tell you, because it's
nothing. Chen and I hung out once, maybe twice. Then I thought to tell you, because otherwise if you found out you might misunderstand and think that it was something.”

“He's Chinese?” said Fitzgerald.

“Who cares,” she said.

“You kissed him.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” she said. “This is why I wasn't going to mention it.”

A week later, Ming said that perhaps she and Fitzgerald should “slow down.” Also, there was something that she regretted, she said. A tiny misunderstanding, which she and Chen had already clarified. Chen hadn't exactly known about her commitment to Fitzgerald, and so there had been a kiss, although entirely one-sided, and she had stopped him as soon as it started, so it wasn't really that she had kissed him at all.