Three Moments of an Explosion (45 page)

These days there are so many odd and troubling noises in the city—in any city—you are forever jerking awake long before dawn with a hammering heart, trying to make sense of some noise you cannot even really remember but that you know is what frightened you awake. Maybe it was always that way and everyone has always been forever waking in a flustered confusion deep at night trying to believe that the awful sound they think woke them was nothing, or was the nervous bark of a dog, not the sound of violence or of a child weeping in the kind of desolation or terror that demands intervention, from which it is imperative that they be rescued, not the sound of a young man or woman, one of too many suddenly in the city, in odd clothes, whispering with stilted whispers, staring through windows at the shiny shapes of horses, shepherdesses and shepherds, cars, fish and angels, at other people’s china animals.

THE DESIGN

There is a fact familiar to anyone who has worked with the dead. Do anything to a cadaver, it will do something back to you. This is not gusty spiritualism but psychology. It is true for even the gentlest interaction: actually
cutting
those quiet specimens provokes a far more serious response. One adjusts with speed, but the act never loses its taint.

This is the second time I have tried to write this document. The first, years ago, I started thus:
Now that William is dead, I am released from the concerns of his discretion
. In fact I decided, to my own surprise, to extend that care beyond his passing, up to the point of mine.

Upon his arrival in Glasgow, William—a clever, ambitious, somewhat sheltered young man, but no sort of a prig—indulged with enthusiasm in all the typical carousing for which students at the medical school were notorious. He also worked hard, including at anatomy. In those days, he later told me, he handled the dead with adequate respect and interest, but little more.

The laboratory was belowground. Its frosted windows were at ceiling level, calf-high to pedestrians outside. Our class—I was not present in those early weeks, and what I describe here I do from later knowledge—would gather in groups of four around each of the cadavers, prod and probe, lifting the formalin-soaked sheets while professors issued instructions.

It was the third month of study, late, and cold (for obvious reasons the room was not heated above a minimum). Evening access to the room was permitted, on the understanding that while swotting was acceptable, actual cutting outside official hours would constitute a discourtesy to one’s quartet, like underlining in a shared textbook. There were three students present that night. One of them was William.

He was sketching musculature. He prodded at a flayed limb. He rotated it to see how its inner fibers moved.

The body was that of a man in his sixties, still rangy and muscled under a certain later-life thickening. William rummaged between flexors and extensors. They had been disconnected from the tendons of the hand, and he folded them back. He uncovered a long bone curving gently in the dead man’s arm.

He stopped. For many seconds, William was still, looking closely at what was beneath his fingers. He wiped away tissue, felt his fingers slide on the ulna’s sausage skin–thin casing.

On the off-white of the bone were scratches. For a moment William thought they must be the results of injury. But they were not random. No chance mishap could have caused what he saw.

The markings were a design. They were pictures.

Through a tear in the periosteum, the bone’s fibrous fascia, William saw curlicues. Carved filigrees entwined the shafts of ulna and radius like the borders of an illuminated manuscript.

William looked up at the age-stained walls, at John and Harpreet at their own cadavers, back down at last at the bone he touched. It remained impossibly carved. He could make out rust-red lines as if through gauze.

With hands that had begun to tremble, he peeled back muscle and meat, brought more bone into the light. He traced intricate illustration. Near the wrist he uncovered images of plants, between the leaves of which, rendered in even finer lines, was the tiny figure of a man.

William was certain that until he and his classmates had taken scalpels to it, the skin of the arm had been unbroken. He leaned on the table. He loomed over the cloth-obscured face.

“You chaps,” he said. Neither John nor Harpreet heard him. He had to clear his throat and repeat himself. What he heard himself say when they looked up, he later told me, astonished him. What he’d intended was to say, “Here’s a queer thing—come tell me if this makes any more sense to you than it does to me.” What he said, after a tiny hesitation, was, “I’m going to get knocked for six by this test. I’ve no idea what I’m looking at in here.”

At which misleading truth his classmates grinned, insisted on their own equally shocking ignorance, and went back to work, leaving William staring into the gray arm, at the intricacies on the bone.

The dead man in his care had no tattoos, and only everyday scars. His hands suggested manual work and his knuckles that he had not been a fighter.

When one has put oneself in the frame of mind necessary for cutting, I can attest, it is hard to see a cadaver’s face as a face at all. It was with effort, when he lifted the flannel, that William registered not planes of skin but features. He pulled back the lids of the eyes and tried to imagine this etched man moving in the world.

Eventually Harpreet and John left. Bourne, the porter, peered in and nodded good evening, then withdrew, leaving William alone in the presence of the mystery. He sat motionless in the cold room for a long time, as if keeping vigil. When at last he stood, he moved decisively. He took a blade and extended the cut with more finesse than he’d expected he would muster. He sluiced the nestled bone with water, and all along it found more marks.

Paisleys, cloud-like forms, waves. Here was a woman, bent, her body crisscrossed lines. William opened the man’s thigh. He tugged the tremendous muscles apart to uncover the femur—there is no profit in being gentle with the dead—and looking up at him from within the leg was an eye scratched onto the bone.

Two cuts to the chest, like martyrs’ wounds. On the ribs to one side was a scene of sailing; on the other, abstract shapes.

William cleaned his hands. He listened to the occasional footsteps that came and went outside.

There were no anatomy classes for another two days, but any of his three cadaver-sharers might come in at any time. He later said he knew he had no moral right to do what he decided to do, that the design was his only contingently, that it had not been vouchsafed to him. I have never in fact believed he was quite sure he was unchosen.

“Late one for you tonight,” Bourne said when William at last signed out.

“Indeed,” William said. “Exam coming up.” He was shaking. He blinked and smiled, not very successfully, and headed into the chilly dark.

Perhaps two hours later he was back. He wore drab, featureless clothes, a hat low on his head. He pushed a compost-filled barrow taken with agonizing silence from the garden of his lodgings. There were not many hours until dawn. William glanced at the rear of the houses that overlooked him. They were unlit. He knelt on the pavement outside and tugged open the window he had left unlatched.

Reaching into the darkness, where the dead lay, he extracted the bag of chemicals and tools he’d tied to the frame. He braced himself, leaning against the wall. He groped for the ends of the winding sheets he had coiled into ropes. They stretched from where he had secured them to the worktop below, and to the results of his long, unpleasant work.

William had no expertise. It must have been a bad business. With the help of the textbooks in the cutting-room, in agonies, terrified of interruption, he had, as quickly as he could and with clumsy care, dismembered the body.

One slip now, and his burdens would slam down with a din like the dead stamping. Bourne would come rushing. Part by part William pulled the body out by its own shroud.

At last he sat back in the alley, gasping. His shirt was damp with sweat, and with preserving fluid leaking and soaked through the wrappings. He reeked. He arranged the swaddled components in his wheelbarrow, smothered them in compost. He buried his dead. Hoping he looked like an early-rising workman, he lifted the handles and walked away.

It would not be until late the following day that William’s crime was discovered. Two students, alone in the room, found that the body at their station was not the one on which they had hitherto been working.

William had considered various ways to spread confusion, including desecrating every cadaver (a notion he instantly rejected). In the end, he simply rearranged all their gurneys, wheeling them all to new positions, and leaving his own, now empty, discreetly by the wall.

It was effective. It took Johnson and Hirsch almost half an hour to find their specimen, in the corner where William had left it. When they did, at first they simply assumed they’d forgotten some explanatory announcement, and recommenced working on it. Uneasy at last, they finally reported the situation, but it was hours again after they did so that the porters, rolling their eyes at what seemed a prank, tried to return every cadaver to its designated place, and realized that one was missing.

William’s pressing need was for a hiding place. His heart clamoring in his chest, he had pushed the barrow into an unsalubrious quarter of the city, haunted by a sudden wish that his dead man was whole and unbroken.

The night was nearly gone when he found the tenements he remembered. They were, for the length of four or five buildings, empty, broken-windowed and fire-damaged. It was the work of minutes to prise open a rear door and push in through clutter and rubbish. He passed a noisome chamber used by tramps and local boys to relieve themselves. The smell was revolting and, William hoped, off-putting to other intruders. He hauled his burden up the stairs and laid it down.

He tried to sit it up, in its pieces, in a body shape, shoulders to the wall. He hoped the chemicals would keep rats away. Not one part of the flesh was visible. The thing regarded him with its filthy-cloth-obscured face. William watched it back, his stomach fluttering.

He imagined how the sun would rise, how at a certain point its rays would crawl across the shroud and the dead man, cross from one side of him to the other, and how he would not move at all under that light.

I was present when the dean, Dr. Kelly, thundered about the heinous act that had been committed. It was my first, dramatic day. I’d transferred from my previous place of studies to Glasgow in a rush of instructions and hurried plans. What I arrived to was that outraged speech.

There were police constables in the room. When we were dismissed, and I was shuffling out among a group of young men politely introducing themselves, I saw a porter call four fellows from the crowd to where the officers were waiting.

“Who are they?” I said.

“The chaps whose body’s toddled off,” someone said. “Hauled before His Nibs and Scotland’s finest.” He shuddered theatrically.

It was helpful to William to hear how aggrieved by the questioning were his innocent colleagues. His own denials of knowledge could approximate theirs. He’d discarded the clothes he’d worn that night. Mrs. Malley’s wheelbarrow was at the bottom of a canal. That William was not discovered then does not make this a story of the incompetence of the police.

“So, come on, then,” said Mills, a phlegmatic young Yorkshireman who was to fall in France in 1940. “Who has a theory?”

We took turns speculating on what had happened to the cadaver. We mooted theft, ghostliness, complicated games. William had joined us in the pub by then, and his own flight of fancy was that the man had woken up, realized he wasn’t dead, shrugged, and gone home. Mine—my classmates encouraged the new boy to play—was that they were all victims of a hex operating on their memories, that there had never been any such corpse as the one they remembered.

The newly bodiless quartet was dispersed—“like the tribes of bloody Israel,” according to Adenborough—among their peers. I was also assigned a place, so five of the anatomy stations became five-man teams. William complained exactly sufficiently about this disruption.

The disappearing body quickly became shorthand. Anything lost was considered pocketed by our ambulatory corpse on its way home. Unexpected noises in corridors were the incompetent creepings of the revenant. William took part in such joshing no more and no less than anyone else.

Under a stretch of houses overlooking a railway cut, William found storerooms where local shops kept surplus wares. He peered into a grimy window. A train passed. A little girl playing in the gutter looked up from her doll.

The owner of the room, an aging tough, agreed a price. William impressed upon his landlord the need for discretion and privacy, hinting that he might be working with dangerous chemicals. The man obviously assumed this would be some cottage industry in liquor or narcotics. William allowed the impression.

“Can you keep the local lads out?” William said.

“They’ll mind me.”

When William crept back to the old house for the bundled parts, he was afraid the police would be waiting for him. But there was only the stained cloth and the flesh within. The moon spotlit the floor a little to one side of the remains: incompetent stagecraft.

William took three awful night walks to his new laboratory. He brought the torso in a suitcase. Then two legs, then both arms and the head, in a knapsack. Treated as they were, his burdens did not smell of rot, but they did not smell good.

Did anyone, in those days, notice how tired he was? Did his work slip, his marks suffer? I think not. We were all working hard, all exhausted. His secret researches meant William was absent sometimes, but that was hardly unusual. We’d always cover for each other—“Oh, Bryce is down with fever, sir.” It was second nature. The professors were game enough, drily wishing absentees recovery.

He did not work at my table but I had got to know William a little by then. He was not the center of any social group, but neither was I.