THE CADAVER ROOM
“Let’s go to the Cadaver Room.”
This happened a long time ago. The three of us had all started college together. Now, I was in my fifth year of a four year undergraduate program. Jack had dropped out at the beginning of the previous year and worked for the Post Office, the greatest repository of almost doctors, engineers and lawyers on earth. Jason however, was a first year medical student. And (so far) he was clearly the winner of our race through life.
It was late Saturday afternoon. We were all sitting around Jason’s dorm room finishing off a six pack and listening to Miriam Makeba singing Kilimanjaro, our favorite Saturday song, although we didn’t understand a word of it. I looked at Jack and he smiled back at me.
“Okay.” We said in unison.
We had never been to the Cadaver Room. And the idea of being in that room full of dead people, seeing them up close, perhaps even touching one was a creepy and uncomfortable yet strangely tantalizing notion. And (as usual) there wasn’t anything else going on.
So, we finished up the beer, listened to Kilimanjaro one more time, not even trying to glean some meaning from the puzzle of her beautifully tuneful words. It didn’t matter what she was saying. It was a great song. That done, we headed off to the medical school a few blocks away.
When we got there, Jason took us on a little tour. He was a magnanimous host. This was his school and he wanted to show it off to his friends without being too braggadocios about it. He took us to a big spacious room that contained a number of student work spaces.
“This is mine,” he said pointing to a particular table. We looked at the table. It had some books on it and some other unexplained paraphernalia.
“Oh,” we said.
His next door neighbor was hard at work on a project. She stood in front of a high table. On the right side of the table top was a box of live mice. She was very earnest and intense, taking one mouse out of the box at a time, cracking it in the head hard and killing it with a small metal hammer. Then, she’d quickly (almost franticly) lay it down on its back, slice open its chest and pull out its heart. After a brief examination, she’d throw the dead mouse and its severed parts into a box of other dead mice to her left. I asked what she was doing and she told me that she was trying to take out a beating heart. I didn’t know that was even possible.
Suddenly, she stopped her mouse bludgeoning and stared at me with some suspicion.
“Are you an anti-vivisectionist?”
“No,” I answered immediately with just the right amount of indignation, “of course not.” Although I only had the barest understanding of what that was, it was very clear that the right answer to her question was an emphatic, “No.”
Seemingly satisfied, she flashed a slight smile (more to herself than to me) and returned to her labors. That resolved, I completely disappeared from her reality, as she grabbed another live mouse from the box and purposefully hefted her little hammer. In that moment it just seemed to me like such a pointless slaughter of helpless living creatures. I certainly knew that experiments with living things were probably necessary in order to train doctors. But still, that lady mouse killer made me think of Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele and his medical experiments. I wondered if any useful discoveries ever resulted from his horrible research. Although I made a mental note to check, I forgot, which would perhaps explain why I was still struggling to get through college.
On the way out, we passed a big unconscious dog on a table. It was a Golden Retriever, hooked up with tubes and monitors. I wondered what kind of operation they were doing on the dog. In another circumstance, I could easily envision him prancing gracefully through a grassy yard, his luxurious golden hair fluffing in the breeze. They are beautiful, smart, friendly dogs. I asked Jason if the dog was going to be okay.
“No,” he said. “The dogs always die.”
He shrugged guiltily and waved a hand at the sleeping dog.
“This process is not as antiseptic as it should be.”
“Oh,” I said.
I looked at the big furry dog peacefully asleep on the table and ruminated over the possibility that on some level it could be made to understand the nobility of its sacrifice, to give its life for science. Clearly it was unaware of this and hadn’t been given the opportunity to weigh the options and make that decision. But then, it was a dog (just a dog), loyal to a fault, blindly trusting in the wisdom and good intentions of its master and best friend.
In situations like this I often rely on my go-to aphorism, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking an egg.” You must decide. Do you want a Western omelet or buffalo wings? No, this is closer to the point. What do you prefer, a few more dogs or a few more doctors? This is a bargain. Millions of dogs and cats live in our homes and the survival of their species is assured. In exchange for that, a relative few are sacrificed to help facilitate the continuance of mankind. At this stage in our evolution this appears to be the best idea we could think of. Sadly, existential musings can be painfully pragmatic and difficult.
As we walked through the long echoing corridor toward the elevator, I wondered how many mice the school used in the course of a year and reasoned that it surely must be in the tens of thousands (whole villages of mice, whole cities). I didn’t want to think about the dogs. I really liked dogs.
The medical school was a wonderful conglomeration of classrooms, auditoriums, laboratories and of course the Cadaver Room, the most esoteric and fascinating place of all. As I recall, it was in the basement and to say it was a creepy place would be an understatement. The room was stark and white, over abundantly bathed in glaring fluoresce; the perfect place for aliens to conduct their bizarre experiments on kidnapped humans. There were two long rows of uniquely designed stainless steel tables (twelve or fourteen in all). Actually they were rectangular wells on wheels, which contained preservation fluid. The cadavers were submerged inside when not in use. They rested on trays that could be raised and lowered with a hand crank. When the two metal doors on top were closed no one would ever know what was inside.
On this day, most of the tables were closed up tight. Six or seven were opened with their cadavers stretched out on top. Some of those were covered with a kind of blue tarp but two were fully exposed. Jason’s cadaver was one of them. As I gazed around the room and especially at the covered corpses, I won’t say I expected it, but on some level I did anticipate the possibility of movement under those covers. I had never seen a dead person at all in my entire life. In fact, I’d never even been to a funeral. I used to joke about how no one in my family ever died and that we were clearly a family of immortals. I have a photo of me as a 12 year old, surrounded by my parents and a half a dozen aunts and uncles. Now, in the far distant future from that long ago captured moment, everyone in that picture is dead, except me. It occurs to me now that at some point (hopefully not too soon), a descendant of mine will hold up that same photo and say, “Here is a picture of some of my ancestors.” And I would then be simply blended into history along with all the other members of the endless caravan of bygone people, as surely as if I’d lived in the 17th century. That is the flow of life.
When I gazed down at that first uncovered corpse, I realized that there could be no possible way (short of some intervening Hollywood magic) that it could ever move again. Jason and a group of his classmates had their own cadaver. It was a man, stiff, and gaunt. It could very well have been made of wax or clay. There was nothing about it that gave any hint that it had ever lived. But it did live at one time. However, its existence in life was seemingly as anonymous as its “life” as a cadaver.
There was a chart at the foot of the table. It was identified as an African American (then Negro) homeless male approximate age 50 years old. That is all I remember, but I’m sure there was more. It is likely that such details as height/weight and cause of death were included as well. Maybe there was also something about the mechanism that had delivered him to the medical school cadaver room. Was it (he) donated? Can a person be donated, like an old suit or a pair of outdated skis?
What I do remember though, is that he was identified only as Number 9. Perhaps this was done for privacy reasons. Of course, that makes perfect sense. It is certainly understandable because if he had been identified as, say, William Raymond Claxton, e.g., he would have been a person. He would have been “Billy” perhaps or “Willie Ray” from down the street who fell on hard times after he lost his job at Ferrold’s Hardware Store (But, Lord, how that man could dance!).
With a name, he would certainly not be any the less dead. But he would be a person, a real life dead person. And the truth is (I think) that all the necessary horrible, mutilating, humiliating things that those young medical students were about to do to Number 9 could never be done to the late William Claxton, who had a daughter and two grandchildren in Tallahassee. So, it made sense that Number 9 would be nameless in life and nameless in death. As a cadaver, he (it) was just another necessary training tool for aspiring doctors.
The school year was just beginning. Jason explained that the medical students began their dissection with the torso and that the head, hands and feet were wrapped to preserve them until later in the year. Save those parts, Cadaver Number 9 was uncovered and was completely naked. Hacked off pieces of his flesh lay in a careless scatter beside a wide ragged opening in his chest that exposed his ribs.
That scattering of flesh is what I remember most about Cadaver Number 9. Its mummified face was voided of all humanness. It had the appearance of something unfinished that was waiting for the final injection of its identity like a generic clone or a sea pod from a science fiction movie. But still, clearly it was not a mannequin. Unfinished or not, even as it was gaunt and stiff and dead, it was still a human being. And the haphazard scattering of flesh gathered about its chest, was human flesh.
We were talking about this and that while standing in a casual circle around the cadaver. I wasn’t paying attention. Maybe they were still speculating about the words to “Kilimanjaro.”
I couldn’t take my eyes away from the loose flesh that lay at the cadaver’s side. On impulse, I reached over and picked up a piece of it. I raised it up to see, and pinched the flesh between my fingers. It was stringy and the only thing I remember thinking at the time, was:
“It looks just like turkey.”
Sometimes I have trouble reconciling that image and that thought with the fact that I always loved turkey. This is a particular problem especially on Thanksgiving, when everyone is turkeyed out beyond all reason. I see that big roast turkey on a platter carved up, with pieces of it scattered around the turkey carcass and I can’t help but think of Cadaver Number 9 with its scattering of human flesh on its big stainless-steel platter.
I try to blot out that ancient association, to chasten it and banish it from my head. But try as I might, from time to time (especially at Thanksgiving) when I see that big Tom Turkey on a platter, I remember Cadaver Number 9. I remember me standing in that room full of dead bodies with a stringy piece of human meat between my fingers. I remember me thinking, “It looks like turkey.”
And wondering…
