Stiff (2 page)

Hey, I wanted to say, we didn't order this. But of course I said nothing.

Death makes us helplessly polite.

The mortician told us we had an hour with her, and quietly retreated. Rip looked at me. An
hour
? What do you do with a dead person for an hour?

Mom had been sick for a long time; we'd done our grieving and crying and saying goodbye. It was like being served a slice of pie you didn't want to eat. We felt it would be rude to leave, after all the trouble they'd gone to. We walked up to the coffin for a closer look. I placed my palm on her forehead, partly as a gesture of tenderness, partly to see what a dead person felt like. Her skin was cold the way metal is cold, or glass.

A week ago at that time, Mom would have been reading the
Valley News
and doing the Jumble. As far as I know, she'd done the Jumble every morning for the past forty-five years. Sometimes in the hospital, I'd get up on the bed with her and we'd work on it together. She was bedridden, and it was one of the last things she could still do and enjoy. I looked at Rip. Should we all do the Jumble together one last time? Rip went out to the car to get the paper. We leaned on the coffin and read the clues aloud.

That was when I cried. It was the small things that got to me that week: finding her bingo winnings when we cleaned out her dresser drawers, emptying the fourteen individually wrapped pieces of chicken from her freezer, each one labeled "chicken" in her careful penmanship. And the Jumble. Seeing her cadaver was strange, but it wasn't really sad. It wasn't
her
.

What I found hardest to get used to this past year was not the bodies I saw, but the reactions of people who asked me to tell them about my book. People want to be excited for you when they hear you are writing a book; they want to have something nice to say. A book about dead bodies is a conversational curveball. It's all well and good to write an article about corpses, but a full-size book plants a red flag on your character.
We
knew Mary was quirky, but now we're wondering if she's, you know, okay
. I experienced a moment last summer at the checkout desk at the medical school library at the University of California, San Francisco, that sums up what it is like to write a book about cadavers. A young man was looking at the computer record of the books under my name:
The Principles and
Practice of Embalming, The Chemistry of Death, Gunshot Injuries
. He looked at the book I now wished to check out:
Proceedings of the Ninth Stapp Car
Crash Conference
. He didn't say anything, but he didn't need to. It was all there in his glance. Often when I checked out a book I expected to be questioned. Why do you want this book? What are you up to? What kind of person are you?

They never asked, so I never told them. But I'll tell you now. I'm a curious person. Like all journalists, I'm a voyeur. I write about what I find fascinating. I used to write about travel. I traveled to escape the known and the ordinary. The longer I did this, the farther afield I had to go. By the time I found myself in Antarctica for the third time, I began to search closer at hand. I began to look for the foreign lands between the cracks.

Science was one such land. Science involving the dead was particularly foreign and strange and, in its repellent way, enticing. The places I traveled to this past year were not as beautiful as Antarctica, but they were as strange and interesting and, I hope, as worthy of sharing.

Footnotes:

[
1]
Or almost always. Every now and then, it will happen that an anatomy student recognizes a lab cadaver. "I've had it happen twice in a quarter of a century," says Hugh Patterson, an anatomy professor at the University of California, San Francisco, Medical School.

STIFF

1

A Head is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Practicing surgery on the dead

The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken. I have never before had occasion to make the comparison, for never before today have I seen a head in a roasting pan. But here are forty of them, one per pan, resting faceup on what looks to be a small pet-food bowl. The heads are for plastic surgeons, two per head, to practice on. I'm observing a facial anatomy and face-lift refresher course, sponsored by a southern university medical center and led by a half-dozen of America's most sought-after face-lifters.

The heads have been put in roasting pans—which are of the disposable aluminum variety—for the same reason chickens are put in roasting pans: to catch the drippings. Surgery, even surgery upon the dead, is a tidy, orderly affair. Forty folding utility tables have been draped in lavender plastic cloths, and a roasting pan is centered on each. Skin hooks and retractors are set out with the pleasing precision of restaurant cutlery. The whole thing has the look of a catered reception. I mention to the young woman whose job it was to set up the seminar this morning that the lavender gives the room a cheery sort of Easter-party feeling. Her name is Theresa. She replies that lavender was chosen because it's a soothing color.

It surprises me to hear that men and women who spend their days pruning eyelids and vacuuming fat would require anything in the way of soothing, but severed heads can be upsetting even to professionals.

Especially fresh ones ("fresh" here meaning unembalmed). The forty heads are from people who have died in the past few days and, as such, still look very much the way they looked while those people were alive.

(Embalming hardens tissues, making the structures less pliable and the surgery experience less reflective of an actual operation.) For the moment, you can't see the faces. They've been draped with white cloths, pending the arrival of the surgeons. When you first enter the room, you see only the tops of the heads, which are shaved down to stubble. You could be looking at rows of old men reclining in barber chairs with hot towels on their faces. The situation only starts to become dire when you make your way down the rows. Now you see stumps, and the stumps are not covered. They are bloody and rough. I was picturing something cleanly sliced, like the edge of a deli ham. I look at the heads, and then I look at the lavender tablecloths. Horrify me, soothe me, horrify me.

They are also very short, these stumps. If it were my job to cut the heads off bodies, I would leave the neck and cap the gore somehow. These heads appear to have been lopped off just below the chin, as though the cadaver had been wearing a turtleneck and the decapitator hadn't wished to damage the fabric. I find myself wondering whose handiwork this is.

"Theresa?" She is distributing dissection guides to the tables, humming quietly as she works.

"Mm?"

"Who cuts off the heads?"

Theresa answers that the heads are sawed off in the room across the hall, by a woman named Yvonne. I wonder out loud whether this particular aspect of Yvonne's job bothers her. Likewise Theresa. It was Theresa who brought the heads in and set them up on their little stands. I ask her about this.

"What I do is, I think of them as wax."

Theresa is practicing a time-honored coping method: objectification. For those who must deal with human corpses regularly, it is easier (and, I suppose, more accurate) to think of them as objects, not people. For most physicians, objectification is mastered their first year of medical school, in the gross anatomy lab, or "gross lab," as it is casually and somewhat aptly known. To help depersonalize the human form that students will be expected to sink knives into and eviscerate, anatomy lab personnel often swathe the cadavers in gauze and encourage students to unwrap as they go, part by part.

The problem with cadavers is that they look so much like people. It's the reason most of us prefer a pork chop to a slice of whole suckling pig. It's the reason we say "pork" and "beef" instead of "pig" and "cow." Dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial. Physicians and anatomy students must learn to think of cadavers as wholly unrelated to the people they once were.

"Dissection," writes historian Ruth Richardson in
Death, Dissection, and the
Destitute
, "requires in its practitioners the effective suspension or suppression of many normal physical and emotional responses to the wilful mutilation of the body of another human being."

Heads—or more to the point, faces—are especially unsettling. At the University of California, San Francisco, in whose medical school anatomy lab I would soon spend an afternoon, the head and hands are often left wrapped until their dissection comes up on the syllabus. "So it's not so intense," one student would later tell me. "Because that's what you see of a person."

The surgeons are beginning to gather in the hallway outside the lab, filling out paperwork and chatting volubly. I go out to watch them. Or to not watch the heads, I'm not sure which. No one pays much attention to me, except for a small, dark-haired woman, who stands off to the side, staring at me. She doesn't look as if she wants to be my friend. I decide to think of her as wax. I talk with the surgeons, most of whom seem to think I'm part of the setup staff. A man with a shrubbery of white chest hair in the V-neck of his surgical scrubs says to me: "Were y'in there injectin' 'em with water?" A Texas accent makes tarry of his syllables. "Plumpin' 'em up?" Many of today's heads have been around a few days and have, like any refrigerated meat, begun to dry out. Injections of saline, he explains, are used to freshen them.

Abruptly, the hard-eyed wax woman is at my side, demanding to know who I am. I explain that the surgeon in charge of the symposium invited me to observe. This is not an entirely truthful rendering of the events. A entirely truthful rendering of the events would employ words such as

"wheedle.," "plead," and "attempted bribe."

"Does publications know you're here? If you're not cleared through the publications office, you'll have to leave." She strides into her office and dials the phone, staring at me while she talks, like security guards in bad action movies just before Steven Seagal clubs them on the head from behind.

One of the seminar organizers joins me. "Is Yvonne giving you a hard time?"

Yvonne! My nemesis is none other than the cadaver beheader. As it turns out, she is also the lab manager, the person responsible when things go wrong, such as writers fainting and/or getting sick to their stomach and then going home and writing books that refer to anatomy lab managers as beheaders. Yvonne is off the phone now. She has come over to outline her misgivings. The seminar organizer reassures her. My end of the conversation takes place entirely in my head and consists of a single repeated line.
You cut off heads. You cut off heads. You cut off heads
.

Meanwhile, I've missed the unveiling of the faces. The surgeons are already at work, leaning kiss-close over their specimens and glancing up at video monitors mounted above each work station. On the screen are the hands of an unseen narrator, demonstrating the procedures on a head of his own. The shot is an extreme close-up, making it impossible to tell, without already knowing, what kind of flesh it is. It could be Julia Child skinning poultry before a studio audience.

The seminar begins with a review of facial anatomy. "Elevate the skin in a subcutaneous plane from lateral to medial," intones the narrator.

Obligingly, the surgeons sink scalpels into faces. The flesh gives no resistance and yields no blood.

"Isolate the brow as a skin island." The narrator speaks slowly, in a flat tone. I'm sure the idea is to sound neither excited and delighted at the prospect of isolating skin islands, nor overly dismayed. The net effect is that he sounds chemically sedated, which seems to me like a good idea.

I walk up and down the rows. The heads look like rubber Halloween masks. They also look like human heads, but my brain has no precedent for human heads on tables or in roasting pans or anywhere other than on top of human bodies, and so I think it has chosen to interpret the sight in a more comforting manner.
Here we are at the rubber mask factory. Look at
the nice men and women working on the masks
. I used to have a Halloween mask of an old toothless man whose lips fell in upon his gums. There are several of him here. There is a Hunchback of Notre Dame, bat-nosed and with lower teeth exposed, and a Ross Perot.

The surgeons don't seem queasy or repulsed, though Theresa told me later that one of them had to leave the room. "They hate it," she says. "It"

meaning working with heads. I sense from them only a mild discomfort with their task. As I stop at their tables to watch, they turn to me with a vaguely irritated, embarrassed look. You've seen that look if you make a habit of entering bathrooms without knocking. The look says, Please go away.

Though the surgeons clearly do not relish dissecting dead people's heads, they just as clearly value the opportunity to practice and explore on someone who isn't going to wake up and look in the mirror anytime soon. "You have a structure you keep seeing [during surgeries], and you're not sure what it is, and you're afraid to cut it," says one surgeon. "I came here with four questions." If he leaves today with answers, it will have been worth the $500. The surgeon picks his head up and sets it back down, adjusting its position like a seamstress pausing to shift the cloth she is working on. He points out that the heads aren't cut off out of ghoulishness. They are cut off so that someone else can make use of the other pieces: arms, legs, organs. In the world of donated cadavers, nothing is wasted. Before their face-lifts, today's heads got nose jobs in the Monday rhinoplasty lab.