Do No Harm

Plastic Surgery had requested ribs still attached to musculature for a 7 A.M. talk-an unusual lecture focusing on the innervation of the teres major. He could see already that one of the bodies was too obese to be of much use to the med students. He'd junk that one for parts and preserve the other intact. The obese body lay supine, wrapped like a mummy. He prodded the bulge of its stomach, debating where to dig in.

It would be a messy process.

Hands sheathed in thick blue gloves, he picked up his autopsy gown but hesitated a moment before pulling it on. He'd had two cups of coffee on his way over, trying to chase reminiscences of sleep from his hazy head, and he'd have to stop soon and take a leak. He opted to go now, before he got sticky.

Shuffling out in his oversize shoe covers, he headed down the empty hall to the bathroom and pissed long and hard, smiling to himself afterward while he fumbled in his autopsy gloves to zip up his fly. Walking back down the hall, he punched a four-digit code into the Omnilock and reentered the prep room.

If he sneaked a cigarette, all lingering traces of smoke would be long dissipated by the time the first students began to arrive in a few hours. He searched the counter, but his cigarettes were gone. Maybe he'd misplaced them on his way to the bathroom. Shrugging on a blue autopsy gown, he slid a surgical mask over his head. The built-in eye shield, a rectangle of clear plastic atop the mask, would be helpful once the sawing began.

He started with the obese body, electing to leave the smaller one for later. Moving it to the embalming table gave him some trouble, but he managed. He used trauma shears to free the cadaver from the white sheets. A bluing elderly gentleman with sagging jowls and a thick mustache, funeral-dressed in a dark suit. The rose in his lapel had wilted. Probably moved straight from the convalescent home to the parlor to the hospital. Once they arrived, bodies were brought to Horace's happy workplace by the freight elevators, which rode up and down the shafts on the backside of the passenger elevators. Hospital staff did their best to keep the bodies out of the patients' sight. Nothing chills the sick like a fresh reminder of mortality.

Horace pulled the clothes off the cadaver and tossed them in a corner. Then, humming Vivaldi's "La Primavera," he shaved the skull with a pair of barber clippers. He used a scalpel to peel the scalp, the fresh meat yielding a steady current of blood. The slant of the table caused the blood to flow toward the feet to a drain, which was hooked up to a sink against the wall. Bodies also yielded viscid fluids and tangles of tissue. Clogged drains here were a bitch and a half.

Once he had the skull adequately peeled, he began to cut a large circle around the top with a Stryker saw. The circular blade did not spin; it vibrated ever so slightly. Horace had, on occasion, slipped and touched the oscillating blade to his hand, but it wouldn't cut flesh, only hard surfaces like bone. The end of the saw heated up, sending up thin tendrils of smoke that he could smell through his mask-a pungent odor like burning hair, like the dentist-chair stench of a tooth being hollowed.

Once he finished, he popped the skull lid off, lifted the frontal lobe of the brain, and cut the connective tissue, starting with the optic nerve, then moving through the other nerves, the arteries, and finally the spinal cord. Wiggling his fingers beneath the brain, he gently peeled it up out of the head.

Passing a string under the artery so the brain dangled from the middle, he lowered it into a bucket filled with formalin and snapped the lid on quickly, clamping down on both ends of the string. Inside the bucket, the brain hung upside down in the fluid, a perfect natural specimen. Had he not suspended it, it would have sunk to the bottom and hardened with a distorting flat spot, and he never would have heard the end of it from neurobiology.

He switched to a pistol-grip Sawzall, an old-fashioned reciprocating saw. Pressure on the trigger sent the straight blade, which protruded from the saw's long body, hammering up and down. Horace sawed off the feet next, wrapping them in a red biohazard bag and dropping them into a top-loading freezer that ran the length of the east wall. The fire red wrapping would tip off the podiatrists that they were dealing with fresh material-ripe, bloody, and possibly contaminated.

Next he attacked the knees and elbows, severing the limbs about ten inches off the joints on either side but keeping the skin and muscles intact. There wasn't a big call for hands, so he left them attached. He dropped all four units in the freezer, praying that would buy him some time with the orthopedics guys, and turned to the big chore of the day-the musculature-attached ribs needed for the morning lecture.