Saving Butterfly McQueen

Before we Slice the Thirty-Odd Cadavers Open, a Unitarian chaplain offers a prayer. It’s a hot August day in Baltimore. The breeze stirs the magnolia trees outside the lab window; the leaves scratch the glass and block the sun, leaving a mottled pool of light beneath our gurneys.

“We are grateful for these gifts,” the chaplain says. “May the bodies of these men and women provide the light of truth and help you practice better medicine.”

“Break out the bone saws!” one of my classmates calls out. We are, I think, eager to show mettle we don’t yet have. The jokes are a coping mechanism; you earn your indifference to blood and guts. Each of us is anxious to unzip the body bag and see who we will disembowel in the name of science.

Our instructor is clear that we shouldn’t name our cadaver, but of course we do, and because our cadaver is fat (everyone’s is) and has thick black chest hair, we call him Daddy Vegas. My partner Sarah slides a pair of garish gas station aviator sunglasses over his pale, waxen nose.

“As long as I can’t see his eyes, I’m fine,” she says.

“We have to flip him over first anyway,” I say, slipping my fingers underneath his buttocks to get a sense of his weight.

“God,” I say. “He’s big.” And full of embalming fluid.

“I thought they stopped taking the fat ones,” Sarah says. “Maybe there was a shortage?”

“Maybe,” I say, though the lab tech told me the school morgue has more bodies than it can handle; the economy is bad and the costs of burial are up.

This is my second encounter with a cadaver, third if you count my mother’s body. The first—a set actually—I saw at an exhibit, where they danced, played fiddles, and rode horses with plastinated grace, hundreds of spectators leering at their exposed muscles. Those bodies were bathed in silicone, and strangely beautiful, lifeless and full of life. Vegas is bloated and infinitely real.

“Daddy Vegas smells like toilet cleaner,” Sarah says. “Or menthol cigarettes?”

Sarah is brunette, hardly five feet tall and tenacious in the way of a terrier. Her parents are internists in Ohio and she’s impatient about school. “I’m ready to marry myself to the hospital halls,” she says, “or the first hot anesthesiologist who talks to me.”

“No pictures of the bodies online,” our lab instructor tells us. “Ever. And goggles are a must when sawing bone. Watch out for bionic knees and hips; the metal will take out your eye.”

We come to the gurney well aware of the risks: The scent of phenol may make us salivate and become strangely hungry. We may not want meat for months.

Sarah makes a point of discussing her craving for beef carpaccio. “I like a little blood on my plate,” she says.

“Who are you?” I ask.

“It’s his heart that did him in,” Sarah says, aiming her scalpel at his bare chest. “Blockage. I know it. I can’t wait to get in there.”

With the help of our group members, we flip Vegas onto his stomach. Holding onto his body for the first time gives me chills. Surely this is not what he wanted, students making fat jokes and speculating about his cause of death. Though I’m determined to remain an exceedingly rational person during med school, part of me wonders if some part of Vegas is aware of what we’re doing to him.

I run my scalpel down his vertebrae, not cutting, just thinking, and know I should be focused, the surgical scissors not quite a familiar weight in my hand. Grabbing onto his hip with the ferocity of a lover, I’m about to go wrist-deep, slice through subcutaneous fat, peel the skin off Vegas’s back like a rug.

In the Winter of 1994, fifteen years before my divorce at twenty-nine, and before my mother died of breast cancer, I carried...