Vivian Sandifer

My girlfriend comes home smelling of iron and formaldehyde. I silently point to the laundry hamper, positioned in its new spot by the front door. She sighs, lips pursed, and peels off her jumper and pants. I carry her clothes to the washer right away. I used to fret over the wasted water, but it has become impossible for me to wash her clothes with anything else; little flecks of skin collect in the washing machine, as if she is shedding into her clothes. She assures me this is a normal byproduct of the gross anatomy lab. The cadavers flake, she shrugs apologetically.

I find her sitting in the kitchen with a bowl of pasta. You couldn’t wait for me, I ask. It’s the formaldehyde, she says in between bites. Powerful appetite stimulant. I have heard this all before, of course. Gross anatomy lab started three months ago, and she revels in her newfound knowledge of the body and the chemicals that preserve it, sharing her facts with me night after night. I regurgitate these facts at work when people ask after her. My colleagues say how lucky I am, to have such an ambitious partner. I wanted to be a doctor, they say wistfully. I let their lost dreams wash over me. Later, at night, I tell her of these med-school failures, and she grins. Her lips graze my ear as she whispers, lucky you, getting me.

***

On the day she brings Janice home, I am sitting at the kitchen table, plowing through endless emails. It is my work-from-home day, a perk of my excruciatingly mundane job, as she likes to call it. I look out the window to see her lugging a small pine coffin up our front steps, her slender arms shaking with the weight of it. When I open the door, she gestures for me to come help her. I grab my end of the coffin, and we slowly maneuver it into our house, depositing it on the kitchen countertop. She exhales, and claps her hands together. Sorry to bother you during work hours, she says. I’ll be silent as the grave while I unpack her, she grins, her mouth curling up at her own joke. I stand staring at her, my eyes sliding from her face, flushed pink with the cold and exertion, to the unassuming pine box on our countertop. Oh, she starts, suddenly seeming to grasp my confusion. This is Janice, my cadaver from anatomy lab. I should have introduced you properly, but I figured it best to wait until after I’d unpacked her.

***

Janice becomes an unobtrusive presence in our lives. As I make my way out the door every day on my way to work, I find myself greeting her. She lays content in her box, her body kept preserved by the chemicals in her and the ice packs my girlfriend diligently packs around her. I wonder at who she was before she became a cadaver in our kitchen. She’s a small woman, barely five-two, and her hair is a mousy brown. She has no tattoos or piercings, and my girlfriend tells me she was never married, a lonely secretary at a law firm. She died suddenly, a heart attack, my girlfriend says, showing me the calcification in her coronary arteries. I can’t bring myself to ask if she wanted her body donated to science or if this is simply what happens to women who exist on the edges, unloved. Everything about her suggests meekness. Even in death she has become defined in relation to someone else, to my girlfriend, rather than to herself.

My girlfriend is a dutiful caretaker to Janice. When I arrive home from work, she is always at Janice’s side, either tending her ice packs or studying some intricacy of her body. I ask, once, in the first week that she brings Janice to our apartment, why it has become necessary for medical students to bring their cadavers home. She sighs as she answers me, holding a scalpel between her teeth as she fiddles with Janice’s abdomen. It’s a new program the school’s trying out, she explains. They want us to become entirely immersed in the human body, and how better to do that than to have your cadaver at home. We weren’t getting enough time in the gross anatomy lab anyway, she laments.

I accept her explanation without resistance. Even in undergrad, my girlfriend went above and beyond in her studies. After one of our first dates, I remember going over to her dorm room and finding the small space crammed with metal cages, each containing a snowy white rat. She had a student job working in her biology professor’s lab. The experiment involving the rats had concluded, she told me, and her professor had instructed her to euthanize them. She couldn’t bring herself to do it, holding their small, warm bodies in one hand, a needle poised with the necessary dose in the other. They had done so much for science, she said to me, her voice rising with emotion. It wasn’t fair they should be put to death. Besides, she could continue to observe them from the comfort of her dorm room, see what latent effects the experiment might have on them.

I hated the rats at first, their ceaseless scratching and chirrups, asked her to get rid of them. I begged her to come over to my room whenever we met, dreading the thought of being surrounded by the watchful eyes of those white rats. Over time, though, I grew to like them. She showed me how to feed them, gently placing one in my hands. They were smart, smarter than I’d thought, and I loved to watch them perform the tricks she taught them. When we graduated college and had to move, our apartment had a strict no-pets policy. She cried when we had to leave those rats at a local animal shelter. I held her in my arms, whispering to her that they’d find good homes, become beloved family or class pets. Before we left the shelter, she left explicit instructions with the man at the front desk, telling him the names of each of the rats and what she had learned from each one. It was important, she told him, that their next caretakers recognize their contributions to the scientific world.

***

Janice becomes, to me, an extension of the rats, another example of my girlfriend’s passionate devotion to the bodies that make her work possible. She must have Janice at home, per the medical school’s instructions, but I secretly think that she is more diligent a caretaker of Janice than the other students must be of their cadavers. She spends nearly every moment in her company; when I leave for work, she is already at Janice’s side, studying her for a few hours before her classes begin, and she is again with her when I return from work.

***

When a month passes, and I am again home from work, she offers to teach me about Janice. She says she doesn’t have classes that day, and she wants to show me the mystery and beauty of the exposed human body. I trail into the kitchen by her side, my legs wobbly. I am not squeamish, but I feel utterly unprepared for the lesson she intends to impart to me. My job as a publishing assistant consists of reading manuscripts and answering emails; I have no foothold in the murky realm of the human body in which my girlfriend thrives. She smiles at me as I wobble beside her, placing a hand on my shoulder. Don’t be afraid, she says softly.

She pulls a glove around my hand, the latex pinching around my wrist. Extracting a scalpel from a bag at her side, she places it in my hand. I feel faint and twitch violently, the scalpel clattering to the floor. My girlfriend keeps her eyes on mine as she bends to retrieve it. It’s okay, she says gently. You don’t have to do it. Tension releases from my shoulders that I did not realize I had been holding. Let me teach you another way, she says, eyes glittering slyly. She clasps my hand, still clad in the latex glove, and pulls me toward our bedroom. Laying me down, she strips me methodically, carefully, as precisely as I have seen her split the soft seams of Janice’s body with her scalpel, except this time she is carving me open with her bare hands, my skin unspooling at her touch. Afterwards, as we lay side by side, hair fanned out across the pillows, she delicately runs her index finger across me. Clavicle, humerus, ulna, radius, she says, working her way down my arm, pressing on each bone as she names it. I shiver at her touch. I wish I could see your bones, she says wistfully. I snap my head towards her. So you wish I was a skeleton, all bleached bones and angles, I ask her. Of course not, she replies, laughter coating her voice. But I could see your soul, if I could open you up.

***

I fell in love with my girlfriend’s mind first, observing awestruck as it leapt from place to place. Her intellect is nimble, quick, but also thoughtful and meditative. She never speaks without having deeply considered what she is saying. I asked her once, as we lay in bed together, midnight light tumbling through her sheer curtains, do you believe in the afterlife? It was one of those questions that, I think, every pair of new lovers ask one another, desperate to appear philosophical and ethereal. Perhaps it was a trite question, but she took her time before she answered me, brushing her thumb back and forth across the bone of my wrist.

Have you ever read the Iliad, she asked me.

Once, I nodded, in high school.

There’s this recurring passage in it, she told me, whenever a hero dies on the battlefield. The poet talks about how the dead hero’s soul flies out from his chest, winging its way down to the underworld, groaning as it leaves behind the pleasures of earthly life. ψυχή, they called it, she said, the word falling lightly from her lips. I believe in that, in a soul that lives in me but also will one day exist beyond me. I think though, she said, her finger now absentmindedly tracing the veins running up my arm, that the soul isn’t just a discrete entity. Bits of it dwell in the heart and the mind and everywhere else humans have ever imagined the seat of their mortality to be, but it also pools in the marrow, in the bones, a lifeblood of sorts, just waiting to be freed.

I did not know how to respond to her. All I could do was stare at her finger running back and forth, back and forth, across my veins, wondering what lay hidden within them.

***

Out grocery bill has increased exponentially over the past month. My girlfriend assures me it is the lingering odor of formaldehyde in our apartment, stimulating both of our appetites. I spend most of my free time now cooking, stockpiling ready-to-heat meals that seem to disappear as soon as I make them. I am shopping, for the second time that week, when I see her classmate, Amelia.

I met Amelia at one of the dinners my girlfriend’s medical school hosted, affairs that were meant primarily to solicit donations from hapless friends and family members of current medical students. Amelia was seated at our table, and I noticed a faded paperback sticking out of her bag. I latched onto this as a topic of conversation, desperate to do something other than sit mutely at the table while my girlfriend held court, discussing dissection techniques.

Amelia had been an English major in college, she told me, only deciding to pursue medicine after she’d graduated. I discovered what I really found alluring about literature was its attempt to convey the human condition, Amelia explained, and medicine seemed a much better way of learning about this than burying my head in books.

Amelia and I had remained, if not friends, close acquaintances, and I attempted to meet with her ever so often for a coffee, but I couldn’t recall the last time I had seen her since Janice had moved to the apartment. I couldn’t very well have guests over with a corpse in our kitchen, though perhaps Amelia would understand, since I presumed she was also living with her cadaver.

Amelia waves at me, and I maneuver my cart over to the cereal aisle. How are you, she asks me. I tell her that my girlfriend and I have both been busy, she with school, me with the ceaseless preparation of food to curb our appetites. Amelia’s brow furrows when I say this. School, she says. Does this mean that your girlfriend found a spot at a different university? What, I ask, my mouth sticky. What do you mean, a different university? Don’t you know, she asks, concern creasing her face, she was expelled.

***

I drive home in a dazed state, my groceries left abandoned at the store. Expelled. How could this possibly be true? We have a cadaver at the apartment, and my girlfriend has mentioned her studies multiple times. Yet, now that I consider it, I cannot recall the last time she went to a class. She is home when I leave in the mornings, and she is there when I get off work. On the days that I work from home, her classes have always been cancelled for some reason or another. My hands trembling on the wheel, I pull over into the parking lot of a dry cleaner. Amelia’s words ring in my ears. She was obsessive, she had told me, when I asked her. The anatomy professor called it an uncanny obsession. Dissection, you must know, is meant to be a learning exercise. We learn how to take the body apart to be able to put it back together. But your girlfriend, she was too keen. The university caught her coming into the lab at night, cutting into the other students’ cadavers. There’s a line of morality, of human decency, expected around dissection, and she crossed it with no hesitation.

***

I did not tell Amelia that there was currently a cadaver sitting on our kitchen counter, that there had been one there for quite some time now. My anger flared on my girlfriend’s behalf. How could she talk of a line of morality, of decency, when the school had failed to notice that one of their cadavers had been taken by a wayward med student? When my girlfriend first started med school, I had skimmed one of her anatomy textbooks, trying to orient myself in the strange world she now moved through, where one was graded on how precisely she could flay a human body. A section of the book was entitled, “Part 1: Skinning Your Cadaver.” Amelia could talk of decency, of humanity, all she wanted, but any institution which proudly taught its students how to skin a human body had already crossed the line she spoke of. I did not object to the crossing of this line; the ability to stride across it and then back over it was what equipped doctors to do their jobs. I objected to the demarcation of this line. If my girlfriend had indeed crossed some arbitrary line, if she had somewhere along the way began to play with humanity, I would have noticed. But she treated Janice with the care she might afford a living person. I had watched her effortlessly cut lines through Janice’s body, intently examining the contents within, and then sewing her back up, the stitches lined up like ants against Janice’s waxen skin. My girlfriend was just as human as the day she had brought those snowy rats to her dorm, unwilling to watch them die.

***

I sit in the car when I arrive back at the apartment, my thoughts clanging against the sides of my brain. I do not know how to approach my girlfriend about the expulsion. I am certain she is embarrassed, and this is why she has neglected to mention it to me. Surely she knows I would be on her side. Pulling the key out of the ignition, I resolve to say something to her. There is a cadaver in our kitchen; I cannot simply let the matter go.

She waves at me when I walked through the door, one hand clad in a latex glove, the other balancing the anatomy textbook on her knee. I stand in front of her, keys hanging limply from my hand, my mouth popping open and closed like a fish. She is intent on her work, scalpel poised between her long fingers, the center of Janice’s chest gaping open. It is not a gruesome scene, like one found at a crime scene. The preservatives in Janice’s body have cleared it of blood, leaving her a tidy husk, organs stacked neatly inside. I can see her heart from where I stand, shriveled and lifeless but still majestic, valves twisting off it into the recesses of Janice’s chest cavity.

The keys clatter when I drop them onto the coffee table, my girlfriend startling from her reverie. Where are the groceries, she asks, looking around.

I suck air against my teeth, my mind scrambling for the right words. I saw Amelia, I say, eyes searching hers.

I see, she says softly. There is no flicker in her eyes, no sense of guilt or remorse hiding in her voice. She stares at me openly, nakedly.

She told me, I say, willing a response. About the expulsion.

Ah, my girlfriend says, flicking her wrist delicately as she excises part of Janice’s heart from her chest wall.

She takes her time, drawing the heart ever so gently from its coffin into her hand. My girlfriend turns to face me, blond hair swinging.

I was going to tell you, eventually, she says. I wasn’t embarrassed, you must know. They didn’t appreciate my talents, my curiosity there. I’m finding it quite freeing actually, escaping the drudgery of academia. I can pursue my own studies now. That’s why I brought Janice home, actually. I needed her, for my research.

I feel a numbness creeping over me. She is not ashamed, not embarrassed. She seems excitable, her nostrils flaring as she talks about her research. I can practically see the neurons firing in her brain. Is this what it feels like, to live with brilliancy? Or was Amelia right, and I am living with lunacy, insanity? She looks beautiful, golden hair, teeth gleaming, the heart a deep red in her pale hand.

***

What is it like, I asked her once, when she first started her anatomy lab, to dissect another human. She tilted her head, pursing her lips. Our professor warned us, the first day, she said, that it would be difficult. That we would have to lay our humanity aside, to think of the body as just flesh, rather than something that had once been alive and vibrant, one of us. I could never bring myself to think that way, and I didn’t find it necessary. The organs, the flesh, they once held part of what makes someone alive. And I don’t understand why someone would try to divorce her mind from that truth. There’s something beautiful, something incredibly intimate, about getting to see the soft, vulnerable bits of another human. I would have lost that if I pretended I was looking at some mound of flesh that had never been alive.

***

She comes to me later, finds me lying like a starfish on our bed, limbs stretched to every corner. She traces the outline of my body, fingers gliding across my rough edges. Won’t you look at me, she asks, voice soft.

I cannot refuse her this, just as I have never been able to refuse her anything. I let her live with lab rats, let her bring a cadaver into our home, and now I would let her touch me, would let her convince me that there was nothing wrong about being expelled from medical school and stealing a cadaver for vague research purposes. She slips beside me, fitting her body around mine. She is slow, deliberate, kisses landing softly on the creases of my skin. I am radiating heat outwards, can practically feel embers kindling on my skin. She pauses, her head still above me. Let me take you apart, she says softly, her fingers still relentlessly tracing my body. Let me show you your soul, let me explain to you what it is I am searching for. You trust me, don’t you, she says, eyes flaming into mine.

In that moment, my body flush from her touch, I answer without hesitation: Yes, I tell her. Disassemble me.

***

My mind plods slowly, and I feel like I am watching us through a smoke screen as she lifts my shirt over my head. I see the glint of metal in a daze, feel nothing as my girlfriend slices my chest open. As I watch the line of red materialize on my chest, running from the hollow of my sternum to the beginning of my ribcage, I think oddly of those Greek souls, ashy smoke flowing out into the aether.