Vivisection

I have sprouted glassy feathers, and someone is plucking them out of my left arm, one by one. This must be what a duck feels like at the butcher, bound up, strapped down, stripped naked, and shivering. Although I always assumed they were dead beforehand. Why am I not dead yet?

She is coming at me with forceps, and when the blunt tips press into my flesh, I become acutely aware that I cannot move my arms. Coarse fabric digs grooves into my ankles and wrists. My shoes have been removed. I can see my toes, my feet; they are splayed like Da Vinci’s Vitruvius, and my palms face the ceiling. Someone has slit my shirt down the center and it is stripped away from my chest, spread out to my sides like delicately removed skin from a corpse on an autopsy table.
This is not butchery; this is vivisection.

My skull throbs and pulses and I blink my eyes in the fluorescent light, running in parallel lines above my immobile head. When Jeanne took me to the Anatomy Amphitheater at the university medical center on Wednesday to practice for her presentation, I joked with her and lay down spread-eagle on the surgical table on stage. Far above, flies ingloriously committed suicide, flying kamikaze missions into the buzzing fluorescent lights. She yelled at me and told me not to ridicule the medical profession.

“It’ll save your life one day, you know!”

Jeanne was always chastising me—for my crooked tie, for my liquored breath, for my mussed hair, for my unpolished shoes. Even so, she wanted me to come to her dissertation presentation. I promised I’d sit in the back and not make a fuss. But I wanted to touch the table where the bodies lay.

I didn’t want to be the body.

I force my eyes open and widen my mouth into the perfect oval for a blood-curdling scream. I’m not dead yet! But stiff pads press into my temples and I cannot tilt my head back. No oxygen reaches my lungs. The woman in white is still depluming me.

The straps around my wrists tighten as I tense my muscles and try to move them, and the woman looks up, startled. She wipes her white smock with pudgy fingers and stares at me with terrified green eyes from under wisps of ginger hair.

“You’re . . . awake! They said you were unconscious and it’s just a short drive and, and . . . uh, what’s your name, sir?”

She sets her forceps down with a clank and loses her balance. The table lurches and my weight shifts painfully onto my left side. The tubes attached to my arms are swinging rhythmically; I realize that I am moving. We have just turned a corner. A siren is whining in my ears, ringing, exhausted.

“Will I be late?” I croak. Moving my tongue to speak I notice that my teeth are warm and sticky. There is a hole where my
front tooth goes. Wincing, I bare my sanguine grin.

“We’ll be there soon, don’t worry.” She tells me I’ll be alright, but her tone is unconvincing. She scuttles about my horizontal body with her tools. From her deep pocket she produces gauze, and attacks my forehead with a wet rag and peroxide.

“What’s your name?” the woman in white wants to know. “Can you tell me who you are? Do you know how you got here?”

When I don’t answer, she tells me an elaborate tale about rainclouds and puddles, skidding and brake lights, windshields and steering wheels. The details tumble hurriedly from her mouth and plop like raindrops somewhere beyond my consciousness, sending ripples through my nerves as she swabs my forehead with alcohol. She dictates like a police report, without adjectives, without feeling, although her eyes widen as she speaks, as though she is frightened by the very story she is reciting. An eastbound, silver Honda CRV skidded through a red light on icy pavement and broadsided a maroon ’98 Volvo heading northbound on Westchester Avenue at approximately 10:10 Friday morning. The driver of the Volvo was rendered unconscious upon impact. Significant bodily damage was inflicted upon both vehicle and operator.

I have a Volvo. My uncle lent it to me after I maneuvered my Nissan into a ditch after a particularly heavy Saturday night out. He never liked the color of that old car.

“Do you know where you are?” asks the woman.

I am not in my Volvo. My Volvo’s plush upholstery smells stale like cigarettes and its wide backseat smells sweaty like sex, not sterile like bleach and steel. I keep condoms and registration and a map of the Midwest in my glove compartment, not tubes and forceps.

The woman in white is leaning over me, pulling open my eyelids. I am briefly blinded; she must be searching in my brain for something. I wonder what she sees.

I have a sneaking suspicion that I will not be on time for Jeanne’s dissertation presentation. It starts at 11.

“Will I be late?” I ask again. My words are slurring but I can’t help it. My lips won’t open fully, my teeth aren’t set straight. My tongue lags behind in the back of my throat, and I fear I might vomit on the woman in white.

Jeanne will assume that I had been drunk, that I’d gone overboard on a Thursday night again, that I hadn’t woken up to my alarm. But I wasn’t. Not this time. I swear.

“Will I be late?”

My body lurches to the right, and the woman in white nearly tumbles on top of me. She is shaking my shoulder, harder than I suppose she should.

“What’s your name? Stay with me, honey, I want you to tell me your name!”

I want to be Jeanne, but I am not. I press my eyelids shut again. They are sticky and cool as they sweep up and down over my swelling eyeballs. My contracting esophagus compels me gag, to expel from my stomach this morning’s breakfast, last night’s nightcap, yesterday evening’s dinner. I want to rid my body of its contents, of its toxins and alcohol and cigarette smoke. My lips sag open and spittle collects on the corners of my mouth like unused excuses.

“Will I be late?”

When I lie, feet out, palms up, spread-eagle under Jeanne’s penetrating gaze, I want her to find me clean. Clean. Clean. So clean that there won’t even be blood when she approaches me with forceps and scalpel and pins.