“Guess what I’m doing on Friday,” I said.
Several days before my trip to the lab, my friend Sarah and I shared a cab uptown we were on our way to a black-tie birthday party.
It had never occurred to me that one must “go at” one’s present and future as well. You must go at your life with a broadax…” The line had long appealed to me-Dillard’s vision of the artist, whom she later describes as a kind of sacrificial flame, is flattering, particularly if, as she asserts, “the world without light is wasteland and chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.” But until I visited Laura’s cadaver, I had always assumed it was one’s past one must attack. In Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard asks her students which of them want to be writers, and then she tells them what the decision must mean: “You can’t be anything else. If I described the lab scene to a trusting reader, but while in the lab had thought only of its literary potential, must a truthful rendering of that scene thus include admission of my mindset? And what of the poor cadaver, whose former occupant had decided to bequeath her body to the medical school, but had likely not foreseen an outcome such as this? Finally I wondered about the repercussions of undergoing certain “significant” experiences simply because they might provide fodder for one’s stories. The notion of going to see a cadaver with the prior knowledge I would write about it struck me as manipulative. I envisioned the piece I would write (the organs gleaming like gemstones), as though the visit itself were a formality. Not only was I treating the cadaver as a mere curiosity, but there was a hint of self-satisfaction in my conviction that its sight would not affect me-I think it derived from a leftover tomboyish belief that invulnerability is always preferable to fear. I wanted to hear more about Laura’s experience, but I noticed that my own attitude toward the visit was one of cynicism. And for an instant he was only a body, and his penis, which was unexcited, hanging there, was just dead flesh, a dead thing.” “He walked into the bathroom fully clothed,” she said, “and when he came out again, he was naked. And how, afterward, upon first seeing her boyfriend’s undressed body, there was a moment in which he too had seemed a corpse. How, when she put the plastic bag back over the woman’s head, she could not dispel the feeling she was suffocating her, “killing her further.” How she loathed the smell of formaldehyde, which, after two and a half hours in the lab, seeped into her hair and skin, seeming to embalm her. And while I had no prior affinity for the subject of human dissection, I was indeed intrigued by Laura’s morbid observations: how cutting into the cadaver’s chest for the first time made her feel guilty, as though she were desecrating the body and causing the woman pain. “I would never inflict this on anyone else,” she said, “but I thought you might like to write about it.” Implicit in her assumption was the notion, both perverse and correct, that a writer seeking a story will readily, even gladly, undertake the kinds of encounters most others go to great lengths to avoid. Her professor had invited his first-year medical students to share the rite of passage with a friend or family member, and Laura-who hated anatomy class-had chosen me. When I was in my mid-twenties, an aspiring writer casting about for material, I made a date with my friend Laura to visit the cadaver she was dissecting for anatomy class.
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