Summer of the Dead
“Bacteria and Memory” by Sophia Zhao
It was only three months, the summer between first and second year med school, and nothing happened, nothing at all really, but I remember it vividly. My classmates scurried to get clinical experience on hospital wards, and I got a job in Pathology. I figured I couldn't fuck up when the patients were dead already. I was wrong about that, I did fuck up, I threw the stomach contents away at an autopsy before Professor Melvin Scott could examine them. He was a short, fidgety pathologist with a collection of polka-dot bowties and an aversion to the living. He had made his reputation at a murder trial based upon unexpected stomach contents, so he approached innards of the newly deceased like a kid looking for the prize in a Cracker Jack box. Stomachs are just bags of barf that we carry around inside us, I figured.
We did autopsies most days, and since MRI and CAT scans weren't around then, we found surprising stuff. A middle-aged man got wiped out by a drunk driver, but inside he had a bronchogenic carcinoma that he didn't know about yet. It would have killed him painfully within six months. Lucky guy.
The average male cadaver looks like he needs a shave because facial hair continues to grow for two or three days after death. Facial muscles relax. Sometimes the mouth falls open. Someone has usually closed the eyelids, like closing the curtains of a house after sunset. Yes, there is a name tag tied with string around a big toe, just like on television. Formaldehyde vapors are irritating, and only get worse after the dissection begins. It wasn't just formaldehyde that got me, but everyone smoked, and the combination made me sneeze. I wasn't adept at dissecting anyway, but when I sneezed, who knew what I would slice?
I learned about defensive wounds on stabbing victims. The random slashes and cuts on her forearms and hands contrasted with her carefully painted and manicured nails. Dr. Scott said the victim was always a woman and the attacker always a man. I tried not to think about her last, terrifying moments, but I had nightmares about them.
A brother and sister, 10 and 8 years old, chased a ball into the street between parked cars. Both were hit and killed by the same truck. Their bodies were like rag dolls, so many broken bones. Tire imprints across a crushed chest. I tried not to think about their parents, or whether they had other children, or the truck driver.
It was a hot summer in an empty university town, London Ontario. The windows of the Ceeps Tavern were thrown open to the humid night air. We found nothing to do except drink and fuck and ruminate. Sylvia was more into fucking, I into rumination. All those dead bodies squelched my natural impulses and focused me on life and death. One day we performed an autopsy on a farmer who died suddenly at 10:30 AM, when he inserted his head into the underside of a broken farm implement, and got it squashed like a bail of hay. The machine was just doing its job. A week later his blood alcohol level came back at 8 times the legal limit. I thought how one minor detail changed a whole life story.
Sylvia said it didn't make any difference. She wore cutoff jeans above volleyball legs, and a scarlet bikini top tied loosely. Cher hair. A slash of scarlet lipstick. She smelled pleasantly raunchy, far more enticing than formaldehyde. We would lie naked, side-by-side yet miles apart on her single bed in front of the huge window fan, lit by a fingernail moon. We were breathing and our hearts were beating. We could touch and feel.
A 28-year-old woman didn't wake up one morning. The autopsy didn't reveal a cause of death. Toxicology was negative. Microscopic sections from her heart and other organs were all normal. “Probably a cardiac arrhythmia,” Dr. Scott said, but he didn't know. I was turning 22 and Sylvia was 23.
“Because I could not stop for Death He kindly stopped for me,” Sylvia shouted into the night as we walked through Victoria Park on our way back from the Ceeps. I thought it was Sylvia's poem until she added “Emily Dickinson” at the end, followed by “best words in the best order.” She said that all the time. It was Samuel Taylor Coleridge's comment on poetry. She asked me about the soul and I said I never saw one flutter up through the ceiling. “Soul is 100 miles down the highway, across the border in Motown,” I added unhelpfully.
“Poetry has rhythm, and sex has rhythm, but it's not the same rhythm,” Sylvia sounded certain.
Death has no rhythm, I knew. It can be so random. I had seen too many dead bodies that summer. It could happen to me. I needed an active plan to not die, but I didn't know where to start. I felt an urgency to do something with my life while I still had it, something more meaningful than going back to medical school that fall.
“Get it while you can” sang Sylvia in her off-key Janis Joplin imitation, as we exited the park. She was right about that. I hugged her summer-hot body, alive and throbbing beneath her T-shirt and cutoffs. I squeezed her too tightly, because a beer burp escaped those scarlet lips a second before she kissed me. The breath of life.
About the Author
David Waters is a retired cardiologist who lives in San Francisco with his wife and Kerry Blue terrier. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Cleaver, The MacGuffin, Flash Fiction, Beyond Words, Amarillo Bay, Marrow, Umbrella Factory, 34th Parallel, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Chiron Review, and others. He teaches prose and poetry at The Writers Studio.
About the artist
Sophia Zhao is an artist and writer from Newark, Delaware. She recently graduated from Yale University, where she studied Global Health, History of Medicine, and Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. Her body of work navigates themes of cultural identity, grief, health, and memory.