Sectioned

“I would have been in my second year of ancient Greek and Philology,” Memus44 told me. “Adrienne was a student of engineering, a pretty girl, with a lop-sided grin and dark hair flecked with golden-brown. She was always confiding interesting things about the forces winds exert, or the maximum permissable snow-loading on roof structures, and I would often tell her about my linguistic theories. Then one day she didn’t turn up in the Union Bar as arranged. We never met again.

“As you know I gave up the language studies. The Department of Ancient Lore had reacted badly to my suggestion that the ending of Plato’s Symposium was the first fade-out in all the long history of media studies, and they’d marked me down quite insultingly.

“Eventually I entered medical school, and began the course with physiology and anatomy. At the start of term, a small group of us was being shown round the Anatomy Department - you won’t have forgotten the smell of formalin? I noticed that on the top shelf of a display cabinet stood a series of glass jars, each containing a preserved human head.

“In each specimen, the upper part of the skull had been removed, to expose the brain. The faces were pallid and shiny-skinned, the expressions either entirely vacant or worried-looking.

“Every jar had a hand-written label:

Male
Age 43
Insane

Female
Age 56
Insane

Male
Age 29
Insane

“Reading between the sparse lines, one might understand how the days of freedom and lucidity had flooded past, until suddenly the realisation had dawned within each person’s brain, now beautifully fixed and preserved in a glass jar on a green-painted shelf, that time’s flux had reached an end, that summer was finished and all summers too, beyond recall.

“With my mind rapidly filling with sad reflections, I bumped into a large glass case standing on the floor directly opposite the mad gallery.

“Chilled to the marrow, I saw it contained the body of a young woman preserved in formalin. She must have been quite a find, for there were no signs of injury or disease. Maybe she had cut her wrists, or rather her left one, for there was no way of telling, since the case contained only her neatly prepared right sagittal section.

“Kneeling as if to fit more comfortably into the confined space, with her internal parts displayed for our education: the pelvic organs, diaphragm, spinal cord with delicate cauda equina, the great vessels in the thorax, her sweet little heart and lungs, and with her dark, gold-flecked hair floating lightly in the preservative fluid, she seems to have been somehow immortalised, unborn again in a cold and permanent womb.

“That evening as I leave the Anatomy Department, the white-coated technician turns out the lights with a horribly jarring series of loud metallic clicks. The insane heads look down on Adrienne, who stares back across the darkness with one eye and a half-smile.”

Copyright © Donnie Ross 2010