The Consolation of Anatomy

Kurt Magsamen

Cadavers don’t look much like anatomy drawings. They don’t smell much like  anatomy books. The drawings are clean, ordered, the striations of muscle cells combed out tight and smooth, like the strings of a harp. The nets of veins, nerves, and lymph nodes have been lifted out and colored blue, red, pale yellow, and black. Some drawings are not in books but are posters of skinless athletes posing in the gym reaching up one hand and tipping back a toe to make visible the Brachialis, Brachioradialis, and Extensor carpi radialis longus muscles. Their muscles are a beautiful red, more like the red of lipstick than the blackened red of blood on a floor or the purple of blood puddled beneath the skin. The models of anatomy have wide eyes staring out that cannot follow strangers walking past. They are calm in their exposing repose. Cadavers too are calm but much more muddled, and everything is obscured by fat. Press a blade through the skin and fat will emerge, not the clean white fat of cattle, but the jaundiced globules that fall away and stick to the steel slab, and if the slab is warm enough, melt there.

It was that cold, yellow color that made me think my dad was half cadaver. His skin had gone yellow, translucent, waiting to cool and coagulate. A fall had put him there. He’d fallen on his head, his face really, and below his eye was a bruise so swollen and purple it looked as if a spoiled plum rolled beneath his skin. But his neck was broken too.

Gray’s Anatomy: “The anterior cerebrospinal fasciculus which is usually small, but varies inversely in size with the lateral cerebrospinal fasciculus. It lies close to the anterior median fissure.” Four vertebrae were crushed. Wait until he comes to. Then we’ll know more.

Latin is so much like a prayer. In Nomine Patris. The extent to which the fibers of the ventral cerebrospinal, Et Fílii, cross in the cord is open to question. Et Spíritus Sancti, the influence of the motor cortex is preponderantly contralateral, there is a slight ipsilateral effect. There was brain damage. That’s called contracoup from the brain bouncing around within the skull. Again, there is Gray’s: “Its posterior surface is received into the fossa between the hemispheres of the cerebellum, and the upper portion of it forms the lower part of the floor of the fourth ventricle.” My Dad and I were close enough to have talked about life and death, and we both agreed never to let the two mix, not for ourselves, or each other.

So I wait for the gap to close and dread what I may do. Where are the combed tight lines to show us? Where is the man in the robe speaking Latin? “Other fibers conducting proprioceptive impulses pass upward in the dorsal spinocerebellar fasciculus.” Or am I left with the advice of my good buddy, Vladimir Nabokov, who once told me, “The cradle rocks above the abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” So now do I grip the rails of my father’s bed and tip him out of light, or do I lean in, and when the stubble of his beard grazes my cheek, betray him with a kiss?