F. Wilson - The Select

"Now. Roll your cover sheets down to the foot of the table. It is time to begin."

Quinn looked at Tim across the table. He raised his eyebrows.

"Ready, partner?"

"Sure," she said, steeling herself. "Now or never. Let's get to it."

They each grabbed a corner of the green plastic sheet and drew it swiftly toward the end of the table.

Gray hair...sallow, wrinkled, sagging, turgorless skin... flabby buttocks...skinny legs—the images, strobed close-ups, bits and pieces, catapulted into her brain. She blinked, got the whole picture. Female. A thin old woman. No jolting surprises in the appearance of their cadaver except that it was lying face down on the table.

Quinn glanced around at the other tables. All the cadavers were face down.

She turned back to her table. Whoever the woman was—or had been—Quinn felt embarrassed for her, laid bare like this under these pitiless lights. She wanted to edge the sheet up, at least to cover her buttocks, but she left it where it was. As she tucked the plastic sheet under the cadaver's feet she noticed a tag tied to her left great toe. She turned it over and read the print:

Fredrickson Funeral Home

Towson, MD

A name had been block printed in blue ink below the heading:

Dorothy Havers.

Dorothy Havers...that couldn't be anything but the woman's name. They weren't supposed to know their cadaver's name. Nobody was.

Quinn pulled her dissection kit from her labcoat pocket, removed the scissors, and snipped the string. The back of her hand brushed the cold, stiff flesh. She shuddered.

"What are you doing?" Tim asked, leaning over from his side.

"Nothing." She stuffed the tag into her pocket. "Just checking out my kit."

"Good afternoon, Miss Cleary."

Quinn turned and recognized the white-haired figure standing by the head of their table. He wore a stained, wrinkled labcoat and had a battered hardcover copy of Gray's Anatomy clamped under his left arm.

"You lucked out," he said, looking over the cadaver. "You got yourself a thin one."

"Dr. Emerson. I didn't expect to see you here."

"Oh, you'll see a lot of me around here," he said, smiling. "Neuropharmacology is my field and my love, but you can spend only so many hours a day calculating minuscule changes in the reuptake rates of sundry neurotransmitters without going batty. A few afternoons a week it does me good to get back to the basics of gross anatomy."

Quinn was glad he was here. She liked Dr. Emerson. She had a feeling he'd played an important part in her acceptance, but she would have liked him anyway. He radiated a certain warmth that invited trust. And it was certainly good to know that she had someone willing to go to bat for her at The Ingraham.

She introduced him to Tim.

"Do you have a photophobic condition, Mr. Brown?" he said, eying Tim's shades.

"Yes," Tim said slowly. "In a way."

Quinn then asked the question that had been plaguing her since they'd removed the plastic sheet.

"Why is she face down?"

"Because the first dissection you'll be doing is the nuchal region, the back of the neck. You'll be looking to isolate the greater occipital nerve. Dr. Kogan will be starting you off momentarily but if you want to get a jump, take a look at Section One in your lab workbook."

"Okay," Quinn said. "But first..."

She freed the end of the plastic sheet from under Dorothy's feet and drew it up to the middle of her back.

Dr. Emerson was looking at her curiously. A faint smile played about his lips. "Are you afraid your cadaver's going to catch a chill?"

She's not just a cadaver, Quinn thought. She's Dorothy.

She shrugged. "We'll only be working on the neck, so I just thought..." She ran out of words.

Apparently she didn't need any more. Dr. Emerson was nodding slowly, his eyes bright.

"I understand, Miss Cleary. I understand perfectly."

*

Quinn made the first cut.

With Dr. Kogan instructing over the loudspeaker and Dr. Emerson watching, Quinn gloved up, fixed a blade to her scalpel handle, and poised the point over the white-haired scalp. The diagram showed a central incision running from the back of the head down to the base of the neck.

She hesitated.

"Want me to do it?" Tim said.

She shook her head. She was going to have to get used to this and the quickest way to acclimate to the water was to jump in.

"Press hard," Dr. Emerson told her. "Human skin is tough. And human skin that's been in a formaldehyde bath can be almost like shoe leather."

Quinn gritted her teeth and pushed the point through the skin. Dr. Emerson hadn't been exaggerating. Even with a brand-new scalpel blade it was tough going. The honed edge rasped and gritted as she dragged the blade downward to the base of the skull and along the midline groove above the vertebrae of the neck.

"Very good," Dr. Emerson said. "Now you've started. From here on you're each on your own, each responsible for the dissection of your own side. Later, of course, when we get to them, you'll have to share the unpaired internal organs." He patted Quinn on the shoulder. "I'll be back later to see how you're doing."

"Wow," Tim said to the air when Dr. Emerson had moved on to another table. "Only just got here and already she's teacher's pet."

She flashed him a grin. "Some of us have engaging personalities, some of us don't."

"Is that so?" Tim raised his scalpel in challenge. "Race you to the greater occipital nerve?"

"You're on."

*

Quinn won.

In fact, she had to stop her own dissection a couple of times to help Tim with his.

Finally she told him, "I would venture to say that your manual dexterity is inversely proportional to the accuracy of your memory."

"Am I to take it then that you don't think neurosurgery is the field for me?"

"Only if you keep the world's finest malpractice defense attorney on permanent retainer."

"Who knows? I may decide to be the world's finest defense attorney."

"You have to go to law school for that. This is a med school, in case you forgot."

"Didn't I tell you? I'm going to law school as soon as I graduate from The Ingraham."

Quinn was about to ask Tim if he was joking when one of the second-year student teaching assistants strolled up to the table. The name tag on his labcoat read "Harrison." He was thin, with longish blond hair, and pale, pock-marked skin that glistened under the fluorescents. His attitude was condescending, bordering on imperious. Quinn disliked him almost immediately.

"Not bad," he said as he inspected their dissection.

He smiled as he pulled a pen-like instrument from the breast pocket of his labcoat, telescoped it into a pointer, and began quizzing Quinn on the local anatomy. She did all right on the tissues they'd already covered in class, but then he began to move into unknown territory.

"We haven't got there yet," Tim said, coming to her aid.

"Oh, really?" Harrison said, his gaze flicking back and forth between the two of them. "Well, maybe you ought to consider showing some initiative. One way to get ahead at The Ingraham is to work ahead."

"Thank you for that advice," Tim said softly. "Now, if you don't mind, what was the origin and insertion of that last muscle you pointed to?"

Harrison smirked. "Look it up," he said, then turned and almost walked into the man standing directly behind him.

"Oh," Harrison said. "Excuse me, Dr. Emerson."

Dr. Emerson's expression was not pleased.

Quinn wondered how long he'd been standing there. Long enough to hear Harrison's last remark, apparently. Quinn hadn't noticed him come up. But Tim obviously had. His lopsided smile told her he'd bushwhacked the second-year student. He cocked his head toward Harrison as he mouthed the words, Dumb ass .