The Exhibit

The girl’s clean white shoulders gleamed like tiny bird skulls in the sun. If I held her, I thought, those shoulders would fit neatly in my palms, they would cave and splinter like hollow globes. 1

She flew up the stone steps with her skirt darting and bobbing about her thighs. The sun played fire games in her long careless curls. The sky was wide and empty, it yawned above the world like the impossible mouth of God. A warm current of wind slapped against my face and her messy, abused sketch pad went sailing from her hands. She was much farther up the steps than me, and the scattered sheets of paper jig sawed starkly against the blue curtain of sky. Papers dipped and floated playfully on the breeze. Her hands scrambled in the air like strange birds as she frantically jumped to catch them. 2

People passed her without offering so much as a glance. Their faces were stoic, unconcerned with the student grabbing frantically at her escaped sketches. A fanciful thought struck me, which I immediately brushed aside: it is as though her art cannot be contained; her drawings wanted to soar over the arc of the earth, to see and be seen. A bookish sort, I was never much of an art person, but I recognized that quality of art, its ability to be inanimate and yet somehow alive. 3

Like everyone else, I passed her by on the steps. I was afraid that if I leaned over and handed the girl one of her sketches, I would be disappointed to find them amateur and lifeless, the scribblings of a child. Sometimes, I find I need to hold on to my illusions. 4

When I entered the cool lobby of the museum, which was cleared of all of its normal exhibits for this particular showing, I was assaulted by the sight of dozens of bodies spread in various poses throughout the room. As a medical student, I was accustomed to the sight of cadavers; I could read the muscles and nerves of the human body like words printed on a page. The dead were familiar company, but I had never seen so much, so many, all at once like this before. 5

I paid my ticket and moved through the exhibits. The carpet was a deep maroon, mirroring the striated red muscles of the splayed bodies. There were no glass cases or guardrails; they inhabited the museum like a congregation of the dead, posed in grotesque yet beautiful mimicries of life. They danced and played ball, their stiff plasticized arms suspended in the air above their heads like still images in a photograph, the moment in time snatched and forced to remain fixed in place. There was a man who held his own empty skin in front of him, as though hanging his suit jacket up after an exhausting day at work. A man walked with his muscles peeled away and hanging off of him, like the plumage of some mad bird. Lovers held each other with their heads bowed, their spines wriggling out of their backs. And a gymnast, her coppery hair still dangling intact from her scalp, did a backbend. 6

I was fascinated by a man astride a horse, his muscles dried and faded like jerky. Both he and the horse were skinless so that you could see where the muscles bunched and stretched. The horse’s mouth was open and gibbering silently. When I leaned in, I could see every vein that clung to him like tiny ropes of blue ivy. I was unmoved and unaffected by the fact of this body, that it had once been a living breathing man, with his own independent thoughts and actions. He could have been anyone. He could have been a doctor or a janitor. He could have been married, or he could have been a lonely, angry man, abusive and quick to temper. He could have been a kind man once. But none of that amounted to anything now as he sat on the back of his horse with his insides on display. Parts of himself he’d never seen or been aware of were being scrutinized and analyzed, drawn by strangers. He might not have even known how to ride a horse, I thought. 7

I tried to keep myself detached from all of this, as I was taught to do, but it was the absurdity of it that struck me. The pirate skull perched on his head, the sword clutched in his fist. Somehow, the carefully dissected body lost some of its integrity before my eyes. The whole exhibit seemed like a child’s morbid puppet show, abandoned dolls poised where they were left, as though ready to spring back to life at any moment. 8

I continued to move through the museum, wondering about the people that scribbled furiously in their notebooks or simply gazed at the bodies with wide fascinated eyes. I wondered at this seemingly fantastical integration of the living and the dead, standing beside each other, it was almost as if they were communicating with their bodies. I saw the girl again, studying the body of a man with the skin of his face split and hanging from his cheeks like the sides of a mask. 9

The displays got steadily stranger as I went on. There was a pregnant woman with her unborn child still curled inside her. There was a chicken composed of nothing but veins, suspended like a blown open net. There were fetuses of various stages of development, at first alien and lima bean-like, then slowly stretching their limbs and spreading their un-webbed fingers. A man, presumably a doctor, leaned over a body on a table in a sort of morbid irony. It wasn’t going to make any difference now. 10

I found myself thinking again of detachment. How was it that people, including me, were able to look at the dead pregnant woman and her child, these former potentials for life lost, and remain unstirred, unmoved by the tragedy of it? In all of my life, I had never touched death so closely as when I gazed at these cadavers and silently asked them, what have you known? It wasn’t because we had accepted death, lived side by side with it in companionable silence as we should have. It was clear that underneath their scrutiny, all of the people in this room were secretly terrified. They felt Death’s breath at their backs as he sailed about the exhibit, touching and taking from everyone. No, no one was comfortable in its presence; it loomed over us, heavy as the earth itself.11

There seems to be an instinctive fascination with the morbid and the gruesome in the human condition. People will slow their cars down when passing an accident on the road, eager for a glimpse of a body, the sight of blood sprawled across the pavement like a long fingered hand. Yet beside that fascination people possess such an unconcern for the living, they’ll step over a body on the sidewalk, trample a man on Black Friday to reach the early sales. Where does this apathy come from? Is it some sort of defense mechanism, a shield against our own frailty? 12

As I stepped, dazzled, back into the sunlight, several men and women held up a sign that read, ‘ethical rally to stop Body Worlds exhibit immediately’. It seemed odd to me that people could be so concerned with welfare of the dead and gone, when people who were alive were starving or beaten, were stripped of their families and homes for all of the wrong reasons. The dead don’t care, I thought, the dead would laugh. 13

On the ground, I spotted one of the girl’s sketches squashed against a step. As I had hoped, it was well drawn, but unfinished. Charcoal figures struggled up a hill with their arms outstretched to keep their balance. One figure was finished, her hair blown about her face and her eyes mirthful, holding the hand of another which was still a crude unpolished skeleton, undefined and featureless. I tucked the drawing carefully into my pocket and made my way down the stairs, thinking that maybe people weren’t all that I thought. That this display of the dead bridged a gap somehow, that by allowing people to walk away from death, unscathed, they could be changed. They could emerge from it, strangers holding hands with strangers. 14