Exposure

By Anne Jay

The cadavers were coming down.  All over Saint Louis the enormous signs promoting the Body Worlds 3 exhibit were slapped with large yellow banners crying "FINAL DAYS," as if the human bodies posed in the exhibit were going to be laid solemnly to rest at last. But there is no 'rest' for these dead. Having done their work as living, they were now preserved specimens, stripped of skin, hair and identifying features, hardened through a Plastination process and posed to model the intricate wonders inside the human body. They were life-sized anatomical displays, and their show had to go on.

On a dreary winter afternoon, I hauled myself over to the Saint Louis Science Center. After a month of personal crises that battered my maternal, marital and professional confidence, I craved diversion, possibly even enlightenment.  Dead bodies were safe, I thought. They couldn't hurt.

So I entered the somber, church-like dome of the Science Center, turned off my cellphone, and breathed. Immediately I was shoved by the crowd against a case containing the bones, cartilage and dried, meaty muscles of a human leg. A bloodless amputation. To the left a skinless, full-bodied male balanced on a large ball. On the right a woman's upper torso, sliced from shoulders to groin, was pealed expertly into three pieces. Around the corner, a muscled body leaned back to heave a javelin far over the skulls of his dead colleagues, his massive biceps flexed in anticipation.  A female hung upside-down on a trapeze, her intestines removed to expose her reproductive organs. One male held the entire contents of his chest cavity on a pole above him like a package he was keeping out of reach of a hungry dog, while another held his frozen heart out to his audience as if asking for understanding.

A crowd of Missourians of all shapes, colors and sizes, swirled around the plasticized bodies. There was too much life among the dead. And even the dead, set in circus poses where they displayed an alarming amount of blue eyes and penises, demanded my attention rather than quietly welcoming it. I wanted seduction, not psychopathic exhibitionists. There was one calming figure who had his entire layer of skin draped over his muscled arm like a portable shadow. Perhaps if I grabbed this skin I could wear it as extra protection against my real world.

These corpses were once real people who had walked and talked and made mistakes like the rest of us, experiencing the conflicts of family life for most of their decades. But in their present state, they didn't have rages, or uncontrollable laughter, PMS or pride.  They didn't have cramps or romantic attacks that set them yowling in the night. There were no more eggs or sperm working desperately to meet their match. Dead bodies don't fantasize or stumble; these ones didn't even smell.

I considered the rumors that the 'donations' of these bodies were suspicious, that political prisoners in China were quietly eliminated and their bodies, but not their identities, preserved for exhibits like this one.  My daughters are Chinese adoptees. Always sensitive to their heritage, I should have been relieved by all the blue-eyed cadavers, but wondered where the diversity could be recognized. Can you tell from the shape of an eye socket the heritage of a person?  Without skin color, eyelids or hair, it was hard to go by anything but the color of the irises decorating the ultra-white eyeballs.  There were no deeply dark brown eyes, described as 'black' on my daughters' passports.  I was surprised and irrationally disappointed by the fairly narrow representation- the corpses seemed to be mostly well proportioned Caucasians.

In some glass cases there were segments of bodies displayed as examples of health gone wrong: the effects of obesity on the internal organs, cancer, tumors, arthritis, enlarged hearts. But not a whole person suffering cancer. Just a slice of the breast.  Just a repaired heart. They were carefully labeled on tiny pieces of paper with the printed explanation and an arrow.  Even with labels it was hard for me to recognize the trauma described. Could cancer really look so mundane? 

 

If members of my family were stripped of skin and examined thoroughly, what could the common spectator recognize about us? Without the scars and tattoos of life, who were we?  Could an expert tell from the physique the racial origin, cause of death or whether reproductive organs had ever reproduced?  Would someone see beyond my nine-year-old's bulky body to understand the deprivations she might have experienced from living in an orphanage for her first year of life? Would they see my seven-year-old's athleticism, or the cause for her anxiety that last week had her clinging to the benches at school so she wouldn't have to enter the classroom that she enjoyed the day before? Could they tell that my husband spends too much time hunched at the computer, forced into long work hours to support the family he didn't think he'd have?

My own father suffered enormous disfigurement of his spine in his later years and was always in pain.  What started as the bad back of a tall champion runner, deteriorated into a contorted body, twisted and bent to an almost 90 degree angle. My father was a stoic. For the three decades during which his posture deteriorated and the pain increased, he never sought an expert diagnosis or any sort of relief, except for a strong cocktail in the early evening and a glass of wine or two with dinner. His descendants will never know why his body gave out in this way, whether there might be a genetic link.  So far, as they approach their sixtieth year, my older brothers are standing tall. But a chronic ache in my own leg that makes me swing my hip a specific way is more than a casual threat.

If my family saw my father's physique preserved in an exhibit like this, stripped to bones and muscles, void of his defining white hair and nervous giggle, would any of us recognize him?  How shocking would that be for me, his youngest daughter, who still harbors adolescent resentment for trivial miseries he inflicted?  What sort of pose would they put him in- could he be sitting in his favorite position, his skinless face to the wind, his hand on the tiller as he sailed a non-existent boat?  Or would his overly curved spine be preserved in one of the cases for anomalies?  Of course my father's body wasn't preserved in its 78-year-old state and so, during the ten years since his death, I have mentally regenerated his nerves and slowly straightened his spine. I rehabilitated his pained grimace back into a paternal grin and recreated, in bits and pieces, the tall, handsome hero of my childhood.   

So much of how people define themselves has a genetic component.  Their hair, their teeth, their artistic attributes and handedness.  My own daughters' genetic make-up is a mystery. At least once a year we have to write repeated 'unknowns' to medical questions about their family history; does their mother have hypertension? Does the birthfather have asthma? What do we know of their genetic link to cancer, mental illness?  It makes me look harder for explanations for their discomforts.  If one daughter gets overweight, is it environmental or genetic?  Perhaps there's an anxiety gene in my younger daughter, or maybe she's suffering residual terror from her early traumas of being abandoned and passed from home to home. 

What would the Plastination experts find to label about me, stripped of life and the external forms of identity such as my abundance of moles and thick, graying hair?  Could they read my history through my exposed heart, note the difficult years like the rings of trees? Imagine if they could dissect me and discover all the secrets I have packed in the emotional journal that I keep deep, deep inside.  Even in death, I expect I would cling to my truths, tucking them into the far pouches of my frontal lobe. But would my womb look noticeably unused? How many eyes would focus on my uterus, distorted by a hefty fibroid the size of a newborn's head? Would all this physical data override my experience of motherhood?

When I stepped into a room full of fetuses, I found myself experiencing emotions I hadn't expected. Here was the marvel of the beginning of life; the embryonic blob, the neural tube, the emerging limbs. Here was where it all began.  And for me, here was where it all took that serious detour.  My daughters didn't grow inside me.  Someone else kept them warm and nourished as they proceeded to pass through these miraculous stages.  And just after the pregnancy was over, after all that care and nurturing, these birth mothers had to turn their hearts and their backs on these miracles.  They had to walk away. My nine year old was only a day old when she was abandoned and discovered at the gates to a factory.  For reasons we will never know, my daughter's birth family couldn't keep her and I imagine my daughter absorbed all the anguish of that separation and still carries it today.  My younger daughter is more mysterious.  Her birthday is unknown. She doesn't look Chinese to the Chinese.  She spent over six months with a foster family and for days after her adoption she displayed the trauma of being taken from all that she trusted through shrieks of anger whenever I, her new mother, her new protector, came near. 

Now, here I was, alone in this dark room with the floating babies, feeling in some way responsible that my womb had never performed. I failed as a birth mother. And in a backward logic that gets hardened into these intense emotions, I felt I had let my girls down too. I should have carried them safe inside me. Perhaps then they wouldn't have all these meltdowns.  My family wouldn't be in crisis.

But really what was so deeply enforced in every footstep through that room was the grief I felt for not having the privilege of making my body, with all my female parts, work. For over 30 years I have been menstruating, plugging myself up with tampons to keep the useless fluid from seeping all over my clothes and life, fighting the distorting effect of hormones for two weeks a month.   It is easy enough to say "it was meant to be." I was meant to have this fibroid clinging to my uterus; I was meant to marry someone who had had a vasectomy during a previous marriage. It is the only way we could have made this family.  And there are always sighs of relief. My girls won't have my vulnerable teeth, my mother's moles, my father's bad back.  But they also won't have the strong genes that keep the women in my family gardening into their 90's, that have barely a reference to cancer in multiple generations. They won't have the security of knowing that they look like their parents, grow like their siblings, are part of a specific genetic history that spans hundreds of years.  Their ancestors aren't my ancestors.  We are cut off by that word.  I have stopped my line and it is now too late to change that.

And yet dramatic as it sounds, there was a perverse pleasure in soaking in the grief again as I passed on to the display of reproductive organs and then, finally, out into the chilled afternoon.  It is my grief that no one can touch, though a few might understand. I have this protected part of me, this tomb, where I can hide and let barbs pass over.  It is not a cancer, nor a death that relentlessly pulls at my emotions, nor a mistake that I made at some stage of my life. But this grief is a part of my identity that no one can change; a process that I am still surviving.  It is as much a part of me as my liver, my muscles, my spine-alive but invisible to the common eye. Hidden, though some might notice, if they looked deeply enough, now just a little exposed.

 

Anne Jay lives with her husband and two daughters in St. Louis, Missouri.  As a speech-language pathologist, she worked with children with all types of developmental delays but specialized in working with hearing impairments. Anne is proud to be a recent graduate of the Queens University MFA program in Charlotte, NC.