Chapter One


Emotion is the imprinter of memory.

The remembrance of that first day of medical school was forever after like the unfolding of a bad dream for Daniel Lassiter, never objective or sequential but always beginning with a stark, haunting vision: the slow-motion opening of the doors to the anatomy lab, a faint odor of embalming fluid wafting to his nostrils, and then his sudden immersion into the macabre world of cadavers within.

Although the briefing by Gil Youngman had come earlier and the evening with Nora would follow, it was always the opening of those hard-wood doors that came shiveringly to mind first-the realization that behind this barrier lay no mortuary with subdued lighting and soothing music but the derelict bodies of the working dead.

The day should have been triumphal: a culmination of all the arduous years of war and study that had preceded it. But something in Dan's psyche had been unprepared, had flooded his mind and gut with protest, and the day had deteriorated into one of the worst of his life. The Inchon invasion had been more frightening for a raw, twenty-two-year-old infantry officer, but none had been more morbid. Ghoulish. Packs of medical students poised with their shining new instruments to pick apart the dead.

His college friend, Gil Youngman, now a sophomore at Massachusetts State Medical College, had warned him what to expect in the anatomy lab, though not within himself.

Relieved and cynical at having survived the rigors of that first year, Gil had offered advice freely: "Oh, anatomy's a ball breaker, all right," he said, between bites into a knockwurst sandwich and sips of beer at a local tavern, "and a lot hinges on luck: the luck of the draw. The best you can hope for is to draw a body that's fairly presentable. I don't mean one you'd necessarily want to bring home to meet the folks, but the kind of stiff who's not too hard to stomach first thing in the morning. Not one who's a hundred years old or too damned fat, either. And preferably a male." Gil wiped beer foam from his lips. "Believe me, they're a lot easier on your nervous system. The few women cadavers the school manages to turn up each year are nearly always what we call coalbarges-big, hefty Negro gals. Takes you months to hack through all the fat and gristle on them without mutilating some important nerve or blood vessel.

"Now a Negro male, on the other hand, is probably the best cadaver you can hope for. That's 'cause they're usually leaner and have better developed muscles. With some of the old white gents we had handed to us last year you could hardly find any muscles and the ones they did have were flabby as jelly . . . Yeah, you got to be lucky, that's all. Now my bunch made out real well. The cadaver we pulled from the tank was a middle-aged Negro and hard as a rock." Gil grinned. "Know what we called him? 'Gold Coast Charlie'-on account of the gold fillings in his teeth... See, that's what I mean about lucking out. But, oh, those miserable fat ones just make for a lot more work and trouble!
"
So cautioned Gil Youngman, and though impressed by his irreverence, Dan thought no more about cadavers until after lunch. What preoccupied him more for the moment was the heavy study load of a freshman, the thick tomes of anatomy and histology that were required reading. A bright but erratically diligent student in college, Dan realized that such prodigious reading assignments, night after night, demanded a dedication and self-discipline he was not quite certain he possessed.

But fear drove them all: fear of falling behind and flunking out, fear of Nathan Snider, the autocratic chairman of the anatomy department and deity to all fledgling medical students at State. Since Snider, not the dean, was the absolute sovereign over the freshmen for as long as they remained on the fifth floor, it was more sensible than shameful to stand in awe of him, Gil had warned.

After lunch, the class gathered in the large, windowless lecture hall to await Snider's appearance. Dan took a backrow seat next to Roger Hickman, an intense, owlish student who shared his workbench in the classroom. Though Dan had known and been forced to compete for grades with many premedical students like Roger in undergraduate school-studious, unathletic, securely financed by their parents-he harbored no ill will towards them, Nor did he particularly seek out their company. While Roger prattled nervously about college days, he barely listened. His seat at the end put Dan a few feet from the side door that led to the anatomy lab, and his thoughts kept returning to the luck of the draw and what he might find in there.

He remembered the slaughter at Inchon, the dead and near dead piled face-down on the beaches, their torn, hemorrhaging bodies bled ever paler by the waves lapping over them, and tried to transfer such conditioned callousness to his present experience. Think of it as just another beachhead, he told himself, one that you're better prepared for than most.

At that moment, Dr. Lyle Southwell, an assistant professor of anatomy, mounted the platform to inform the class that Snider's introductory lecture would be postponed until morning because he had been called away for a surgical consultation. Southwell, recently of Wheeling, West Virginia, drawled this announcement pridefully, going on to explain that not every professor of anatomy was so preeminent an authority that surgeons begged his advice in the operating room. Having learned from Gil that Snider customarily delivered more of a sermon than a lecture, Dan didn't care whether it was postponed or not. What Southwell said next, however, commanded his attention. Snider had left instructions for the class to spend the afternoon in the anatomy lab, familiarizing themselves with their cadavers.