... Continued from the magazine ...
*
‘Does it hurt?’
‘No, but I’d rather look away.’
‘I have never had a body.’
‘Be glad. It is repulsive to see four strangers rummaging through your insides.’
‘…with your consent.’
‘How in the world could I have known that I was actually going to see it all myself?’
‘Of course you could not have known, Mr Geist. No sign. No sound. No symbol. No ironic
use of name...’
‘Ha!’
*
‘Look at this one!’ a young dark head called to his girlfriend. They stood before a body whose legs and arms were horizontally stretched to both sides and from whose finger tips and ankles dangled flaps of pink muscle. The rib cage was split open and both parts were tilted sideways to reveal a tightly packed ovular clump of organs. The face revealed eyes, nose, and mouth but had become unrecognizable because of the carefully removed skin.
‘It’s grotesque!’ the girl exclaimed.
‘Thank you’
‘It’s completely torn open!’
‘Don’t remind me…’
‘How long has it been preserved?’ she asked one of the guards standing close by.
‘This one has been moved to different expositions for over four years. Not a muscle has rotted away. This guy is completely immortalized!’
‘Oh joy’
‘Do you know who it is? There are no name plates.’
The guard shrugged and said that he didn’t know.
‘It’s probably to safe-guard his identity.’
The girl nodded in assent, ‘I wouldn’t want people to see me hanging like this.’
An elderly man placed a wooden stool opposite the body and examined it for several minutes. He then pulled forth a small sketchbook from his coat pocket and busied himself by making sketches.
*
‘Crucifixion number…?’
‘I don’t know. Seventeenth? Am I really positioned in such a way?’
‘Perhaps it is the circumstance. Killed and now placed upon an iron rod in a rather…how shall I put this delicately…’
‘…humiliating way?’
‘Spot on.’
‘Is this hell, Angelo?’
‘Well, if it is, it is not completely deprived of beautiful women. Look at the red one.’
*
A woman with long red hair entered the exhibition hall. She carefully read the information plates and examined the different organs stored behind glass on tables in the centre of the hall. The sunlight fell through the glass windows in the ceiling upon her face. She was not beautiful, but she was illuminating. She smiled slightly as she recognized Hamlet’s words printed on a large blue banner: “What a piece of work is a man...”
‘Look mommy!’ A small girl with equally red hair stood pointing in front the body on an iron pole. The woman walked towards the girl and they both stood staring at the distorted body.
‘Who would be mad enough to sign up for this?’ She looked at the skinless face and carefully examined the organs. Her eyes lingered on the heart. She saw the security guard looking at her, and smiled.
‘Excuse me, sir? May I ask what happened to its heart? It is different from the one I have seen earlier on in the exhibition.’
‘Shot, ma’am.’
The woman’s head jerked slightly.
‘When?’
The security guard shrugged and said that the only thing he knew was that the body had been exhibited for over four years and that it had been shot. The woman turned from him abruptly and placed herself as closely to the body as was permitted.
A young man came up from behind her.
‘Agnes, what are you doing?’
She jumped slightly.
‘Nothing, Thomas.’
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Thomas said. ‘These bodies are giving me the creeps, and I am not sure whether
*
The old man sat sketching silently. The sun shone upon the naked muscles and veins in the exhibition. Something as small as a pinhead fell down and lay glistening on the floor just beneath the poled body. The old man closed his sketchbook, picked up the wooden stool and left the hall.
