“Found dead in her crib. Don’t know why she died. Thousands of kids do this to us every year, one of the mysteries. Damn fool of a young family doctor gave her mouth-to-mouth before giving up. Waited a day and then started to get cold sweats realizing that for all he knew she might have died of something highly contagious. Hepatitis, t.b., who the hell knows what. Serve him right if we find something, the klutz.”

He shoved his hands into gloves, flexed his fingers and then picked up a scalpel and made an incision that ran from each shoulder to the sternum and then down to the belly. “In Europe they do this from the chin down in a straight line. We favor the Y.” The brown leather parted magically. Beneath it was a layer of yellow, baby fat Adam thought somewhat light-headedly, and beneath that, white tissue.

“The thing to remember,” Lobsenz said, not unkindly, “is that this is not flesh. This is no longer a human being. What makes a body a person is life, personality, the divine soul. The soul has gone from this cage. What is left is clay, a kind of plastic material made by a highly efficient manufacturer.”

As he talked the gloved hands explored, the scalpel slashed, he was taking samples, a dib here, a dab there, a little piece of this, a little slice of that. “The liver is beautiful. Did you ever see a prettier liver? Hepatitis would make it swollen, probably with spotty hemorrhage. It doesn’t look like tuberculosis, either. Lucky klutz, that G.P.”

He dropped the specimens in jars for laboratory testing and then replaced everything in the cavity and sewed up the chest incision.

It didn’t bother me at all, Adam told himself. That’s all there is to it?

Lobsenz led him down the hall, into another dissection room, a near-duplicate of the first. “When we’re rushed, the diener sets up one room while I work in the other one,” he explained. There was an old lady on the table, worn-out body, flaccid dugs, wrinkled face: my God, wearing a smile. The arms were folded across the chest. Lobsenz unfolded them, grunting with effort. “The textbooks tell you rigor mortis starts in the jaws and moves down the body in orderly progression. Take it from me, it never does.”

When she was opened she did not emit four and twenty blackbirds. He kept his jaws shut tight—rigor vitae—and breathed as infrequently as possible, aware that his abdomen was convulsing over his empty stomach. Who reckoned being ill as one of the great pleasures in life? Samuel Butler. I will not enjoy myself, he told himself firmly.

Eventually, Lobsenz resewed the chest.