During dinner on my birthday, Aydika and I talked, as usual, about everything.
Obviously, since "everything" includes the subject of animal dissection, we swapped dissection stories and opinions. It brought to mind this pleasant little memory from fourth grade (I must have been about ten years old)...
It was a day like any other in 1987.
Unless you choose to differentiate it by the rows of luncheon tables covered with newspaper, plastic, large salmon, and cutting implements.
Aside from that, it was very normal.
The reason I said that "It was a day like any other" is that there's a good chance that you work at a fish hatchery or a morgue. In either case, you should be able to relate easily to the events of this story. On the outside chance that you aren't a fish hatchery worker or an embalmer of the dead, then things might seem a little strange, but let's be honest: It's your fault for choosing a profession so strange that it doesn't involve regular contact with dead fish and flesh-cutting tools.
Anyway, to get back to the point, before this became a post in which I tried to point out how utterly unprepared some of you may be to digest the sweet nectar of these, my words, there were fish everywhere.
I think there must have been about twenty-five of the slain water beasts, and to each dead fish was assigned two (2) children, each child being roughly ten years in age. Our task was to cut them up (the fish - not the children) and learn about life in the process.
Whoever thought this whole activity up was a genius, let me tell you. I can imagine the thoughts which led to this day:
Let's see... What are the children in our school really lacking? We have math covered, literature, bible studies, physical education, pie making, and so on. It seems... I don't know. Like there's a blind spot. Like we're glossing over something really important here.
What is it? Argh! How to fill this knowledge gap?
Increase spending on the computer lab? Don't be silly, self... That's a foolish thought.
Spruce up the biology labs? Seems obvious, but I can't see what the benefit would be.
No... No... It's so obvious - could it be that the answer has been staring me right in the face this entire time? Could it be that I was so blinded by convention that I wasn't able to pluck this thought, hanging like a juicy plum, and pierce its smooth flesh, to suckle its sweet interiors? How could I have been so stupid!
The answer is fish. These children have never had the chance to take large, sharp objects and cut open enormous animals under insufficient adult supervision. It's perfect! We're understaffed, totally unqualified to do this, and willing to spend the money on providing insane children with shears, scalpels, and probes with which to discover the not exceptionally clean innards of salmon.
I am so due for a promotion...
Note to future educators of youth in America: If you give children knives and fish and expect things to go as planned, you are a fool of the highest order.
Our eyes were wide: The metal implements with which we would torture the dead gleamed in the erratic fluorescent lighting of the cafetorium. Our noses were assailed with the odors of the river brought to us on platters of silver. Sweet, sweet mess awaited us in quantities we'd never thought possible, and qualities for which we would need to develop new senses to fully enjoy.
I took my seat at one of the long tables and waited along with the rest of my classmates for permission to begin cutting.
Some adult, somewhere off in the distance, wholly unaware of the type of creature to whom he was giving instruction, was lecturing us on safety.
Blah, blah, blah... Be careful with the blah, blah blah... Don't cut your friends with the blah, blah, blah...
Nobody was listening. Although I later learned the proper names for the tools with which one calmly and orderly dissects an animal, I was busy making up my own names:
- The eyeball liquid pressurizer
- Gall bladder twister
- Brain scrambler and scooper
It's odd, as I'm a very non-violent, non-dead-thing-interested person. But, this was the first time I'd ever had the chance to do such a thing, and I decided to throw myself into it the way I might throw myself into a pile of leaves in the Fall. I would do this thing with gusto. I would do this thing without throwing-up (much more difficult than you might think). I would do this thing like a pro.
Being drawn back into the real world from my daydream reveries, I got the sense that it was GO-TIME as children around me reached for various sharp things.
I went straight for the scalpel. I don't know what drew me to it. It called to me. It sang a siren's song to my little ears. It called with the persistence of a Jehovah's Witness ringing the doorbell. Jehovah's Witnesses are trained, seriously, trained to ring doorbells in ways completely outside their intended operational parameters. A high-ranking Jehovah's Witness could kill a man with a doorbell ring from fifty feet. You could be sitting at home, minding your own business, smoking your pipe by the fire while reading TV Guide, when you'll suddenly feel a strange vibration in the air, see the world narrow and then go black, and come to on the floor three hours later with a collection of pamphlets stuffed in your trousers, your glasses broken, your new ID number tattooed on your buttocks, and your wallet missing. Witnesses don't mess around.
And neither does a boy with a scalpel.
Ignoring the innocents around me, pushing other tiny hands out of the way, I took the scalpel to the tummy of the salmon and cut like the god damned wind. 12.7 seconds passed before I had access to the gollywots of this lifeless, scaled river-torpedo.
What I saw astounded me. For the most part, to be honest, I learned nothing about what I was seeing. There were strange, bulbous items, some of which looked like they were about to burst, and others which I could probably bring to bursting levels with strategically applied surgical encouragement.
There were also eggs. Billions of them. Salmon roe, lined up in packs of translucent berries, red as the fires of Hell, waiting to be removed and stored for later inspection.
The one organ that I managed to identify (after calling a teacher over and then shooing her away) was the gall bladder. This thing fascinated me. Utterly. It was a balloon that lived inside of the fish. The salmon used it to control its buoyancy, filling it to rise, and deflating it to sink. I wanted to fill it with helium and tie a string to one end of it. I wanted to march down the road, fish organ in tow, showing the world the inner glories of dinner floating on the wind in a one-boy procession through the neighborhood.
After the gall bladder, the memories become very murky. There was blood. A lot of it. Too much, really. There were sacks of things that broke, spilling green, granular ick everywhere. We had no gloves. I had no change of clothes. I may even have chopped part of one of my own fingers off and examined it, wondering what part of the fish it was.
"Gruesome," I think, is the word that would best describe the scene.
Many minutes later, we received a warning that the dissection was coming to an end and that we would soon be leaving. This broke my heart. I couldn't tolerate the thought. I felt like I had just been given entrance to a magical forest filled with sprites and enchantments undreamt. I was up to my arms in blood, reeking of fish oil death, thinking, "But we just started!"
The tyranny of adults is difficult to overcome under the best circumstances. Coming to the immediate realization that such a magnificent corpse would have to be left behind made this an especially tough situation.
To make matters worse, the teachers announced that we could keep certain parts of the fish if we removed them cleanly, placed them in sandwich bags, and took them home.
It reminded me of the contests that were advertised on TV when I was a kid. If you won, you would get 90 seconds to run through a toy store with a shopping cart, and you could keep whatever you could pull from the shelves in the allotted time. I had many scenarios up in my head about how I would handle the winning of such a contest, but there was nothing to prepare me for this race against time.
I did my best to determine quickly what I wanted to keep:
- The eggs
- The eyes
- The heart
- The tongue
It was now just a matter of acquiring them before time ran out.
The eggs were easy. I scooped them up and placed them in sandwich bags. Done.
The eyes weren't so tough, either. A little probing here, a little yanking there, and they were out. The eyes were mine.
The heart was extracted with great efficiency. I simply hacked at the flesh around it the way a lumberjack hacks at old-growth. Yea, though it may have long ago pumped its last bit of fluid, it was still a prized bit of internals nonetheless.
The tongue... The tongue was a different story. You don't know one of life's greater challenges until you've attempted to remove the tongue from a salmon. It looks easy, but it required the most time. I tried at first to remove it with the scalpel, but learned the hard way that a knife wasn't at all sufficient for the task. Switching to the shears, I found a better tool, but they were more difficult to use in the tight quarters of the fish's mouth. Although it must have just been a couple minutes, it felt like an eternity before I managed to finally relieve that muscle of muscles from the prison of the salmon's facial orifice.
This is when the real fun began.
I had my fish parts nicely packaged in sandwich bags, ready to take them home.
We went back up to the classroom where we deposited our fish parts, agreeing to retrieve them at the end of the day and take them home to mummy and daddy who would be overjoyed to see such beautiful biological artifacts brought into the house.
Here's the deal, though: I really liked my fish parts, and I wanted to spend a lot of time with them. It wasn't easy to wrestle them from the fish, and I didn't want to part with them for the many hours of the day during which I attended class. I wanted them right there with me where I could love them and monitor them 'round the clock.
And so they remained.
In my desk.
In sandwich bags.
Unrefrigerated.
Eggs, eyes, heart, and a tongue. Next to the textbooks. Left of the pencils.
And time passed.
And more time passed.
Within a couple days, my love affair with the fish bits subsided, and I returned to my previous loves: Marathon nose-picking, chair-wetting, and boredom with class. The fish was wiped right off my radar. When I opened my desk to get out a book or a pencil, I didn't even see the bags of parts. They no longer mattered to me or figured into my Master Plan for the world.
And more time passed.
And still more.
And, if you can believe it, even more time went sailing by.
And then a curious smell, detected days earlier by classmates and teacher alike, rather than waning, grew in intensity.
And then a criminal inspection ensued.
Shelves were checked, children were interrogated, shoulders shrugged, and innocent eyes honestly expressed ignorance in the matter.
I sat in the room and tried not to look guilty. I hunched down in my seat and watched the other children with my shifty eyes, wondering if any of them Knew.
Did RT suspect? He was sitting right next to me. Was that a look of suspicion on Tiffany's face? Would I have to "deal" with these children before they squealed? Who did they work for? How much were they getting paid for this treachery? Could they be bought with a sweeter deal? Or would I have to send them to Davy Jones' locker?
The paranoia was probably unnecessary, though, as the offending odor resembled certain tones in the sense that it could not be easily pinpointed. Extremely high and low frequencies operate like this: You know they're there, but you don't know where they're coming from. Some smells, like these sounds, don't lend themselves well to triangulation. The hunt continued, but was fruitless for a good long while.
Eventually, traditional methods of child information extraction were given up, and the desks were simply searched. It seemed like a good time to get up, go to the bathroom, and then move to Mexico, but that would have given me away. Done right, I could pull this thing off as though I had no idea that the smell in the room could have possibly been coming from the rotting organs in my desk.
When my desk was opened, the look on my teacher's face was one for which the invention of a new adjective might have been appropriate. Traditional words like "disgust" and "horror" aren't up to the task. I think parts of her face were actually sneered into other physical dimensions, disappearing into the eddies and waves of time and space.
With a grim determination and inner strength well beyond anything I've known since, she reached into my desk and removed, one by one, the bags of now liquefied organic compounds. None of them was identifiable. The eggs looked like a brownish soup, the tongue like a cockroach prune, the eyes like gumballs that had been sucked on and partially digested before being spit out, and the heart like a miscellaneous bit of forgotten butchery, left on the floor for a lucky bit of barking mange to suck up into its microbe-infested collection of rotting innards. The health workers on scene of Ebola outbreaks haven't seen such carnage. For my fourth grade teacher, this was probably a trauma from which she has not yet recovered. I wonder what the statute of limitations is like for mental crimes like this.
What shocked even me at the time was that I felt a sense of affection for the sacks of liquid while watching them go. It's true that they were not what they once were, but they still had that kernel of beauty that had originally drawn me in. I felt guilty that I hadn't spent more time with them, letting them know how I felt, that they were the best internal organs I had ever extracted and then packaged myself.
Stop to smell the flowers, people. Don't let life pass you by. The roses will be sacks of liquefied gollywots before you know it.
Also, if you tell my shrink about any of this, then I won't be friends with you anymore.