I read how the power of the church weakened in the Renaissance, and artists began dissecting bodies. Battlefield surgeons followed and gained market share as clerical physicians failed to deliver on their brand promise – to alleviate suffering and heal. The men of letters had to admit the need for the bloody skill of dissection. As for the surgeons, they sought professional prestige and recognition (a quaint way of saying they wanted to brand up to the premium segment) by pursuing book learning and publishing their anatomical findings. Both realised that to capture the market they must have authority over the word and the meat. It’s much the same today.
Now it’s the words, the books, that are in short supply, but then it was apparently the pounds of flesh. Only convicted murderers could be dissected after hanging, as further punishment for their crimes, and there were never enough of these for medical research and clinical instruction. Instead, the poor who died in the almshouses and cadavers stolen from graves by resurrectionists provided the matter for the making of medical men.
I wondered what Eda-Lyn’s relative, the bearer of pork products, had done upon discovering that her corpse had disappeared. The family member was probably about as successful in reclaiming her body from the doctor as I was in getting modern practitioners to care for my father. Maybe Dad never believed that I could convince the doctor of anything after all. Now, just about everyone’s body lands on the autopsy table, and fatal second haemorrhages are automatically assigned for post-mortem. Those who pass on weak genetic material must pay off their debts to future society by contributing to the advance of neuroscience.
Concluding with the nineteenth century, The Fork in the Medicine Tree describes how doctors’ command of scholarly language and a steady scalpel hand came together in books bound in human skin. It was something of a professional vogue. Eda-Lyn was not an exception, then. What’s more, the finely worked binding civilised the doctor’s ‘curing’ of the sick: leather has its place in the library, study and museum. And of course, the book had ended up in Dr Ungar Sever’s collection – the man whose LipService prescription fixes our broken words. I was unsure what I should be more afraid of – the copywriter and doctor castes, or their upmanship as they try to steal each others’ trade secrets.
I thought about Eda-Lyn, who was so hungry and had become a thesis on ravenous worms. I realised that when I went into hospital, I would come out as a leaflet for electric toothbrushes or shoe polish. I traced with a finger over the letters of Dad’s note in the margin – I wanted to revive the movement of his hand and for it to offer reassurance. But it was like rolling over a mattress worn out by someone else. Now that the body was gone, the hollows were hard and empty.
The last clump of pages in the book was the story of Echo and Narcissus from the Metamorphoses. I had read it to Dad; he liked to hear it declaimed, the parable of our time. If I could find a place where no one would hear me, I would record myself reading it so that I could still hear it out loud after the rupture.
Ovid writes that Juno punished Echo for chattering to her on the mountainside and giving the other nymphs who had entwined their limbs with Jupiter a chance to escape. The goddess says, ‘I shall curtail the powers of that tongue which has tricked me: you will have only the briefest possible use of your voice.’ From then on, Echo could only repeat the last words another had spoken – like anyone come of haemorrh-age. I often wondered what the nymph talked about to Juno. She must’ve had words like constellations.
When she sees beautiful Narcissus who ‘was driving timid deer into his nets’ (that says everything about him), she falls in love with him. I imagine Narcissus as looking like the male model in the Ravish pour Homme cologne ad. His perfectly muscled arms are in the press-up position and he looks down into a dark pool. A perfectly blonde helix hovers over his forehead, suggesting flawless genetic material. The next scene when Echo finds Narcissus alone one day was Dad’s favourite.
The boy, by chance, had wandered away from his faithful band of comrades and he called out: ‘Is there anybody here?’ Echo answered: ‘Here!’ Narcissus stood still in astonishment, looking around in every direction, and cried at the pitch of his voice: ‘Come!’ As he called, she called in reply. He looked behind him and when no one appeared, cried again: ‘Why are you avoiding me?’ But all he heard were his own words echoed back. Still he persisted, deceived by what he took to be another’s voice, and said, ‘Come here, and let us meet!’ Echo answered: ‘Let us meet!’ Never again would she reply more willingly to any sound.
It’s a monologue that forks into a dialogue. There is Echo with her Narcissus patch and, despite her second-hand speech, she seldom means what he does. The same words become new. I always paused then in my reading, paused over the possibility. And we knew what happens next. She runs to embrace him and Narcissus rejects her. Brands can’t reciprocate, they can only gaze spellbound at their own image reflected in a pool. Echo withdrew to lonely caves and withered away. Her bones turned to stone and only her voice remained.
Afterwards, Dad and I would sit still for a moment as my last words reverberated in the silo. Neither Juno nor the rebuff of that fragrance pin-up could silence her.
Eda-Lyn and Echo. Two disembodied voices that keep on speaking, but not their own words. LipServants in perpetuity.
I finished rereading the story but there were still a few pages left. The story of Echo and Narcissus had been pasted in a second time. It made no sense until I got to lines 455–482. Pressed between pages were drops of blood, red dandelions crushed in the moment that the seeds broke away. Dad’s nose bled when the aneurysm ruptured. I could see why. The stroke had happened when he was working on these pages. Blacking out many of the printed words and leaving only a chosen few, Dad wrote something that defied LipService. He found a way to echo off Ovid and it shorted his neural circuits.
I had cut a piece from Dad’s shirt before they took his body away. I wrote out his Echo on it, just as I used to write tastures years ago in my patchwork book made of fabric squares from the dressing-up box. ‘Touch dwells in lonely caves.’ Lonely caves like the one the tongue sleeps in? Did he taste textures too? Eda-Lyn had made this book an inescapably tangible object – a corporeal corpus.
LipServant
6
You are petering out. The ballpoint rolls on but the ink is stuttering into a Morse code of dots and dashes. This morning as I stepped into the shower, I glimpsed the LipService patch on my shoulder in the mirror. The Dermaluxe paint logo has paled so that the stylised paintbrush looks like the handprint of a prehistoric hunter on a cave wall. That means You don’t have much time left. My cells have almost completely metabolised You. I rush into the spaces You are receding from. My lungs rustle with the wind of prohibited words and I start to think I am on the brink of saying something – speaking the unspeakable. Then it’s lost. And no sound comes out at all except for a clicking at the back of my throat like the phone being put down.
The Dermaluxe patch slurps at my skin as I peel it off. It’s a sound that always summons the memory of the nurse with a face the texture of roughened polystyrene. Every third day at the hospital, she used to stand in the middle of the ward. ‘Strip, double over, dispatch,’ she would say in an alarm-clock voice, and everyone submissively removed their LipService patch, folded it in half and dropped it in the medical waste container she carried to each bed. I always wanted to gloat at the thought of You stripped, doubled over and finally dispatched. But it was a tartrazine pleasure, a yellow deception. I only had to look at the nurse for my swagger to crumple into a cringe. She was nothing but an intricate plumbing system that gushed LipService. The words passed through her with no resistance. Open the tap and she gurgled away. Is this what becomes of us?