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This is not an autopsy.
This is no methodical unfurling of the body, no cataloguing of the innards, no exploration of the thoracic and abdominal cavities to determine the cause of death. There is no mystery to it. There is no silk suture thread. This is not a body meant to be put together again.
As Goodsir makes the first incision, he does not check his watch, nor does he have a grasp of the time, nor does he even wear his watch on his person anymore. The sun has dried up any need for it. There are no days here now. He cuts with a rust-dotted blade through the dip at the base of Gibson’s throat and opens him from collar to belly. It would feel indecent to make the cut any longer. He cracks the sternum and separates it from the ribs. Splays those open, too, like a great spider laying on its back. The flesh wrinkles and stretches in a way it is not used to being wrinkled and stretched, and in a way he is more used to seeing than it is to being manipulated thusly.
Then comes the business of butchery. This is the part when the weak disguise he has privately given it no longer fits, the first proper step into desecration, but his hands are already bloody. Goodsir removes the organs one by one, setting them in the cradle formed of Gibson’s clothes where they lay folded on the floor of the tent. They are fleshy and greying, and they stain the striped fabric of his shirt with stagnant blood. There lies the coil of his intestines, the shrunken bag of his stomach, the lungs and the bladder. The heart, the liver, the kidneys. There is nothing remarkable about them, nothing that might have set this man apart from any other in life. They are all made of the same stuff. Death makes that all the more clearer.
He receives a single visitor to the tent while he works. This is Hickey, who pushes his way through the flaps-- Goodsir can hear them rustle, and feel the presence at his back like one might feel the delicate point of a dagger. There is something shadowlike to Hickey, an absence. He seems to live in the spaces between, never really one thing or another but the difference between both. He hums and nudges Gibson’s small intestine with the toe of his boot. Whether or not that means this is a part he intends to consume, Goodsir knows not.
“How are we coming along, Mr. Goodsir?” he asks, his hands in his pockets, keen on keeping his hands clean. Goodsir’s are tacky. His shirt is stained where he has wiped his hands in the absence of a rag, if only to free his fingers enough to continue working. He says nothing in response, and hears Hickey click his tongue.
“Your forty minutes are half up,” Hickey tells him. A smile hides in his voice, curled underneath his lip. “Doesn’t take so long to open him up and empty him, does it?” A laughing edge hides there, too, in the pocket where fangs are often found. Goodsir does not look up to meet it. The handle of his scalpel sticks to his palm as he uses it to separate the viscera from its cavity until the body is hollow. Like this, it looks like an optical illusion, some trick of the light. A man standing behind a medicine chest; a human head on a mannequin’s body.
Hickey stoops beside Gibson’s head, wearing a strange expression on his face, his mouth a taut bow and his eyes cold. Goodsir cannot distinguish amusement from anything else now; cannot discern whether Hickey is capable of feeling anything other than amusement or the lack thereof. It seems he lives in two distinct states, things gone right and things gone wrong, and thrives in turning one into the other. Goodsir recalls the noise Gibson had made as the knife had slid into his back. The wound itself, from the interior side, peers up at him through the ribs like a nosy neighbor through shutters. The best of a bad situation, Hickey had said.
“Have you come to give Mr. Gibson parting words?” Goodsir asks, knowing even so that Hickey has not. “If so, I shall step out to give you privacy, with the agreement that my remaining time will resume when you’re finished.”
Still bent towards Gibson’s face, Hickey shakes his head. His eyes slide to Goodsir, creased at the corners as if to laugh at him. “Oh, there’s no need, Mr. Goodsir,” he replies, watching him begin to separate the ribs. “I would hate to trouble you. Besides, I’ve already told Billy all he needs to hear from me.” He says it as though he intends for Goodsir to ask him what it was he said to Gibson. Goodsir does not. He uses the flat of his blade to shear muscle from bone and does not try to find the difference between the killing and the preparation of the body. Which act is crueler-- taking a man’s life, or making mince of his remains? There is no tally of offence here, where there is a cook but no carpenter. Gibson smells of sweat and blood, life and death. The scent rises from the cavern of his chest, and neither Hickey nor Goodsir flinch at it.
Hickey touches Gibson’s cheek. “It was my right to do this,” he says. “It’s important to me you know that.”
For a moment, Goodsir belays his reply. What little meat there was on Gibson’s chest comes off, tough and pale, and the force of its separation jostles the body but for where Hickey’s hand holds it still. “To what?” Goodsir asks, laying the strip of muscle aside. “To kill him?”
“Mm.”
Hickey sweeps a thumb along the orbital ridge, circling Gibson’s eye socket like a wet finger around the rim of a wine glass. He smoothes the papery skin underneath the closed eyes in a way that suggests this is something he had done often while Gibson was alive. The gesture carries some afterimage of affection with it. Sundogs; something false around something real. Goodsir imagines the skin growing colder where Hickey touches. “Is that what you really believe, Mr. Hickey?” he asks him gently.
“It’s what I know to be true,” says Hickey.
This is not any truth of the sort in which Goodsir deals. “How do you know so?”
“Because I fed him.”
Goodsir pauses. He looks down towards the collection of organs he has removed from Gibson and recognizes the evidence of a meager meal in a stomach too-long starved. He feels Hickey’s eyes on him as he stares at it, too, and wonders briefly if he plans to order him to cut it open and scrape out its contents to garnish their supper. “Oh, doctor,” Hickey laughs as he follows the line of his eyes, “I wouldn’t ask that of you. Think of what it would say to the men, that after they eat you’ll just cut them open and divide their portion.”
“Did offering him food truly give you claim over his life?” Goodsir asks him. There are still the limbs yet to be carved-- this is not an amputation, though it is a removal of something, and not only for Gibson. He has no idea of how many minutes of his original forty remain; begins the process of cutting the flesh from the arms. Hickey has not yet stepped back, requiring Goodsir to work around him as one might weave to avoid a pothole.
“It does,” he replies as if he has not heard the disgust in Goodsir’s voice. “I gave him meat, red and fresh as you please. For that much longer, he was alive, because of what I gave him. Allowed him. He might have collapsed in his harness, Billy, if I hadn’t had meat for him.”
“He was already dying.”
“Then it’s of no consequence how, is it. He’d no choice about it either way.” The rocks shift as Hickey straightens up, resuming his relaxed stance just out of sight, stepping into Goodsir’s blind spot. He can visualize the furrow of his brow as he asks, “What are you trying to argue, doctor?”
It is not so much that Goodsir is arguing anything at this point and more that he wishes to refute Hickey at every turn. He has discovered himself to have grown tired of self-importance, though he cannot pinpoint when this began, or when he started to recognize it as such. He loses track of the moments during which he does not answer, until eventually Hickey speaks again, vindicated in some way by his silence.
“The way I figure it,” he muses, face turned skyward as if he can see something other than the canvas ceiling above himself, “if you’re doing something that keeps them alive, you’ve no obligation yourself to keep doing whatever that is. Like you, for example.”
Goodsir’s scalpel pauses briefly in the soft part of Gibson’s arm-- softness, of course, is a relative term here-- and gives away that he has been listening.
“We didn’t bring you along for want of a doctor, Mr. Goodsir,” Hickey goes on to assure him. “I don’t hold it against you that you’ve withheld that particular skill from us, and neither did Billy. The other men may get ruffled later on, but I’ll see to it no harm comes to you from them for it.”
“How will you gain that right?” asks Goodsir. “By feeding me?”
Hickey is quiet a moment, but not for hesitation. “Depends,” he says. “Will you eat?”
Not from your hand, Goodsir thinks. He has no plan how he will live out his existence, nor does whatever choice he makes, should he make one, matter. The men will still die, and Hickey will sate himself. He wonders if that right is preemptive, as well.
“You could stop,” Hickey offers, nodding to Goodsir’s wrist. “No one’s forcing you to do this work.”
“What of Lieutenant Hodgson then?” Goodsir asks.
“What of him?”
Goodsir shakes his head and commits himself for the moment to the task of separating muscle from bone. It does not want to go, but the protest it puts up is weak against a knife, even dull as it is. It is an exhausted struggle that would be made easier by a sharper knife or a healthier body. “You told me you would cut into him if I didn’t cut into Mr. Gibson,” he reminds Hickey, who cannot have forgotten.
Hickey makes a sound of acknowledgement, draws his breath in sharply through his teeth and says, “Yeah,” with a jerk of his chin. His hands go to his pockets, and he offers no further elaboration.
Goodsir lifts Gibson’s right arm and brings the scalpel to the underside of it, where what little fat there is hangs. He is unused to thinking of a body as this-- as fat and muscle, edible and inedible. Meat and gristle. They are not meant to be plundered in this way. “I cannot let harm come to the living,” Goodsir says. “Certainly not when I have prior warning and the ability to stop it.”
“Yet Billy was alive.”
“Yes, until you killed him. He must be of more use to you now that you intend to consume him.”
“You’re a quick one, Mr. Goodsir,” says Hickey, head tilted so that he cannot see the smile he hears in his voice. “No wonder you might’ve been a doctor.” The hypothetical feels preposterous. Perhaps Hickey is the only one among them who can still feel the pull or the future, tugging him ever onward the same way they haul the boats over land. How long until whatever force drives him collapses in its harness, dies on the shale? What happens then? Every man lies, he had proclaimed at his hanging; well, there is another thing every man does, whether or not he wants to, whether or not he believes he can.
When he removes his hand from his pocket, he brings his knife with it, its long blade trailing last from the dark sky of the coat he has taken to wearing. He bends low again by Gibson’s head; strokes his cheek with that same hand, and then cuts the scant hollow of it from his face. He goes bone-deep, leaving a flash of yellowed teeth and grey gums. Goodsir does not prevent him from doing this. The hand that might stop him is sticky with Gibson’s blood, anyhow, and his grip would only slip.
“Be sure to trim him well,” Hickey tells him, tossing the freshly carved piece aside. “We’ll need all Billy can give us.”
This is not an autopsy, but Goodsir cannot recall the word for it.
They eat silently. Goodsir remains in his tent, but he can tell by the peptic quiet that comes over the camp that suppertime has come. He cannot even hear the sounds of chewing, which is perhaps for the better. Mastication is only so far removed from murder, given the circumstances. Under the guidance of Hickey’s hands, everything is a bit like killing. It ought not to be possible here. Then again, the beauty of the natural world-- one of the many beauties of it, if he is being honest-- is that ought has no place in it. There is, there isn’t. Tense is a foreign thing there, imposed upon the subject by its study.
Memories have begun to fade, Goodsir has noticed. If he forgets his brothers’ names, he must have never known them. If he forgets his own, he must have never had one. So, too, does man import the concept of the future, and with it the distinction between certainty and uncertainty.
Manson’s shadow reaches Goodsir from the entrance to the tent. For a moment, they only regard each other in silence across the short distance from one man to the other. Then Manson tells him, “Hickey said for me to fetch you.”
“Thank you, Manson,” says Goodsir, and his back protests as he gets to his feet; the table in sickbay had been higher, but he had to stoop over Gibson’s body where it was laid out. Neither he nor Manson move from their places.
“There was one more thing, sir,” Manson says, his eyes glancing around the tent. They alight on the table with its scant collection of bottles, the cot on which Goodsir is to sleep but will find little rest, the corners where only empty boxes sit. “He said he wanted you to bring him a leg.”
The meat has been stripped away from Gibson’s legs, the both of them, from hip to ankle. They are part of the gore which filled the bag Goodsir brought out earlier. That much may already be consumed. “I gave him all there was,” Goodsir replies.
Manson shifts, his brow knitting. “I don’t think he means that,” he tells him. “I think- the bones.”
Wrapped up in a blanket are the rest of Gibson’s remains, the parts Goodsir had separated from the rest while having an optimistic thought about burial without figuring the particulars of where and by whom. He blinks and pulls his mouth thin. “Thank you, Manson.”
He brings out a tibia, bits of pink flesh clinging to it. Some eyes are on him as he exits the tent and approaches their table, but not all. Tozer keeps his eyes forward and far; Armitage does not seem to see much of anything. Though he must hear his approach, Hickey does not turn until Goodsir is just behind him, remaining in that blind spot Hickey favors. Wordlessly, he accepts the bone, curling his thin fingers around it and casting Goodsir a glance over his shoulder-- eyebrows raised like supplicating hands, the faintest of smiles at his lips. It is a far gentler expression than any he has seen him wear. It makes it seem like a ceremony of sorts when Hickey presses the bone to the table and leans on the other end of it until it breaks. The touch of his lips against the jagged edge looks like a kiss from this angle; his eyes meet Goodsir’s as he drinks the marrow.
If you feed a man, then, by rights, you may kill him. Hickey eats of Gibson with his eyes open, ponderous, taking bites large enough to choke upon. But killing someone is not a right to be given, or even a right at all. It is not a thing allowed by the meeting of some primary condition; it is not guaranteed by contract or by natural law.
It is an opportunity.