The Joy of Anatomy

“You’re gonna get it now, you done messed up!” The father roared.

Donald watched his mother get it. He stood and watched because nobody told him not to. For as long as he could remember, Donald watched. But watching his mother get it didn’t bother him so much; it was like watching a weekly t.v. show. He stood with wide blue eyes and drank it all in-the yelling, slamming bruises that pounded into her. He was more interested in the purpling raised flesh than anything else.

Sometimes when she was dozing in the faded brown easy chair he would tiptoe over to her and stare at those bruises and welts. A few times he even picked at some scabs until they opened and bled. His mother would awaken with a gasp and push him away, calling him a goddamn pervert, but not before he would dig a fingernail into the wound, part the skin, and gaze with intense interest. Once the father caught him and laughed.

“Whatcha doin’ there, boy.” He tossed his hardhat carelessly on the kitchen table and stood with his calloused, work-roughened hands on his hips. “Gonna be a doctor, boy? Gonna be one of them surgeons and let me quit the phone company?” He laughed again, and it felt kind of good that the father was happy with him.

When he was eight and he preferred to be called Donny, he liked catching bugs. The mother thought it was a good hobby, one that would teach him, maybe, even though she kept telling him he was empty-headed and a fool. He did learn from his little hobby. He learned how many body parts an insect could live without. He learned what a burning fly smells like, or a burning cricket. He inhaled the smell way deep into his lungs and wondered what other things would smell like when they burned.

Donny had a brother, but he was much older and gone from the house by the time Donny was going to school, so he really couldn’t remember what having one was like. Derrick never visited, and when Donny asked why once the father snorted. “The redheads in the family tree always were a stuck-up bunch.” He took another swig of beer, sitting at the Formica kitchen table, and glared at the younger son. “I don’t want to hear no more about Derrick.” He spat onto the floor and lit a cigarette.

After the father said that Donny went back to his room, stared into his hair for any signs of red, and when he thought he saw some highlights through thick, tousled brown he grabbed the father’s electric razor and buzzed it away, all of it.

“What the hell did you do to your hair,” the mother asked, bony hands reaching out to swipe at his head. “You idiot. Now you look like a bowling ball.” She laughed at herself and sent him outside to play.

When Donny went outside he sometimes kicked a ball around with some other boys, but more often he went behind the garage. He read all kinds of books at ten-yrs-old that he probably shouldn’t have, but no one told him not to. The parents had seen his books and didn’t care. The father still swore he was going to be a doctor because he was into reading about anatomy. He loved the pictures most of all-skinned bodies with pink muscles splashing the pages in vibrant color, much more interesting without that top layer, he thought. Once when he was behind the garage he had a knife from the kitchen and he drew the blade across his arm. He felt pain, but more than that he felt a surge, an elation as he stared into his arm and saw the same red as in the books. He did it again to his stomach and legs. He was fascinated, but the mother found out what he was doing when the school called about suspicious wounds. She was so mad at him and called him so many names that he knew he couldn’t do it again.

He got frustrated. He wanted to see more pulsating life under skin, but he didn’t dare do it to himself, anymore. Once when he was sent out to play by his mother he collected bugs with the little kid next door, and Donny thought about cutting him, he really did. He stared so much at the fat cheeks and dimpled arms that the boy asked, “whatcha doin? Why you staring at me like that?” He was only five and got spooked, so he ran into his house.

But Donny couldn’t stop thinking about it. The mother gave him a birthday party when he turned eleven, at the local pizza place. Most of the classmates were there and gave him stuff like footballs and baseball mitts, but all he could do was stare into the red sauce and wish like anything that he could see it again. The red liquid, red muscles, red skin around a cut. Everything was so crimson inside. He got dizzy from staring into the red of the pizza, swirled a finger into it, brought it to his lips and sucked, imagining.

“What the hell are you doing?” The mother was staring at him with some anger and a little uncertainty in her little, squinty eyes. He pulled the finger from his mouth and wiped it on his jeans.

“Nothing.” He never told anyone about the joy of anatomy, least of all her.

Sometimes he wished he could give it to her the way his father did, especially when she pushed his buttons.

“I tell ya, boy,” the father said once when he’d been drinking beers a whole day. His voice was rough and slurry. “That woman, she knows how to push buttons, don’t she.” He leaned forward, swaying, a stocky arm raised, and ruffled Donny’s hair before he could move away. Donny felt the hair on his own arms raise up. He hated being touched, hated it more than almost anything. He couldn’t remember being touched by the parents much, and thank goodness. Someone else’s skin on his skin made him hurt.

But Donny knew it was true about the buttons because she pushed his all the time. Like when he came in from school. If he dropped his backpack anywhere but in his room she’d scream at him. If he left crumbs on the counter or a dirty glass in the sink she screamed at him. The father wasn’t hitting her so much anymore, and Donny found himself wishing he would, wishing he’d hit her dead in the mouth to shut her up. Maybe he’d do it, he thought once when he felt his crimson blood begin to boil when she screamed at him again and again and again. He finally wailed loud and low, blinded by rage-a blackness- so enveloping that he didn’t remember grabbing the toaster and lobbing it at his mother’s head. She ducked and the front window needed replacing.

The father beat him for that, the first beating he’d had in a long time and it was almost a relief. Afterwards he stared at his own raised flesh with a measure of satisfaction, picked at some of the broken skin until it oozed. When kids at school asked him what happened, he told them he fell down the basement stairs.

When Donny was fourteen the father decided to do some work behind the garage and he found them. He found the books and the knives and the little squirrels and chipmunks so artfully carved. He darted strange looks at his son, his sagging, aging body bent from years of hard work, beer, and debilitating anger. Donny was almost the aging man’s height by this time and there wasn’t much the father could do that Donny couldn’t do back. Truth be told, the father was learning to fear the son. He told himself staunchly that it was his son’s predisposition for the medical field that did it, caused him to do what he did to those animals.

“I’m sorry. I won’t do it again, I promise.” The mutinous, adolescent face dared the father to disagree.

“You really shouldn’t. Someone comes along and sees this, they won’t understand. They won’t know what you’re doing.”

“No problem. Just let me have the books and I’ll put them in my room.”

The parents never went into Donny’s room. The mother stopped cleaning it when he was twelve, when she found some anatomy books in there and just didn’t want to know. That’s what she told Donny. “I just don’t want to know.” She shook her head slowly back and forth, making him think of a pendulum.

So he played his raucous rock music about death and blood-nothing the other kids weren’t listening to-and he read and carved in his room. Every once in a while the mother would complain about the smell, and the next day the smell would be gone. To stand in the doorway of his room was to envision the domain of a teenage boy. Lots of posters sporting naked women dotted his walls. If someone walked a few steps in, they’d be able to see the red pen lines on the pictures.

When he was eighteen he graduated from high school with pretty decent grades. He went to a community college while he still lived with the parents and the grades got even better. He was a friendly guy, everyone said so. His height was average, his brown hair was kept closely cropped to his head. At night, late into the darkness, he still carved in his room, and his book collection was vast.

Donny had girlfriends but he got in trouble with them for getting rough, for not holding hands, for hitting. So there was no one special, not until he got to med school. Then he met a girl behind the counter at 7-eleven, and he pursued her. She wasn’t the most pretty girl he’d ever seen, but she was thin and small and he wanted her. Settle down, the voice told him. When he took her home one night he let her into his room with the turn of a key, and she stood nervously.

The posters were gone, tucked neatly under his mattress. The girl gazed around the room and then looked back at Donny, chocolate eyes wide. “What’s that smell?”

He shrugged with a half smile. “What do you think.”

She wandered around a bit then stopped, looked at the closet door. “It’s coming from there.” She inhaled. “Is that-is that blood?”

His smile widened. “Sure is.” He showed her his stash-the little hearts, the tiny lungs, the minute vein systems that he’d actually pulled out intact. If she was horrified she hid it well. He told her they were for experimentation, preparation for his med school years. She nodded her dark head trance-like and said nothing. And she didn’t run. She was the first person he shared this with, and she didn’t run.

His need--Sex didn't stop it, wasn't even good without cutting her somewhere. She would gasp, grab her lip in teeth that drew blood, but she never said no. Food didn't halt it; the stuff became tasteless. Nothing stopped his kaleidescope of dreams at night, then in the day. He thought about it when he performed in school. Thought about pulsating veins, screams of agony that created his own ecstacy. Such sweet ecstacy.

A week before he was to begin his internship, when he and the girl were married and living in a tiny apartment not too far from her job at the 7-eleven, Donny walked into a salon. He was growing his hair and it was roaming about his head in abandon. There were the expected jokes about his untamed locks, and then the question: what to do with such a mess. Donny smiled at the cute young stylist, couldn’t help noting the white of her flesh, blue veins visible through transparency, and his breath quickened in anticipation. He licked his lips. “I’m going red. Color my hair red after you cut it.” He leaned back with a smile and a wink, and the girl couldn’t help thinking that his wedding ring was a shame. A damn shame.


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