The Mortification of Fovea Munson Read online

  The Museum of Holography had been shut down since February. Every day it stayed closed killed me a little more. My parents, on the other hand, didn’t even notice until I told them. Holograms aren’t really their thing. They prefer things they can cut into or sew up or repair or replace. They get the science part of holograms; lasers bounce and make images hover in the air. They just, very cheerfully, don’t understand why anybody would care about them. My mom and dad like the solid world.

  Once you make a hologram, you pretty much can’t do anything to it. It exists and also it doesn’t exist, and it’s perfect.

  From the window, I could see the welcome desk and the edge of the Michael Jordan machine. Farther in, back past the no-longer-jumping Michael Jordan, there were four small rooms that used to be crammed with holograms hovering in glass tubes. The lights were always low, so you could see the images better—the darker the room, the clearer the hologram. My favorite was the banana. There was also the shark and a dinosaur. The head of the Medusa, of course. But the banana was perfect. It was so simple. Using all those lasers, all that complex science, to make something so simple—it was like a cosmic joke.

  For me, the Museum of Holography was the best place on earth. It was straight-up magical.

  So of course, after Em moved into the city, I took her there.

  “This is bonkers,” she said, stepping in front of the hologram of Michael Jordan. “They’re making us see something that isn’t there. It’s like being hypnotized.” We’d hypnotize ourselves for a whole afternoon, standing next to each other in front of those light waves. The best part of it was not talking, because I knew we were thinking the same thing.

  Four months ago, around the time I realized we weren’t thinking the same thing anymore, the museum closed. Just flickered out like a laser. The last day I went, right before it closed with no warning, I was alone. I stood in front of the banana and tried to be enough by myself.

  A week later, there was a closed-for-good sign on the door. But, I told myself, as long as the machines were still in there, it wasn’t permanent. It might reopen someday. It might.

  “See anything in there?” asked my mom, holding up a page of something from inside the bag. Half the page was brown and coffee dripped off it.

  “I can still see the edge of the Michael Jordan machine.”

  “Er—is that good?”

  “Better than nothing.” I kicked away a little of the sidewalk trash as we started walking again. To the lab. Ugh. The lab. I’d managed to forget for a full second. There were about a million other places I’d rather be going. A chewed-gum landfill. A yurt in Siberia. A wild piranha sanctuary.

  My mom was in the middle of sucking the coffee out of her sleeve when her phone rang. It was my dad’s ring, Janis Joplin singing “Take another little piece of my heart.” For anybody else, that would be romantic. For my parents, it was a suggestion.

  “All set?” she said into the phone suspiciously. “Great. Okay, bye!”

  I didn’t like the way this sounded.

  As we closed in on the lab, my mom and I stepped off the curb and into the cool shadow of the train tracks that ran overhead. The train made a loop around the heart of the city, then stretched its veins in all directions, slicing Chicago into wedges. The lab was just along the edge of a slice, so sometimes you could hear the train rumble by when you were inside the lobby. We ducked under the rusty metal stairway that led up to the train platform and crossed the street, the bland-looking front door of the lab directly ahead.

  My parents had picked a quiet side street for their lab. They’d chosen an office building that could have been anything, sandwiched between the equally dull-looking offices of an exterminator and a demolition company—the Death Block, I secretly called it.

  In the middle of the Death Block, right in front of the lab, stood my dad. He was smiling broadly in front of a sign he’d taped on the door. What previously read DE LEON AND MUNSON now read DE LEON, MUNSON & MUNSON.

  They both looked at me expectantly.

  “Wow,” I said. “That sure is…all of our names.”

  They stood on either side of me, admiring the sign. I could already tell this was going to be a long day. We stepped inside, the usual blast of cold air hitting our faces.

  “Stay here,” my mom said excitedly. “We’ll be right back!” With that, she and my dad disappeared through the blue door behind the front desk.

  “No problem,” I said to nobody.

  A seven-foot-tall portrait of Hippocrates stared down at me.

  The Father of Modern Medicine took up one entire wall of the lobby. In the giant painting, Hippocrates is holding a skull and wearing a toga that clearly doesn’t fit him. And he has a huge smile. Like, dimples. It’s not the sort of cheerfulness you expect from the Father of Modern ­Medicine, but you’d have to take that up with my dad, who painted the portrait back when he was in med school.

  Aside from Hippocrates and the front desk, there were two uncomfortable waiting-room chairs and a small table between them. Behind one of the uncomfortable chairs, there was a strange, in-the-wall fish tank. The lonesome lab betta fish swam laps, probably wondering what he’d done in his life to deserve being a cadaver lab fish.

  He was new. As one of her last acts as receptionist, Whitney convinced my parents to get a real fish and ditch the plastic one they’d had for years.

  Unfortunately for the fish, he was named after the Father of Anatomy, the first guy who officially dissected human bodies for science: Herophilus. It’s kind of an intense name for a fish. You couldn’t blame him for looking a little panicked.

  So aside from the panicked fish and the portrait of Hippocrates, the lobby is really a boringly normal setup. You could almost convince yourself you were in a normal doctor’s office.

  If all the patients weren’t dead.

  Just then, my parents burst out of the blue door.

  “Ta-da!” they said in unison as my dad pulled a doctor’s coat from behind his back. It was exactly my size.

  “I’m not a doctor,” I said.

  “Well, we know that,” my mom said, chuckling.

  “I’m a receptionist.”

  “But we keep the temperature pretty cold in the office,” my dad said as he ceremoniously handed the coat over to me. “Because of course we don’t want the cadavers to get warm—”

  “Dad.”

  They’d gotten the lab coat stitched over the pocket to say DR. MUNSON, JR. My mom pointed to my dad’s coat, which had been altered to read DR. MUNSON, SR. I reluctantly pulled on the coat and sat behind the desk.

  “Perfect,” my dad said proudly. Then he slid a clipboard across the desk. “These are today’s appointments.”

  My mom smiled. “We’ll be in the back, so you’ll greet people when they arrive, sign for deliveries, that sort of thing. But sometimes, people without appointments will try to talk their way past you and into the back. The medical-device salespeople, for example, are very sneaky. When you run a cadaver lab, people want to sell you all kinds of things.”

  “They can be relentless,” my dad agreed.

  “So if they aren’t on that list, they don’t get past you. Actually…” my mom said, elbowing my dad. “Actually, she’s less like a receptionist and more like a bouncer.”

  “Ha!” my dad said, getting misty. “You’re our muscle. Our adorable muscle!”

  Ugh.

  My dad kissed me on the head. “We’re going to get to work. You can call the lab phone if you have any questions. Love you!”

  “You, too,” I said weakly as they headed toward the blue door.

  As they opened it and walked through, I could see down the hallway behind it.

  Once you go past that blue door, all the obvious and boring stuff goes away. There’s a long white hallway. To the left and right are the conference room and my parents’ adorable shared office. The hallway itself is decorated, unfortunately, with my dad’s framed drawings of human innards.

  Strai
ght ahead, at the far end of the Hall of Innards, is a heavy industrial door covered with various signs, all of which essentially say: YOU DON’T WANT TO COME IN HERE. YOU MIGHT THINK YOU WANT TO, BUT YOU’RE WRONG. ALSO, NO OPEN-TOED SHOES.

  That was as far as I’d ever been.

  But if you walk through that door, which is a terrible idea, you will find yourself in Downtown Grossville. They call that room the wet lab. I do not think they could have come up with a more disgusting name. What is wet? You immediately want to know. Despite the fact that YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW.

  Contrary to popular opinion at school, I’d never been in there.

  Not interested.

  Didn’t even want to think about it.

  Good old cadaver lab.

  My home for the entire summer, according to my parents.

  I looked up at Hippocrates. I looked over at Herophilus. I glanced at the clipboard.

  Okay, I was a bouncer at possibly the worst idea for a club ever.

  But still, a bouncer was miles better than being an Igor. Plus, most of the people involved with a cadaver lab aren’t going to give you any trouble, if you know what I mean.

  Then, for the other people, I had a list. Let them come in if they were on the list. Tell them to leave if they weren’t.

  I mean, I could 100 percent GUARANTEE that there weren’t going to be lines of people fighting to get into my cadaver lab. I could do this. Until I found a way to get out of it, I could do this.

  The first hour did not exactly fly by.

  It would have been a great time to play around on my phone, if I were a person whose parents had let them have a phone, but since my parents were obsessed with studies about brain development and little screens and whatever, I was stuck with a desktop and a desk. So I played around on the computer and opened all the drawers so I could go through Whitney’s left-behind stashes of stuff, which turned out to be, in fact, way educational. Probably not how my mom originally envisioned.

  First of all, Whitney had the widest variety of tampons I’d ever seen in person.

  There was a bottle of bright purple nail polish.

  She had apparently saved every sticky note she’d ever written.

  There were takeout/delivery menus for practically all the restaurants in the entire city.

  And at the very bottom was a crazy elaborate manicure kit, including a bunch of different kinds of scissors, a dozen tiny chemical bottles labeled REMOVE and STRENGTHEN and DISSOLVE, plus some weird-looking tools and what was definitely the biggest, sharpest nail file known to man. Or at least known to me.

  Clearly, Whitney had been getting a lot of work done around here.

  I decided against giving myself a terrifying-looking manicure, and right around then, four exhausted med students slogged through the front door. I checked off their names and let them go on through the blue door. It swung shut behind them with a click.

  Soon after that, a deliveryman dropped by, wearing a shiny blue jumpsuit and matching beret. He smiled. Seemed nice. Friendly.

  He set a small package on my desk.

  The package had red tape on it, and bright stickers that said REFRIGERATE IMMEDIATELY and BIOHAZARD. My mom had told me about delivery people coming by. She had not said a word about what they might be delivering. All of a sudden it was gruesomely obvious.

  The guy adjusted his shiny blue beret.

  I guess when you’re a shipping company specializing in body parts, you get to dress your people any way you want.

  “You new?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Cool. So, probably best to get that in the fridge. You know. Before it thaws.” He smiled, got me to sign for the package, and then told me to have a great day as he left. Me alone. With the box.

  Inside that box was a body part. Some Body’s Part. I tried not to think about what exactly would fit in a box that size. Instead, I dialed the number for the wet lab so someone could come out and get the thing, but nobody picked up. They were busy. Great.

  The box and I stared at each other.

  After a minute, I scooted the computer monitor between us.

  I looked up at Hippocrates, who seemed to think this was hilarious.

  After another minute, I went over to the fish tank. The box could have the desk. That was fine.

  I was in the middle of hanging out with Herophilus and trying to come up with a new summer plan for the billionth time when my mom swished out to the front in her blue surgical gown and booties.

  “Hot dog!” she said, leaping for the little biohazard like it was Christmas. “My bull urethra!”

  Her bull urethra.

  She admired the box. “Why didn’t you call? We need to get this baby in the fridge!”

  “I did call. You didn’t answer.”

  “Aha! I bet we were in the freezer—we should really get a phone line in there. It’s so hard to hear the phone ring when you’re neck-deep in necks!” She winked.

  I cringed.

  “How’s it going out here?”

  “Oh…quiet,” I said, which was true. Bull urethras hardly ever said things out loud.

  “Don’t worry, it gets more exciting!”

  “Does it?”

  “So much better than you thought, right?” She shook the box for emphasis, like it was a maraca.

  “It’s definitely…”

  “A blastula?” She winked again.

  I didn’t get it, but I was confident that the joke was both medical and revolting. “Sure,” I said. “A total blastula.”

  “Today’s been busy,” she went on, cheerful and oblivious, “so we’re ordering lunch. We’ll celebrate your first day!” She held the box up triumphantly. “And the bull urethra!” Then she headed back to the wet lab, even cheerier than before.

  The food eventually arrived, filling the lobby and the hallway with the thick smell of barbecue. I locked up, flipped the sign to CLOSED, and everybody gathered in the conference room and started making plates except for one of the students. He stopped at the door, got really pale, and then backed out, saying something about getting a cheese sandwich.

  “It’s the barbecue, I think,” my mom said, when she came back from letting him out the front door.

  “The ribs,” my dad agreed, nodding as he chewed. “You know, because…” With a mouth full of barbecue, he waved toward the lab and suddenly I understood exactly what he meant.

  I pushed my plate away from me and sighed. My parents were monsters. Maybe everybody at school was right. Maybe I was gross by association.

  When my parents and the three remaining students walked through the lobby about half an hour later, deep in conversation about some kind of hemispheric procedure, I happened to be right in the middle of this computer game where you’re in this tree world helping these squirrels—actually, never mind, that makes me sound like a four-year-old. Just take my word for it. It’s a freaking hard game. There’s all these nuts.

  Anyway.

  I paused the game and tried to look less like a four-year-old. It worked, somehow, or maybe my parents were anxious to make me feel at home, because they agreed to let me stay by myself for an hour while they went to some lecture on a noninvasive something or other.

  My dad and the students waited outside while my mom gave me instructions. “We’re not expecting anybody, so it should be quiet. If there are any deliveries, you can accept them. But nobody else comes in. Keep the door locked. If you need us, call us. We’ll have our phones. And could you help clean up? Just do a sweep of the conference room so there aren’t lunch things left out?”

  This was great. If I could prove that I was responsible being left alone for short periods of the day, maybe I could convince them to let me stay at home. The whole me-at-the-lab experiment could be short-lived.

  They all left, and I decided to clean up the leftovers from lunch first. Once that was done, I could get back to the squirrel game. The nuts awaited, you know.

  Most of the food in the conference room was
already gone, so there wasn’t even that much to take care of. I tossed the empty soda cans in a bag for recycling, threw everything else out, and wiped down the table. Done.

  I was on my way back out to the lobby when I heard someone talking behind me.

  Directly behind me. Coming from in the lab.

  I stopped right where I was, surrounded by line drawings of nerve endings and ear canals. I must’ve misheard.

  But then the talking happened again, and I jumped, dropping the bag of soda cans; as they clattered all over the floor, I ran into the lobby and slammed the blue door behind me. Superfast, I reviewed in my mind who had left for the lecture: my mom, my dad, the three remaining med students. All of them. Nobody was still back there.

  Except somebody was there.

  My heart was suddenly beating all over my whole body. My mom would have said that was anatomically impossible. She would have been wrong.

  Okay. Maybe there was a mouse. Or something. Something mouselike.

  Or maybe it was something worse, like somebody broke in the back way, where the bodies came in.

  Or…

  My stomach lurched.

  Had I locked the door behind my parents? I didn’t remember doing it. A robber wouldn’t even have had to sneak in. Freaking anybody could have waltzed right in while I was cleaning up coleslaw. All right. Possible robbery, possibly my fault, definitely in progress. I needed options.

  I could call the police.

  And then if it was a false alarm, I’d look like a wuss and my parents would never ever leave me alone again, and I’d be stuck working at the lab and going to surgery lectures until I was an old lady.

  I could ignore it.

  And then if someone was back there, my parents would get ripped off, all their expensive equipment gone, and it would be my fault.

  I could check it out really quickly and then run back into the lobby and lock the door between us.

  Then I could call the police if there was a reason to call the police.