A Day in the Lab

I'm nervous. She scales the fence easily and I throw our bags over after her. "Sara, there's a reason there's a fence here, there are actual security breaches in Israel".
"Do you want to go around to the other gate? It'll take about twenty minutes." The security guards have left and the campus has shut down for the night. Students could only leave the campus legitimately, not enter it.
I shrug. "No, let's just do this." A couple of student approach the gate from the inside and I quickly join Sara on the other side. The students saw us, they don't pay us particular attention, and she's frustratingly cool about this.
I follow her into the lab building, deserted at this hour. We stop by some lockers and she opens hers and tosses me a white lab coat and some latex gloves and takes the same for herself. We put them on, push our way through the heavy metal double doors and we're in the lab. Sara turns on the lights. I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't this.
"Those are bodies!" I choke out. Of course they're bodies, you asked to be here, stupid, I tell myself.
"Are you okay?" Sara asks.
"I'm fine." Oh I'm not, I'm so not.
The lab is an auditorium, with seats arranged orchestra-like in the center of the room, and ten or so corpses on operating tables wrapped in blue towels and then sealed in clear plastic. Sara walks over to the last one and I follow her, still silent and gaping like a fish. The smell isn't that bad, a clinic smells worse. That surprises me.
She unties the string over where the corpse's head would be.
"You're unwrapping it?" I ask dumbly.
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm fine."
"Do you want me to show you all the bones and muscles we just went over?"
She had taught me some names of bones and muscles before we came to the lab.
"Yeah," I replied. Came here all this way, might as well see some bodies.
She finishes unwrapping the corpse with a clinical unaffectedness (well duh Meirav, she's a doctor in training). She arranges some fabric scraps over the head so I don't have to look at it and bares the corpse to the lower torso. There's an incision on the chest and down the left arm- she tells me where it is exactly in medical terms but I'm not retaining, or even parrticularly listening to anything at this point. It looks like chicken, like meat, dried bone and sinew. She points out some muscle nerve groups and I'm amazed at how thick nerves can be- like 3 mm in diameter at the thickest I see. I thought they were miniscule, invisible to the human eye. She explains some things- her casualness is infinitely baffling to me, your hands are in a corpse for crying out loud- I nod as she explains.
I thaw out after a while, and zone back in.
"Okay, let me see if I get this right," I say. "That bone is the radius-" she nods- "that one's the ulna, that there would be the pronator quadratus and that the pronator teres, and somewhere over there the supinator." I'm terrified and proud of myself at the same time. She picks up where I leave off and my brain again rejects all stimulation but the dead cut up person in front of me.
When Sara is done explaining she seals the corpse back up. We throw away the gloves and wash our hands.
"You wanted to see the brain room too right?"
"Yeah."
This one's much less disconcerting. We do walk past another corpse room and I make Sara hold my hand because it's dark, but otherwise I'm acting like less of a baby. She shows me preserved brains, and tells me about different parts and their functions. We also see fetuses in various stages, including a little unborn cyclops baby. This is all okay, because the brains have been dead for much longer and have no face, and the fetuses are in glass cases.
We go back out through the corpse room, and then the corpse auditorium. I touch the one Sara had shown me through the wrappings- why this is reassuring, I don't know.
"Hey Sara," I say, "So- do you promise none of them have jumped up and attacked anyone?"
"No," she replies, "Oh- except for that one over there."
"Oh," I say, "that's okay then."
And we put the coats back in the locker, and walk out of the building and off the campus, legitimately this time.