AFTER TALKING WITH SINCLAIR AND RANKIN, I FELTthe need for a more wholesome and pleasant experience, so I drove across the river to the Body Farm to check on Maurie Gershwin’s decomposition. As the weather had begun to warm, day by day, the pace of the anchorwoman’s decay had gradually accelerated. By now, some three weeks after her arrival, her eye orbits stared emptily at the camera and her cheekbones and chin jutted through the remnants of her face. Her blond hair had been stained a greasy gray by the volatile fatty acids leaching from her body, and her finger bones bore the fine tooth marks of small carnivores. I squatted beside her, studying her with interest and an odd sense of fondness—kinship, even. “It’s been a hard month,” I said to the vacant face. “For both of us.”
A few minutes later, somewhat restored, I headed to the UT Hospital cafeteria for a sandwich. In the lobby I passed a gray-haired, scrub-suited doctor who looked like he’d been on his feet for the past twenty years. He looked up as our paths crossed, and his face brightened, taking a decade off his age. When he smiled, I recognized him as Jim Yates, a cardiologist. “Bill Brockton,” he said, “your ears must be burning. I was just talking about you.”
“Uh-oh. Am I in trouble again?”
“Nothing we can’t fix with a new heart or a pig valve.” He laughed. “Actually, I have a patient who’s interested in taking up residence at the Body Farm. He’s in the cardiac-care unit, and he’s probably not long for this world. Have you got a minute?” I nodded, and he led me to an elevator and pushed the button for the floor that housed the CCU. “He’s got myocarditis—inflammation of the heart muscle—and his right ventricle’s failing.”
“Can’t you get him a new heart?”
Yates shook his head. “There’s no time. He could have an arrhythmia and go into cardiac arrest at any moment. What would he need to sign to donate his body, and how could I get a hold of it for him?”
“Simple,” I said. “There’s a consent form he’d need to sign and have witnessed. I think it’s all of two or three sentences long. I can send it over in a campus-mail envelope if you want, or I can tell you how to find it on the Internet and print it out for him.”
The elevator stopped, and the doors opened on the cardiac floor. “You willing to step off long enough to show me?”
“Don’t you think that would make me look a little vulturish?”
Yates held the door and motioned me down the hall toward the nurses’ station. When we stepped behind the counter, a nurse—a heavyset African-American woman who looked to be in her late forties—glanced up. “Lord, Lord,” she said, “the vultures are circling.” I winced, but she and the cardiologist both guffawed.
Yates leaned over a computer and called up the hospital’s Web-access page. I sat down in the armless chair and rolled up to the keyboard. I’d never managed to remember all the slashes and periods in our Web site’s address, but I knew that if I searched for “tennessee forensic anthropology center body donation,” I’d be rewarded with a link to the donor form. Three mouse clicks later, I saw the words I’d seen thousands of times before: “I do hereby dispose of and give my body, after my death, to The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, for use by the Department of Anthropology or its designee, for educational and research purposes. I request, authorize, and instruct my surviving spouse, next-of-kin, executor or the physician who certifies my death to notify The University of Tennessee, Department of Anthropology, immediately after my death of the availability of my body.” In a room under the stadium, a file drawer contained nearly two thousand of these forms, each signed and witnessed and awaiting the death and delivery of the donor’s body. In another, larger room, row upon row of metal shelves held almost a thousand boxed skeletons, the bones of donors who had already delivered on their promise. I hit “print” and asked for three copies, and I was rewarded by the whir of the printer. “Done,” I announced over my shoulder to Dr. Yates, but he didn’t answer, and when I glanced around, he was gone. Puzzled, I looked at the nurse, who nodded wordlessly over the counter and down the hall. The cardiologist was emerging from a patient’s room. He caught my eye and beckoned to me.
“Bring that form, please, Bill,” he called, and I obliged, but when I realized what he had in mind, I flushed with self-consciousness and stopped halfway down the hall. He practically jogged toward me, this physician who’d looked dead on his feet just minutes before. “Don’t be shy,” he said. “When I told him you were out here, he was so pleased. He actually smiled, this dying man. It would mean a lot to him to meet you.”
Slumping, I allowed him to steer me into the room.