“I’ve never read anything like it,” I said truthfully; then—before he had a chance to drag me into Fourier analysis or other mathematical waters that were over my head—I changed the subject. “If you don’t mind my asking, how are your hands?”
My question contained equal measures of curiosity, concern, and amazement. A few years before, Eddie’s hands had been terribly burned by radiation. A physicist in Oak Ridge—“the Atomic City”—had been murdered by a radioactive pellet: a powerful imaging source hidden inside a vitamin capsule. Eddie, not realizing what he was handling, had removed the pellet from the dead man’s intestine, and as he held it in his hands—for no more than sixty seconds—the radiation had inflicted irreversible damage. He had tried bionic prosthetics—a pair of i-limb hands, which looked straight out of Star Wars—but the lack of tactile feedback had made them only marginally useful for a physician whose work required deftness with scalpels, forceps, and microscope slides. So when he was offered the chance for a dual hand transplant at Emory University, Eddie had accepted without hesitating, despite the risk that sepsis might set in, or his body’s immune system might reject the new hands completely, or the nerves might not regenerate fully. So my deceptive question carried a lot of weight, and a lot of worry.
By way of an answer, Eddie stretched out both hands, his gloved fingers extended and spread wide. Next he clenched and unclenched both hands slowly, then touched each of his fingertips to his thumbs, one by one. Finally he extended his right hand toward me—toward my own hand—offering to shake. I took his hand in mine, and when he gripped, my eyes widened, first in admiration, then in something approaching pain. “Uncle,” I said, only half joking, and when he released my hand, his smile matched my own. “Eddie, that’s amazing. I’m thrilled the transplants have worked so well.”
“I thought my career was over,” he said. “I don’t often use the word ‘miracle,’ but I can’t think of a more accurate term for this. It has given me back my work. My life. My wholeness.” And with that, we hitched up our paper masks. And we began.
We started by simply looking once Eddie had cut away the clothing. Jimmy Ray Shiflett was a tall, sinewy guy, measuring six feet, two inches, weighing one hundred eighty-three pounds, clothed. He wasn’t beefy, in the way of weight lifters and bodybuilders, but he was muscled in a lean, ropy way—a cowboy way—and I suspected that his military service and militia training had instilled in him a regimen of regular workouts. Hard to fight the battle of Armageddon, I supposed—or the New Civil War, or whatever war might present itself—if you’re fat and out of shape.
The most striking thing about him, of course, was his blasted face. It drew my eye irresistibly—horrifyingly—even when I tried to focus elsewhere. And there was abundant evidence of other trauma, earlier trauma, elsewhere on his body. In addition to the tattoos, Shiflett’s skin bore a profusion of scars attesting to fistfights (layer upon layer of scar tissue on his knuckles), bludgeon fights (star-shaped scars on his cheek and scalp), even knife fights (long, healed gashes in an upper arm and the lower belly).
Eddie interrupted his dictated inventory of the scars long enough for a side comment to me. “Nobody would accuse him of having a soft life.”
“Just a guess,” I said, “but I’d hate to see the other guys. I suspect they look even worse.” I caught myself looking at the face again. “Except, of course, for . . . you know.”
“Indeed. By the way, do you need me to take DNA samples for identification? Dental records are perhaps not ideal in this case.”
“Perhaps not,” I echoed, amused by his wry understatement. “But no, we don’t need DNA. The TBI took fingerprints from the hand that didn’t get blasted. The prints in his service records are a match. It’s Shiflett, for sure.”
Eddie nodded, then, with deft strokes of a scalpel, he made a Y-shaped incision, cutting from each shoulder to the breastbone, then down the chest and abdomen to the pubic bone. He laid the scalpel aside, then tugged open the flaps he’d made, exposing the rib cage and viscera. As he did, I was struck again by his hands: if I didn’t know they’d been cut from a cadaver and stitched onto Eddie’s wrists, I wouldn’t have guessed there’d ever been a thing wrong with them.
Using a stout pair of shears, he cut the ribs and opened the chest cavity, moving swiftly, removing and weighing the heart and lungs, then slicing open each and examining the interior, dictating, as he worked, into a microphone suspended over the autopsy table. For a dead guy, Shiflett appeared remarkably healthy—except, of course, for . . . you know.
Finally I decided to stop resisting and just give in—just look at the damn face. “Eddie,” I said, stretching both hands toward the head, “do you mind?”