The Corpse

THE CORPSE

Once a corpse in a wildly popular “Bodies” exhibition had some things to say about the crowd milling around it.
First of all, what were they even doing here? For days, mobs of them had been pressing up against the entrance doors like shoppers on Black Friday, ready to trample one another in a rush for whatever they felt was just the thing needed to fill some gap in their lives. Fistfights were a constant threat as irritable parents accused one another of cutting into line and trying to get to the corpses on display before “my little Billy Joe and Mary Beth here break into tears! They’ve been up all night with excitement!” As if death were the latest, must-have virtual reality game.
And look at the way these people dressed! If they had no sense of dignity themselves, couldn’t they at least acknowledge that the corpses they were gawking at might still claim some measure of it? Did they imagine the fellow in the pose of a champion runner over there, all his muscles bared and preserved—all the beauty of a powerful body at its peak and never to decline—did they imagine he would have stooped to wearing their stained T-shirts and loud, baggy shorts? Or the young woman on exhibit just ahead of him in joyful awareness of her mind and body so beautifully in balance, how thankful she must be to escape a decline over the next decade or two into one of these coiffured frumps from the mall.
Like lovers on a Grecian urn the young pair were.
Even the corpses whose organs presented various stages of disease or decay must wince at the spectacle of this squinting, grimacing lot who’d bought tickets for an opportunity to feel pleased about their own state by comparison. A sweaty crush barely able to resist the urge to reach out and poke at bodies so coolly poised—little did they know who looked the more ravaged by time, excess, and neglect.
But what struck the corpse as even more distasteful was the unacknowledged fascination with death itself betrayed by so many of these visitors. How clear death’s hypnotic power over them was as they awkwardly tried to mask their fixation through exaggerated displays of revulsion or theatrical titters. Rather than giving themselves over to awe at the human form fully revealed, they sought to cover up their embarrassment at its naked truth by adopting a Peeping Tom sneer, as if to satisfy a repressed necrophilic urge while still pretending they didn’t suffer from it in the least.
This secret infatuation with death must leave them only half-alive: strangers to their own existence unless it brought them some thrill that raised their pulse a beat or two. The equivalent of Eros and Thanatos sitting side by side in the cheap seats yet oblivious to each other’s presence all the while? No wonder benumbed, waxen Internet porn was the biggest business on the planet. What else could offer these people the combination of titillation and deniability that no doubt brought them to an exhibition like this as well? How prurient! And how morbid! It was enough to give any self-respecting corpse the heebie-jeebies.
This one wanted to shout out loud, “Who are the real dead ones in the room, anyway?”