Bodies

The most jarring thing about being back in the US has been taking in Americans.

The sudden hyper-abundance of adults in T-shirts, shorts and sneakers is shocking. Right now, everyone looks kind of child-like. Their faces are full, well-fed, untroubled, open. Their carriage is relaxed. They smile and joke a lot. They are wearing sneakers and white socks, shapeless T-shirts tucked into pleated shorts. They have their hands in their pockets and caps on their heads and are just a whole lot bigger — taller, broader in the shoulders, taking up more space — than I am used to at the moment.

But if I am having a little trouble with them, they are not having any obvious trouble with me. When a little boy in the row ahead on the airplane turns to make faces at me, it's because he's an extroverted little kid, and not because he can't stop staring at the freaky Asian lady. When I take off my sunglasses, there are no sudden double-takes, or intense sidelong stares, or elbowing of companions and speculating about the "Chinese" (actually partly Japanese) body standing near them.

I appreciate that, at least in routine transactions, differences in clothing and phenotype do not immediately preoccupy people here (in Columbus) as those differences seemed to distract people there (Tbilisi). And I am surprised at how much of my own discomfort at re-entry to the US is with those things, and how little of it has to do with, say, the radically different landscape or food.

Yesterday, I went to "BODIES: the exhibition" — a display of polymerized dissected human cadavers — and for a few hours I stopped noticing or thinking about how people style themselves on the outside.

The BODIES exhibition is surprisingly gentle on the senses — the dissected bodies are unexpectedly immaculate — jerky-like, cured, free of odor or unsettling slippery texture. (Even so, the rose-tinted muscles on the skinless poised specimens present an unfortunate corollary to a rib-eye steak I ate previous night, and that night I dream of eating ground person). Most of the full bodies on display are male. Their ghostly testes hover like vinegar-softened eggs at the end of vermicelli. Of the outer skin, only the outer rings of belly-buttons, penis glans, and labia remain. These resemble the lips of tied-off balloons, and are the color of condensed milk.

Much of the exhibit is brightly lit, with warm-colored walls and instructive blurbs on the walls. There are the most helpful docents I've ever seen — all of them medical professionals — in white lab-coats and “ASK ME!” buttons on hand to teach visitors more about the BODY. One animated sports therapist points out where the ACL has been mislabeled. A middle-school health teacher explains the function of the small and large intestine, pointing with enthusiasm at the noodley organs' crooks and curves. All of this is instructive, startling, sobering. I put a hand over my abdomen and think about how little the conscious part of my brain has been looking out for the welfare of the army of organs under its watch.

There are two rooms that invite a different sort of contemplation. The room showcasing the vascular system, and the room demonstrating fetal development, are both lit like the gem exhibit at the Natural History Museum in Washington DC. These are dark rooms where each specimen is bathed in a soft pool of bright light. The atmosphere encourages reverent, hushed contemplation. In the vascular room, the delicate framework of the body's blood vessels are suspended in water. They are brightly colored coral — red, blue, green, white — and are dazzling in their intricacy. Fragments of fragile latticework have broken and lie in barely visible drifts at the bottoms of the glass cases.

In the fetus room, translucent palm-sized babies float in crystal-clear cylinders of water. Their needle-thin bones have been injected with a red dye to illustrate skeletal development. They are beautiful, these person-shaped jellyfish with their whispers of ruby bones. There are also larger, less pretty specimens on display here: two polymerized babies with birth defects sprawl in a glass case. One has a cleft palette, the other spinal bifida. These plasticized infants look like Gerber Baby dolls that hit a manufacturing snag. It is difficult to associate them with flesh-and-blood infants.

In the last room of the exhibit, there is a skinless body in three head-to-foot slices. The cadaver is split like a peach, with the pit of the body — the internal organs — suspended between the front and back sides. The accompanying sign notes that the greatest possible genetic difference between two people is .1%.

BODIES doesn't need to make the point that we are all alike — all of the bodies on display, sans skin, look terribly like one another, however they are sliced. What seems more remarkable, in the end, is how much stock we put in that slim margin of difference — and how much work we do to exaggerate it, to distinguish ourselves and each other from “the rest.”