Viscera

It's pretty comfortable, this dentist's chair. I’m cushioned by patent leather, and kept warm by the surgical sheets laid over me. Steel kidney dishes sit on the trolley next to me, their contents concealed beneath cloth.

You come in, wearing pink scrubs and a face mask. Your hair is tucked back over your ears under a net. You carry another dish with a broad gauge hypodermic. It’s an epidural. I know because you’ve prepared me for this scene already.

I roll onto my side, and lift the sheet to expose my bare back. With gloved fingers you count down six thoracic vertebrae. You wipe the area with an alcohol scrub then insert the needle and guide it between my bones until the tip reaches the subarachnoid. You depress the plunger and I feel the pressure of the anaesthetic entering me. Numbness wraps around my back and torso. I hear you withdraw the needle and adhere an antibacterial plaster to the puncture.

I lie back, feeling distant from my body. You cuff my hands above my head and spread my legs with ankle cuffs on the chair frame. Your fingers brush my sternum but I don’t feel it.

You’re trying not to let me see it, but you have a book on the trolley next to the chair. It’s an anatomy book. It shows a male torso in cross-section and incision contours marked out according to surgical intent – what lines to cut depending on what organ you’re removing.

With a Sharpie you begin to dot dot dot beneath my lowest rib. Phantom tickles sparkle above my collarbone which I realise is the upper border of anaesthesia. Once you’ve marked the incision, you set the pen aside, and pull up a stool. You make yourself comfortable, turning yourself slightly side-on to me, then you pick up a scalpel.

I feel a dull poke as the blade tip pushes into the skin, then a long tug as you draw a crimson line across me. The line broadens in the blade’s slow wake. Your eyes travel with the scalpel’s point as I watch my torso split open.

You put the scalpel aside then turn back and begin to reflect the tissues of my belly, folding it over my groin, until I see my insides for the first time. My first thought is how closely packed my innards are, and how neatly delineated. There’s no mess of meat and sinew. It’s a carefully packed hamper. Each piece is coated in some natural lube that lets it writhe and grind against its neighbour. We both pause to appreciate the subtle ballet of my existence.

Internal organs don’t feel pain. They lack the nociceptors to perceive traumatic injury like cutting, burning or piercing. They experience only the visceral sensations, which are tension, inflammation and secondary effects caused by constriction of operation, often experienced as nausea, dizziness and respiratory depression.

The experiment begins. With a gloved hand you begin to delve. You trace the veiny ribbing of my large intestine with a latex-covered finger. Strings of mucus run along behind. You wrap your fingers around it and squeeze. You smile. “Warm.”

As I watch you contort my innards, I don’t really feel anything. The absence of sensation is dizzying. I can hear you moving the stuff around inside the tubes inside me, but it’s like it isn’t me. It’s some other machine you’re pumping and massaging.

You push four fingers under the bulk of my liver. It’s the largest organ there. Its rubbery lobes make it look more like a movie prop. Inert, unmoving, the slow haematic filtration processes require no physical motion. With both hands you tug it out from under the shelf of my diaphragm with a wet schloop, hinging it out from the bundle of tubes connecting its anterior section to the rest of me. It’s incredible what a construction kit I am, each piece discrete to be shifted at will.

My liver proves unentertaining. You shove it back into place and move on to my stomach. The stomach contains mostly acid and the remnants of recently ingested food. But I’ve not eaten anything recently so at first you’re disappointed there is nothing more to play with there. You squeeze it harder, and I feel bile rising up my oesophagus and a twinge of heartburn. You reach down to a bag at your feet and take from it a Tupperware lunchbox. You pull out a sandwich (mustard, gherkins, lettuce, cheese, white bread but with grains) and hold it to my mouth. I bite a chunk out of it and chew it as you watch me, then I swallow and you watch the bolus pass down my throat and wait for it to reach your other hand still holding my stomach tight. Not enough. We repeat the process several times, until with a satisfied pause you can now feel the food inside me. With both hands now you massage the food around inside the smooth sac of my stomach. With fascinated determination you try to squeeze the new food out the right side of the stomach into the duodenum and the first ribs of the large intestine, but it all gets a bit vague and undefined at that boundary, so you release it and just let the food be digested.

The small intestines are appealing in all their oozy chaos. There doesn’t seem much order to their arrangement. You bury both your hands into their mass. The coils move and slide around your wrists like a nest of lazy pythons. I feel your fingers grasp my spinal column. You slide them down slowly until you reach the base of my abdominal cavity. Somewhere lower lie my bladder and sphincter, tucked tight into the pelvic cavity. With a finger you push between the last bulges of my lower intestine until you find the large white sac of my bladder. You tug it and a small trail of piss comes out of me.

I’m shivering now, with my inner temperature already quite compromised. So my head goes back and I close my eyes as you quickly close me up. You fold back the flap of my belly and fix it in place with surgical staples along the incision, then you close the wound with liquid adhesive and cover it with gauze.

I writhe in a limited fashion in the chair. The wound is throbbing now. The epidural is wearing off. So you pick up another hypodermic, this one finer, and you search for a vein in my arm, place the tip, insert it and depress the plunger. The analgesic takes effect, my mind drops into unconsciousness and this strange dream comes to an end.

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