When I questioned what kind of bad guys pluses and minuses could really be in the storylines of nightmares, my mother just told me to go back to sleep; everything was alright; my father had just had a bad dream. Even now, I still can’t understand what about theorems and proofs could have given my father so much pain and made him lose so much sleep. I don’t know if the tension migraines went away after he stopped working or not. I didn’t ask him. When my father called last night, I knew he either wanted to talk about how he was dying or how he was disappointed in me. He had been both for years now. My mother, sister, and me silently started wearing earplugs to bed. It was a habit I kept, later prompting my med school roommate to inquire if I really found the sounds of his nocturnal activities that repellent. I told him the story. I regretted it. After that, whenever I outperformed him on an exam, he would clap his hands over his forehead, screw up his face in a sort of scholarly constipation, and cry, “Augh, so smart! It hurts, oh it hurts!” That wasn’t how I felt though. How I felt was more like my medical school roommate’s response when I first told him about my father’s headaches. “Well. Never had that happen to me before,” he had said. “I must be a moron.” The cadaver class was held in a locked room down a long hallway, which was also locked. This was a precaution so that no one would walk in accidently. God forbid some luckless French Revolution PhD should stumble in and get a real good look at a real dead body. It was fair, though, I guess. It was enough when you knew exactly what you were getting yourself into. The college had a limited number of cadavers, so they required that each pair of firstyear students dissect under teaching assistant supervision. The morning after my father called, I unlocked the door to the cadaver lab and discovered, to my relief, that years after my own first-year anatomy class, I was still used to the smell. The lights were surgically bright but green-tinged. This, like the smell, was the same as I remembered it. I suspected they made the lighting this way so that no one would notice that the cadavers’ skin was a little blue. The students smiled too much and stood with their hands clasped behind their backs when they received instructions, except for one thin girl with glasses who kept pulling at her earlobe, stretching the flesh open around the hole for her earring. It turned my stomach. I was assigned to supervise two young men. I knew I had my work cut out for me when I witnessed them poking at their cadaver like they were trying to wake him from a nap—he, a Caucasian male who had retained the pursed lips of a concert violinist—and I
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