People Have Their Uses

Scratchy wool sound though the forty-year old mono speaker of the school projector. On the screen there's a series of cursive handwritten letters that run up the frame too fast to catch. Maybe there is an "I" and some word that ends with "tch," maybe.

The entire frame goes white for a blinding second.

A sweeping arm rotates clockwise over the countdown of Academy Leader^TM: 5 4 3 — there's never a 2, just a short and shrill beep to help determine the soundtrack is synchronized correctly — then "Picture Start."

Title card reads: "People Have Their Uses."

In a black and white world, on the residential sidewalk of a black and white city, a young boy is walking down the street. He wears white sneakers, a t-shirt for a band who had their 15 minutes 20 minutes ago, and an unbuttoned shirt over the t-shirt. He's got long hair. He wears glasses. He's paying attention to a portable music player. There is some function he's trying to make work, but it isn't working, and this sudden reticence from his otherwise trustworthy MP3 player feels more like a betrayal than a malfunction.

Tiny distant music on the soundtrack. He's listening to something bass heavy, but it is otherwise just a thin, unidentifiable hum.

The nameless boy's foot catches the edge of a section of the sidewalk that's been lifted by a tree root that has extended under it. The nameless boy goes down hard with his benarms still in front of him. His right elbow shatters as he hits the pavement. The separation of one of the bones in his arm produces a sharp point that then tears through the flesh.

The boy flops on to his back. He's bleeding profusely. He tries to sit up, cries out in pain, and falls back to the pavement. He begins crying. There is a puddle of blood pooling under his right elbow. The nameless boy pushes the back of his head against the pavement to lift his chest and level his eyes with the horizon. He looks around and the entire black and white world is upside down. He sees a mailbox a few feet away. He uses his legs to push himself towards the mailbox. It is slow work and his right foot slips in the puddle of blood he's left behind.

He reaches the mailbox and inches his way into a sitting position. He cradles his shattered elbow like it was an infant. He's still crying.

Suddenly, just above and to the left of the wounded boy's bowed head, an animated screw appears in the air. It floats screw-head down without any apparent support. It has two eyes, each with a thick black rectangle of eyebrow hovering inexplicably above it. It has a small isosceles triangle of a nose. It has an oddly detached smile, something like the Cheshire cat's. An improbable, tiny cowboy hat sits at a jaunty angle off the point of the screw.

"Whoa Jeffrey," the screw says. "Looks like you've had quite a buster."

Jeffrey looks up. Despite the fact that blood continues to flow freely from the bone shard protruding from his elbow, happiness spreads quickly across is face. "Montana Jim the Bone Screw!" Then, as if ashamed, Jeffrey drops his head. "I think I busted my arm up. I don't think it will ever be fixed."

"Well don't worry on that account, little partner. We'll have you good as new soon. I'll even help you out."

Jeffrey's tears are drying. "You can do that, Montana Jim?"

"You bet, amigo. That's what we bone screws do. But first, let's get you to the hospital."

As I'm literally hacked out of somebody at the beginning of my life and end it vanishing into the body of another, what is me and what is them gets confused. If I'm going to get this all out at all, I need to do it now. While I still think there's a me.

Pinpointing the moment I became me is difficult. I hear that this is no easier for you. And I have the luxury of indifference. Establishing the moment when a person is alive is a politically contentious issue for you. For me it's a fairly pointless speculation.

I can describe my "father," as it were.

Brad Jurey. Brad was a housing inspector for the Multnomah County Department of Human Services. Average height, I guess. His hair was thinning in the back, he wore glass, he was out of shape, but a lucky metabolism keep him looking reasonably fit without his putting any effort into it.

Brad was divorced. He married right out of college. He and his wife, Diane, had three children: two boys and a girl. He was fundamentally unsuited for married life. He cheated on his wife on four different occasions. He was caught three times. The third time the argument got bad and he hit Diane. She left him. He secretly felt relieved and put up only token resistance. His lawyer, who was more zealous about Brad's paternal rights than Brad was, managed to get Brad a regular schedule of visitations. Brad kept it up for awhile, but fell out of the habit. Nobody pushed him to come around more.

In 1995 or 1996, Brad's middle boy, Alex, sent him a long and angry letter. Brad read about half of it before filing it away with other mementos in a floor safe in the master bedroom.

I wonder if anybody ever found that floor safe.

After a period of self-loathing, Brad refocused on his career. His single-minded devotion, though born mostly of a dread of the effort a personal life would entail, earned him the respect of colleagues. He got a small office with a window.

Brad also found himself flirting with Blair Tucker, a young woman in Human Services. She worked with Metro on Waste Management. Blair was a thin, mousy woman. She was a decade younger than him and Brad was shocked to find his attention was welcome. Their first date was to a movie. I forget the name. It was awful and they walked out of it less than half way through. Brad had never walked out of a movie before, but Blair said they should go and it seemed natural and kind of liberating. After some awkward bumps in the road, Brad and Blair became a steady thing.

One morning, while fiddling with a too-thin tie that Brad couldn't remember buying, his brain killed him. He had developed a balloon-like bulge in a cluster of veins at the base of his brain. He didn't know this and, as he was thinking that he should just wear a different tie, the bulge burst and killed him instantly. It happens.

Blair found him later that night. He had crumpled into a heap of expired humanity in front of mirror that hung on the inside of the door to his bedroom closet.

At this point, I was still just an undifferentiated spot of commercial potential in Brad's right leg.

"This is where bones screws get their start, Jeffrey, on the disarticulation table."

The animated screw hovers above the naked and pale body of Brad Jurey.

"Most of the bodies that end up here are donated by their families for medical research. They assume, incorrectly, that their loved one will end up at a medical school. Instead, innovative mortuary companies have found ways of turning useless dead corpses into useful medical products."

"But Montana Jim, isn't that illegal?" asks Jeffrey in an off-screen voice over.

"Not at all," says the cartoon. "It is illegal to sell corpses. But you are allowed to recoup the cost of shipping and other related charges."

A mortuary worker, a short and chubby man in white overalls, approaches the corpse. He wears latex gloves and a black rubber apron. A Pall Mall dangles from his lips.

"Some crooked body brokers inflate the costs of these charges. And that is illegal. But smart brokers simply create two independent companies and sell the bodies, or body parts, to themselves. That's perfectly legal."

"And smart!"

"Right, Jeffrey!"

"But Montana Jim, you said 'body parts' — why would any medical school want body parts?"

"Most of these bodies aren't headed to medical schools, little buddy," says the smiling screw. "A majority of them are headed to medical supply companies where they will be used in marketing campaigns. Supply companies use bodies for product demonstrations at conferences and other medical gatherings. But these companies don't need the whole corpse for their marketing purposes, just certain parts. So, body brokers find it more profitable to 'step on' the corpses — cutting them up into saleable parts."

The mortuary worker takes a small circular saw in hand and begins to cut into the flesh of Brad's right leg. There is a high pitched whine on the film's soundtrack, this deepens and becomes an uneven moan as the blade works its way through skin, fat, and muscle.

The screw continues: "The brokers call this disarticulation, and it is the secret to making a killing — oops, heh heh, in the cadaver business. A whole body 'sells' for $5,000, but a fully disarticulated body can fetch nearly $12,000. An intact spine alone can be sold for nearly $2,000."

"Wow. That's a lot of comic books," Jeffrey exclaims.

"That it is," chuckles Montana Jim. "That it is."

I don't know if the disarticulation is the bed one which I was conceived, but I feel it marked the definitive end of Brad and should be marked as some sort of milestone in my birth.

After the thigh was removed from the body, I was set in a blue and white picnic cooler — the words "Medical Samples" written on the lid in black felt tip marker — and set aside in a cold storage locker. I didn't understand it at the time, but parts that aren't already slated for sale are stored in hopes that some order will come in. I wasn't alone: random organs in bags labeled with pieces of masking tape, five left feet, half a hip structure with semi-collapsed uterus still attached, and a three fingered hand were all in with me in what the mortuary workers called the Meat Locker.

My memory is already starting to blend with my new me, but I still remember one of the mortuary workers clearly. She was a red-headed girl, a dash of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She only ever painted the nails on her thumbs and pinky fingers. She wore a pin featuring a small image of an astronaut on the left breast of her overalls. She'd eat her lunches in the Meat Locker, mostly raw veggies. If being surrounded by body parts while she ate bothered her, I don't recall her ever giving any sign of it. She would eat with this blank expression on her face, staring off into space.

Untreated, body parts don't last long. Even in the cold. And nobody wants damaged parts.

After a week or so, any part that wasn't shipped out was slotted for destruction or, as happened in my case, was stripped of the remaining flesh. This is, from the grumbling I heard, a real pain of a job. Most of the methods the mortuary works would like to use to rapidly strip flesh from bone would also weaken the bone structure.

"So they have to strip it off by hand," says Montana Jim, cheerfully.

On screen, a mortuary worker packs newly cleaned bones in a FedEx box.

"From there the bones are shipped to the manufacturing company."

Montage of a truck, a plane, another truck, and, finally, a worker receiving the package at a loading dock.

"Skilled workers then put the bone in a machine called a lathe. Here, at this Texas facility, we use a lathe that was once used to create parts for jets for Lockheed-Martin. The body broker business doesn't like to see anything go to waste."

"Gee Montana Jim," says Jeffrey, still off-screen. "I bet that's really good for the environment. All that recycling, I mean."

"That it is, partner. That it is."

Cut to a CGI-sequence showing how the lathe carves bone into small screw.

"Hey," says Jeffrey. "That looks just like you Montana Jim!"

"Why it does! Howdy brother!"

Spasms of other memories, newer memories from another me, make it harder to recall. Anything from before.

I remember the packaging I came in.

And something about a birthday. An accident. A mailbox.

But, I'm losing it. Packaging. Right, packaging.

I was shrink-wrapped and then stapled to a small bit of cardboard backing. Red symbol above me: two red snakes wrapped around a torch, some vines clinging to it, I think.

I remember now. I busted my elbow. They had replaced the joint. With me. No, with metal and foreign bone. Us?

Temple Biological. Does that make any sense?

It gets confusing. But you get used to it.