The dermatome is his most specialized instrument, one used to take skin from one part of the body and graft it onto another part. The surgery has been going seven hours now, the dermatome in constant use for the past two; for the first time the surgeon is beginning to see his work start to take shape, the way a portrait artist first glimpses the face on his canvas. Blood, pus, urine, the stench of human flesh burningthese are some of the vulgar realities of the craftbut the art… The surgeon pauses a moment in his work to admire what he's accomplished.
STATEMENT
The bars used to get to me, the singles bars along the Strip especially, the rainy Wednesday night just starting to roll. The first exultant beat of the disco music summoning the dancers to the floor. The first roaring snort of coke shared in both the men's and women's bathrooms. The first inkling in the minds of otherwise faithful wives out with girlfriends that maybe… just maybe… well, who can be faithful forever, right? And over it all a kind of despair… everybody knowing that soon enough their looks will be gone and the dancefloor given over to younger and prettier people… and that life will be measured out in paychecks and annual health checkups and the ever-increasing number of funerals one attends as one gets older. But if the music is loud enough… if the drugs are spellbinding enough… if the sex is hard and fast and explosive enough… well, then all these terrible intimations of age and grief can be held at bay for one boozy night.
I was of them, the dancers, and yet not of them because I knew the secret: that it doesn't matter. That you can go out and carve up as many people as you want because memory passes so quickly… collective memory… generation unto generation. All those people coming out of Loop office buildings today, soon enough they'll all be gone and gone utterly and gone for ever… in the dust and ash of relentless Time… the Time I'm always so aware of… the Death I see in the faces of infants… the Smile, there at the last, on the faces of the women, as if they're glad to finally have it over with.
And so turn the music up louder; and take an extra hit of coke; and cut her up real goodbutcher her, in factbecause in the end, despite all the bullshit the priests and the politicians try and fill us with, in the end, it doesn't matter.
It just doesn't matter at all.