Becoming A Cadaver
By: Seth Lyon
I briefly dated a guy that worked at a cadaver lab. My mother often tells me that I like to find the strangest person in a room and strike up a conversation.
“Whatever happened to the heroin addict?” she asked over the phone.
“He wasn’t a heroin addict,” I said, making my bed. “He said he used to sell heroin as a teenager in high school. It’s a little bit different, I guess. We don’t talk anymore, though. He moved.”
“And what’s wrong with this one?”
“This one?” I wrestled with my pillows and pulled some of my clothes off the floor. “Nothing,” I said. I sprayed some cologne on my bed and tried to flatten out the wrinkles. “Well. I don’t know — he works in a cadaver lab.”
My mom went silent for a second.
I don’t usually post stories about my love life, partly because I don’t want to put someone’s else’s life on blast, but mostly because my deep archive of one-night-stands doesn’t really make for particularly interesting stories.
Plus, it doesn’t help that I’m not really a “dating” person to begin with. Throughout my time at FSU I didn’t really go on many “dates”, because there’s only so much lying I can stomach over the course of one meal. I eventually have to call my date out on their bullshit.
The second you say you’re secretly a math genius, or that your favorite band is Coldplay, you’re going to be able to feel me trying to obliterate you into dust with my mind. And when that happens, neither of us can enjoy our soup.
I pretty much avoided dates at all costs, focusing my energy instead on more productive areas — like becoming the glowing, cynical douchebag I am today. By the time senior year rolled around, I had given up on the dating process entirely and resorted to the more-than-occasional hookup.
I think my mom knew this — at least subconsciously — so, as happy as she was that I was getting back into the traditional, heteronormative lifestyle, I could tell she was more than a little disappointed in my choices.
“He works… in a cadaver lab?” she repeated.
“Yes,” I said. “He’s a professor, kind of. He teaches undergrad classes down there. He cuts open bodies and stuff.”
I could hear my mom judgmentally flip through some pages of a magazine she wasn’t reading. “Where in the world do you meet these people?”
Dan and I met on Grindr, a gay “dating” app where most wayward homosexuals decide to meet each other.
Like most dating apps, Grindr has its pros and cons, but unlike most dating apps, Grindr isn’t for dating at all. Grindr is for sex and literally everyone knows it.
Grindr is to dating what Dunkin’ Donuts is to coffee. Sure, they say they sell coffee there, but if you’ve ever tasted it, you know it’s just cigarette ashes in water. So, you’re better off just admitting you’re there for donut holes.
My Grindr profile was a simple one — height, age, weight, the usual. I wanted everyone to know how amazingly funny I was, so I uploaded a picture of myself that I had taken on Snapchat, using the filter where it puts a big, homosexual, flower-crown on your head. I captioned it: “I took this gay-ass picture at your dad’s house.”
Whenever I opened the app, I waited patiently for the harem of boys to come knocking.
Usually people took one a look at the caption, laughed, and proceeded to tell me horrible and graphic things they wanted to do me.
And, as much as I make fun of it, I do actually enjoy Grindr for what it is. It’s a glimpse into the most primal slice of society where someone can message you “hey,” twice a day, everyday, for four years without ever getting the message that you’re not interested.
It’s an app riddled with straight boys that are afraid to give you their real name without performing a military-grade background check on you. And, even then, you’re probably still getting a fake one and only half of a face.
It’s an app that’s comprised of more than a hundred, identical looking six-pack torsos that are almost completely indistinguishable from each other.
It’s an app where someone will casually ask you to tie them up to a bed and take them forcibly, or blow them in public, or spank them until they’re sore, or shit on their chest and call you “Daddy.”
But it’s also, apparently, an app where people genuinely look for long-term relationships — give me a break.
Every once in a while, since Grindr doesn’t force users to upload a picture or write a description of themselves, you will get a message from, quite literally, a blank profile.
About two months before I was supposed to graduate and move out of my apartment, I received one of these. A message from a blank profile without a name, caption, or picture — a catcall from a dark alley, in a seedy part of town, where all I heard was:
“Hi.”
Normally, I wouldn’t respond to a blank profile, but the month or so before I graduated college was a strange time for me, as I think it is for a lot of people. I started to obsess over all the people I could have been and all the things I could have done during my time there. I’ve already published a story on that so I won’t go into detail.
What I will say is: during this time I was pretty much doing anything for the story, including flirting with blank Grindr profiles.
“My name’s Dan,” the blank profile said.
“Seth,” I said back.
Of course, my mother would never understand any of this, so I think I just told her “we met online.”
“That explains it,” she said. I heard her close the magazine. “Is he cute at least?”
I ran some fingers through my hair and squeezed into some jeans. “Very,” I said.
It took some time, but I eventually got Dan to open up and step into the light. He sent me two pictures of himself, one wearing a suit and tie, another half-naked on a wakeboard. He looked like if Hercules had a better looking cousin, with finely groomed stubble, and an ass that could crack walnuts.
He told me about where he used to go to college, and his new job as a teacher in the cadaver lab, where he used to live, and a bunch of other details that eventually led up the The Grindr Question:
“What are you looking for?” he asked.
“Usually something stupid but right now I’m ‘studying.’ What about you?”
“Looking for dates. Relationship oriented.”
Of course he was. Anyone above an eight on the hot scale is always looking for long-term relationships. I probably sighed, or rolled my eyes, and spun around in my chair a little more.
“I’m not really on the dating scene,” I said. “Sorry. But hey, if you ever want to do something stupid, I’m definitely interested.”
“Something stupid.” He took a second. “I like it.”
We went for coffee two days later. Most of my stuff was in boxes at the time, so I really didn’t have a whole lot to do besides doodle on my move-out form and spin around in my rolling desk chair while I sent him texts from my overheating phone.
I tried blowing him off once or twice, mostly because dating someone more attractive than me is the fabric of my nightmares. I even told him that a few times, but he laughed as if I was somehow joking.
Part of me didn’t know why I agreed to go on a date with him, so I spent the greater portion of that morning thinking about it.
At the time I think convinced myself it was because he was irresistible to a writer like me, who was more than a little convinced he was a complete and total weirdo. An attractive weirdo, who somehow managed to make every conversation about the flesh of human bodies or how eyeballs look when you sliced them in half.
He fascinated me. And I think despite hating dating and the entire dating culture, I have to believe I went on the date to observe him.
It was going to make for a thrilling story.
I decided that if I was going to go, I was going to go as the most unsavory version of myself, so that he wouldn’t want more than one date. If there was a level-ten version of myself, I decided I was going into the date as a level-three. I wanted to give him every reason and opportunity to leave me in the gutter.
When he came to pick me up, I wore a hoodie. I also didn’t shave and the way I looked vaguely resembled Tom Hanks in that movie when he was stranded on a deserted island without any basic hygiene supplies or concern for the opinions of others.
Not that Dan would have cared about my hygiene. When I got in the car he shook my hand and apologized for smelling like dead people.
“Sorry if I smell like dead fat,” he said. “I was scraping skin today and some of the fat flung up and hit me in the face.”
“Um. It’s okay,” I said, fastening my seatbelt. “I don’t smell anything anyway.”
“Good. I put on some cologne,” he said. “And tell me if I’m being too gross or anything. I’m kind of desensitized to all of it.”
“Not an issue,” I said. I leaned over and kissed him on the side of the cheek, remembered that dead fat had just been there, and regretted it immediately.
He wanted to take me to a coffee shop he liked on the other side of town, so we were due for a bit of a car ride. I used the opportunity to set the tone right away. I started spouting all the dirty laundry I could muster up on the spot.
Right out of the starting gate, I told him I wasn’t shaved or douched so anal sex wasn’t happening. Most guys I’ve hooked up with would have taken that as some sort of convoluted insult, but Dan thought it was funny. He even blushed like it was endearing.
I told him that I lurked his instagram for hours before our date, and he told me I should have followed him.
I told him I was a vegan for nearly six years, and he said his big, muscular ass was somehow a vegetarian.
And then, in an attempt to tell him the worst thing about myself, I told him I was an English major — and we talked about our favorite books until he eventually parked the car.
“I read a lot of the classics but I mostly enjoy theoretical literature,” I said.
“Oh really?”
“Yeah,” I continued, trying to sound like as much of a douchebag as possible. “A lot of space theory and rhetoric. Some books on vegetarianism too. The Omnivore’s Dilemma, stuff like that.”
“I love The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” he said. “I’ve read it like five times. Michael Pollan is a genius.”
I blinked a few times. “Wait — really?”
By the time we entered the coffee shop, I realized he had barely said anything at all, other than an occasional giggle, an almost verbal blush, and various, resounding agreements with something I said.
Dan liked so many of my unsavory qualities, that, at one point, I began to legitimately panic that there wasn’t anything I could say to make him dislike me.
When we sat down with our drinks, I decided to let him do the talking. That’s why I was here, wasn’t it? Besides, it was the least I could do after the social waterboarding I had inflicted on him in the car.
I sat back in my chair, sipping my cold glass of coffee, jotting down mental notes of everything he said.
He mostly talked about the cadaver lab, unsurprisingly. He told me how he’s a teacher at the Med School, how he helps first year students pull back the skin of dead bodies, scrape out their fat, and identify the muscles underneath.
“Do you ever rip out hearts?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “but that’s coming soon enough.”
From the way his eyes beamed, I could tell he cared very little about anything other than his job dissecting human bodies, which I suppose is a great quality to have for someone in the medical field, but for someone like me, who once fainted while cutting raw chicken, I needed variety.
I was determined to discover something else about him, so in a desperate attempt to change the subject from dead bodies, I asked him a generic date question:
“What’s your favorite movie?” I asked, setting my empty glass down.
“Hmm,” he said. He thought about it for a moment, and after a while he leaned in and said: “have you ever seen the movie Saw?”
“You’re a serial killer, aren’t you?” I said it before I even thought about saying it.
He laughed and put his head on the table. “Oh no,” he said, giggling. “You must think I’m a psycho. Let me explain!”
“Oh, I’m going to let you explain,” I said. “Don’t worry about that, Dan.” Dan giggled into the table and I started laughing too. “I’m going to give you all the time you fuckin’ need on that one.”
When he finally caught his breath, he looked up and said “okay, maybe it’s not my favorite movie. I just think it’s really well done and I’ve never seen anything like it.”
For the record, Saw is a horror film where victims torture each other in an attempt to escape. I wondered if that’s what we were doing to each other.
When he asked me what my favorite movie was, I picked a romantic comedy — not because I like romantic comedies, but because I figured saying that a romantic comedy was my favorite movie was good way to raise some red flags about my emotional stability.
It didn’t.
“I love romantic comedies,” he said. “Have you ever seen Frances Ha?”
The rest of the date went swimmingly, or at least, it went exactly how I expected it to go. We stayed in the coffee shop for about two hours. Afterwards we walked around a park.
“I performed surgery on a cat once,” he said as we walked over a bridge. He stared at his feet when he said it, almost romantically, like if we were in a movie and he just told his girlfriend he loved her.
“You did?” I asked, in an almost completely unsurprised tone.
He looked up at a fake, man-made waterfall and pretended to bask in the majesty of mother nature. “Yeah,” he said, nonchalantly. “I don’t really think it’s a big deal.”
“It’s a big deal,” my mother interrupted. “I watch those Investigation Discovery shows, Seth. I see those detectives they interview talk about this stuff. Those serial killers slice up animals.”
I started laughing.
“It’s a serious thing, Seth. Don’t laugh at me like that.”
“Mom, when I take it out of context like that it’s going to sound bad, but in the moment it didn’t sound like that. He was helping a cat.”
“It’s just too much,” my mom said. “Too many red flags all at once. Why did you even continue past coffee?”
Despite my constant attempts to burn it all to the ground, my date with Dan was one of the most exciting conversations I’d had in a long time. When he said he had to go back to work, he dropped me off at my apartment, he kissed me, and he told me we should do it again soon.
When I got to my room, I immediately plopped down into my rolling chair, opened my computer, and started violently typing every detail I could remember about the guy whose only two interests were me and dead people.
“Becoming a Cadaver,” I titled it.
It practically wrote itself.
The story took shape easier than anything I had ever written and I began to see why bad-date stories were so popular. They’re instantly funny — and I really didn’t have to reinvent the wheel:
- guy reluctantly goes on date
- guy’s date is stranger than expected
- guy writes essay where he makes fun of his strange date for laughs
The problem is, I started to think I just picked a random victim to scrutinize for fun. That, maybe, I was the one performing an autopsy on an innocent person.
When I realized this, I felt like shit for three days.
I felt like a teenager after their first date. Why did I do that? Why did I say that? Why wasn’t I just myself? I had convinced myself I was both a horrible person and I had maybe, just maybe, ruined the only tangible relationship material I had gotten in years.
There was something wrong about it to me. Something unethical. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
“It’s raw,” my professor said, reading my essay.
Later that week I submitted it as an assignment in one of my writing classes so I could get some advice. After class my professor pulled me aside to talk about it.
She held the story in her hands, reading it to back to me: “… a horror film where victims torture each other in an attempt to escape. I wondered if that’s what we were doing to each other…” She put the essay down. “I just love it. And the dialogue between you two — it’s fresh. It’s — I don’t know. Your sentences, the inclusion of your mom’s calls, the things Dan said. I felt scared for you at times. Weren’t you scared?”
“No,” I said, maybe under my breath. “In a lot of ways he was charming.”
She closed the essay and ran her hand over the cover page. “Becoming a Cadaver. Great stuff. If you want to publish it, you should change Dan’s name, though. If you’re going to go there, you should really go all the way. Call him ‘cadaver boy’ — or no, ‘dead boy’ — something like that.”
“I don’t think I’m going to publish it,” I said.
“What?”
“It just feels like I’ve done a bad thing. I went on a date for the sole purpose of writing a story about him.”
“Well — weren’t all the details true?”
“Yes,” I said. “But that’s not even the point. He was just trying to live his life and maybe find love but instead I showed up, a reporter in disguise.”
My professor dismissed my concerns, as did a handful of students that had overheard the conversation.
“That’s what we do,” one of the students said. “We write. Even if you write fiction, you’re just going to write about things you’ve experienced. It’s better you write something good than something boring. Do you even still talk to him?”
After our date, I continuously tried to put myself in positions where I could make it up and prove that I wasn’t a shit person. At the time, I wasn’t really a person who drank or stayed out late with any regularity, but I went out every night for a week in the hopes that he would come out to see me.
He didn’t.
And after about the third night of trying to meet him at the club, he told me he had a confession: he didn’t drink. He goes to bed early every night so that he can get up and be prepared to teach.
I told him I didn’t drink either, which is a hard sell when you’ve gone out three nights in a row.
We sent texts, though. A lot of them. Including that time he said he “finally watched that movie.”
“What movie?”
“We Need To Talk About Kevin. The one where the kid shoots up the school.”
“Yeah”, I said. “It’s one of the few thrillers I like.”
“Yeah, it was super good,” he said. “I think I identify with the kid.”
“You what?”
“Not because he like shot up the school or anything, just the way he hates his mom.”
I didn’t tell my mother that part.
A few days later I convinced him to come over and stay the night. When I called him, he was reluctant. He said he had to get up early in the morning because he likes to go to the gym before class. I told him it was lowkey. We didn’t have to have sex.
“Just come over and chill, it’s not a big deal.”
He agreed and I hung up the phone to prepare for the imminent sex.
“I don’t think you should see him again,” my mother said. At this point, she had stopped all the side tasks she was doing and was laser-focused on our conversation.
“I know you don’t,” I said, looking through the blinds of my window, “but I’m going to.”
“When?”
I laughed. “Right now.”
Dan’s car pulled up outside my apartment building and I grabbed my keys off my kitchen counter. “I’ve got to go,” I said. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Please don’t let him kill you.”
There wasn’t any visitors parking at my house, so Dan told me to get in and we drove about two blocks down the road so he could park by a campus building — the med school to be specific.
Dan brought over a backseat full of garbage he said he needed in order to sleep over, which included a pillow, a few Publix bags, and a giant backpack full of pre-prepared meals to feed that herculean ass of his.
When we got out, he handed me his pillow and put on his backpack. “You know what’s down there?” he asked, pointing to a small rectangular window at the bottom of the med school.
“The bodies?” I asked.
“Mhm,” he said, smiling the cheekiest of cheeky smiles.
When we got to my apartment, I laid on the bed. He dropped his bag of food off on my desk and flopped down beside me, giggling at some show on the television. I think it must have been American Dad (his favorite show), because I remember him staring at it with complete and total attention.
I just stared at him pretty much the whole time.
He was honestly so stunning to look at, and maybe that’s why I was so unphased by all of the the things I knew were sketchy about him. A muscular frame that made his shirt seem too tight for his body, a jawline that looked like it could slice the thick collarbone it rested on, and a series of soft veins that ran up his hand and over his wrist.
When I reached out and ran some fingers over them, he looked at me and pulled me in. Dan was affectionate, more affectionate than this story would lead you to believe, but when he pulled me in he climbed on top of me, pushed his stomach on my stomach, and ran some fingers over my shoulder blade.
“I like your shoulders,” he said, running his finger down and around my nipple. “Your chest. Your softness.” He giggled and pushed his down. “I can imagine what you look like underneath. If I dissected you, I mean. I can almost see the muscles. And the fat.”
My body flushed with chills just imagining those words on a page.
“Wait,” he said, climbing off of me and walking to my desk. “I forgot.”
He rummaged around in his backpack for a while and I fluffed up the pillows behind me.
“You forgot what?”
“My meal preps need to go in your fridge, is that cool?” His voice trailed off but heard him taking some things out of his bag.
“Yeah,” I said, rolling back over. “Of course.”
When I rolled over, he was looking at something on my desk. He looked at it for a while, hovering over the table and tapping on it.
The flickers of the television weren’t strong enough for me to see what it was from where he was standing, and, for a moment I couldn’t remember where I had left my story about him. In fact, for a moment, I couldn’t even remember the last time I was holding it.
“Is something wrong?”
My face blushed. And not your average, school-girl blush. It was a blush so hard and so strong that I could swear I heard my heartbeat in my cheeks.
Dan took the rest of the things out of his bag and walked to the fridge.
“You’re moving out?” he asked.
Oh, good, I thought to myself, he just saw my move-out form.
“Yeah,” I said. “In a few weeks.”
“Where?” He shut the fridge and walked back to the table.
“South Carolina,” I said, trying to laugh. “Where my parents live. What’s up?”
“You’re graduating?”
“Yeah, I told you that.”
“You didn’t, actually.”
He came back over to the bed, where he laid motionless for fifteen minutes. It was a quiet fifteen minutes, and as soon as they were over, he got up and put his things back in his bag.
“I can’t sleep here.”
“What do you mean you can’t? All your stuff is here.”
“No,” he said, zipping up his bag and putting on his shoes. “I mean I won’t be able to get any sleep here. And if I don’t get any sleep, I won’t be able to go to the gym or teach tomorrow. I’m sorry.”
He started to walk out the door and I convinced him to at least let me walk with him.
I’ve often taken walks alone in the middle of the night, but I swear to you, the walk to his car was the quietest walk I’ve ever been on. It was deafening. When we got to his car, he threw his stuff inside and said he’d drop me off at the front of my place, which he did, silently, and when I got out, he didn’t kiss me.
“So what is this?” I asked. “I don’t know what this is. An end to a relationship that never started? You don’t want to be friends with me?”
“I’m not getting involved with someone who’s moving away. I’m just not. I told you I was looking for a long term relationship.”
“So is that it?” I said. “It’s all or nothing and all of a sudden you’ve decided you don’t like me?”
“I like you too much — that’s the problem. I didn’t realize this whole fuckin’ thing was dead before it started.”
This is the first story in the series Becoming. To continue this series, click here.
