At lunch I ordered 'steak frites' but the smell of the burnt man would not leave my sinuses. The steak tasted like a Marseille BBQ! I filled up on fries.
On the way to the autopsy room the professor started talking about how the man we were going see was a known drug dealer, and that we shouldn't feel too bad for him. It's not like he was a innocent caught in the cross-fire. We should think of it as a "work accident" (accident de travail).
Let me tell you, an AK will fuck your shit up. The guy was hit maybe 10 times in the chest and head. There was hardly any of his brain left. The ever-hilarious chain-smoking doctor opened up the cranium for all to see the paltry remains and said "See the size of an average gangster's brain? 100 grams!" (An average human brain is 1300 grams.)
We got to take a more active role in this autopsy, helping carry stuff and getting to fiddle with his innards. The doctor urged me to pick up an arm to see how hard it is to move a stiff. I did, and the corpse grabbed me! I didn't shriek like a little girl, but almost. I moved the wrist in such a way that the tendons naturally caused the hand to grip me.
I also handled and examined his heart, lungs, stomach, liver, pancreas, and spleen.
They very carefully examined each entrance and exit wound to determine how many bullets hit him. They longly debated whether or not a bullet had shattered midway causing two exit wounds. They smoked and debated some more. Voices were raised, sarcastic volleys followed. There was an uneasy balance between the fact that it was pretty obvious what happened here (he was a drug dealer whose head was shot to hell by other drug dealers and that's how he died, duh) and the fact that for legal purposes they needed to be fairly precise.
On the train ride home I probably passed within a few hundred meters of the site of the shooting, near St. Joseph. Quite an odd feeling stopping at St. Joseph and seeing all the housing projects and all the poor people who inhabit them. I don't know if I would have ended up any differently than the guy whose spleen I played with if I lived there. Precisely 24 hours ago, he was probably driving around like everyone else, alive. I'm sure he was ignorant, and brutish and whatever else you want, but I cannot feel better or worse about his death than that of the 70 year old woman who died of complications in the hospital.
On the way to the autopsy room the professor started talking about how the man we were going see was a known drug dealer, and that we shouldn't feel too bad for him. It's not like he was a innocent caught in the cross-fire. We should think of it as a "work accident" (accident de travail).
Let me tell you, an AK will fuck your shit up. The guy was hit maybe 10 times in the chest and head. There was hardly any of his brain left. The ever-hilarious chain-smoking doctor opened up the cranium for all to see the paltry remains and said "See the size of an average gangster's brain? 100 grams!" (An average human brain is 1300 grams.)
We got to take a more active role in this autopsy, helping carry stuff and getting to fiddle with his innards. The doctor urged me to pick up an arm to see how hard it is to move a stiff. I did, and the corpse grabbed me! I didn't shriek like a little girl, but almost. I moved the wrist in such a way that the tendons naturally caused the hand to grip me.
I also handled and examined his heart, lungs, stomach, liver, pancreas, and spleen.
They very carefully examined each entrance and exit wound to determine how many bullets hit him. They longly debated whether or not a bullet had shattered midway causing two exit wounds. They smoked and debated some more. Voices were raised, sarcastic volleys followed. There was an uneasy balance between the fact that it was pretty obvious what happened here (he was a drug dealer whose head was shot to hell by other drug dealers and that's how he died, duh) and the fact that for legal purposes they needed to be fairly precise.
On the train ride home I probably passed within a few hundred meters of the site of the shooting, near St. Joseph. Quite an odd feeling stopping at St. Joseph and seeing all the housing projects and all the poor people who inhabit them. I don't know if I would have ended up any differently than the guy whose spleen I played with if I lived there. Precisely 24 hours ago, he was probably driving around like everyone else, alive. I'm sure he was ignorant, and brutish and whatever else you want, but I cannot feel better or worse about his death than that of the 70 year old woman who died of complications in the hospital.
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