There are a lot of people at the Conversat. There isn’t that much to do for entertainment on the weekends in Toronto. The building has a festive air: its usual smells of Dustbane and furniture polish and mouse droppings and snakes mingle with other smells, of winter clothing, cigarette smoke, and women’s perfume. Streamers of colored paper are taped to the walls, with arrows of construction paper at intervals, along the halls and up and down the stairs and into the different rooms, to show the way. Each room has its own displays, grouped according to what you are supposed to learn. In the first room there are chicken embryos at various stages of development, from a red dot to a big-headed, bulgy-eyed, pin-feathered chick, looking not fluffy and cute the way they do on Easter cards, but slimy, its claws curled under, its eyelids a slit open, showing a crescent of agate-blue eye. The embryos have been pickled; the scent of formaldehyde is very strong. In another display there’s a jar of twins, real dead identical human twins with their placenta attached, gray-skinned, floating in something that looks like dishwater. Their veins and arteries have been injected with colored rubber, blue for the veins, purple for the arteries, so we can see that their blood systems are connected. There’s a human brain in a bottle, like a giant flabby gray walnut. I can’t believe there is such a thing inside my head. In another room there’s a table where you can get your fingerprints taken, so you can see they aren’t the same as anyone else’s. There’s a large piece of Bristol board with enlarged photographs of people’s fingerprints pinned up on it. My brother and Danny and I all get our fingerprints taken. Danny and my brother have made light of the chickens and the twins—“Awnt-way any-nay icken-chay or-fay upper-say?” “Ow-hay about-way ome-say ewed-stay in-tway?”—but they weren’t in any hurry to stay in that room. Their enthusiasm for the fingerprints is boisterous. They make fingerprints in the centers of each other’s foreheads with their inky fingers, saying, “The Mark of the Black Hand!” in loud, ominous voices, until our father passes nearby and tells them to pipe down. Beautiful Mr. Banerji from India is with him. He smiles nervously at me and says, “How are you, miss?” He always calls me “miss.” Among all these winter-white faces he looks darker than usual; his teeth shine and shine. In the same room with the fingerprints they’re handing out pieces of paper; you’re supposed to taste them and say whether they taste bitter, like peach pits, or sour, like lemons. This proves that some things are inherited. There’s also a mirror where you can do tongue exercises, to see if you can roll your tongue up at the sides or into a cloverleaf shape. Some people can’t do either. Danny and my brother hog the mirror and make gruesome faces by sticking their thumbs into the sides of their mouths and pulling the edges of their eyelids down so that the red shows.
Some of the Conversat is less interesting, with too much writing, and some of it is only charts on the wall or looking through microscopes, which we can do whenever we want to anyway. It’s crowded as we shuffle along the halls, following the paper streamers, baby-blue and yellow, in our winter overshoes. We haven’t taken our coats off. It’s very warm. The clanking radiators are going full-blast, and the air is filling with other people’s breath.
We come to a room where there’s a cut-open turtle. It’s in a white enamel tray, like the ones in butcher shops. The turtle is alive; or it’s dead, but its heart is alive. This turtle is an experiment to show how the heart of a reptile can keep on going after the rest of it is dead.
The turtle’s bottom shell has a hole sawed into it. The turtle is on its back so you can see down into it, right to the heart, which is beating away slowly, glistening dark red down there in its cave, wincing like the end of a touched worm, lengthening again, wincing. It’s like a hand, clenching and unclenching. It’s like an eye.