At Indiana University, on the lowest floor of the Student Building, is a glass display case filled with skulls. The specimens represent numerous species of felines, avians, canines and primates. Most of the specimens are authentic. There is also a synthetic reproduction of a human skull.

And next to that, a real human skull.

I've named it "Ed." The bone is yellow, and lacks teeth; the jawbone is gray and discolored on the right side, and there is a sort of stout metal pin or bolt stuck in it, below where the right canine tooth would be. It is an adult skull, and for all I know it is female.

Occasionally, when I have some free time and the right mood takes me, I swing by and consider it. I think: That is the bare frame of a human life. That is me, beneath all this flesh. In life, Ed was as much an individual as I, with desires and a will and rationality and emotion. Why, he or she might have decked me for looking at them like this. But no more.