The Dismantling

by Brian Deleeuw

  He opened the laptop and tapped a key. The screen lit up, her e-mail account open and naked in the browser window. He’d start here. Scanning the list of received messages, he could see that she’d read all of them but, beginning with the day she’d arrived in New York, hadn’t responded to any. He opened a few conversations from before that date. Most were banal exchanges with friends: scheduling dinners and movies, forwarding YouTube links and inside jokes. Moving further back in time, to early September, he saw his own messages, their whole cagey exchange.

  He returned to the most recent message, from dalia.rodriguez@gmail.com. “Please M,” it read, “just an e-mail, a text, fucking something! Let us know you’re OK. Whatever it is, we can help. I promise. xo, Dal.” There were dozens of other similar, pleading e-mails sent from three or four addresses over the last few weeks, all unanswered.

  Simon closed the browser window. Maria’s desktop image was a black-and-white photograph of a man prone on the sidewalk, his faced smashed sideways into the concrete, long hair swept off his forehead, blood pooling beneath his busted nose. A revolver rested on the sidewalk in the foreground, the barrel pointing toward the man’s head. He was quite clearly dead. Simon felt a jolt of dislocation before he was able to place the image as a Weegee, the murdered man some long-ago-doomed Lower East Side gangster.

  Aside from the Weegee, Maria’s desktop was strikingly bare: only two folders, one labeled “Memento,” the other “Mori.” Simon opened Memento first. Inside was only one file, a PDF of a death certificate. Name: Vanessa Campos. Date of death: August 1, 1999. Vanessa Campos had died two days short of her thirty-third birthday. Simon scanned down to the cause of death: respiratory arrest as a consequence of opiate intoxication. She’d been pronounced dead at her address of residence in Alhambra, at one thirty in the afternoon. He couldn’t be certain, but Simon had to guess this was Maria’s mother he was reading about. In 1999 Maria had been thirteen. Simon pictured her returning home from a routine day at school to find her mother’s body already removed from the apartment, a social worker sitting on the porch prepared to deliver the news. Or had they sent somebody to her middle school to pluck her out of class? How did it work? Under “Marital status,” the box for “Never married” was checked. What if Maria had been the only next of kin? She’d told him she was estranged from her father; perhaps that had been true even then. Did they make her identify the body? Could you do that to a thirteen year-old kid, drag her down to the morgue to stare at her dead mother?

  Simon closed the file and clicked open the Mori folder. Inside was a list of about thirty JPEGs, each with a generic string of numbers for its title. He opened one at random: a photograph of a modest neighborhood—somewhere in Southern California, it looked like—palm trees bracketing small houses and tidy, fenced-in squares of lawn. The parked cars dated it to the late eighties. A young black man in a Los Angeles Raiders cap sprawled on the sidewalk, the fingers of one limp hand curled delicately over the curb. The cap had been knocked back so Simon could see that most of his forehead was missing, in its place a mash of reddish-white tissue. Blood stained the sidewalk beneath his head. A few other young men stood nearby, their faces scrubbed of emotion. A police officer was positioned between the group and the dead kid. A second officer stood closer to the body, looking down, his hands on his hips. Simon closed the file and opened another. This second one was clearly an official crime scene photograph. The victim—a white man in his twenties or thirties—wore a 1970s-style tan suit, the baby-blue shirt underneath soaked with blood. He was sprawled in what looked like a red leather restaurant booth, his sightless eyes staring up at the ceiling. Simon opened more of the files. A body covered by a tarp in 1980s Times Square, gawkers crowding the police cordon. A man at the bottom of a freshly dug ditch, his hands bound behind his back, a bullet hole in the back of his skull. Another Weegee, this one of a man laid out on his back, pageboy cap blown off his head, legs crossed demurely at the ankles, a pail of what looked like melons incongruously crowding the front edge of the frame. A CCTV still shot of a man crumpled on the floor of a convenience store, back pressed against the soda fridge, baggy white T-shirt bloodied, hand loosely gripping a pistol. One after another, a lurid catalogue of violent ends. Finally Simon closed the folder. He shut his eyes and the grotesque parade played across the inside of his lids. The photos had been taken over at least five decades. The victims were black, white, Hispanic, rich and poor—murdered in hotels, apartments, out on the street. They only had three things in common: they were all men, they were all young, and they had all been shot to death.

  BACK in the Roosevelt Island apartment that night, sometime closer to sleepless dawn than midnight, Simon sat up in the darkness and rested his head against the wall. The quiet in his bedroom was a black canvas against which the raindrops spattering onto his window stood out like gobs of neon paint. Fragments of Maria’s photos—a bullet-shredded torso; a gaping, forever-silenced mouth—flashed across his mind. He’d told DaSilva only about the e-mails he’d read, leaving out of his account the contents of the Memento and Mori folders. Peter had been impressed at Simon’s ability to infiltrate Maria’s apartment, less impressed at the volume of information he’d managed to uncover. He instructed Simon to continue to monitor Maria’s recovery, to pry for the truth whenever he sensed an opportunity, and to report back with everything he discovered. Simon agreed, although he privately considered the reporting to be optional; DaSilva didn’t need to know everything.

  Now his memory reached back to his sister’s emptied room, to that dusty, stale space sealed off from the rest of the living world. It was Vanessa Campos’s death certificate that had summoned Amelia to his insomniac mind. The thought of teenage Maria in the morgue, identifying her mother, blurred with the memories of his own visit, alongside his father, to the Queens County Morgue to view Amelia’s bloated corpse, which had washed up onto the Rockaway beach like any piece of trash. For years and years, he’d believed that to avoid thinking about the specifics of her death would somehow, over time, erode its pain, that it was useless, or worse, to relive events he couldn’t change. But this approach, he now saw with a painful flash, had gotten him nowhere, gained him nothing. It wasn’t just ineffective; it was cowardly.

  And so he gave up trying to fight it off, and he sank into his memories of that April day: Walking to the train in the morning with Amelia. His sister angry with him, not talking, earbuds screwed firmly in place. Finishing her homework on the subway, or pretending to. She looked terrible—purple bags under her eyes, bad skin. She hadn’t been sleeping much for weeks, and it showed. As soon as they arrived at school, she bolted for a group of her girlfriends. They’d been given the next day off, for Good Friday, on the optimistic theory that the students would attend services with their families, but just to be thorough, St. Edmund’s ended Holy Thursday with a Mass of its own, in the old church on Park Avenue. Amelia sat with her class somewhere behind Simon. After Mass was completed and the students let out onto the street in an unruly throng, Simon looked around, but he couldn’t find her. A few of his friends informed him that they were heading to Central Park to get high. He didn’t want to go back to Rockaway alone yet, so he went along even though he already knew he wasn’t in the mood.

  It was drizzling, one of those fine-grained rains that seem less to fall than to hang suspended in the air. By the time they’d walked the four blocks to the park and up to the bridle path around the reservoir, they were soaked. One of his friends had hidden two wrinkly, needle-thin joints, wrapped in a ziplock bag, in a pocket of his backpack, and they passed these around under the shelter of an oak, doing their best to keep dry. Simon sucked fiercely at the joints, smoking more than his share, and by the time they were finished he was stupendously high. The other boys decided to see what was playing at the movie theater on Eighty-Sixth Street. He said he’d go with them, but then as they all left the park and reemerged onto the street, he was seized by a horrible panic. He had a sud
den impulse to be alone. The faces of his friends distended into grotesque, gargoyle-like masks. He knew, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he’d simply smoked too much, too fast. But that knowledge didn’t change anything. He had to leave, immediately. He mumbled something about needing to meet his sister, and then he bolted.

  As soon as he got on the subway, he knew he’d made a terrible mistake. If he’d just gone to the movie, he would’ve been fine. A dark theater is one of the better places to be dysfunctionally stoned; a packed subway car is not. The fluorescent lighting was an abomination. Simon was convinced he reeked of weed, and he tried not to look anybody in the eye. He was jammed up against the doors on the 6 train, somebody’s messenger bag wedged into his crotch. The train was delayed between stations for a few minutes, and he thought he was having a heart attack. His palms were sweaty, he couldn’t get his breath, and he felt his pulse thudding in his temple, his mind a rabid dog with its leash cut, snapping at anything within range.

  By the time he switched to the A at Nassau Street, he was doing somewhat better. Getting off the train for a few minutes and walking across the station helped; he took the fact that he could walk as proof that he probably wasn’t dying. The passengers thinned out as the train made its way across Brooklyn. Only two dozen or so people waited on the outdoor platform at Broad Channel for the shuttle to the peninsula. It was around six o’clock by then and nearly dark. On the ride across the bay, he watched pockets of rain skitter over the water and was fascinated by the way they spun and weaved like miniature tornadoes; he was calmed by his fascination because it took him outside himself for a moment, focusing his brain on something other than his own anxiety.

  The house was dark and empty when he got home. He heated some leftover lasagna and sat in front of the television and watched a surfing video. Amelia came home about an hour after him, alone. She wore a purple windbreaker without a hood, and her hair was soaked and tangled. She looked around and asked why he hadn’t turned on the lights. He shrugged. He felt his heart start up again, kicking the way it had on the train. She looked small and bedraggled and very tired. She took off her jacket and sat next to him on the couch. They watched the movie in silence.

  He wanted to say the right thing to make his sister less angry with him, but his tongue felt fat and useless, like a slug in his mouth. The plate of lasagna leftovers, with its red smears of dried tomato sauce, suddenly seemed shameful to him and eating itself an embarrassing act. The sun set and the house became very dark, the blue glow of the television the only light.

  Out of the long silence, Amelia said, “You need to stop.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know what.”

  “I don’t.”

  “All of it. All the jealousy or whatever you want to call it. It’s fucked up, Simon. You’ve got to let it go.”

  He said he wasn’t jealous. He said he was trying to help her.

  “Do you want me to hate you?” she asked. “Is that what you want? Because I can’t understand why else you’d act like this.”

  What he’d done was confront her boyfriend, Ray Kippler, a freckled and loud-mouthed Beach Channel High senior. Their father may not have paid attention to what Amelia did with herself, but Simon did, and he’d decided that Ray was ruining his sister.

  The first time Simon saw Kippler, he was at the beach with Amelia, on Labor Day, seven months before this conversation in the den. He remembered walking to the edge of the ocean, slipping under the crumbling waves, the sky overcast, the Atlantic the color of corroded copper. Underwater, he opened his eyes and watched columns of disturbed sand drift lazily upward. He pushed off the bottom, surfaced. He could make out, on the shore, his sister on her towel, knees drawn up to her chest. Another teenager squatted next to her, poking at the sand with a stick. Simon couldn’t see his face at first, only a shock of bright blond, nearly white, hair. The kid stared at the sand as he spoke, as though afraid to look at Amelia. Simon understood the feeling: that summer his little sister had morphed into some entirely new creature, bronzed and spindly, a sudden and humbling inch taller than him. He’d walk into the living room, and she’d be huddled on the couch with two or three of her Rockaway girlfriends, under a pile of towels, their long limbs crooked and jutting like those of some giant daddy longlegs, heads bent toward each other in furtive conference. Whole fertile swaths of her life suddenly seemed to be hidden from his view. So, yes, sometimes he too was afraid to look at her, at this evolved Amelia, afraid to see in what way she was shedding her childhood self now—afraid because the more she grew up, the less she might need him.

  He next saw Ray a month later, in October. Simon was in the habit, that autumn, of surfing before school. He would creep downstairs, to the silent kitchen, where he’d eat gummy white bread and slug orange juice straight from the carton. He’d grab his thirdhand board from the mudroom, a chunky 6'5" pintail with cracking epoxy and a permanent coat of dirty wax, and jog down to the beach in the silvery predawn to paddle out alone. One morning he left the house and turned toward the salt-heavy air, passing a few houses not unlike his own—two-story clapboard boxes with a car in the cement yard and three locks on the front door—before he crossed Shore Front Parkway and the boardwalk, and stepped down onto the beach, the cool white sand, fine as ashes, pooling over his feet.

  He changed into his wetsuit, tucking his sweatshirt under the boardwalk, and inspected the ocean. The waves were shit, but at least he had them all to himself. Then he saw even that wasn’t true. A small figure in a red wetsuit stood at the water’s edge, white-blond hair bright against the dull morning. As Simon stepped closer, he realized this was the same kid he’d seen speaking to Amelia.

  The boy turned and saw him. “Dude.” He nodded, freckles spattered across his face. He was short and lean, and he seemed somehow to vibrate, energy effervescing out of his pores. His nose was so sunburned it appeared flayed.

  “What’s up.” Dude? Surfing or not, they were still in Queens.

  The kid frowned at the choppy lineup. “Sucks.”

  “It looks all right.”

  “I guess for up around here.”

  “Why, where’re you from?”

  “Florida,” the kid said, still looking at the ocean. “Moved a month ago. My mom barely pulled her shit together to get us up here before school started.”

  “Beach Channel?”

  He nodded again, then finally looked at Simon. “How come I haven’t seen you there?”

  “I go to school in Manhattan.” Simon bent down and fiddled with his leash. “What’s your name?”

  “Ray Kippler,” the kid said. “Are we surfing or what?”

  Simon had learned to surf by reading magazines and watching the Rockaway locals. He’d started the first summer they’d moved to the peninsula, and he’d liked it immediately—the physical challenge, the sense of being alone and yet also connected by the invisible thread of shared desire to the other surfers in the lineup. By the time he met Kippler, he thought of himself as a decent surfer, at least above the Rockaway average. But it only took five minutes to see that Ray Kippler was on an entirely different level, not just from Simon but from any Rockaway surfer Simon had ever seen.

  He watched from the shoulder as the Florida kid clawed into his first wave. Ray flattened his upper body against his board before he sprang to his feet, pumping down the line past Simon and launching a giant air, his arms spread wide, his red body and white board suspended against the gray towers and gray parkway and gray sky like some exotic species of bird, ripping himself out of the normal flow of time and motion in the manner of all airborne things. He landed cleanly in the flats and stepped casually off his board like it was no big deal. This went on for nearly an hour, Kippler tearing his waves to shreds while Simon watched, stunned, the enjoyment of his own rides compromised by how pedestrian they seemed in comparison. Finally Simon spotted his sister sta
nding on the shore. He straight-lined a wave on his belly and trotted out of the shallows, shaking his wet head like a dog.

  Amelia thrust his sweatshirt at him. “Jesus, Simon, you’re not even wearing a watch.”

  “Where’d you find that?”

  “Behind the same stupid pylon where you always stash it.”

  “You couldn’t wait at the house?”

  “Not when you’re this late. Hurry up.”

  She glanced behind him and frowned. He turned around, and there was Ray, board tucked under his arm, grinning like an idiot.

  “It’s Ray,” he said. “From the beach.”

  “I know,” Amelia said. Was she blushing?

  “Oh. Good.”

  “This is my older brother.” Amelia tapped Simon’s shoulder. “In case you hadn’t figured it out.”

  Simon took his sweatshirt and jogged underneath the boardwalk to change. From behind a pylon he saw Ray say something to Amelia before giving her an awkward sort of salute and sprinting up the stairs to the boardwalk, the soles of his bare feet flashing ghost white before he disappeared somewhere above Simon’s head.