The Dismantling

by Brian Deleeuw

  “Yes, yes, of course,” he said.

  The old lady shook her head, pulled her sweater tight around her shoulders; Michael changed the subject.

  Each morning they sat with the woman until noon, then went to eat lunch at a pub down the road, their father broodingly sipping from a pint of cask ale as Simon and Amelia picked at their coronation chicken sandwiches. Afternoons, they spent another two or three hours in the home, until their grandmother nodded off in her chair in the recreation room, under the blaring wall-mounted television. Michael seemed to experience the visit as an exercise in self-flagellation, excruciating but morally necessary, yet by the end of the week he’d realized that whatever he thought he was atoning for had nothing to do with his children, and so on the flight home he made it clear that Simon and Amelia would not be required to make the trip the following May.

  “And that was the only time you met her?” Maria said.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s sad.”

  “It’s sad for her to be in a nursing home and to have a son who doesn’t want to be around her very much. But it’s not sad for me. I don’t even know her.”

  “But she’s still your grandmother. She’s part of your family.”

  “So I should have deep feelings for an unpleasant old woman I’ve met once in my life? Just because we share some genes?”

  Maria shook her head. “That’s a fucked-up way of understanding how you fit into the world.”

  “Maybe. But you can also look at it this way: the family you’re born into matters because it still determines the material facts of your life, at least at first. Your social class, your education. But who you are inside, your private self—you don’t owe that to anybody, certainly not to your grandparents or even your parents. You’re free to create it on your own.”

  “I wish that were true. But it’s not so easy.”

  “It is true.”

  “You know what’s funny?” Maria speared a piece of omelet on her fork and jabbed it at Simon. “That sounds a lot like your father’s philosophy. Which seems to disprove the point.”

  “Very clever.”

  “Anyway, I think you’re being naive.”

  “So did my sister. It’s something we always argued about.”

  He told Maria how Amelia used to curl up with their father’s old photo albums spread open across her lap. She turned the pages reverentially, as though they were illuminated texts, fragile and antique, while Simon couldn’t be bothered to spend more than a few minutes with the things. There were Michael’s parents standing in front of the old family cottage in Oxfordshire: gray people, gray house, gray sky. There was their father, no older than twenty, in a peacoat, with his hair falling across his eyes, leaning into the doorway of a pub. Later, in the basement of the Rockaway house, Amelia had found shoeboxes stuffed with more photographs, the boxes sagging, their cardboard damp and mildewy. She’d carried the boxes upstairs, displaying their contents to Michael as though they were evidence of a crime he’d deliberately concealed. Was he just planning on leaving them down there to rot? Didn’t he care what happened to them? He shrugged, said she could do what she wanted with them. Didn’t he want to look at them with her? He shook his head. “Do what you want with them,” he said again. “I’m not short on memories.”

  And so she spent much of that winter organizing the orphaned photographs. Simon would find her cross-legged on the rug, neat stacks of photos arranged in front of her, an unsorted pile to one side, a family album open on the other. She’d flip a photo around, ask what he thought of it, where it might fit into her elaborate system of categorization. Most of the pictures she asked him about were of their mother. There she was, in her early twenties, leaning her elbows on a railing overlooking the Thames, her glossy brown hair gathered with a red ribbon at the nape of her neck. There she was, standing with another woman at a cocktail party, her belly giant and tight against her red sweater as the woman reached out to touch it. Here was their mother lifting the infant Amelia up to a Christmas tree, a crocheted snowflake gripped in Amelia’s tiny fist. Their mother’s hair was shorter here, cut and shaped into a dark bob that might have been a wig, her face washed out by the flash, her bare arms bony and milk white. Simon wanted to help his sister, but he could never stick with the project for very long. He’d been less than three when his mother died, and so he’d experienced her early death primarily as a kind of echo contained and transmitted within the character of his father, more as a part of Michael than as the passing away of a separate, discrete human being. Looking at the photos seemed to give Amelia a fierce, weepy sort of happiness, but it was depressing for him, and not in a cathartic way.

  “I’m sorry about what happened to her,” Maria said.

  “I was very little. I barely knew her.”

  “I meant Amelia.”

  “Oh. Yes.”

  “You were close with her.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a question.”

  “It’s what the newspaper articles said.”

  “We spent a lot of time together. But then, so do most siblings.”

  “Which doesn’t make what you had worth anything less.”

  “No.”

  “And I’m sure it didn’t make it any easier when she was gone.”

  He closed his eyes, all the familiar, awful images pushing up against his lids. “Have you ever seen a dead body?”

  “Yeah.” The answer was immediate.

  “What about somebody who drowned?”

  “No.”

  “You’d think the skin would be pale. Bleached. At least that’s what I thought.” He opened his eyes. “But it’s not like that. After a few days in the water, the skin turns black. Dark purple. Like a bruise covering the entire body. The person becomes swollen and bloated.”

  She reached across the table and squeezed his hand. “I’m sorry you saw that.”

  “I didn’t have to go to the morgue. My father could’ve identified her by himself—they didn’t need me. I chose to be there.”

  “Why?”

  “I knew it would be horrible,” he said. “Even if I didn’t know exactly how she would look, I knew it would be horrible. So I went as penance. Because I was alive and she wasn’t.” He’d never talked about these things with anybody before, not even his father, and it was strange to hear his private thoughts suddenly exposed, like flower bulbs or squint-eyed moles, pale and moist and unaccustomed to sunlight or scrutiny. He felt naked, vulnerable. He’d said enough for this morning; he didn’t want to talk about Amelia anymore. “What about your family? Is what you told me before true?”

  Maria looked down, frowning.

  “About your parents, I mean.”

  She sighed. “Part of it.”

  “Which part?”

  “I lied about my father. I have no idea where he is or what he does, I’ve never known him. But my mother is dead. Just like yours.”

  He pictured the death certificate. “How old were you when it happened?” He hoped he sounded interested in the answer for its own sake, rather than as a test of her truthfulness.

  “Thirteen.”

  He could feel her withdrawing from him again, turning her attention inward. “How did she die?” he asked softly.

  She turned away from him, squinting at the bright window. “Simon.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t push it.”

  He chewed and swallowed a final bite of steak and eggs, then excused himself to go outside and smoke a cigarette. He sat on the bench in front of the restaurant, the French bulldogs sniffing his ankles. He got up, walked to the curb, turned around. Through the window’s glare, he could see Maria in profile. She bent over one of her three plates, cutting into the croissant sandwich, raising the egg-dripping morsel to her mouth. She savored her bite with almost comical relish, as though she were starring
in a commercial, an advertisement, not for a brand of food but for, perhaps, a national airline, a nation itself, a way of life. She put her fork down and sipped from her coffee in that pensive, theatrical way rare in actual life: the thumb and forefinger of her free hand bracing the rim of the cup as she brought it to her lips. She’d let the waiter clear Simon’s plate, and if he didn’t know better, he would think, from where he stood, that she was dining alone, and happy to be. In less than a week, she’d gone from being barely able to walk to this, the satiated woman in the window. It was a happy change, of course, but he couldn’t help wondering what she would need him for now. He tried to suppress this sort of thinking, to not let it ruin the unexpected pleasure of sharing his past with her, but it seeped up into his thoughts anyway, like toxic groundwater. The old jealousy, the old possessiveness. He remembered suddenly that he was supposed to have dinner with his father in Rockaway Beach that night. What could he possibly tell Michael about his life right now that wasn’t a complete lie? He sucked at the last of his cigarette, tossed it aside, and rejoined Maria at the table to find that she’d already paid for their meal with a few bills peeled from a thick wad in the back pocket of her jeans.

  OVER and over, Simon had rehearsed the story in his head, preparing for when he would finally tell his father the truth. He would need to begin, he’d decided, on the evening before the first classes of the first semester. On the Great Lawn in Central Park, the matriculating class spread out across six baseball diamonds, bats slung over shoulders, gloves tucked under arms. The late August air thick as mud, coolers of beer stashed behind the backstops. Simon leaning against the dugout fence, learning names: Anita, Dan, Rakesh, Liz, Levi. His classmates in baseball caps, tube socks, faded T-shirts, the names of their colleges and high schools emblazoned across their chests in flaking letters.

  At the bar afterward, Simon shared the end of a long table with a girl—a woman, really; she was older than him—wearing a T-shirt that read “I BX.” This was Katherine Peel. She’d just moved to Manhattan from Yonkers; sharp and sarcastic and unimpressed, she was going to be a trauma surgeon. They went up to the bar to refill their pitcher, but Katherine decided she wanted whiskey instead, so whiskey is what they had. They sat at the bar and drank. She told him she’d grown up in the Bronx, and when he asked what neighborhood, she told him Riverdale, “but not the part you’re thinking of.” She said she’d been a nurse after college, before doing her premed courses at Pace. She peppered her speech with hospital jargon Simon didn’t know, but he didn’t want to appear callow, so he kept nodding and frowning and mumbling agreement.

  A few drinks later, the other students began to drift out of the bar. Some slapped Simon’s shoulder as they passed, and he felt an absurd sense of accomplishment for remembering their names. Allison, Pria, Jeff. These were to be his classmates. A looseness spread through his limbs. He smiled at Katherine, who was talking about witnessing her first open-heart surgery, the cracking of the rib cage. She paused, smiled back at him. He wondered how he appeared to her, whether he seemed like the kind of person who made friends easily, picked up girls in bars, traded one girlfriend for the next. He wondered if, instead, she could tell how private and constricted his life really was, whether that was in fact what she found appealing. Because he could see that she liked him, that she wanted to know more about him. He thought—he hoped—maybe it was a case of two damaged people recognizing the wound in each other, the way damaged people sometimes do. The skin of her throat was white as milk, a red blush creeping above the collar of her shirt; her smile was crooked, provocative, crimson lipstick like blood on snow. One drink more and they stood, Katherine grabbing his arm. He offered to take her home, but she told him she could make it alone. He helped her catch a taxi, and her lips brushed against his cheek as she slid into the backseat. As he walked uptown, to his new apartment on York Avenue, he was too high on the possibilities of this next phase in his life to be disappointed that she’d left without him. From the fourteenth floor, he looked out over the river and then south, down along the avenue. He thought he could see his old building, where he and his father and Amelia had lived before moving to the Rockaways, but he couldn’t be sure he was looking at the right one.

  The next morning, after listening to the semester’s opening lecture, he stood with the rest of the students in a long, low-ceilinged hallway in the basement of the medical school. At the end of the hall, behind a set of steel double doors, waited the anatomy lab. He could already smell the formalin, sick and sweet and chemical. The professors opened the doors and the students filed into the large square room. Eighteen rolling metal tables were laid out in rows. On each table rested a white body bag and numbered placard. The odor of formalin pushed against Simon’s face, like a soaked rag held to his mouth. He found his assigned table. His three dissection partners for the duration of the semester were stationed there already, and he saw that Katherine Peel was one of them, her black hair tied up in a bun, her eyes red and hooded. The other two, a boy and a girl, blond and fresh faced and looking very young, exuded an air of horrible competence. Katherine leaned her mouth to his ear, her breath smelling of synthetic mint layered over alcohol: “You were supposed to be at the next table. I switched the placards. Thank me later.”

  One of the circulating professors unzipped their bag. The torso and legs were swaddled in beige cloth, the hands, feet, and head wrapped in gauzy white material over which clear plastic had been fixed in place with rubber bands. The professor pulled aside the cloth covering the cadaver’s left arm, baring the skin from wrist to shoulder, then folded the cloth to expose the clavicle and the swell of a small breast. The skin was a noncolor: not quite white, not quite gray, not quite green. Smooth, unwrinkled—a young woman’s arm, slim and hairless. Simon watched as the professor made the first cut, a shallow H at the rounding of the shoulder. The professor peeled back the skin with his gloved fingers, naming the revealed layer of greasy, yellowish tissue—the fascia—before sweeping it away to show the striated muscle underneath.

  The four of them took turns with the scalpel, scissors, forceps, probe, and their fingers—mostly their fingers—picking their way through the structures of the woman’s upper arm. This was a necessary task, and Simon was going to perform it as best he could. He looked across the table at Katherine. Her mouth was pressed flat; sweat beaded on her forehead. She held the dissection manual, reading the instructions aloud as Simon peeled the skin away from the bicep and dropped it into the tissue bucket at the foot of the table. The skin clung to his glove, and he shook his hand until it slid away and puddled at the bottom of the bucket. Katherine broke off in midsentence, handed the manual to one of their partners, and walked out of the room. Simon stopped, his scalpel poised above the cadaver’s arm. He asked if he should go after her. There isn’t time, the blonds said, we’re behind already.

  During their lunch break, he found Katherine eating a tuna sandwich in the cafeteria. She told him she’d needed to vomit, so that’s what she went and did. One of the professors had found her in the hallway, she said, and tried to get philosophical. He told her it was normal to be upset by what they were doing; anybody in the lab who wasn’t disturbed by it was the one with the problem. He said it would get better with time. She told Simon they’d had a nice moment, she and the professor, but what he didn’t know was that she wasn’t upset at all, she was just really fucking hungover. She laughed as she told Simon this story, as though to actually be disturbed by dissecting a cadaver would be ridiculous.

  That evening they continued their work on the woman’s upper arm. When they were finished, they sprayed a wetting solution on the flesh before rewrapping the torso. Simon zipped up the body bag, and as he pulled the zipper over the woman’s wrapped head, he wondered what her face looked like, how she died, who she’d been.

  The next week they moved on to the hands, removing the plastic bags and unwrapping the gauze. The woman’s nails were painted black. The coverage was unif
orm, without chips or scratches, as though she’d just applied a fresh coat. Katherine cut down the center of the palm, drew a line across the base of the fingers, bisected each digit. The palm skin was thick and difficult to slice, and Katherine replaced the blade on her scalpel four times before finishing the cut.

  After the arms came the thorax, the seat of the heart and lungs. They removed the cadaver’s breasts from the chest cavity, along with the surrounding skin. The blonds took turns sawing through the ribs, bone dust curling into the air. When the work was done, they lifted the rib cage free of the body. Her lungs were mottled: she’d been a smoker. Simon felt a spasm of kinship. He held the woman’s heart in his hands in the deep-basined sink, flushing the clotted blood and formalin out of the arteries.

  Late at night, high above York Avenue, Simon twisted in his bed, from sleep to wakefulness and back again. He rolled over onto his stomach and flung out his arm, and his hand landed in a nest of fascia, yellow and clingy. He rolled over onto his back and sank down into heavy water, his hands and feet and head wrapped in thick plastic. He opened his mouth to breathe, the plastic clinging to his tongue. The smell of formalin filled his nostrils. This smell now followed him everywhere, no matter how hard he scrubbed his fingers and scalp in the shower. It was in his clothes, his skin, his hair, his saliva, his sweat. It filled his mouth; it was his air. He opened his eyes and his cadaver was lying in the bed next to him. She rested on her back, her chest cavity emptied out, the wet red walls glistening in the dim light that seeped around the blinds. Her face was covered in black plastic. He reached out and tore the plastic away. Underneath was a layer of gauze, which he unwrapped with difficulty, the gauze clinging to the damp skin. He pulled away the last of it, and it was as he knew it would be: it was Amelia, of course, it was his sister as he’d seen her in the Queens County Morgue, staring at him, open mouthed and dead eyed.

  He told nobody about his dream. It didn’t occur to him that other students might be having dreams of their own; if they were, they weren’t telling anybody about them either.