The Assembler of Parts: A Novel

by Wientzen, Raoul

  Dr. Burke was telling her of my missing parts and of the plan afoot to search for other errors in assembly. He paused for a moment so Mother could blow her nose and unfold another hanky from the packet she held pressed to her right breast. Before he could resume his discussion, I began to cry. I listen now* to that cry. It was a looping cry that began low and rose in pitch, hovered there and swooped back down only to rise again, my “hold me” cry, rude and crude for lack of practice. Back then* in that dim room I couldn’t hear its songful beauty, but Burke’s good ears deciphered it immediately. He walked over, his neck-hung stethoscope swinging like a metronome to my rough music, and scooped me up from the bassinet. He laid me on the pillow where my mother’s head had lain and unwrapped me. I could smell her sweat, and the warm honey-scent of my mother’s hair, as if it had hived a hundred bees. He made a show of my hands to Mother and Father. He had her press my forearm like I was a cake tested for doneness. I was spongy to the gentle press, and her tears only increased through this inventory of missing parts. When Burke slipped her pinkie tip into the blind pouches that should have been ear canals, her sadness became a moan. Father was stoic, his back straight, his arms fixed at his sides, a man with a stiff upper lip and a stiffer skeleton, bone on every bone. He cleared his throat and asked, “Does this mean she can’t hear?”

  “Probably it does,” said Burke. “We can do some hearing tests to be absolutely sure, but most of the time this external anomaly is associated with absence of the bones that conduct sound. So I’m sorry, but yes, there is a very good chance Jessica is deaf. But ear surgeons can do wonderful things now to correct some of these defects, to restore some hearing, so let’s wait and see what they have to say. I think they’ll figure a way to give her some auditory capability. And with the new generation of hearing aids, well, there’s a lot of hope here, is what I’m trying to say.”

  Father’s bones seemed to age as his shoulders sank. He took Mother’s free hand in his. “Kate,” he said. “This isn’t what—”

  Burke interrupted. “Look at her eyes, Kate. Look at them. They’re looking right at you, and they are beautiful. Really beautiful.”

  Well, I was, and she did. My black eyes locked on to my mother’s blood-shot browns, and we stared at each other for a while. Her tears stopped, and her moans. I reached out with my right hand and scraped the blue air. She offered me her index finger, and I perched my fingers and hand on it like a bird on a branch. “Aren’t they the most amazing coal-black eyes?” Burke asked. “There’s so much strength in them. Don’t you think?” In that instant Mother managed a weak smile, a shadow of the one I’d seen after delivery, but a smile nonetheless. I forgave Dr. Burke his every transgression, his pinch of my skin and his pinching of my tiny teeth, and fell in love with him all over again. He made my mother halt her tears; he lighted her with smile. I never could hold a grudge very long.

  But I could hold a finger. I squeezed Mother’s with all my neonate might and tried to coo. It was even more imperfect than my “hold me” cry, but Mother smiled again. She looked at Father and dropped the words, “Jessica is beautiful, don’t you think, Ford? Even with everything, she’s beautiful.” She looked back to me and I kicked with my legs.

  Father’s frame lost even more of its bone. His head hung down like a shamed child’s. Without looking at either of us, he whispered, “Yes,” and released Mother’s hand.

  I hung on to the other with four fingers.

  In the newborn period the mouth is dry as baked clay, unless made moist from the plucking of teeth or the sucking of teat. By that moment in my mother’s room the thin roots ripped away had ceased their bloody seep and again my mouth was all sand and talc. It is a circumstance, I think, well intended by the Assembler whose aim is to fix us with a constant thirst, to pucker us always for the wet sweet weep of mother’s milk. She put me to her breast. My mouth seemed me, all of me, more than me, as I tried to latch on to the milk nubbin she cradled me against. But at my first attempt, my lips closed before my tongue had settled. I squirmed and sucked but managed not a drop. She gently pulled me off and brought me back, but my tongue would not stop its useless flick, and my lips lost the way to a perfect seal. Away again and a pat on the back. A third attempt came so very close—a drop of colostrum before my tongue lost its way. My mouth seemed me, all of me, more than me—it was all thumbs.

  We switched sides and tried again. This time, it was a piece of cake. I nursed her to sleep on this second sweet breast. Her heart tapped me kindly to keep me awake all the while I sucked. She awoke to find my black eyes studying her face. Such a beautiful face, my mother’s. She smiled.

  I left my droopy-eyed mother a little while later after I had mastered her other breast and had lain warm and content with my cheek on her chest. The nurse entered the room and watched me watch my mother’s slow breathful rise. She took me up and placed me in the bassinet, leaving my mother content to rest after her labors.

  In the nursery I was reintroduced to the rectal thermometer. Not to be outdone, my infant bowel presented the world its first stool. Meconium, as sticky and greeny-black as that dark name suggests. My nurse withdrew her slender probe and said, “Well, aren’t you the best little one!” Something inside me deep as the roots of the rose knew I was. I slept well that night in the silent nursery.

  There were more tests and examinations in the next days. Many more. I helped the lady cardiologist listen to my heart. I held still and tried not to breathe too fast as she positioned her cold stethoscope and colder hand on my chest. She had words for all the sounds of the heart. They fell from her lips to my eyes and to my mouth, and they were so hard they hurt: aortic, mitral, systole, diastole, shunt, murmur. I tried to help her hold the metal disc of her stethoscope, but she moved my hands away. Her quick touch was like ice. Then she wiped her hands on her nursery outer gown. It stung to see her do that. But so ardent was she for the sounds of my heart, so much did her eyes register nothing, for her ears were her full self as she stood with black tubes in her face and caught my noises and dropped them back out of her slack mouth, that I forgave her wiping and tried not to breathe. She was the first to hear the sounds of my true heart, its leaky swirl and swish, and was true enough herself to whisper them to me. So I rolled my fingers into bird fists and lay on my back. I waited for the shape of words from her lips to fall at me. My hands unfurled like flowers to catch them. I knew not then the fruit of those sad blossoms. It was a good thing, really, not to know.

  The pictures she later took with her echo machine told the story of my sounds without words. The holes not given to my ears had somehow been mounted in my heart. Ventricular septal defect, atrial septal defect. The Assembler napping on the job again, not quite finished with the knit of tissue to quarter my heart to chambers, upper, lower, left, right.

  The tally grew: two thumbs, twelve bones, one kidney, and two holes in the lace of the heart.

  The news she gave my mother, though, was excellent. The heart would likely heal itself, knit up those tiny leaks and silence those puny squeaks, and if not, at age seven the nimble surgeon would sew me up. Until then I would carry a noise like a shout in my heart, one I could not myself hear but which, in quiet moments as I fell to sleep, I could often feel athump and aswish.

  Good news, very good news, indeed, what the heart lady said. But in the end, the news was not wholly true. The telling was a kindness told so she, or we, would not lose heart.

  In my newborn life, sound traded places with scent. I couldn’t hear my own belly rumble or the rocket burst of a good burp or the fresh squish of a seedy stool. They come back to me now*, those thousand intestinal voices, in a grand chorus of music that takes my breath away. But then*, in noiseless life, those functions of the body announced their presence in the world with their own perfumes. But my noisy, soundless heart’s perfume I did not, could not, share. It lay furled inside my chest like a flower never bloomed, a petal case for fragrance only I could breathe. It was there as I fell to sleep, that sc
ent pulsed out into my nose by the soundless thump, the quiet swish of an imperfectly quartered heart. It smelled like earth, rich and damp and deep. It smelled like the tunnels worms make.

  It is a game we play up here*, at meals or on walks or before the movies start: rank your doctors in order of preference. We all had doctors in life, some more than others, but all of us well acquainted with the disciples of life and living.

  My list: Burke, Garraway, Marshall, O’Neil, Law, Martel, Zarur, Stein, and Shaw.

  There were many others, but they played small parts in my life, my death.

  Sean Burke and his kindness for my life was first, and Eileen Marshall of Cardiology, kind too, but in third place if only because her hands were cold, summer or winter— and she never let me warm them—and because it was her error that took my life at seven. But she ranks ahead of Pat O’Neil of ENT and Carmen Law of Nephrology, and Arthur Stein of Urology and all those others, because she made my mother and my father untroubled, at least for a while. Thank you, Eileen Marshall.

  The doctors trailing Marshall, they were all fine. More cut and dried than the first three on the list, perhaps (especially that urologist Stein who took my kidney and left it in a jar like a pig’s knuckle in a saloon), but all fine enough.

  Then there was Vincent Garraway, my geneticist. I loved him so, my number two. He knew so much and was so wise, had the softest of words and the sweetest of kisses. He was the only one, of all my doctors, who ever kissed me. He kissed me every visit. He opened my eyes with his kiss on my lids, but he opened my heart with his kiss on my fingers. “Good morning, my pretty little lady!” he’d say and take my hand to his lips. One, two, three, four would go his pecks. Only then, in the wish for a fifth touch of his lips, did I ever long for missing thumbs. Only then.

  But if I kicked enough with feet and legs, he’d sometimes nod and smile and bend low to blow on my toes, to the blessed number ten. It made me scream, giddy with joy.

  And if this were not enough to win me, here is what else he did: he made it possible for Mother to have another child! Through him, a sister to come out into the limelight, to watch over the stars and animals of the ceiling, to feed and sleep and stool and coo and be and be in love.

  But that was not for some time to come. There was that first visit to me in the nursery well before there was little baby Jeanine. That first visit, not long after the inventory was nearly complete, organ by organ, system by system, exam by exam. It is all recorded on Tape #2.

  I was on my back taking in the evening shadows spread out on the nursery’s far wall when he came through the door. The shadows were made by the sun’s push past the bird cutouts taped to the large western window to dissuade real birds from attempting to visit us babies.

  I first noticed him when he stood with the shadow of a parrot on his shoulder. He was very tall and gangly and appeared in a sleeveless hospital gown with his slim arms at his side. The arms were bare and shiny and curved like cutlasses. He needed only a black patch over one eye to be a pirate. He waited by the wall, watching me watch him, until my mother arrived.

  They talked for a few minutes before they approached my bassinet. Mother wasn’t smiling then, but there was a confidence in her eyes, a cross between acceptance and anticipation, maybe, or relief and determination. “Good morning, my pretty little lady,” he said taking my hands in his for the first time. It was a long way down to my stubby arms from where his mouth had dropped those syrupy words, but he came down like a graceful stork, regally closer second by second, and with his thin straight lips, he deposited his octuplet of baby kisses. I squealed and kicked and couldn’t control my roving, raving eyes until I was so out of breath I had to quiet. He began his exam just then and did again what all the others had done before, a search for holes denied or oversupplied, for bones amiss, unmatched and matchless. But more than any of his predecessors, he searched for something else, something in my eyes. Well, not in my eyes, but somehow through my eyes. Maybe good Dr. Burke had seen it too, that first night. But Vincent Garraway’s watery blue globes fixed themselves on my lumps of jellied coal until I thought they’d ignite in flames. I refused to turn away from his face with its long sharp nose and not-too-pretty ears and tarnished red skin and a mark like a splash of purple wine on his forehead. I wanted to study that stain because its shape promised a new and unusual landscape (in time I would find there a tiny salamander whose tongue was stuck to a frozen lamppost, but not that first visit), but I held his eyes with mine until he was done.

  The upshot of his examination: my uvula was missing! Ha! The useless uvula missing! Very good news from Dr. Vincent Garraway. Apparently only the finest of singers suffer by the absence of the uvula. And that made no difference to me.

  Final tally before going home from the hospital: two thumbs, twelve bones, one kidney, one uvula, and two holes in the heart.

  Final words to my mother before Dr. Garraway left that night: “She’s a keeper, all right.”

  He made me feel almost perfect.

  2

  OF RITES AND WRONGS

  The main advantage to a February birthday was the range of sweaters I could be dressed in. Mother had received at least a dozen baby outfits that included a sweater. Some were heavy and warm, made of scratchy wool; others were light and pretty, made of cotton or silk. The morning we left the hospital, on my fifth day of life, she dressed me in a bright red one that had tiny roses embroidered on both sleeves. She covered my head with a matching red bonnet and, heedless of my kicks, managed to stuff my fat baby hams into a pair of white tights.

  Father took a picture of us that morning just before we left to go home. The room was festooned with flowers and balloons. Mother was holding me cradled in the crook of one arm, and in the other rested a bouquet of red and white roses. Her head was inclined toward me and she was smiling, with sunlight on her neck. It became our family’s Christmas card ten months later. I studied it many times as I grew older. I was five before I understood its powerful message. The sleeves of my sweater are pulled up to the mid-portion of my forearms. My baby-pink skin shines against the bright red silk. The looking eye notes that contrast immediately. The eye is drawn also to the hands, the four-fingered hands, the thumbless hands. There are two bouquets in Mother’s arms, her message to the world.

  I was fast asleep the entire car ride home. The vibrations of the car’s engine were like a tactile lullaby, a vibratory hymn that tranced me and made me droop with sleep. I passed from car seat to crib this way, and not even a brief stop for a diaper change on the cold tabletop in my room could rouse me.

  Hours later I awoke, rediapered, refreshed, and reflective on my back, facing the dollops and swirls of the yellow cream seas and ripe savannahs on my stucco ceiling. It would be eighteen months before the first elephant would materialize out of that primordial wavy landscape and months more before the lions and egrets chose to be seen. But now I had an ocean of waves, a plain of grasses, to scan. On the waters, I saw crests and caps, canyons and barrels, peaks like breasts—the only items of my newfound world that called me back to the hungry here of crib and home.

  That first day home, my mother came to my call, looked into my large black eyes, and said, “Oh, so hungry from your baby dreams!” She put me to her breast. She rocked me slowly in the green-plaid chair while, all mouth and eyes, I took her in. She was wrong, though, in her view of baby sleep. There were no dreams back then when I slept, just the pounding dark and the faint wormy whiff of tunneled earth in my nose. I awoke from this nowhere five or six times a day, and went with my eyes wherever I could. There were so many worlds in my mother’s face, a dozen at least in her round brown eyes, a hundred in her smiles.

  The day after discharge Mother dressed me in a tiny pair of denim overalls and zipped me up in a sort of burlap bag for transport to the office of Dr. Burke. I cried during the thirty-minute car ride because my chin was scratchy from the rough brown weave and my arms were held to my sides by the sack.

  “What�
��s the matter with her?” Father asked, careful not to take his eyes off the road ahead except to glance anxiously in the rearview mirror at Mother and me in the backseat. His eyes progressively narrowed in discomfort as the noisy ride proceeded.

  “Maybe I overdressed her,” Mother finally said as we entered the gloom of the hospital’s underground garage. She pulled down the casing’s zipper and my crying stopped at once. She looked at me with a face so full of self-reproach that I wished for an instant I had been born cry-less as well as deaf. Her index finger swept softly under my jowl and cooled my rough red skin.

  “I’m sorry, baby,” she cooed at me. “I’m sorry,” and her fingers brushed away my pain. Father’s eyes in the mirror winced.

  The visit was more than a simple follow-up with Dr. Burke. He had assembled the others in the tiny conference room that smelled like burnt rubber from the new tile floor (and still smelled faintly of that acrid melt seven years later at my final visit). From where I sat propped on Mother’s lap, the room itself held my interest only in the lattice of acoustic squares that made up the ceiling. Each taupe tile was punctured by thousands of holes and cuts and nicks. There were no breasts in this flat expanse, but as years of meetings went by in this same cramped room, I would stitch hole to hole and scrape to scrape to spy a horse, a crab, an archer, the ceiling having become my horoscopic heavens.

  Burke spoke. The words are with me now*, but then* all I could do was note the face of my doctor as his lips moved and the augury of words dropped onto the shiny conference table for all to see.