The Assembler of Parts: A Novel

by Wientzen, Raoul

  Cassidy was steamed when he heard about it. He tried to get an appointment to meet with Father Murray but was denied. He managed to get Father Larrie on the phone. Father Larrie listened patiently, but wouldn’t meet with him either. Father Larrie merely said he would look into the question of my suitability for Communion training.

  At the dinner table that Sunday night, Cassidy kept repeating, “diminished mental capacity” and then shaking his head in bewilderment. He told Father when they started clearing, “I’ll diminish their goddamn teeth, I get in a room with them alone. Like I shoulda done nineteen years ago, Ford, over Joey. They were a pair of jackasses young and are a pair of jackasses old. Diminished mental capacity, those dried-up old bastards.”

  “Joe,” said Father, nodding in my direction.

  “I mean it, Ford. The time of reckoning has come.”

  That night we read the myth of Perseus and Medusa again. And Pegasus and Andromeda. Later in bed they were there with me, shining down from the plaster sky. Except for Medusa the Gorgon. She was dead by Perseus’s arm and Hermes’s sword. Good. God, give her a new head in heaven, right from the box. I went to sleep seeing her gleaming hair blowing in the wind as she stood on the ocean’s perch. The hair was like silver strings, but soft like cats’ fur.

  First grade was an easy year, except for CCD and soccer again. We went two and four. Timmy twisted his knee. Not playing soccer, but walking to the oranges and Gatorade table at halftime. Lexi became goalie for two games while he healed and ate potato chips with his parents on the sidelines. We won them both. Her body bath replaced Timmy’s creosote in the air. I watched her more than the action on the field. Her hair was platinum blond. Long and gleaming like the night moon’s silver trail on the sea that led Odysseus home.

  She told me to turn around, face the play, thirty-seven times during those two games. She had hair like Pegasus’s tail.

  I left my regular class and went to third grade for reading and math every day. I learned cursive at home from Father and Cassidy. I couldn’t draw to save my life, but I was good at naming colors. I would always spot the gray in greens, the teal in blues. I just couldn’t draw a sailboat.

  Spring came and went. Jeanine was walking and talking. She stopped learning new signs as she learned to speak. Cassidy read to her, now, at seven thirty while I did my homework. Then it was my turn at eight. If he couldn’t come, Mother or Father read to me. I followed the words with my eyes. Sometimes I couldn’t stop my hands from moving. Usually I just made the signs for the story we were doing. But sometimes, my hands moved like they had in the mirror of my bathroom when I tried mastering transubstantiation. I didn’t say it to anyone, but sometimes I wanted the myths and legends to be real. To come alive. Right off the page, out of the brilliantly colored pictures. My thumbless hands were hungry for magic.

  In late summer, just before second grade was to begin, we drove to Florida to visit Nana and Ned. We drove for two days, stayed with them for three, and then drove two more days back home. Jeanine slept and then cried, or sometimes cried and then slept, in the car seat next to me, unless I read to her or she was eating. I read her nine books eleven times each on the way down. She received three new books as travel presents from Nana and Ned, and I placed them in rotation for reading on the way home. Most of the time, Mother, who sat in the front seat next to Father, dozed off before Jeanine’s eyes had fully closed. Then I placed my pillow against the door window so she could sleep with her head supported. She had announced her pregnancy the night before we left. Father stood behind her, smiling with his hand on her shoulder. Jeanine cried when she heard the news. To be fair, at almost two, Jeanine had taken to crying at the drop of a hat. Or the ring of the doorbell. Or the smell of pepperoni pizza. Cassidy told her he was buying us ice cream cones one hot Saturday afternoon and she started crying.

  It was hotter in Florida in early September than in Bethesda, Maryland, in the height of the summer. But Florida had better clouds. They were bigger and whiter and faster than our clouds. We’d all go to the beach in the morning before the day got too hot. I couldn’t get wet above my waist because of my hearing apparatus, so most of the day I sat in the shade of a red-striped umbrella and read, or lay on my back watching the clouds sail by. Most were too round and fat to be anything but clouds, but often in late morning, as the breeze off the ocean stiffened, some of them were torn into strips and bits. These I could piece together into familiar shapes—boats, animals, major gods of antiquity, a can of mushroom soup. The wattle neck of Father Larrie.

  Nana and Ned had a dog, a golden retriever named Jed. They let me take him for walks in the evenings, along the beach, all by myself. Jed could get wet and swim whenever he wanted, and if I threw a stick into the surf, he’d charge right in and get it. When he came out and ran to me with his mouth clamped on the wet wood, he shook his yellow coat till it reminded me of Lexi’s hair when she ran with her ponytail untied. Except Jed sprayed me with sandy sea water that smelled faintly of gasoline, whereas Lexi was dry and all Jean Naté.

  I walked the beach those late afternoons, scanning the surf for Aphrodite rising up on a cushion of white foam. Every porpoise playing in the evening waters seemed her in disguise, smiling at me at the top of her leap. I was tempted to hold out my hands and move them in a blessing through the air, but I had promised Father, so I didn’t.

  On my last afternoon walk, the west wind was high. The sound of the wind-driven water was bright green whisperings in my ears, hollow and luminous like the low notes of a sad song. That music brought me to the water’s edge. I stepped in a few paces, and the coral foam gripped my ankles. The gurgled green song of the sea grew louder in my ears. The foam then was to my thigh. The water was warm and soft like the music in the wind. I bent slightly and brought my face to the skin of the sea. A swell rose to meet me. I kissed its lips. I felt the tug of the receding waves pull at me. I stepped once, twice, three times further out. The music softened to a golden voice made weak by the sight of beauty. I looked to my yellow bathing suit darkened to my chest by the sea. The song now was the whisper in a shell. I covered my ears with my hands. The whisper was light as a feather, soft and shiny and alive. A wave moved past me and seconds later began its strong retreat. My right foot rose from the sand, drifted forward an inch. The whisper in my ear was a sad, certain yes. I will dive into the sea and swim out, far out, to the whispering song, I thought. Then I felt a creature scrape past my back. Frightened, I turned. Jed began to bark and growl as he paddled around me, placing himself between me and the wind and the waves and the whisper. His bark was loud and guttural, wet and incessant. The whispered song of the sea was stilled. I turned and walked to shore.

  We drove home to Maryland the next morning. Mother helped me write a thank-you note to Nana and Ned for the fun time they showed us. I tried to draw a likeness of Jed on the reverse side of the card, to thank him. I tried to make him look like he was barking, but the way I rounded his lips made him look more like he was singing.

  School began again. Second grade was easy. I went to fourth grade twice a day for math and reading. Our soccer team went five and two. Timmy decided not to play. Father would not consider my quitting the team. I looked at Lexi less and less but smelled her just as much. I did not practice transubstantiation. My second tour of provisional, provisional time went well. For some reason, it was Father Larrie who sat behind the desk now each Sunday when he came to ask the stupid questions. I answered well. Father Larrie smiled at me sometimes. Once or twice, I even thought he would have smiled if I had made a mistake.

  Mother’s belly swelled as the months went by.

  Jeanine’s second birthday came. Cassidy came to the party we had for her, the day after Thanksgiving that year, with eyes whiskey-wet at noon. When we sang her “Happy Birthday,” he barely lifted his voice. The rest of that week he only read to us once. His face was like the ocean running out from the sand, roiled and angry and rough.

  7

  THE COMFORT OF S
ILENCE

  Cassidy continued to drink heavily. Some evenings he called on the phone to tell Father he wasn’t coming for supper or to read books with me or BJ, as Jeanine was being called. But even on those nights he’d sometimes arrive, haggard and stumbling, coming like a blind man into the kitchen and banging his hip against the Formica table as he tried to negotiate his way to his chair. Then he listed left or right on the rough whiskey sea inside of him and mumbled on about his bad day at work, the heartless weight of Christmas mail, the needless parcels needing to be weighed and postaged, the dull folks buying ten-dollar money orders to give to their kids as presents. This last gripe he repeated again and again. He was moved, temporarily, to the loading docks. He refused the coffee Mother offered and the food we were eating. Sometimes Father tried to convince him to sleep the night on the living room couch rather than drive home. If Father threw a bottle of rye into the bargain, he stayed. On those occasions, I saw him in the morning before I went off to school or out to play. Usually, there was a tumbler of whiskey in his hand even at that early hour. His eyes were red and tinged with yellow in the whites like a poorly beaten egg, and his breath was wormy. His breath those mornings when I went to hug him was the primordial air itself, the mushroomy wick of what tunnels below.

  “You okay?” I signed each time. Yes, he’d answer flatly, sipping his rye. Finally, three days before Christmas, he said nothing in reply to my question. Instead he broke into tears. Whether he did it purposefully or not, I don’t know, but the way his left hand went to his wet eyes and slid down his cheeks seemed to be the sign for “sad” or “sorrowful.” The death in his breath blew at me. The whiskey in his right hand trembled.

  “Joey?” I mouthed slowly. I knew it was. I had heard Mother and Father talking about it over the past few days. He looked at me with startle in his face. “Sorry,” I signed, rubbing my fisted right hand in circles over my heart. I placed my hand on his wrist. He went to take another sip but I held on tight. He jerked his hand free and began to say something. His face seemed full of pained apology, but he fell into silence. There was comfort in that silence, it seemed, like the comfort of the confessional’s private whisper that I’d practiced twice in CCD class. He blankly looked past me, through me and past me, and signed, “Joey and more.” The fingertips of both hands banged together twice, and then twice again. More and more. Some whiskey dripped onto the tabletop, forming the number eight as two pools merged. I remembered the gravestones with the identical dates of death. Today was the anniversary.

  “Joey and Rose Mary?” I finger-spelled. “Twenty years today?” He went to drink and caught himself. He brought the tumbler back down on the top of the coffee table with such force the loud bang made me turn my head to see if he’d shattered the glass.

  “That,” he signed, “that and more.” There was nothing but hopeless, vacant space in his eyes. And our resorting to unspoken communication, to sign, seemed to expand that void to engulf us both. I didn’t have the heart to brush my right index finger down over my left palm to ask the question, “What?” Instead, I put my arms around his neck, locked my fingers, and pressed him as hard as I could. I felt his torso lean to the table and his arm reach for his drink. “You will be okay,” I said into his ear as perfectly as I could. He put his glass down, gently this time, and tied me up tight with his arms. He kissed my cheek and cried. kissed it again and was quiet.

  He held me like that until Mother came in with BJ and sent me and her back to my room to play. “You will be okay” were the last words I said to him. He had gone home half an hour later when I came downstairs, and I was dead only twelve hours after that.

  Here’s how I died: My voice, my imperfect voice, died first. My throat grew so tight, so constricted, I had no air for my dysmorphic words. My breath was blocky and thick, so difficult to move beyond the beefy tissues of my throat, I spent every joule of my body’s energy pushing the frozen bellows of my chest. Soon my arms grew limp, too weak and too tired to form a sentence, a phrase, a word in sign. I sat in my chair in my room hearing at first the dull hiss of the cool-mist vaporizer Mother shot my way. My leaden arms drooped at my sides like the stems of a dying plant. My mouth hung open. My chest caved with each impossibly stridulous breath until I thought I felt my breastbone kiss my spinal column. My ears, my drilled ears, died next. At ten that night the hiss softened to a gentle breeze like the one that ruffled the canopy of the trees in high summer. And that sound slowly waned to become the longingly hollow, caressing susurrus of a seashell. The sound was familiar and frightening. Mother came in with a cool cloth and spoke. I heard nothing. I saw her lips move a little but nothing seemed to drop to my eyes, my lips. I remember the look of panic on her face. The sound of the sea in the shell ceased. A last difficult breath smelled richly of fungus and damp.

  That’s how I died: as silently as I was born.

  *

  Then I was here* and the movies began.

  It is not a good thing to have here* in heaven, the last memory of your mother’s face full of panic over your death.

  I see the death, I see the panic, and it seems I know nothing of my existence, have learned nothing from the exercise of the tapes. The tapes are as deaf and dead as my ears in the womb, in the tomb. They teach me nothing. I am no Isaiah, no Ezekiel, no Moses. Only a girl with no thumbs whose life was bookended by silence and despair. The meaning of my life? It is not to be found in the tapes.

  I see the panic on my mother’s face. Mercifully, I cannot hear her screams.

  PART TWO

  ACT OF GOD

  8

  NIGHT ADVANCES

  There is a police investigation of my death. It is a routine procedure when a child is brought in dead by the rescue squad. I was dead for six minutes when they arrived at my room. Father’s attempt to give me rescue breathing was futile. He knelt by my bedside with his dry lips on mine and blew as forcibly as he could while Mother called 911 and, later, did chest compressions, just as she had learned in her Red Cross CPR class. My blood surged under the frantic weight of her palms, but it did no good. My blood was brown by then, brown and thick as sludge. My upper airway was obstructed and none of Father’s furious air went beyond my vocal cords.

  The EMS techs arrive. One of them manages to insert an endotracheal tube down my airway, which relieves the obstruction, but by then it is much, much too late. Five minutes, to be exact. Cassidy could make you cry if he sang that long, and five minutes without oxygen makes you dead. They try to restart my heart. They push drugs down the tube into my lungs and into a vein in my arm. It does no good.

  Mother stands near my bedside staring blankly during this time, her frozen gaze directed to the dark outside my window. Her face registers no emotion but shock. It seems to darken, to take on the color of the night. Her mouth is open a fraction of an inch and, if I look closely, I can see my own fixed the same. It is the tube that parts my lips; shock, my mother’s. Neither of us blinks. Our eyes are offered to the dry air of the house, our vision to the advance of the night. Her hair is swirled wildly as if a great wind had coursed through the room, whipping her long strands where it will. But it is from the position she held those eleven minutes working over my breastbone with the palm of her hand. My hair is too short to be disheveled.

  Father creeps closer to the working men as their nine minutes of effort spin out. It is not so much shock on his face as bewilderment. His slow encroachment on their space seems like the action of a curious child who wants to understand what he is viewing from too far a distance. Just another few feet closer and it will all make sense, he says with his baby steps.

  The men are still breathing for me with their black Ambu bags and banging on my chest and squirting drugs into my vein as they load me onto a stretcher and bring me downstairs to their truck for the ride to the emergency room. Mother and Father follow behind in their car. Mrs. Sampson from across the street stays with BJ, who sleeps through it all.

  In the emergency room, my hearing aids gle
am under the intense light from the overhead lamp as Dr. Arthur Jamison pounds my chest with the fury of an angry man in a brawl. Another doctor shines a light into my eyes and shakes his head. “Fixed and dilated,” he says.

  Jamison gives my breastbone a last frustrated shove and announces, “Ten forty-two. Let’s call it.” A nurse closes off the IV drip; a respiratory therapist detaches the Ambu bag from the tube in my airway. I am officially dead.

  But even in death I still fascinate my doctors. Jamison places both gloved hands on my head and rolls it from side to side so he can inspect my ears and their hardware. “Huh,” he manages. He reaches down and takes my right hand into his. He squeezes the thumbless spot near my index finger and moves his hand up the length of my forearm, pressing every inch or so for the missing bone. “Huh,” he says again. He pulls his gloves off with a snap that sounds like the whip of the animal trainer at the circus. He leaves to find my parents.

  I am surprised Mother and Father don’t cry right away in the emergency room when Jamison tells them I am dead. Perhaps their immediate tears would have buffered their anger over what was to happen. Perhaps, if they had fallen into each other’s arms and sobbed in pain, they would have spent themselves emotionally too much to grow angry over what was to come. There are only a few seconds between the doctor’s terrible declarative sentence, “I’m sorry, Jessica didn’t make it,” and the next about the police needing to clarify the events of the evening. Father, in those few moments, does put his arm around Mother and tugs her closer. And Mother does take a deep breath and pauses. Is this the advance of tears? Perhaps. And perhaps if Dr. Jamison had waited just a moment longer they would have come, the tears. Was he so busy he could not wait? Was he, at thirty-six, already so jaded about the death of a child? Or was it the death of this particular child, this two-“huh” deformed child, that propelled him through the event so tranquilly? Nothing on the tape clarifies this for me.