The Assembler of Parts: A Novel

by Wientzen, Raoul

  “I should have called. I should have called Dr. Burke right away when I heard that cough.” Her voice is weak and thin, and she begins to cry again.

  “Kate,” starts Father, and then he falters. “Kate,” he says again. “No. We did what anyone would have done. Don’t say that. You’re not to blame for this.” He reaches his arms across the table and takes her hand in his. “Kate,” he says again, trying to penetrate her tears. “Kate, don’t. No.”

  She says, “It just all happened so fast. One minute the coughing. The next—”

  “Kate, don’t,” but he’s crying now, too. “I should have called. When I needed to get that damned vaporizer, I should have called and asked what else should we do.”

  Get up! Get up! I shout to the film as I watch them. Go to her and hold her. Weep together. Weep in the yellow kitchen light together and in the night dark of your bedroom together. You were my parents and you loved me. That is enough. That is all and enough. Weep, embrace each other for that. It would be good, the bath of your tears.

  Instead they sit opposite, hands in hands, crying, remembering what Burke said, what they didn’t do. Blaming themselves.

  Dawn is slow to come. Night lingers, wanting more. It has an appetite for sorrow. It feeds on guilt.

  Outside, the stars take advantage of the dark and shine more brilliantly.

  *

  I see through my death how much they loved me. Still love me in their separate and sprawling grief. I have returned to that thought as the meaning of it all. Love. Just their love for me. I have seen enough. Please, let the tapes stop. I am ready to let it all go.

  I am dead. I am gone. I was loved. What more can there be? Let their love be the end of me.

  9

  THE BASEMENT TAPES

  Benton Ridgely, the medical examiner for the District of Columbia, finds it easier to dictate as he works on the deceased than to take notes and reduce his findings to words later. A foot-controlled dictation system makes this practical. “The body is that of a seven-year-ten-month-old girl. She is well nourished and well developed. She apparently lacks thumbs. She is dressed in a Snoopy pajama top and bottom. On her left index finger is a paper cigar band. Twin hearing aids sit behind her pinnae, attached by tan wires to her mastoid antra and middle ear clefts. Evidences of medical treatment include an intravenous device in the right antecubital fossa and a five-millimeter endotracheal tube taped to the left corner of her mouth. Her chest is covered by two monitoring pads. There are needle puncture marks in both antecubital fossae and the dorsa of both hands. A urinary catheter exits her urethra.

  “The integument demonstrates dependent lividity but is free of scars, bruises, tattoos, and identifying marks. The hyoid bone is intact. Palpation of the cranial vault discloses no edema or depression. There are no palpable fractures in any bone. The thumbs are aplastic. Her teeth are in good repair. Her tongue and palate are intact. The uvula is absent.

  “The thoracic cavity is entered using the standard Y incision. The lungs are pink and spongy. The heart is dextro. The pericardium is smooth. It strips easily. It contains five cc’s of clear, serous fluid. The heart is removed in the usual fashion. It is attached to a main pulmonary trunk and aortic arch in the normal position. The aorta is seen dividing into . . .” He lifts his foot from the pedal that activates the recording system. He uses his gloved fingers to push aside the connective tissues and tiny lymph nodes in the very center of my chest, my mediastinum, to obtain better exposure. “What is this, little girl?” he asks me, though he couldn’t know that one day* I would be watching and listening. “This isn’t supposed to be there.” He snaps off his gloves and opens the folder containing the faxed medical record from Sean Burke. He scans the section on “Cardiovascular” to see if he had simply read too quickly before starting the dissection. Then he flips to the section marked “Radiographic Studies.” He reads the reports of my last two echocardiograms. “ASD, VSD. Nothing else,” he whispers to me. He dons new gloves and extends his incision to mid-neck level. He retracts nodes and thymus. He traces the course of the vessel from aortic arch to the base of the neck. “Oh, shit,” he says shaking his head. “Oh, holy shit.”

  He removes his gloves again and calls the number for outpatient pediatrics. As soon as the receiver is lifted, he begins to yell, “Don’t put me on hold! Don’t put me on hold! It’s Ridgely in the autopsy room. Get me Sean Burke, immediately. It’s a matter of life and death. Well, it’s at least a matter of death.” That always did the trick with the secretaries. A little humor from the autopsy pit. They always moved pretty quick on that.

  “Sean,” he says when the pediatrician is on the line, “you better get down here. And bring Marshall with you. I found out what happened to your little Hilgar girl. You gotta see this.”

  I see from their faces the displeasure they experience in visiting the morgue. The room is old and dark, perpetually cold and damp, and were it not for the commingled odors of ethyl alcohol and methane, it could be the crypt of a church.

  Eileen Marshall holds a handkerchief across her nose to ward off the odors. Burke, a drained look on his face, stands right next to my head. I can almost feel the warmth of his breath on my face, it seems. But the good news is I can’t feel a thing. Which is really very good because the medical examiner plunges his hands into my chest like he is trying to catch a guppy in a tub of water. “That’s what killed her,” he says with a nod to the structure now perfectly visible amid the ripped tissues of my chest.

  “Aberrant right subclavian,” mumbles Eileen Marshall.

  “An A for the cardiology lady. Aberrant right subclavian artery. It comes off as a separate branch of the aortic arch,” Ridgely points with the blunt end of his scalpel, “courses up and over here, and winds its way all the way to here, where it dips behind the trachea. It’s as fat as a worm and goes almost up to her throat. No wonder she obstructed her airway with a little croup. Trachea was already fifty, sixty percent compressed from behind.” He lets the information settle. “Trouble is, my friends, it wasn’t detected in life.” He releases the tissues. They barely move toward their original anatomic position. Such is their stubbornness for the truth. “That’s the trouble, my friends.”

  Eileen Marshall removes her hand from her face. Her eyes dart left and right before she speaks. Even then she does not look directly at either colleague. Her eyes course from one face to the other, to my chest, to the floor, to the metal-shaded lamp hanging over my table like a hanged man, without fixing on any of it. “I’ll have to review her echoes. I don’t see how something that big could have been missed. . . .” The silence in the room calls for more explanation. She adds, “But, I mean, aberrant subclavians aren’t part of her syndrome. I mean, who could have suspected?” She clears her throat and finishes, “I’ll have to check her echoes.”

  Burke’s face is blank enough that it might be pure shock he feels, like Mother’s at my bedside as I died. But the way he sucks in his lower lip and narrows his eyes, the quick lock of those eyes on Ridgley’s, tells me he feels more. Anger. Sadness. Worry. “Let’s do that,” he manages to say.

  “Anything else for us?” Eileen Marshall asks. Her arms are folded across her chest, warm and full of blood’s hot life. My chest is hollow as a cave now, and just as cold.

  Ridgely thinks for a moment before answering. “Yeah. She was wearing a ring on her finger. From a cigar. Now, who does that anymore? All those young kids with real gold rings and this one, paper. How do you figure?”

  “Any more medical findings, I meant,” she says peevishly.

  “Nope. Just that,” and he points with his finger at the worm from my heart. “Full written report in about two weeks, after we get the toxicology and histopathology back.”

  *

  For reasons He won’t share with me, the Assembler now* presses me to view the Cassidy tapes. The ones from before I died were so difficult to sit through. And the ones from after, well, I’m just not sure how they will make me feel. I think
He wants me to see something there, something that will revive my interest in piecing the parts of my life together so it makes sense in a bigger way. Something that will take me further than what has become my belief since I viewed my death and its immediate aftereffects. That my life made sense ultimately and simply because I lived and was loved. I lived a life of happiness and sorrow, of acceptance and rejection, of fullness and incompletion, and of forgiveness, all wrapped in the love of my family.

  When I tell Him I want to stop this exercise, this Cinema Purgatorio, He says to me again, “What has been hidden from the wise has been revealed to the blind!”

  But not now*, not yet*. There are the Cassidy tapes to watch. When I finally agree to them, He smiles and replies, “Ah, yes, I’ll get them. They’re in the basement.” It seems to take forever* before He returns with them. Perhaps He thinks I need the time to ponder? Or has He lost His way? “Make straight, make straight the way of the Lord!” I want to joke. But I don’t. His feelings are easy to bruise.

  Cassidy is off the morning before my death, just as he had been each December twenty-second for the preceding twenty-one years working for the postal service. Mother sent him home from our house with a mug-full of coffee. He laces it with glove-box whiskey in our driveway, again at the first stop sign down the street, and again when he parks in front of his house on Macomb. He tries to wash and shave but abandons his razor before he’s done his chin and left cheek. By day’s end, which is also my life’s end, he looks mangy and piebald in the face, like he has a cancer. But now, as a shaggy coat of flu mucus begins to form on my throat, he walks through his house room to room, stopping to contemplate the living room couch, the kitchen table, the padded rocker in the spare bedroom, the funeral holy cards stuck in the frame of his bedroom mirror. Two of these he pulls away and reads. “Joseph (Joey) Delaney Cassidy Jr. entered eternal light and rest 12/22/1984.” He mumbles from memory the prayer on the card’s other side. He repeats the process with Rose Mary Ferraro Cassidy’s card. His voice is drunk with whiskey and sorrow. He wipes a tear from his left eye before replacing the cards in the frame.

  He turns sharply to leave the room, loses his balance to whiskey’s pull, and falls onto the corner of the bed. He starts to get up, his arm going to the mattress as if to push away, but suddenly he stops and sits staring at the mirror. He sees his slumped-over frame, his gray uneven stubble, his red, sunken eyes. He sees the third funeral card, and for the first time in many years, he lets himself remember the last morning, the last good memory. Rose Mary leaving their bed for the six a.m. feeding, then bringing Joey back with her to snuggle warm next to him while she showers; the smell of him, of her, almost the same smell; her body glimpsed naked in the mirror of the bathroom vanity before she steps into the shower, her breasts swelled up like life itself; the noises Joey makes from mouth and ass; his joy in it all; the sound of water cascading down his wife’s body; Joey then asleep next to him, the soft spot on his head sucked in with each tiny breath. Then there was his Ma in the kitchen putting out the breakfast. The bacon and eggs and potatoes. A good breakfast in case they get caught long at the doctor’s for Joey’s two-month checkup and Rose’s second postpartum visit. Her words to him as she puts down his plate of food, as Rose Mary enters the kitchen in her robe and black hair so wet it drips. “You never know. At the doctor’s office, you just never know.” Rose saying, “Good morning, Carina,” and his Ma smiling back with that woman’s smile a man can never penetrate. “No counting calories this morning,” his Ma saying as she scoops bacon grease on the yolks of their eggs sizzling in the pan. Rose, after she’s certain Carina is engaged with the eggs, grabbing her breasts through the terry cloth and saying, “No one I know is about to complain.” Her look, a smile a man can penetrate.

  Then he’s at the door readying to leave for work. Then the words, “I’m leavin’ the cab money. Won’t cost much, Ma. I’ll get to those old brakes of yours this weekend. Replace the brake hose, flush the system. If you can remember it, a call after Joey’s visit just to fill me in, OK?” And he’s out the door to his own car, bringing the morning smells of the kitchen in his clothes.

  The rest flashes by in bursts. The police car’s red lights beyond the post office window. The ride to the hospital, passing the scene of the accident, his mother’s old Chevy broadsided by a pickup truck at the intersection of Wisconsin and Reservoir. The eerie quiet in the halls of the emergency room. The corpses of his son and wife on separate gurneys. His mother unscathed, weeping, weeping in a chair, unable to stand, unable to say anything.

  The corpses, separated by space, untouching, alone.

  *

  It is a tape within a tape the Assembler has brought. To see a young Cassidy, his baby and wife and mother, vibrant and alive, and in a flash, to see the two youngest dead, is too much for me to bear. And there appears to be no clue in the sad footage for my own needs. Or what He thinks must be my needs. I continue to watch, knowing full well how it is to lie limp and dead on a hospital gurney. I am broken, heart and soul.

  Cassidy stares at the funeral Mass cards on his mirror. He closes his eyes and lies back on the bed. He sees Father Larrie at the wake sitting opposite his mother, knees to knees, holding her hands as she cries in the corner of the room with the caskets and flowers. Her face holds as much wild terror as deep sadness. Father Larrie is a new-minted priest then, his hair brown and wavy, his eyes shining with the blue of Mother Mary’s hope and love. Carina Cassidy is urgent, nearly hysterical, in her cries and in her words between them. Her face bursts with need. Larrie nods, whispers, “Yes, yes,” and retrieves his stole from the side pocket of his black jacket. The vestment goes around his neck. If you didn’t know better, you’d think he is preparing to leave for the cold walk to his car. The stole is long and ends in dark purple rectangles that dangle almost to the floor. The purple is the color of the bruise on Joey’s forehead in the ER, the only mark on his dead body. Cassidy wants to turn away from the scene when he makes this connection, but there is something in Larrie’s demeanor that won’t let him. It is the way he leans forward toward his ranting mother, the half turn of the head so that she’s whispering directly into his right ear, the slow nodding he does like a man completely convinced, fully certain, about what he hears. The nodding, slow, so slow. He releases her hands and they immediately come together in the pose of prayerfulness. His mother’s face is fixed on the priest’s, as expectant as before but now calm. He turns his head to look at her. His hand makes the sign of the blessing in the air. Cassidy hears the first few Latin words, “Absolvo te . . . ,” and turns away, not knowing if it’s sadness or anger that makes him go.

  There is a hospitality room at Leary’s Funeral Home. Leary’s is an Irish establishment and the hospitality room is stocked with bottles of good Irish whiskey the mourners bring. But Cassidy doesn’t touch a drop the two long afternoons and nights of the wake. He takes condolences from family and friends and drinks warm soda from a plastic cup. He comes and goes from wake to home in his car, alone, while Nana and Ned chauffeur Carina. Before the concluding prayers on the second night, Father Larrie tells him to see after his mother. “She’s suffering mightily for your coldness and distance. Comfort her, Joseph,” he says in the hallway. Cassidy is astonished the priest would even think to approach him after the row they had over the two coffins. But he does, his blue eyes a little cloudy from fatigue and his face a little shiny from sweat. There are a hundred people present for the service and the heat is intense.

  “It’s for me ta decide how ta go on, not for you, Father. She’s the one who drove, who’s responsible for their deaths. That’s not somethin’ I’m likely ta put behind me.” He turns to go but the press of the standing crowd locks him in place.

  “She’s received the absolution of the Church, Joseph. With a penitent heart she has come to Christ and He has forgiven her. She asked me to tell you that. She has no debt to God in any of this sadness, and now you must forgive her also.” His face is set so hard
, Cassidy feels like punching it.

  “Well, all the absolution in Christendom won’t put breath back in my wife or my son. That’s what it will take for me ta give her forgiveness. Their lives returned.”

  “Joseph, you risk the loss of their loved memory. That memory which you share with your mother. You risk losing that and your mother’s love. You won’t get through this with hate and retribution. They will eat the love out of you. Only with love and forgiveness will you get through. Replace your stony heart with a living heart, the Bible says to you, Joseph. Your heart will not live, truly live, unless you go to her in forgiveness.”

  “Well, you’re wrong there, Father. I’m livin’ off anger and hate right now. If I don’t have that, I don’t have nothin’. Nothin’ at all but emptiness. I left her the cab money. She killed them and that’s the way it will always be for me.”

  “Joe,” the priest begins, but Cassidy finds a gap and slips away. “Put away . . . ,” he says to the retreating figure, but his words fall unheard into the din of the room. I read his lips, though, as he finishes, “. . . anger. Put on mercy.”

  The funerals are the next morning at St. Anthony’s. Cassidy refuses to sit next to his mother. Nana holds her, weeping in the front pew the entire service. It is no better at the cemetery. Cassidy does not return to his home for the reception. He drives instead to Rory’s Place and gets drunk in his mourning suit.