The Assembler of Parts: A Novel

by Wientzen, Raoul

  He sits on the chair and flips through the transcript. The compendium of questions and answers goes on for over three hundred pages. Everywhere he turns, Mother has underlined and highlighted and starred and doublestarred answers. There is marginal scribble on every page, much of which references other pages in the transcript where she has divulged more information on the question at hand. Not since high school has he seen anything so well studied as these pages.

  He reads from the beginning. By the fourth page, he is troubled. Misspoke. Kate must have misspoke, he mumbles. Mother’s testimony is that I often fought going to school, that I was reluctant to do my studies, that I essentially lived in my own quiet locked-in world. A fantasy world, really, she remarks in answer to a question, with stories of gods and goddesses and with imaginary animal friends. It is where I preferred to stay, away from people and reality, in a world of my own fashioning, childish and sweet but unreal. Cassidy cannot understand her confusion of fact. The Jess he knew loved the academics of school. Friends were hard to come by, true, and there was a lot of teasing, yes, but he knew a Jess who gladly went to learn math and reading and who readily engaged the physical world. And this Jess lavished her energy on her story life, drawing ideas from her books to fire her imagination. His Jess didn’t live in a fantasy world. She created one to visit as she wished, as do all children in their love of mystery and enchantment. She used it for her own enjoyment, but she did not hide in it.

  He reads on, about my ears and my voice and my hands and my heart. “No!” he cries aloud, “No, Kate, this isn’t right! This isn’t Jess. This isn’t her.” He reads further, and sinks further into confusion and distress.

  He goes downstairs and takes Father’s testimony. He sits on the couch in the parlor and discovers again the alien, mutant Jessica Mary Jackson grown from Father’s memory, dressed in Father’s words. He is shocked and sad, wounded. And angry. Very angry.

  He reads undisturbed for over an hour. There are far too many pages to review them all, but what he reads makes him tremble with rage. He begins to wonder if it is the prospect of money that has induced them to do this to me. But he rejects this thought. Ford is a man who gives away dimes. Kate, a warm woman he has known all her simple, kindhearted life. “Vengeance, then, is it?” he wonders aloud. But how could this possibly serve vengeance, this reconstruction of their daughter into a less perfect being? He does not know; he cannot find his way from point A to point B, from their omissions and half truths to their purpose in it. His confusion intensifies his rage, and he is consumed with a single thought—that whatever their motivation, what they will do to my memory and to their ability to love and cherish it, will be a poison in their souls. No amount of money, no punishment for the guilty, will be antidote to the poison about to enter their lives, he thinks. They will hate themselves, they will hate each other for what they are about to do in court. Their vengeance will not be sweet. It will be venom. They must be made to see this, be made to stop their plan for trial.

  He lays the transcript on the coffee table and sits on the couch in the quiet house staring off into the mid-distance. Memory, he thinks, should heal the pain of loss, not inflame it. Haven’t they all been witness to this? How could they not have seen? Or seen and ignored? D’Woulfe and D’Woulfe’s phone number is listed on the front cover of the transcripts. He dials it. A phone recording announces the office is closed. He looks at his watch. It is only three thirty. He thinks the blame, the fault, might lie in greater part with their attorney, that Brandon D’Woulfe they are always talking about. He thinks D’Woulfe must have had a hand in the transformation of me in these pages of black and white. How else could they have done what they did? He waits ten minutes longer and then begins to pace the house. He is eager for the sound of a car in the driveway, the scrape of shoe on stairs, the creak of the front door. The house is quiet, inside and out.

  He waits another ten minutes. He is desperate for confrontation. He cannot suppress the anger he feels at all three of them, the lawyer and Ford and Kate. He dials the firm’s number again with the same results. Finally, he decides. He searches the transcript for D’Woulfe’s address, and finds it easily.

  He retrieves the spare infant car seat from the hall closet and brings it to his car. He struggles to clasp the seat belt around it, and curses. He slams the car door shut and scrambles up the front stairs, missing the top step by a fraction of an inch. He stumbles forward into the doorjamb. He curses again and proceeds up the hall stairs to Brian Joseph’s room. The baby lies peacefully on his back, asleep. The fan on the dresser turns the air, and the air turns the pony mobile. It sways and circles in the current.

  A moment of practical clarity intrudes on his anger. He rushes downstairs to the kitchen and removes a bottle of pumped breast milk from the refrigerator. He warms it in the microwave and returns with it to BJ’s room. He takes a paper diaper and the small canister of baby wipes and puts them and the bottle into the carryall Mother uses. He goes to the crib and gently lifts Brian Joseph.

  The baby wriggles and stretches and moves his head side to side and settles in Cassidy’s arms. “Shh. Shh,” he says to the baby, and he takes him to his car.

  He walks carefully, purposefully, with the baby in his arms and the blue carryall slung over his shoulder, but even so, he misjudges the last of the brick stairs and lands unexpectedly hard on his left foot. The baby wakes and begins to fuss. “It’s okay, BJ. Just takin’ a little car ride. Quiet down now. We’ll be on our way real soon.” He puts the carryall on the car roof while he tries to strap BJ into the car seat. It is the first car seat the family ever used, my old baby car seat, and he is no longer familiar with it. He at first makes a jumble of the straps. He can’t remember where the arms go, where the legs. He is tempted simply to tie the straps around the baby’s middle. It’s a short drive, only a few minutes, he offers as argument. But he rejects his own bad advice and persists until finally Brian Joseph is made to fit. But he is wailing now, mad to have been awoken from sound sleep, uncomfortable in his wet diapers and on the cusp of hunger. Cassidy stops for a second to reconsider.

  But it is only a fifteen-minute trip to the attorney’s building. That’s okay, he thinks, I’ll change him when I get there. He’ll be okay.

  He closes the door on the bawling baby and walks quickly to his seat. He starts the car. I can hear the deep rumble in the old engine. The vibrations massage the cry out of my brother for a moment. Cassidy breathes a sigh of relief and begins to pull away from the curb. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the blue carryall fall from the car roof to the street. He brakes hard. The jolt startles Brian Joseph and he cries again. Cassidy can see his red face and open pink mouth in the rearview mirror. “Not a good idea,” he says to the reflection of that face. “In fact, a stupid one, kid.” He parks, retrieves the carryall and brings Brian Joseph back inside the house.

  An hour later, Nana and Ned return with Jeanine. The rage that boils out of Joe Cassidy as he shows them the transcripts and summarizes what Mother and Father have sworn to, frightens Jeanine. She begins to cry, and Nana holds her in her lap, torn between hearing what Cassidy has to say, and taking the frightened child into the other room. She stays. Cassidy goes on and on about the testimony he has read. He leaves for the law office at five.

  Nana and Ned sit on the couch, each immersed in the questions and answers that seem to them to pertain to some other child entirely, a child born on the pages of myth and legend rather than to flesh and blood.

  There is little Sunday traffic on Wisconsin Avenue. The city has suffered the retreat of many to the beaches and mountains, so the roads are mostly empty.

  Cassidy is as angry as when he first encountered the transcripts. His review for Nana and Ned refuels his rage. His hands shake holding the steering wheel. The dull sheen of the sun on the metal of his car’s hood puts an ache behind his eyes. He tries to control his breathing, tries to slow it and steady it, but it comes in rapid gulps and his head spins. He can feel and he
ar the squeezing surge of blood in his ears.

  His eyes fall briefly on the glove box. He knows it is empty, has been empty these past eight months. Almost enough time to have a baby, he thinks. He approaches Rory’s Place. There are parking spaces right out front. The word “baby” lingers in his brain. He parks.

  He studies the glove box again and then turns to regard the awning-shaded front of the pub. Through the window he sees the haphazard array of tables and chairs around the bar. A baseball game is on TV. In its sallow glow, patrons sit with glasses and bottles and cigarettes lost in the smoke and shadow. He closes his eyes and squeezes the steering wheel until his fingers play sharp notes of pain. He holds the pain for a minute, savoring it. He opens his eyes, starts the car, and drives away. Now he’s angry and he’s worried. He is desperate to reach D’Woulfe’s office before Mother and Father leave. He wants all three of them together to hear what he has to say. And if that D’Woulfe gets in the way of it, he’s got a punch in his lawyerly face just for him. He speeds southbound down the empty avenue. He makes the light at Wisconsin and Calvert, and the next and the next. A driver pulls his parked car onto the street fifty feet ahead of him, and he must slow and change lanes. The green light at Denton turns amber. He accelerates and gets through the intersection as the light turns red. He switches back to the right lane moving fast. There are only four blocks left. He scans the few cars traveling in the opposite direction, hoping not to see Father’s maroon station wagon. The light at Reservoir goes amber. He accelerates and the Taurus’s engine pings and groans. The light is red before he ever gets to the crosswalk. He looks left. The cross street is empty. He looks right. The white SUV seems to come out of the western sun and slams into his car, caving both passenger doors and sliding Cassidy’s Taurus across the northbound lanes, where it comes to rest against the brick wall of the Georgetown Public Library. Cassidy’s head has spiderwebbed the side window, leaving a bright red bloom of blood at the center of the filigree of cracks.

  It looks like a rose window from a medieval cathedral.

  But Cassidy can’t see this; he’s unconscious. He cannot see, as well, the old car seat impaled by a jagged lance of door metal.

  Eleven minutes later Mother and Father pass the scene on their way home. Cassidy has already been evacuated and is in transport by ambulance to the University Hospital ER. But they are so engrossed in rehearsing their answers— Mother has just sadly recounted Burke’s insensitive words in the ER—that they note merely a slight slowing of the few cars driving in front of them and two DC police cruisers parked with lights flashing in front of the public library.

  “Ah, my most excellent friend, Mr. Cassidy,” says Dr. Zacharia Vinik as the EMTs wheel the stretcher into the trauma room. “Get neurosurgery stat,” he intones to his nurse, “and hang a bolus of mannitol. We need a head and a c-spine CT. And add a blood alcohol level to the admission bloods.” He throws Cassidy’s wallet to the pale medical student at the foot of the bed. “See if you can find the next of kin,” Vinik says.

  Cassidy’s lips are parted almost an inch by the endotracheal tube in his mouth. He looks to me the way I looked the night of my death when they breathed for me with those black bags. But his tube angles up jauntily away from his face.

  A different day, a different hospital room, it would have been a cheap cigar tooth-bit in his mouth, a celebration of another birth, another life. But today, a plastic tube for air, for breath. His parted lips almost seem to smile.

  I note, too, he has a collar around his neck affixed at the scene by the EMTs to stabilize his spine in case it had been injured in the crash. The collar is white and not even the blood from his scalp wound has marked it.

  That is how I know he will not die. He looks just like a priest; he looks just like a new father, too alive to the joy of the moment, its spirit and its flesh, for anything as jarring as death. As I watch with this realization, his right arm rises as if in benediction, startling me. Then his right leg begins to twitch and the extended arm jerks rhythmically. “Seizure!” yells the nurse. “Dr. Vinik, in here stat! He’s seizing!”

  *

  He comes to stand before me. He should be in shadow; He should be dark as sorrow. Instead, He’s light itself. “It’s happening,” He says with excitement in His voice. “The future. Your creation.”

  I turn my eyes from Him, but the light is everywhere. Except in my heart.

  Catastrophe befalls those I love most dearly. My parents, weak and changeable and full of anger, now at the turning point in their life’s understanding of who I was. Cassidy on a ventilator, needing emergency surgery for massive head trauma, the consequence of his protective love of me and my memory.

  The light is everywhere, but it drives darkness deeper into my heart. The blackest of thoughts grow there: my missing fingers and stone ears, my wormy heart, my nubbin kidney, were somehow not even defects for me, but were lures instead, means to bring forth even more sorrow in the world. My life made me not a new Moses, not Ezekiel, not Isaiah. I’m the Minotaur reassembled, love affixed to hate, joy to sorrow, good to evil.

  To my healing past he sews a raging, hateful future. He makes me a monster, and I cannot find forgiveness for what He has done. I cannot forgive myself for letting Him do it through me. To forgive the prodigal God who made this— evil coming from good, hate from love, vengeance from justice—is too much.

  He hears my dark thoughts, but the glow of a thousand supernovas never dims. “Your creation,” He repeats loudly.

  I turn my eyes back to Him but He is gone. And gone with Him is the light.

  It is for the best. Darkness would be my only solace now*, but it is a torment instead: the film plays on in it.

  Mother cries, Father shouts, Nana sits, sad. Only Ned seems in control of his feelings. He stands in the kitchen with Jeanine’s arms wrapped around his neck, her legs around his waist. He pats her back and whispers in her ear. When he puts her down, she walks quickly out of the room. “Ford, stop your shouting. You too, Mae. You’re scaring the kids. We can talk about this quietly, civilized. No need for yelling.”

  Father stops his ranting. The moment he and Mother had stepped into the house, Nana had accused them of lying under oath, of turning me in an “ugly, stupid monster” with their untrue words. What Nana said made Jeanine cry, and Ned picked her up in his arms and held her. He whispered in her ear, loud enough for everyone in the kitchen to hear, “Jess is fine, Jeanine. She’s just not here. She’s happy and the same and she is no monster. Nana was just talking.” That’s when Mother broke into tears.

  Father speaks again, his hoarse voice just loud enough to hear over the sound of Mother’s sobs. “Brandon D’Woulfe explained to us why it was important to testify like we did. That it wasn’t lies, as such, just not . . . just not doing something the jury wouldn’t buy because of their . . . their prejudice. And then he would redo us all at the end. Make Jess come back together again as she was. As she really was. That way we’d win against the biggest lie, the one those docs committed when they let her die like that. Mae, I’m telling you, this is D’Woulfe’s strategy, and he said it wasn’t a lie. We’ll win the case and it will all come out right.” He looks at Mother and holds up his hands. “Kate, tell her it’s as I say.”

  Mother stares at him for a moment, then looks to Nana and Ned and back again to Father. “Ford,” she says slowly, “yes and no.” Before she can go on, the phone rings.

  “Cassidy, probably,” Nana says. “He left an hour ago looking for you at the lawyer’s. Hot. Very hot.” She shoves the portable phone into Father’s hands. He shakes his head, sighs once, and speaks, “Hello? . . . Speaking.”

  Mother, Nana, and Ned watch Father’s eyes narrow as the caller goes on. After a minute, Father says, “We’ll be right there. Oh, God. We’ll all be right there.” He puts down the phone and buries his face in his hands like a child ashamed of what he’s done. “He’s in the ER,” he says from behind his hands. “Car crash. His head. It’s smashed. Th
ey’re going to do surgery, but they don’t know . . . They don’t know if . . .”

  Nana grabs him by the elbow and pulls hard at an arm. Her face is drained of color, but her words are red hot. “This!” She holds out the transcript of Father’s deposition with her other hand. “This is what you’ve done!”

  All Father can do is take away his hands, look at Mother, and say, “Kate?”

  Before Mother can speak, Nana shouts, “No! This is what you both have done!” She shakes the pages so violently they blur.

  I close my eyes. I will see no more. But my new perfect ears hear the pages flap loud as Harpies’ wings. My bones rattle.

  *

  “I am done with the tape,” I tell the Assembler when He reappears. “You can take it away.” I try to avert my eyes from His brightness, but there is no evading it. My eyes seem made of it. It presses on them like the sea on fish. And now*, for the first time*, the scenes of my family’s drama play out in the light. I look without looking, see without seeing. Mother and Father leading the way into the ER, walking quickly along the central corridor toward the nurse’s desk, then turning left and right and left again in the maze of hallways, Nana and Ned, each carrying a child, eight, ten feet behind them, as if distance were an accusation. Each child is crying. Each adult looks ready to.

  “What do you see?” He asks.

  I have had enough of His theater. “This was never about putting the pieces of my life together to see its meaning, was it? All these movies don’t reveal a thing about any of that, do they?” I know I sound angry, but I no longer feel solicitous about His feelings.

  “What do you see?” He asks again patiently, unmoved by my grief.