The Assembler of Parts: A Novel

by Wientzen, Raoul

  I have no choice about seeing. The images are the undimmable light of my inner world. Now* Dr. Vinik is leading them to Cassidy, talking about the CAT scan findings, the plan for surgery. The risk of death. Brain damage. Vegetative state. He draws the curtain to Cassidy’s room, stands aside to let them enter. “I doubt Mr. Cassidy will know you are here,” he says. “But, in these matters, one never truly knows what a patient senses. So be gentle. Be strong.”

  “I see more sadness and anger than I can bear,” I tell the Assembler. “And it’s my fault. And it’s Your fault. And it is all wrong.”

  “No, what do you see?” He asks a third time.

  The images burn in brightness. I see my family gathered in a knot at the entrance, each reluctant to approach Cassidy’s side. I see their fearful faces, their wet cheeks, their wild eyes. The cool light from the fluorescent bulbs bathes Cassidy’s face the bluish color of old snow. An IV drips tiny clear drops. A machine bigger than I ever was whooshes air. Before I can answer again in my anger— “Nothing. I see nothing.”—Nana steps across the threshold into the room, Jeanine in her arms. She goes to the bedside and touches Cassidy’s shoulder. Jeanine laughs. The child who cries at anything laughs at Cassidy in a hospital bed, his head bandaged, his eyes closed, his face lax. Before the echo of that laugh fades, his left hand twitches. Those broad fingers with thick yellow nails rise off the bed, try to touch the source of laughter. Or it’s another seizure. I cannot tell. But Nana moves her hand from Cassidy’s shoulder to his rising wrist. “It’s us, Joe,” she says. She looks toward the entrance. “All of us. We’re here.” His hand comes to rest in midair then slowly lowers to the sheet. She pats it twice, straightens, carries Jeanine back to the entrance.

  “It’s AceyDee,” Jeanine says gaily. At this announcement, everyone is completely still for a few moments, as if they are considering the truth of her statement. Then Nana moves. She extends her free arm around Mother’s shoulders and pulls her close. “It’s alright,” she whispers. “Whatever it is, it will be okay.” Father leans against Mother, puts his arm around her. “I’m sorry, Mae. We never meant—” But Ned has joined the scrum, BJ in his left arm, and he interrupts. “Ford, we’re with you and Kate on this. It’s all of us here together. It’s going to be okay.”

  Mother snuffles her drippy nose and wipes a teary eye. Father rumbles, “Hm-hm,” and pulls her tighter. Ned clears his throat. Jeanine says again, “AceyDee.” Baby BJ breathes. Then there is silence as heavy as gold.

  I am about to repeat my denial, to tell the Assembler, “Nothing. I see nothing,” when I notice the silence. It is unlike other silences, or perhaps like every silence, for the ventilator whooshes like a noisy bellows, the monitors beep and ping, the patients and doctors in adjoining spaces talk, a man in a distant room shouts for a nurse, BJ breathes again, noisily through his nose. But in their souls too there is silence, as real and expandable as space itself. It is a stillness amidst the tug of the world’s noise like mine at birth, at death. It is beautiful.

  “You see,” the Assembler says.

  I do. I do see. I see forgiveness in that inner silence. I see the love they have for each other, and I see it come together, healed and whole. I see love made perfect by forgiveness, as a hand by a thumb. And I see there can be no forgiveness without loss, grief, chaos. Without His chaos, my chaos, there is a hole like a cave in love. Only through chaos can forgiveness exist, can forgiveness touch everything with healing, the past*, present*, future*, all people, all creation, the Assembler Himself. Only through imperfection can forgiveness make love perfect.

  “I see,” I tell Him. “I do see.”

  He takes my hands. Never before has He touched me. But now He takes my hands in His. They are big, soft, warm hands, hardly those of a carpenter or a tinker or a mechanic. More the hands of a mother. More the hands of a postal worker. He brings my hands to His lips and kisses them. He slowly breathes on them. It is as if mountains move under my skin and deserts bloom. My new-made hands grow full. The hollowness at the base of the new thumbs He gave me solidifies, warms, fills in. The cave in my being is gone. This sense of fullness somehow unleashes all the stored memories of Mother in my mind. They flash by now* in God’s instant; and those of Father and Nana and Ned and Cassidy and Jeanine and Tina and Burke and Garraway, and, and, and, and

  He makes me full of my life.

  In that instant*, He makes me full of my life the way a woman at term is full of life. It squirms for room inside me. All the caring, smiling faces; all the sneering, jeering faces; all the songs and sweet words, the sighs and whispers and insults; all the voices at once slurred and perfect, full of air and water, light and shadow, sugar and salt; all the stars in the night skies of plaster and black eternity; all the animals stuck in stucco and running the beach sand; all the gods and goddesses, heroes and monsters, alive inside me. All growing and stretching and kicking with the possibility of love, the necessity of forgiveness.

  Something inside me tightens. All my bones become one bone.

  I am full of joy that I am and that I love and that I am loved, that I forgive and am forgiven.

  He releases me with a last caress of my thumbs, but my hands, my being, continue to register His touch. “That which most makes you human, also makes you divine,” He tells me.

  I know in my fullness what He means. He does not mean my thumbs. Forgiveness is all we know of God, and in the end, it’s all He cares to know of us.

  Then, He is gone. He has taken the tape, the last unfinished tape. I have seen enough. No, I have seen it all. What was hidden from the wise, I remember Him telling me at the very beginning*, has been revealed to the blind.

  14

  NOW

  Iknow their lives on Earth now* without seeing, without the constraint of time*. Images, information can come at once, or at length. Cassidy makes a slow recovery. His brain has been injured—subdural bleeding, neurosurgery, weeks in the intensive care unit—but he lives. His right side is paralyzed for a year. But the post office welcomes him back. He weighs packages, doles out stamps and change, uses the tape dispenser to secure boxes, all with his left hand. He walks with a limp and a lurch like some big ape, his body dodging left, then right, then left as he tries to go in a straight line. His guitar sits unused in his closet these months. With time and physical therapy, strength returns to his arm and he can thrum his notes. He sings with a slight droop to the left corner of his mouth. Surprisingly, his voice is the better for it. The slight weakness in his vocal cords intensifies his lower range. When he sings a lullaby to Joey, as they now call my brother, the density of his song throws a blanket of sleep over the tired baby that takes him full through the nights. Mother is happy for this. She is expecting again. Irish twins, their many friends tease, what with that little Joey still a baby. She is expecting again and needs the rest.

  Mother and Father tell Brandon D’Woulfe not to take the suit to trial. They cut him off in mid-sentence as he tries to wrap his words around their decision. Either settle it or drop it, they tell him, and hang up the phone. He does settle it. All the hospital offers is expected defense court costs. D’Woulfe takes his forty percent of the eighty thousand dollars. Mother and Father use their share to renovate the basement. They put in a shower and fix a bedroom and add windows. Cassidy moves in. He sings every night. Nana and Ned visit a lot. They tape his songs, often downstairs in the basement where the sound booms off the bright grass-green of the painted cinder block walls, enlarging in its echo. It sounds as if there’s more than one singer down there. Later, much later, Father will play one of those recordings at Cassidy’s funeral because no one, no one, sings “Dark Eyed Molly” like Cassidy.

  Father distributes quarters now* to the meter-needy in line at the post office. “Whoa! Who needs quarters? Quarters for sale! Twenty minutes on Uncle Sam. Come and get your quarters!” He never charges for quarters. He holds the record, most free quarters, unbroken to this day*.

  Cassidy takes a little nip at n
ight, most nights. Just one before the meal. Rye, rocks. One is enough. He sips it slow. When Mother and Father are not watching, he lets Jeanine or Joey or, later, little Carina dip their fingers in. “A toast ta your big sister, Jess. Her life,” he says before they drink their glass, knuckle by knuckle.

  I know that this is true. My tongue, my throat, burn in the hallowed light of every full evening where all is forgiven. And my thumbs, my thumbs shimmer. They are perfect.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Awriter is needy.

  A writer needs critical readers. Mine are special. Kathy Carter, Barbara Dagenais, Mary Mason, Suzanne Aro, Mary Ann Hillier, Caroline Wellbery, Chris Gilson, Katie Gekker, Mariah Burton Nelson, Pat Hieber, and Frank Palumbo all provided invaluable critiques and guidance through the drafts of Assembler. Thank you all.

  A writer needs family and friends who nourish the writer’s life. Mine—my wife, four great children, and dozens of close friends from Northern Virginia, D.C., Maryland, Dallas, Texas, Phoenix, Arizona, New York, and Southern California—provided me every support, from encouraging words for my ears to what apparently is some fanciful concept of a writer’s wardrobe, pipe and slippers included. Thank you, all.

  A writer needs an agent. Mine, Sorche Fairbank, is the best. She provided sure-handed guidance, steady resolve, and unerring insight from start to finish. Thank you, Sorche.

  A writer needs an editor. Mine, Cal Barksdale, is brilliant. He found the dim and unjoined stars in my writing and showed me how to make them shine and where they fit. Thank you, Cal.

  A writer needs a first-believer. Mine, Barbara Esstman, was first to see what lay inside the imperfect sentences of my earliest draft and graciously urged me on. Thank you, Barbara.

  And last, but possibly really first, a writer needs the spark of an idea. Holly and Bob Kimmitt asked me to do them a favor one Super Bowl Sunday afternoon. The sacrament of human dignity that walked across the street to meet with me became the rite of initiation, the “Big Bang,” for The Assembler of Parts. Thank you, thank you, Holly and Bob.