The Assembler of Parts: A Novel Read Free Page B

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 scent 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