The Assembler of Parts: A Novel (11 page)

He took me downstairs to the kitchen and held me while he thumbed through the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
on astronomy. “Pegasus,” was all he said as he pointed to the illustration of the Autumn Constellations.

“Peg-shush o-arr-sa,” I echoed back.

“Yeah,” he said with a shake of his head. “You’re right.” He gave me a half-quizzical look and turned to study the illustration again. Then he wrapped me up in his old green army jacket and took me outside. We lay on the cool, dewy grass in the backyard looking up at the night sky. It didn’t take long to find what we were searching for. He held my arm outstretched and traced the outline in black space with my fingers. There are seventeen stars in that horse, and we found them all with my fingers. Then we found more. He said the names reverently, quietly, that early fall night. “Aries.” “Pisces.” “Aquarius.” I spoke them back as well as I could. “A-rees.” “Py-see.” “Kar-y-oos.”

I whispered, too.

Mother came into the kitchen and saw the open door. She looked out. “Ford, what are you doing out there with her
laying on the ground?!
It’s cold and damp and she’s going to get sick. Now come back in here with her. She should be in her crib by now. What’s wrong with you? Don’t you know she needs rest after her surgery?” She folded her arms across her chest.

“We’re studying the stars, is all,” he said. “She found a constellation on her ceiling and we’re just tracking it out here. We got us a pretty smart little one, this girl here,” he said nodding toward me. “What her docs have been saying all along about her, well, I think they’re right.” He pointed my fingers at Pisces and asked, “This, Jess?”

“Py-see,” I whispered again.

“See what I’m saying, Kate?”

Mother softened a little and uncrossed her arms. “I didn’t need all the stars in heaven to see,” Mother said. She waved us inside with her right hand, saying, “In. Now.”

It was the end of the hollowness in his words, the start of his unreserved love of me. We would lie together on that same spot of fescue and weeds hundreds of times in the coming years studying the night skies. The grass would be green or brown, dry as dust or wet as rain, covered with snow or still warm from the day’s sun. It didn’t matter. We’d lie there once or twice a week in the dark and look at what the Assembler had made, and marvel at its beauty. We found the constellations of the seasons: winter’s Orion and his dogs, Taurus the Bull and brave Perseus, Gemini and Cancer the Crab and Cassiopeia; spring’s Ursa Major the Great Bear, Leo and Virgo and Corvus the Crow and Boötes the Herdsman; summer’s birds, Cygnus the Swan and Aquila the Eagle, all the parts to the Serpens the Snake, its head and tail, and, Scorpius and Sagittarius and the perfect Northern Crown, Corona Borealis.

*

We became our own constellation on that patch of sod, the two of us pressing our weight down into the earth like stars pressed into the black vault of the sky. Now* I can look down from here* and see our contours still there, perceptible to my new eyes for eternity, his heels, elbows, shoulder blades, and head, dark dots on the dun earth, and my smaller ones next to them. My marks are less distinct than his, made scattered and fuzzy by my growth through the years. It almost looks as if my contour was shaded in to give flesh to my form. I wonder, now*, if this is what the Assembler wants me to see, how I brought that man to love me through the assembly of a horse, how I created a pattern fixed for eternity on the soft crust of the world the same way He hung the stars on the velvet void. I think, The girl with hands useless as a bird’s begat a constellation of love. This is the meaning I am meant to see in the tapes. I am certain of it.

A
t age three I became perplexed by the groups of things so randomly categorized in my reading. How many zebras, a herd? Wolves, a pack? Seals, a pod? Crows, a murder? Oh, the books all cast out their declarations of names, but never would they commit to an honest integration of individuals into a group. Cassidy chuckled each time I brought this topic up. He was reading me his newest gift
—The Big Book of Animal Groups
—most nights of the week. Even when Miss Lamb had her evening sessions, he’d stop by after dinner to learn sign and, later, to read me to sleep.

We opened the book, exposing the luminous blackness of the crow that both frightened and fascinated me. “Haw ahn-y cro-aws?” I asked after he’d read the page’s caption about a murder.

“Five crows, that’s murder. Gotta be,” he said with authority.

We turned the page. The next bird was the owl. Its squat shape and bulbous head somehow reminded me of a thumb. “Why?” I asked Cassidy. “Why no thumbs?” I shook my hand over the brown-speckled bird. It seemed strange to me that there would be a bird that looked exactly like what I didn’t have. Then I remembered the book about penguins. “And why no ears?” I circled the rims of mine with index fingers. “Why in penguins no ears?” A-wha ahn pahn-kans na ah-res?

Cassidy closed the book and took a deep breath. “Damned if I know. Could be the Man upstairs just plain forgot. Screwed up, you know. Or maybe He was just braggin’ through His work. You know, ‘Look what I can do, even when I throw away some bones.’ Like someone showing off, sealin’ a box with hardly no tape at all. But whatever, it was Him, the Assembler, His doing,” he said. “He puts the parts of everything together. Just the way He likes.” He took my hand in his. “These are good hands. Good as any, Jess. The Assembler made ’em, and He don’t make junk. You got enough fingers for two kids. Enough voice for ten. He makes everything just to please Himself. The bones and the skin, the meat and the sap, just the way it suits Him.” He let go of my hand and tweaked me on the arm. “Bones and sap.”

I nodded. “He makes things like I make cookies?” I studded cookies with raisins—three eyes, or two, or one and as many noses as I wished—just for my own pleasure, and then gave them to Mother or Nana to admire. Then I’d get to bake them and eat them.

“He got everything together in one place and glued you all together and there you were, and you made Him happy,” he said nodding.

“Nails, screws, glue and whatnot,” I added casually. “The Assembler did it.”

“He did,” Cassidy said. “All the little parts became you, a human being little girl.”

“Ah-lls,” I said, satisfied about my origin. “Read the ah-lls.”

He opened the book and found the place. I patted the page with my right hand, letting it rest briefly next to the bird that was a thumb with feathers and, when I looked carefully, with the tiny ears of a mouse.

It was not an idle thought, the grouping of things into one unit. I had a growing, evolving world on the ceiling above my bed. The sea had been there, primordially, since my earliest scanning of that stuccoed space. Through the months the waters receded in places—over there by the corner windows, and to my right in the space above the doorway, and to my left where my changing table had been and where my orange dresser now sat. The islands dried when I was eight months old. Wavy stands of grass appeared at a year and, later, palm trees and bushes with hanging fruit. There was no logic to the evolution of the animals for my Eden. When I was a year and a half, the first creature to walk the savannah grasses of my new world was an elephant. We watched each other in mutual adoration for several months. Then one bright winter afternoon I awoke from my nap and an egret had alighted on his island. The next day, a lion. Just as in my books, there was no squabbling. They all stood their ground regally, gracefully, and let the light play with them.

The light. The ever-changing light. That’s what seemed to put this burgeoning world into motion. On rabbit island, next to the western-facing window, three rabbits stood on hind legs, each slowly waving a curled forepaw goodnight in the waning evening glow. Enough for a warren, three rabbits? I do not know, even now*. Above my door, the swirled plaster fashioned two zebras. The early slanting sun moved through the swales of pale grasses where they stood. Their tails seemed to twitch in the morning, their lancet ears in the western evening light, as if a slow shudder had passed with the day through their skins. That same transit of sun tusked my elephant in the morning, flapped his rogue, rug ears at midday. It was this that stirred the dust in my room.

It was in ardent following of a particularly massive suspended speck that my eyes were first drawn to him. The clown. There he was, all of a sudden, as if he had popped out of a speeding miniature car that had zoomed away leaving him stranded there on my ceiling. Short, dumpy, face broad as a shovel, eyes wide as a syndrome, nose bulbous as a doorknob, lips fat as sausages. It was the day after Cassidy had taken me to my first circus, my birthday present from him even though it was two months late because the circus didn’t come to Washington in February. When I saw the clown on my ceiling, I immediately smelled again the sharp urea of moist sawdust, the warmed peanuts, the tangy cocktail of all those manures deposited by carnivore and herbivore alike, the breath of lions. The breath of lions, especially, for some clown not unlike the one there with me in my room had inserted his head—his whole head—into the mouth of one of those roaring beasts. I sniffed ferociously that day in my room. As the sun went behind a cloud, the light waned. The clown winked.

People laugh at clowns for their antics. I applaud their courage. I was convinced, too, that one clown was a circus.

It was good to have the clown to talk to. He understood my flawed speech perfectly. And if Mother, standing at the bottom of the stairs, shouted for me to quiet down and take my nap of an afternoon, I’d simply switch to my equally imperfect signing and carry on with that.

I introduced him to the waters, the trees, the animals defying gravity all about him. I told him about Mother and Father, Nana and Ned. I told him about me. I told him I didn’t like green beans or squash or Velcro or metal snaps. I told him about my operations and about how I heard and spoke and tied my shoelaces and buttoned my buttons with the index and middle fingers of both hands. I told him about my friend Cassidy from the post office. I think he already knew about him. How, I don’t know. But a slight shift in light from a passing cloud or a wisp of birds—five at least in a wisp, but certainly not more than twenty—made the clown’s face darken like a shadow. I put my fisted right hand to my chin with my index finger extended and drew it down. Lonely, I signed. The clown’s eyes widened as the light returned.

I began going to preschool when I was four and a half. There were six other kids in my group. None of them wore hearing aids, but none was particularly good at hearing, either. They all had attention deficit and learning disorders. The four boys liked to wrestle and fight and take the things the girls were playing with and try to make us chase them. Poor Ms. Whitney had her hands full. Jeremy was the worst. He even looked the worst. The skin of his face had a patchy look like the bark of a peeling sycamore. He had a crew cut just like Cassidy, but there was something strange about the pattern of his hair. It was all in intersecting whorls, like tornadoes touching down everywhere on his head. Even his brown eyebrows seemed to spin. He made me dizzy just by looking at him. And he couldn’t even sit still long enough to finish eating a cookie. One time he started running in the very middle of a long burp he was forcing from his mouth. But for me, the most remarkable thing about him was that when the phone on the desk rang, he’d startle like he’d just received an electric shock. His hands would fly out and his legs would skip a step and his head would twist around. You could get hurt just by standing next to him when Ms. Whitney got a call. And the second ring would produce the same wild jerking response, albeit with a little less vigor. As would the third, and so on.

One day, just two weeks into the school year, Ms. Whitney was attending to the spurting bloody nose of my friend Tina—Jeremy had snatched her doll and thrown it at her, hitting her square on the bridge of the nose— when the phone began to ring. Caught in disposable plastic gloves and with the teacher’s aide gone to fetch ice, Ms. Whitney had no option but to let the phone ring. Except for Jeremy, we were all sitting on the floor waiting to start a song. Jeremy jumped and jerked like a loose-limbed puppet on a string for the first six salutes. Then only his shoulders and arms went into spasm, going up two inches or so as the caller persisted. Seven or eight rings later, only Jeremy’s neck responded to the sounds. The long muscles in front, under his jaw, tightened like snapping leather belts, and his head jerked forward and downwards. I watched until finally his eyes closed and he slumped to the floor where he lay across my legs like a dead boy. He felt so heavy lying there on me. Ms. Whitney continued to attend to Tina’s bloody nasal mucus and tiny clear tears. I put my index finger on Jeremy’s head, tracing the swirls of hair from place to place. It was slippery under my finger and sort of silky. My finger went all over, from tornado to tornado, spinning easily against his skull. It was as if his bones were without a single groove or bump, polished smooth as old wood by the spin of the storms. Jeremy began to snore like a fat old dog asleep. It was the first time I had seen him quiet in the weeks I had been in school with him.

We didn’t learn much in that class. In part, it was because Ms. Whitney had to spend most of the time trying to control Jeremy and the three other boys. Some days she’d get them quieted down long enough to read stories or wash baby dolls. Some days if the boys were especially bad— Mondays, usually, it seemed—we got to go outside and play on the playground. I’d climb the monkey bars or slide down the twisting slides. This often was the best option for the morning—it seemed a waste of time to sit and wait for hours while the boys disobeyed Ms. Whitney or just began to roll around with each other, wrestling and trying to break things. I soon realized all I had to do was get Jeremy to chase me around the classroom, and Ms. Whitney would declare our need for fresh air and exercise and take us to the playground. I’d wait until she wasn’t looking. Then I’d grab Jeremy’s sleeve and tug. “Get me, boy!” I’d whisper in his ear. Ah-gt me, ba-oi! And, unless he was tied to his chair, he’d be after me in a heartbeat. I’d run around, wobbly, and scream in pretend panic. Ms. Whitney would abandon her plan for finger-painting or a rondo of children’s songs and usher us all outside. I needed practice on the monkey bars.