The Dismantling (21 page)

Simon couldn't do it, not yet. He stood there, looking at the bagged face. Underneath the clear plastic, gauze hugged the contours of her chin, her lips and nose, the ridges above her eye sockets. He put his hand on the bag, feeling his way across the swells and hollows. He rewrapped the wetting cloth and zipped up the body bag. As he walked home, he raised his hands to his face. He breathed in, smelling the formalin and something else beneath it: a sweet, rotting lemony scent like a soured perfume.

Katherine called to say that he was going to fail the lab. The next exam was in ten days. He said he'd take it, no problem. He said he'd been ill. She didn't believe him, and why would she? He didn't even bother to try to convince her. He asked her why she cared. “Because you're not a robot like these other people,” she said. “The blonds are driving me nuts. You need to come back.” But he couldn't do it. It was an impossibility to be in the lab with the other students, to hold the scalpel and cut. He stopped going to his other classes as well. A dean called, left two messages, then stopped calling. No one was going to make him do anything. He was not a child; he was free to sabotage himself as he liked.

 • • • 

A
few nights later, he took ten milligrams of Valium, dressed, and left his apartment. The Yorkville streets were empty, a bitter wind whipping in from the river. The Valium kicked in as he crossed Third Avenue, and he felt a lightness lift through him, as though his bones had been drained of their marrow. The basement of the lab building was deserted. He unzipped his cadaver's body bag. The zipper's tab was positioned at her feet, and so it was not until he reached the far end of the seam and let the bag fall away that he saw what remained of her head, a pinkish-gray slab. The skin had been mostly removed, as had her left eye and the external structures of her nose and mouth. Her right eye was half-covered by its eyelid, as though she were winking at him. Her ears were still intact, sprouting from the sides of her head like mushrooms. Above her eye sockets, a thin strip of skin was connected to her scalp, which had been cut into four equal flaps and pried loose from her skull. The segments of scalp had been folded back, and he turned over the edge of one flap and saw that the scalp's skin was covered with a fine black stubble. The top bowl of the skull was entirely missing. He looked into its empty basin and saw the knobby floor of her cranial cavity, dotted with the stumps of nerves that had been severed to remove the brain. He checked under the table, and there it was, submerged in formalin at the bottom of a clear plastic bucket, its crenulated lobes the pale-cream color of oatmeal.

He'd waited too long. He would never know what her face had looked like, this woman on the table, this woman who had been reduced, partly by his own hand, to something that did not much resemble a woman. The Valium settled over his nerves like falling snow. Where was her face? The tissue bucket at the foot of the table had been emptied, but a larger plastic disposal bin near the door was mostly full. Inside: a gluey tangle of fascia, fat, bits of skin. He knew from his dissection manual that the skin of the face was removed in two intact pieces. He reached into the bin and gently cleared away a top layer of fascia, cold and wet to the touch, like gelatin. He saw underneath an uninterrupted expanse of skin. He lifted this carefully out of the bucket, letting gravity unfurl the tissue. It could be the lower half of her face, a semicircle with an oval gap for her mouth. He moved to the head of the table and watched his hands lay the skin on top of the exposed muscles of her cheeks and jaw. He returned to the bin and cleared away another clinging layer of fascia. Gently, he disentangled a second large piece of skin and lifted it free. This would be the skin of her forehead and temples. He saw himself lay this piece, too, down where it belonged. The edges of the skin curled back at their meeting point around her eye sockets. He smoothed them down with his thumb so they adhered better to the muscle, but still they rippled and bubbled like a poorly laminated strip of fake wood.

Of course, it was all pointless. What he'd assembled bore less resemblance to a human face than the bare muscles beneath. He left her as she was, under the pitiless fluorescents. He didn't bother to close the laboratory door. Let them find her in the morning and wonder. He was never coming back.

 • • • 

T
WO
a.m. Outside the window of the Health Solutions office, the lights of the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge stretched across the river, their reflection smeared in black water. DaSilva behind the desk, Simon in the chair across from him, a full ashtray between them.

“Bring her to the apartment,” DaSilva was saying. “Keep her there until I figure out how to contain this.”

“I'll try. But I can't force her to do anything.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” He jabbed his finger at Simon. “Get her to the apartment. It's for her own good, she'll see that.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.” He checked his watch. “Or today, I guess. After you see Crewes.”

Simon rubbed his eyes, their corners gritty, sandpapery. He was exhausted, losing concentration. This day just would not end.

The call from Howard Crewes had come late in the afternoon, as Simon sat at his kitchen table, scanning the Cabrera waiting list on his laptop one last time before setting off on the endless subway journey out to the Rockaways. He'd eyed his buzzing cell phone. There was no good reason for Crewes to be calling, and he'd considered not answering, as though he could ward off trouble simply by remaining ignorant of it. On the fourth ring, he'd snatched the phone off the desk.

“Howard,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“He's dead.”

“What? Who?” But even as Simon said it, he knew.

“Cheryl found him this morning. He . . .” Crewes made a low sound, a kind of growl. “Vicodin, Ambien, and whiskey. It wasn't an accident.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Are you listening to me? He waited until Cheryl and the kids were away for one night, and then he did it. He fucking killed himself. He planned this.” Crewes's voice was hoarse, furious. “He tricked us all.”

Simon felt the tingle of panic climb his spine. “I'm so sorry, Howard.”

“You need to know this, whether you cared about Lenny or not. Because it's not going to stop here. You see that, right?”

“Yes.” And Simon did see it, the whole terrible shape of the thing unfurling.

“We need to talk,” Crewes said. “In person. You need to come down here.”

Simon closed his eyes, wishing he could freeze this moment before DaSilva found out, before he had to tell Maria.

“Simon?” Crewes said. “Are you there?”

“I'm here.”

“You'll come see me.”

“Yes.”

“I don't give a shit if this sounds callous,” Crewes said, “but I'll be goddamned if Lenny brings everybody else down with him.”

Of course Simon had never made it out to his father's house for their dinner after that. But if Simon was exhausted, he knew DaSilva had to feel a thousand times worse. Peter had arrived at Cabrera at seven that morning for a transplant surgery unrelated to Health Solutions. The donor had gone under anesthesia at eight, and the recipient had come out of the OR at six in the evening. DaSilva had spent much of that time in the waiting room, with the two families, relaying updates from the surgeons. He hadn't responded to any of Simon's pages, and so he'd known nothing when he was pulled out of the waiting room and put on the phone with a Nassau County medical examiner. Just like Simon, he must have seen it all immediately, the clusterfuck that had just fallen on his head; but unlike Simon, he'd had to keep himself together through endless conversations with Nassau County officials and, later, Cabrera administrators, all the while monitoring the transplant surgery currently under way and attending to the patients' families. For the hospital, the crucial issue was keeping the state of Leonard Pellegrini's health—that he'd been an unreformed alcoholic at the time of surgery—under wraps. Cabrera had patient confidentiality on its side, so its worry was mostly confined to what Cheryl Pellegrini or Howard Crewes or somebody else who had known Lenny well might say.

“What should I tell Crewes?” Simon asked.

“Not to talk to anybody about anything. That you have it under control. He doesn't know Maria's name, does he?”

“No. But Cheryl knows her first name and what she looks like. They met in the hospital.”

“I was there, remember?” DaSilva took an angry drag off his cigarette. “There's nothing we can do about that now.”

“Crewes is going to want to know what kind of trail his money's left.”

“His payments to the hospital are legitimate. And his payment to Maria is untraceable.”

“Are you sure?”

DaSilva stared at him. “Am I sure of what?”

“That the cash is untraceable. How do you know?”

“Because I made it that way, Simon.” His voice was flat, signaling an end to this line of questioning.

Simon hesitated. He decided to leave the issue of the cash alone for now. “What if a reporter tries to talk to him?” he asked. “If the hospital payments are legitimate, that means they're on record. Somebody will find out that he was behind them soon enough.”

“He's grieving. He's upset. He can tell them to fuck off.”

“And when they ask him who Lenny's donor was, he says it's private, none of their business.”

“Right.” DaSilva coughed, a wet, phlegmy rattling. “How did he seem to you, on the phone?”

“Pissed off.”

“Yeah, I would be too. Did he say anything about Lenny's wife?”

“Like what?”

“Her state of mind.”

Simon looked at DaSilva. His mind flashed to Cheryl sitting in the car by the train station, her eyes searching his face as he lied to her. “Her husband just committed suicide. I don't think her state of mind is hard to guess.”

“Don't be an asshole. You know what I'm talking about. Is she looking to blame you? Blame Cabrera?”

“He didn't say. I doubt it.”

DaSilva shook his head. “What a sad fucker. He had no idea what kind of mess he was making.”

“I doubt he would've cared.”

“You're probably right.” He shook his head again. “Bring Maria to the apartment. No bullshit excuses. Keep her out of sight.”

“We should've seen this coming,” Simon said quietly. “Lenny never wanted our help.”

“Don't,” DaSilva warned.

“It's true.”

“Don't fucking start with that right now.” DaSilva glared at him across the desk. “It's pointless. We're moving forward. You understand me?”

Simon said nothing.

“Simon? Pull your head out of your ass and focus. This is your problem too.”

“I know that.”

“Then don't just sit there wishing things had gone differently. Help me fix it, or we're both fucked.”

 • • • 

F
IVE
hours later, Crewes greeted Simon at the front door of the house in New Jersey and led him again to the study in the rear.

He told Simon he'd been in Long Island most of the previous afternoon and well into the night. He'd driven to the Pellegrinis' house to find it still cordoned off by the police but located Cheryl and the two children at a friend's place nearby. Cheryl sat on a couch, surrounded by the owner of the house and a few other women Crewes didn't know, with the boy, Gregory, sitting by her side, his hand in his mouth. Crewes had leaned down to hug her, and she'd been as responsive as a block of wood. He went into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee, and he found the little girl, Daniela, sitting across the kitchen table from an owl-eyed woman whom he later learned was a county social worker. The woman had her hands stretched across the table, palms up, offering them to Daniela, who sat in her chair with her eyes shut and her knees pulled tight to her chest.

“She was the one who found him,” Crewes said. “Dani. He did it in the master bedroom upstairs.”

Simon shook his head. “Christ. They'd been away?”

“Cheryl took the kids to her mother's place for the weekend. Lenny was supposed to go with them. They were about to leave when he said one of his headaches was coming on, and he told her to go without him. She didn't want to leave him alone. But he made her go.” Crewes paused, his hands braced against the edge of the desk.

Against his will, Simon imagined the scene: the kids bursting into the house, itching to see their father after a night away; Cheryl hanging back, already suspecting that something was wrong, wondering why Lenny hadn't answered her call that morning; Cheryl finally stepping inside and taking the temperature of the house, its silence, dread wrapping around her spine as Daniela scampered up the stairs, yelling out her father's name. The cruelty of inflicting such a scenario on your own children was astonishing, but Simon also understood that the pain out of which such cruelty was born had to be so relentless and crippling that it was difficult to hate Lenny for what he'd done.

“What I want to know is when he decided to do it,” Crewes said, his anger like a physical thing occupying the air between them. “I want to know how long he was lying to me. Lying to his wife. I want to know how he could let her and Dani and Greg move back into the house with him, how he could look at them every day knowing what he was going to do.”

“Maybe it wasn't like that,” Simon said, hoping rather than believing this might be true. “Maybe he didn't plan it.”

Crewes was quiet for a long moment. “He tried it before,” he said finally. “About two years ago. With the same shit, pills and booze. But he swore he was past that. He told me the transplant had given him a new start. He looked me in the face and lied to me.”