The Assembler of Parts: A Novel (9 page)

Miss Lamb added sign instruction to her sessions. I still was subject to my parents’ undivided attention, but now I’d see them shape their hands to accompany a particular facial expression. Hungry? Okay? Sleepy? Wet? Go? More? Hurts? began my sign vocabulary.

Nana returned a few days before my ear operation. She took me on long walks in the mild May air. Her face was not so sternly set anymore. It was still gray as a rain puddle, but now at least there were no dark clouds reflected off her pewter skin, just the dull sheen of age and slight hope. As we went she told me stories of her brother Billy, and not all of them were sad.

She’d found a blue-jay feather once and brought it home to him. He wore it in his hair.

She let a neighbor’s dog lick his feet until he cried from the tickle.

She would tilt his wheelchair backwards. It was his favorite thing.

A week before he died she went to the movies, not to see the film but just to buy the popcorn. Extra salt and extra butter. She fed it to him in his hospital bed, piece by piece.

He was too weak to use his hands.

She let him lick her fingers.

He was her brother, she said, her real brother.

“I should have cried,” she told me quietly the morning she pushed me all the way to the post office. “I wanted to,” she added.

They all came from behind their counters and from the back shipping rooms to see me. Nana warned them all against giving me a cold. Father picked me up out of the carriage to show me around. Hands that smelled of glue and ink, of tannic brown paper and cardboard boxes, of clean cotton cord, adhesive tape, and of the dust on old parcels, touched my brow, my chin, caressed my fat neck. Cassidy took me and blew air in my face, dropped his head to my belly, and nuzzled. My hands found his short, spiky hair and tried to grip it so he’d never leave. I squealed and kicked. Nana said, “Alright now, Joseph. Don’t rile her too much. She’ll never go down for her nap.”

Father walked us to the corner and thanked her for coming. I watched him run in an easy lope back to the building. Meanwhile, Mother marketed or cooked or cleaned as a liniment to her anxiety over my looming procedure. The freezer became a cornucopia of stews and casseroles. There was enough milk in the refrigerator for a Boy Scout troop. Enough bread for the five thousand of the Gospels. Every towel, every sheet in the house was washed and folded away against the possibility of a prolonged hospital stay.

I went in to the hospital at six in the morning on a Tuesday, had my surgery at ten, and was sent home the next afternoon.

O’Neil reconstructed my middle ear cleft. It became a space large enough to accommodate his array of tiny plastic tubes and platinum transmitters. Thin gray wires attached my new acoustic apparatus to baby hearing aids that hugged the helices of my ears like bees on blossoms.

I awoke from anesthesia in my mother’s arms. “You Okay?” her face asked me. Father’s face looked pinched and pale. I felt like someone had struck matches and was holding them, flaring and hissing, against the sides of my head. It burned and ached with an incessant spitting sound in my ears. Mother put me to her breast—it had been the previous midnight since my last feed—but each hungry suck sprayed gasoline on the flames. I cried and pulled away and cried again, each shriek producing a tiny distortion in the anatomy of my new middle ears that in turn brought even more hot, throbbing pain. A nurse put cold cloths to my ears and injected me with morphine. I could hear the fire in my ears slowly die. The hiss softened to a warm swish, and the swish cooled to a lukewarm hum, and the hum did not hurt. I slept and woke and ate to the crackle noise of my hospital room, every monitor beep, every nurse footfall, every shuffle of cover converted by my new electronics to a modulation of shattering glass. Mother looked down on me. “J-l-e-a-s-s-h-h, s-h-w-e-e-t-a-r-h-h,” the first perfect imperfect words I heard anyone speak.

In time that night the crackle would brace to clicks and the clicks would sum to a swish and the swish would ignite to a hiss. My nurse knew that cry of flaring pain and was ready with her needle. Mother and Father stood by the side of my crib and watched for quiet to settle my face.

Nana came with Cassidy for evening visiting hours. I was in the third-hour twilight of my most recent dose of morphine and received their touches, their eyes, like a sleepy dog. I remember Cassidy’s strong cologne and his sad eyes, helpless sad eyes, and Nana’s brave smile. After a while Nana sent the three of them to eat. The nurse put me in Nana’s lap. She knew better than to rock. My twilight soon lengthened to full daylight, and for twenty minutes before the pain resumed we watched each other quietly. “Going to be okay,” she said in a voice full of tiny wet sparks. H-o-a-k-a-y-a.

“It’s time,” she said to the nurse in her no-nonsense tone when I started to fret and to bat the side of my head. “It’s time now.”

In the morning Dr. O’Neil visited. He brought a machine on wheels that attached by wires to my scalp. He turned it on and told Mother to say something, anything, to me. “I love you, Jess,” she said. A-h-h l-o-o-a-v-a-o-u-u-h-l-e-a-s-s-h-h.

He pointed to the machine’s green screen. “See,” he said, “they’re working.”

The nurses stopped the morphine and gave me codeine by mouth. It blunted the pain, but I could still feel the flame of a torch touching my brain from the sides. We were sent home at five.

It was not an easy evening. I nursed poorly in my room. Mother laid me down and wound the mobile. I heard the music, but my growing discomfort prevented me from enjoying it. The pain robbed me of sleep and I cried. Father brought me downstairs to where supper was being eaten. He gave me medicine from an eyedropper. I cried in his lap, and Mother’s and Nana’s. The codeine was like a cage around a snarling wild animal, nothing more than a container for the pain. Cassidy walked into the room as I was in my third circuit of holders. They all had been patient and kind with me, but the unremitting shriek of a three-month-old baby can erode even the thickest armor of forbearance. Cassidy saw the unpracticed, drained look of exasperation on their faces.

“I’ll take her for a ride,” he said to Nana who sat before a plate of uneaten chicken and broccoli casserole. “That’ll help soothe her. Works like a charm every time.” He had an unlit cigar between the first two fingers of his right hand that he pointed at Mother. “And the answer ta Kate’s unasked question would be no. Not yet.” In the end it was all they could think to do. It was too soon for more codeine, and they didn’t want to bother Dr. O’Neil. Why, I don’t fully understand, but it had to do with his station in life relative to theirs. They were that way with all my doctors, reluctant to call for advice or help unless it was during normal working hours. It’s part of what killed me. They also said, “Thank you” to diner waitresses who brought more bread and toll-booth attendants who took their quarters and paperboys who threw the
Post
onto our covered stoop. It’s part of what made me love them.

Father put my car seat in the back of Cassidy’s car. “I’ll go with you,” he volunteered.

“Naw, go back in and eat your supper. Take a break from this.” His cigar swept over the racket I was spewing forth in his backseat. “I’ll drive around fifteen, twenty minutes until she settles. If she don’t, I’ll drive some more and then get her back. Go in ta your wife.” He clamped the cigar between his teeth.

Father put his hand on Cassidy’s shoulder. “Thanks for this, Joe.” He handed over my pacifier and a bottle of pumped breast milk. “She may be a touch hungry.”

“Go on in,” Cassidy repeated.

There was a throaty rumble to Cassidy’s old car, like a rocket vainly trying to go up and up. That and the pulsing of light through the canopy of trees that lined the streets at first distracted me from my pain. We drove a mile and my cry became a whimper. The long red light at Van Ness put an end to the trip’s trance, though, and my cry resumed in all its booming force. He swiveled in his seat to look at me before the light turned green. I spit the pacifier out of my mouth. It dangled on its tether like a dog on a leash.

“If I had an earache and the pills weren’t doing the job, I know what I’d take,” he said matter-of-factly. He drove to the parking lot of Calvert Woodley Liquors. He took his bottle from the glove compartment and sat beside me. He nicked the tip of the pacifier with his pocket knife. He poured a small amount into the hollow end of the rubber nipple and put it in my mouth. “Whiskey nipple,” he remarked through teeth clenching his spot-wet cigar. “Good for what ails ya.”

The heat on my tongue sapped the strength of the flame in my ears. My nose burned a little from the vapors. I sucked down the whiskey, and my hot breath bore away more heat. My stomach warmed. From my car seat I saw the sign of the liquor store flash on and off in the fading evening light. The red-lettered word “Liquors” pulsed and faded and seemed to snatch the light from the dying sun. He gave me a drop or two more before he held the milk to my mouth. “Not my idea of a chaser,” he said with a wink. He held his whiskey in his other hand, regarding it like it was something new, something just now discovered. He shook it to a light froth. “Not right now,” he mumbled and replaced the bottle in the compartment. We drove an hour in the car’s embracing rattle, the only sound I heard as I slipped shimmeringly to sleep.

When I replay it all now* I can see the gentleness with which he replaces the bottle into the dashboard box. He holds the glass lightly, as if it could shatter like an egg in his hand. He rests it on maps and folded repair receipts, first bottom, then middle, then top, as if its geometry was unfamiliar, or changeable, or simply imperfect for the space. He regards the laid-down whiskey with his head to the side, just like Mother sometimes looks at me in my crib. He waits till the sloshing liquid settles; he takes measure of the measure left. He closes the door to the compartment slowly, pushing gently until the lock catches with a soft click. His hand lingers on the door for a moment, then taps it twice the way one would say good-bye to a friend.

He said, “no, thanks” to the coffee they offered when I’d been tucked away. Nana made him take a slice of cake on a paper plate. She tapped his arm twice when she walked him to the door.

Now* I watch what he does later that night in his house, what had been his mother’s house where he was raised. When the bottle from the kitchen runs dry, he staggers to his car and drinks what is left there. He lies in the backseat taking pulls at the bottle. He falls asleep with his head on the spot where my seat had been secured, his long legs bent at the knees, extending through the open door, his feet resting on the driveway, a body uncontainable by the space, like his sorrow.

Wednesday’s ear pain was Thursday’s dull ache, belittled to a mild annoyance by three doses of codeine. Friday came painlessly into my ears with clicks and sounds like fish flexing slowly through a sea of molasses. “Tired?” Mother asked me after a series of midday yawns, the word barely able to shimmy its way through the gelled medium of my new, raw middle ears before my eyes closed. In those few transitional seconds from stupor to sleep, I could still sense the riotous gallop in my chest, still could not hear the various thin jets and leaky sprays of each heartbeat, but the sensation of faulty motion brought me back to Cassidy’s car ride where, in the light-headed swoon of his whiskey nipple, that wormy scent from my eddy heart had never been so strong.

Ned arrived Saturday, four days into my recovery from surgery. He went with us for my post-op check on Monday. He never left O’Neil’s waiting room, trapped by the dozens of pamphlets describing the latest in gadgetry for the deaf, including the system now in place in me. “Not all that complicated,” he said to O’Neil when it was time to go.

Nana was glad to have her strolls with Mother and me. Father went to work each day, walking in the early mornings, always with a pocketful of eight-minute dimes to defeat the parking police. I could hear him now: he jingled.

Miss Lamb intensified her curriculum of language training when my recovery was complete. Each hour was devoted to perfection of facial expression, eye contact, and body movements now delivered with progressively more complex hand signs and slow repetition of clearly spoken words. Each session concluded with the reading of a story book. I sat propped in her lap as she turned the pages of
Pat the Bunny, Goodnight Moon,
and a dozen other works as Mother or Father sat before me forming signs and pronouncing words like prophecies. I studied the pictures of rabbits, puppies, pigs, elephants, hippos, and bees, heard the words, saw the signs, watched the lips mound, round, and flatten the sounds. In a few months my own hands moved in gibberish imitation of theirs.

Even if I had known what I wanted to say, even if I had known how to say it in sign, I was thumb-tied in sign language. I lisped and stumbled over thumb-twisters like “shoot” and “sacrifice,” which, without those opposable digits, came out like “short” and “soil.” It would be a bother to me to the last days of my life, when, in preparation for my coming First Holy Communion, I listened to Father Larrie read the Gospel words meant to give comfort and hope. “What Father when his child asks for a fish, hands her a snake instead?” That seemed all too frighteningly possible in my case. Be careful what you ask for, I told myself that day, because you might get something else.

Had I lived, I would have grown more thumb-tied with each passing year, would have relied on speech-reading and imperfect phonation for all my communicating. If I had lived. That had been O’Neil’s plan all along. Create the noise and let me figure it all out. His recommendation for ASL was more to help with my receptive language learning than my expressive communicative skills. So the broad training went on. I mastered those signs my anatomy allowed and reproduced speech in the manner of a deep-sea diver repeating words shouted down to her from a boat bobbing on the sea. When at eight months I began repeating what I had heard, Miss Lamb was there to wring those sounds dry and press them flat. I can’t begin to tell you how difficult it is to remember to reassemble the forms of a heard word before repeating it. It is something quintessentially contrary to the language circuitry of the brain. It’s as if I had to insert an additional synapse at each nerve junction, one that would interrupt what is evolutionarily the great pulse of the brain, the electric urge to replicate the “in” perfectly as an “out.”