The Dismantling (7 page)

Or so it appeared to Simon. How could he know what his father really felt? He might as well ask a tree or a rock or the ocean; he might as well not ask at all. Michael's life had become something that would have been unrecognizable to his younger self. And yet he seemed to have discovered some peace in the idea that there was nothing left to achieve, only the maintenance of daily ritual. He must have smothered his fantasies of what his life should be, of what it could have been; there was only what it was, and that would have to be enough.

His father was saying that what had happened to Chatham was now happening to everybody else, but for even stupider, greedier reasons and on a scale beyond anybody's comprehension. He filled the tumblers.

“Rest in peace, Lehman Brothers,” he said, tossing the whiskey back.

Simon looked at his own glass, then drank it down.

Michael refilled the tumblers: “Rest in peace, Bear Stearns.”

Down went the whiskey.

“Rest in peace, Merrill Lynch.”

Only after the third toast did Michael allow himself a smile, and then Simon knew what this was all about. Let others suffer what Michael had suffered. This was a wake, but like all good wakes, it was also a celebration.

Sometime later, the whiskey bottle nearly empty, Simon stood up to leave. The kitchen tilted and pitched; he hadn't realized how drunk he was. It was exhausting to think of trudging to the subway, of sitting through the endless ride back to Roosevelt Island.

“You can spend the night if you'd like,” Michael said, as if reading his thoughts.

“I have class tomorrow.” The lie slipped easily out of his mouth.

“I'll drive you to Manhattan in the morning,” Michael said. “I have a few things I need to do in the city anyway. How does that sound?”

Simon was too drunk and tired to object. The linen closet smelled as though it hadn't been opened in years, and perhaps it hadn't. Upstairs a layer of dust coated the hallway's floorboards. In Simon's old room, his bed had been pushed into the far corner, the mattress bare and yellowed. His desk was in its old position, but on it sat a new desktop computer and three large ring binders labeled “RECEIPTS,” “MORTGAGE,” and “BANK.” A metal filing cabinet that looked as though it had been salvaged from the street was wedged against the desk, and a rectangle of corkboard had been tacked to the wall.

But the conversion to an office had been abandoned halfway through. The bed was still there, and also Simon's bookshelves, lined with the spines of thirteen years' worth of a progressive Catholic education:
The Confessions of Saint Augustine
, Aristotle's
Poetics
, Caesar's
Commentaries on the Gallic War
,
Ethan Frome
,
1984
, as well as the usual lineup of battered science and math and Spanish textbooks, purchased thirdhand at the annual St. Edmund's book fair. Michael lurched over to the bed, onto which he dropped the stack of sheets and pillows, a cloud of dust billowing into the air.

Coughing, he thumped Simon on the shoulder. “Sorry about the clutter. Sleep tight.” He closed the door behind him, his hacking following him down the stairs.

Simon made up the bed and pulled down the window shades. He turned on the desk lamp and turned off the ceiling light, and then he sat there, on the bed, in the half dark. His body was tired but his mind suddenly awake. The whiskey made it a useless, chaotic awareness, a head full of randomness. He took a book off the shelves and could make no sense of the words. He gave up, turned off the desk lamp, and lay back on the bed.

After a sleepless hour, he turned on the lamp again and looked around the room for some way to pass the time. He'd learned long ago that he couldn't force sleep, couldn't trick or trap it. He got out of bed and sat at the desk. He stared at his bulbous reflection in the computer's convex screen. He turned the machine on. There were no icons on the desktop. No files, no programs whatsoever. Simon searched the Start menu and found that his father hadn't even installed an internet browser. It seemed the impulse to use this office had died before the computer even arrived.

He stood up, his head pulsing from the whiskey, and crept as softly as he could into the hallway. He had not set foot in Amelia's bedroom since his father had stripped it clean of its contents, donating the clothes to Goodwill and junking everything else in a grief-fueled burst of efficiency a month after her death. The room was at the end of the hall. Simon paused for a moment before gripping the cool brass knob and pushing the door. It stuck in the frame, then released with a tearing sound. He stepped inside. The streetlights shone through naked windows. The room was entirely bare, nothing but a thick layer of dust on the floorboards and walls. He felt as though his presence were an intrusion. The dust he'd stirred up resettled onto his bare feet, and he sensed a familiar void opening up inside him, a featureless, bottomless pit of shame and self-loathing to be endlessly filled with his sadness, his anger, his guilt. Amelia was dead, and it was his fault, and nothing he could ever do or say would change that. Turning away, he quickly left the room, shutting the door behind him, not caring about the noise he made as he hurried down the hall and back into his own bedroom, where he collapsed onto the bed and fell finally into a sweaty and shallow sleep.

 • • • 

H
E
was sitting in the Health Solutions office the following afternoon, still tasting the whiskey in the back of his throat, when the desk phone rang. It was Maria, telling him that the tests had gone smoothly. Her transplant coordinator—she meant DaSilva, of course—had met her in the lobby and accompanied her throughout the day, from examination room to lab to imaging department. Simon hadn't been particularly worried about the tests—he knew from the results of the California exams that she enjoyed above-average health—but still, he was always relieved when a donor's first visit to Cabrera went off without a hitch; it validated his work up to that point, he supposed, and it was no different this time, with Maria. As she talked now, Simon pictured her going back to the Royal Crown, sitting alone in her room, anxious and stir-crazy, the surgery looming in her mind.

“I just wanted to let you know everything went fine,” she said. “So—”

“What are you doing right now?” The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them.

“I'm . . . nothing. Heading to the hotel, I guess. Why?”

He wanted to pretend it was because she might need a distraction, but he knew that wasn't the entire truth. “I thought you might want to do something this afternoon.” Silence. “That I might do something with you.”

“Because I'm here alone,” she said flatly.

“I just thought—”

“I told you already, I don't need your pity.”

He flushed, and was glad she wasn't there to see it. “This isn't pity.”

“What is it, then?”

“It's . . . courtesy,” he finally said, then immediately felt stupid for saying it, the word bizarre and anachronistic to his ears.

She laughed—but, to his surprise, genuinely and without malice. “What did you have in mind?”

“It's your first time here. We can do whatever you want.”

“I have no idea, Simon.”

“There must be something you want to do.”

He waited through a long silence before she said, “Okay, yeah. There is something.”

What she wanted to do was see what her liver looked like—or, not her liver, but
a
liver. She'd noticed ads on the subway for an exhibition that displayed dissected and preserved human cadavers. Would he take her there?

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Outside the hospital.”

“Take the F one stop into Manhattan, and meet me outside the station, on Sixty-Third and Lexington.”

He hung up and waited ten minutes for her to cross the river. He knew that with this field trip he was straying into the unorthodox and probably inadvisable, but he was too hungover to reproach himself with any kind of conviction. By the time he walked around the corner, she was standing there, arms crossed over her chest. She'd dressed up for her visit to the hospital, a simple black cotton dress above a pair of black Chuck Taylors. She wasn't reading or listening to music or playing with her cell phone. She just stood there, staring across Sixty-Third Street—in the wrong direction—purse slung over her shoulder, tapping her foot like a caricature of the stood-up date.

He walked up behind her and tapped her shoulder. She jumped as though he'd pressed a lit match to her skin. “Jesus, Simon! Don't fucking sneak up on people like that.”

“I'm sorry,” he said, taken aback. “I didn't mean to.”

She glared at him, on the verge of saying something more. Then she took a deep breath, as though deliberately expelling her anger. “Let's just go, okay?”

Downtown, they made their way through the cobblestoned theme park of South Street Seaport. The entrance to the exhibition was hidden between a J.Crew and a Sephora. Inside, a placard told them the cadavers were unclaimed dead from China, mostly homeless men. “We can't even manufacture our own dead people anymore,” Maria muttered. The bodies were the color of Silly Putty, pink streaks simulating muscle tone. They'd been arranged into dynamic postures: conducting a symphony, shooting a basketball. Individual bones and limbs and organs were displayed in glass cases running along the sides of the rooms: bisected slices of lung, marbled like prosciutto; the coiled eyeless snake of a large intestine; a thumb swollen to the size of a soda can. They drifted through a room that exhibited feathery networks of veins, arteries, and capillaries extracted from their surrounding tissue, dyed bright red, and submerged in tanks of water, resplendent as tropical coral. In another room malformed fetuses curled in on themselves, innards spilling out of their mouths, unfused skulls lumpy and irregular. Soon enough, they arrived at the livers, which sat smooth and tan and dense in their case.

“This might be the dullest thing here,” Maria said. Next to the healthy organ sat a larger and greasier-looking specimen. A placard identified it as an example of fatty liver disease. “Is this what Lenny has?”

“Not exactly. But similar.”

She looked at it for a moment, then switched her attention back to the healthier example. “How much of this lump am I giving up?”

“About seventy percent.”

“
Seventy?
”

“Since he's so much heavier than you, they're probably going to resect the maximum amount, which is about seventy. Don't worry, you'll be back at ninety percent within a few months. In a little over a year, it'll be full size again.”

She touched her abdomen. He placed his fingers on her wrist, moving her hand up and to her right. “There.”

“I can feel her kicking.”

He smiled, but he could sense his heart skittering around his chest. He began to feel hot and nauseous, the gasoline taste of secondhand whiskey rising again in his throat. He desperately wanted a cigarette. He was thinking, unwillingly, of the dismantled bodies in the medical school's anatomy lab. The emptied chest cavity of his cadaver, the feel of her serpentine intestines in his gloved hands, the black nail polish capping her fingers. The liver display was located near the end of the exhibition and its exit, and he guided Maria outside as quickly as he could without seeming pushy.

As they rode the subway together to Times Square, she studied the map affixed to the car's wall. “Show me where you live,” she said.

He hesitated, then pointed out Roosevelt Island. He instantly recognized that he'd just crossed another line he'd drawn for himself when he started working for DaSilva.

“Really? Right by the hospital?”

“On the other end of the island. But, yeah, not too far.”

“Where in the city did you grow up?”

“What makes you think I grew up here?”

“Well, didn't you?”

“I did. But how can you tell?”

“Good guess.” She dropped her eyes. “So, where?”

Where indeed? He paused, then pointed out the Rockaways in the far bottom-right corner of the map. “We moved here when I was twelve.”

She studied the map. “The A train. End of the line.”

“Yeah.”

“That's a long ride.”

“Depends where you're coming from.”

“Manhattan.”

“Yes. It's even longer than it looks. This map, it's not to scale. Manhattan is blown up. Or the other boroughs are shrunk, whichever way you want to think about it.”

“That doesn't seem fair.”

“It's just the way it is.”

Outside the lobby of the Royal Crown, he asked about her plans for the night.

“I need to call my sister,” she said. “She'll put Gabriel on the phone. Other than that . . .” She shrugged. “Room service. Maybe watch some TV then go to sleep early.”

“Your sister,” he said. “What did you tell her you were doing here?”

“I just said I had to go. That I had no choice. She knew I wouldn't have asked her to look after Gabriel if that wasn't true.”

 • • • 

T
HE
next afternoon Simon watched from across his desk, picturing the tiny tears and bruises deep in the man's battered ganglia, as Lenny tried to stitch together the story of his second cousin's generous gift. Lenny was thirty-nine years old, but Simon guessed that his brain more closely resembled that of somebody twice his age. He spoke slowly, as though testing how each word sounded in his mind before releasing it into the room, and he was sweating again even though the AC unit was running on full blast. In the chair next to him, Howard Crewes frowned, a man worried about the soundness of his investment.

“Let's start again,” Simon said. “Just relax, okay? Now, what is your relationship to Maria Campos?”