The Assembler of Parts: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

the pulsing of the light coming onto her face. She was so beautiful, in light and in shadow, so beautiful. Father drove on, silent and sad, in sun and shade, trying to hold on to Garraway’s augury. I see his thumbed hands gripping the wheel knuckle-white tight as Mother hummed.
    As a week-old newborn I had few waking hours, but those that managed to bob on the calm dark surface of sleep were fully pleasurable. Awake all at once, as if from a dry rebirth, I came out of the depths of sleep to engage the world with my senses. Much of the world was my own humming machinery and much of that was my mouth. At first, it explored itself like a captive animal in its pen. My tongue liked to count the papery ridges of the hard palate’s plateau, and to glide over the floor of the mouth to feel its tether, the sharply lined frenulum, and to milk a little saliva from the glands that hid on its either side, and to search for the miracle of erupting teeth in the newly emptied pits along my gumline. It found the frenulum attaching my upper lip to the dental arch one day and worried it sore between two feeds. It licked my lips like a friendly dog, and I am sure would have slathered my cheeks, chin, and nose in happy slobber if only it could have reached. What it could reach now was the frequent offering of my mother’s breasts, and it grew to know the shallow corrugations of each nipple and every soft subcutaneous tubercle in both dark areolae, bumps to slow my sucking progress. Speed bumps.
    And the day came when it made the acquaintance of my fingers. It was not a planned visit of digit and mouth. No, it was all chance that brought my right hand to my face where it groped my nose and found a lip to pull and from the lip a cavity to enter and within the cavity a happy, hungry dog of a tongue to play with. Other fingers followed until all four were red and boggy from the licking and sucking. It was my general sense that day that a thumb could never have been accommodated in that small and busy place. So there, all the better.
    If my mouth had the character of an animal, my skin was pure heavenly soul, intent on softness, lightness, tickles, and caresses, and indeed as I lay on the changing table to receive dry diapers and a dusting of talc, my skin was my organ of conveyance to the future respite of heaven where all is skin lighted from within, a soft warm lamp of skin aglow with quiet peace. My skin was just like that back then*, and never more prickled with joy than when in the yellow plastic tub, lapped by water warm as the liquor I knew before birth, but water I could set now in motion to catch the light. I splashed to make lenses of the waves, to focus the light on my submerged integument, on the ceiling of the bathroom, against the vanity mirror whose height from ground level would never, in all my life, permit me a view of myself unless I stood tiptoed on the toilet seat or bathtub rim. I threw wet light at that mirror even as bright streaks shot down my body and returned in the water’s recoil from the bath basin’s walls. Light, then*, was my plaything. Now*, it is me.
    *
    I wonder about thumbs. They are, after all, what most makes us human. Had the Assembler screwed mine in place, would I have been ennobled in some way? Made more human? Everyone agrees, to err is human. So perhaps those stumpy digits would have offended, would have perfected hands that might have strangled the spirit. So I wonder, as I see myself playing with light, did He make me a little imperfect to preserve me from some greater imperfection? Did He number my bones to improve my soul? Yes, as I watch my life, I think I begin to see. More tapes arrive. I watch, the past*, the present*, the here*, the there*, all blending like the parts of light to a single bright whiteness. I feel so clean.
    The few wakeful hours of those first weeks rarely involved Father. In the evenings, yes, home from work he held me against his shirt and let me breathe his breath as he