Free The Dismantling by Brian Deleeuw Page A

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.”
    â€œI’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.
    â€œThis 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?”
    â€œNot 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?”
    â€œAbout seventy percent.”
    â€œ
Seventy?
”
    â€œSince 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.”
    â€œI 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