THE MAN WHO KNEW THE COLLAGE
“HE’S GONE TOO far this time,” Mrs. Farragut said as she entered the ballroom. “It’s hideous.”
Mr. Farragut walked into the room behind her, reading emails on his phone, his long, narrow frame hunching toward the screen as though his spinal cord was a fishing rod. He was wearing one of his weekend outfits—cotton slacks, a linen button-down shirt, and light brown ostrich-skin loafers without socks. His August Mast cologne announced him whenever he entered a room.
It was the day of the annual Montgomery & Patricia Farragut Summer Gala. I was setting up the bar in the corner of the ballroom and Mrs. Farragut walked over, handing me a small floral arrangement to place next to the ice and prosecco. Mostly, I supervise the rest of the staff and manage the grounds, which wasn’t the career path I’d imagined when I was in grad school for urban planning. But after the Crash this was the best job I could get. At least I’m in charge of things. Except during the Gala days when I’m expected to be “in the trenches” as Mrs. Farragut would say.
“Mrs. Farragut,” I said, “would you like any other decorations on the bar?”
“No,” she said. “Let’s keep it simple and again, for the last time, please call me Patricia.”
I’d been running around all morning trying to make sure everything was just right. The guests always find things to gossip about behind the Farraguts’ backs—the same kinds of things the Farraguts say about other people’s parties.
“Monty,” she said, turning to her husband. “Edward is your son, too. Some input would be nice.”
“I think he’s spoiled and lazy,” he said to her, lifting his eyes but not his head. “A rebel without any real conflict in his life. The best approach is to ignore his antics and, eventually, he’ll regret them.”
“That’s your solution for our son?” she responded. “Regret?”
“Hector,” Mr. Farragut said, bringing me into the conversation. “You’re a father. How would you handle this?”
“I have two daughters,” I answered, wishing they’d take the argument to another room.
“Right,” he said, casually walking over to me and leaning in—another few inches and our foreheads would be touching. “Hypothetically, then.”
I had much to say about Edward.
“Leave him alone,” Patricia interjected. “If you don’t want to talk about Edward with me, then just don’t.”
“As you wish, dear,” he said, letting his eyes fall back down to the screen as he turned away. He didn’t seem at all bothered.
“Hector,” Patricia said. “The bar looks perfect. Thank you.” She gave me a warm smile.
Mr. Farragut stayed behind for a moment after she left the room. He lifted his eyes to meet mine, but his thumb kept swiping. “Make sure the tub on top of the bar is clean before you put ice in it,” he said.
I’ve been the family’s estate manager for over twenty years and have always felt a special fondness for Edward, like an uncle for his nephew.
Ana tells me there’s something wrong with the Farraguts and I should keep my head down and not get concerned with their troubles. We have our own children to worry about. But I’ve spent so much time with that family, the line between business and personal gets blurry.
Edward was vain from a young age. He didn’t think he was better than everybody else like his brother and sister, he just wanted to look and dress a certain way. He had his mother’s dark brown hair and her skin that wasn’t as pale as her husband’s. She was half Italian and half Scottish. Thomas and Ophelia looked more like their father and he preferred them.
Adolescence was much harder for Edward than his siblings. He had to wear braces and his face was riddled with acne. He wasn’t cruel about other people’s flaws, but he did break a few mirrors after looking at his own reflection. Patricia felt terrible the time I cut myself on glass cleaning up after him. Later, Edward said he’d help me with some of my duties for the next month to make up for it. He even told me once he wished I was his father.
When I got home that night Ana cleaned my cut. She said we couldn’t afford for me to be out of work too long if the wound got infected and that I shouldn’t have driven across town with an injured hand. I swore Patricia would make sure we were taken care of if I was disabled on the job, but Ana had her doubts.
“She likes you when you make her life easier,” Ana said as she poured disinfectant over my wound. “She won’t be so generous when you don’t.”
Edward changed during high school; he was angrier. It was mostly directed at his family and the unfairness of the world. But as much as I agreed with some of his convictions, there was more to it than politics
Toward the end of high school, he started pulling pranks at the annual Gala. He was seventeen the first time, when he streaked naked
throughout the party wearing nothing but an elephant mask and a red bow tie. It was funny, but a little over the top. Patricia cried for a long time after everybody left, which made Edward uncomfortable. He’d only really wanted to upset his father and siblings. But his guilt subsided and the pranks continued.
One year he wore a long blonde wig and a gown with makeup and jewelry and even shaved his legs. He flirted with his father’s drunk business associates. A few of them flirted back, thinking he was the Farraguts’ daughter.
Patricia was always upset by his antics, asking nobody in particular what would make him want to embarrass her like that. Mr. Farragut would call him a jobless leech and cut off his allowance. Thomas and Ophelia despised their brother. When Edward was twenty, they bound and gagged him and left him in the attic during the Gala. They would have let him stay there until morning, but two guests who had snuck up for a secret rendezvous untied him.
Edward told me all about it the next day. He was crying and laughing; I’d never seen him so distraught. He sat at the foot of his bed rubbing the rope marks on his wrists.
“They would have left me there forever,” he said.
I put a hand on his shoulder to comfort him, but he jerked away from me.
“I was tied up in the attic for six hours,” he said, as angry as he’d ever been.
“We’d have searched for you after it was over,” I said.
“You and my mom maybe,” he said.
“Your family doesn’t hate you, Edward,” I said to him as I sat down and put my arm around him. “They just don’t necessarily like you all the time, and that’s just how it is with blood.”
“My father laughed,” he said.
Patricia’s sister, Catherine, came over to the house early in the hours leading up to this year’s Gala. Catherine’s a good person who means well, but I find her difficult sometimes. She always wants me to talk about my heritage, asking me the difference between the Spanish my family spoke in Mexico and the Spanish Ana’s family speaks in Puerto Rico, even though I told her that all my grandparents were born in Los Angeles, and I didn’t learn Spanish until Ana was pregnant. She wanted our children to speak at least three languages.
“Edward will grow out of it,” Catherine said, sipping at her tea. “He’s a Sagittarius. He’s not done traveling yet.”
“He’s twenty-nine,” Patricia responded. “I’m not saying he should become Thomas and Ophelia overnight or even that I’d ever want that, but it’s becoming harder and harder to take.”
“I know, Tricia,” Catherine said. “But he’s your favorite.”
“Cath,” Patricia said quietly but firmly, “don’t ever say that. And it’s not true, I don’t have a favorite.”
“Yes, you do,” Catherine said, looking at me and shaking her head. “And everybody knows it. Even the Japanese maple in the backyard knows it.”
I laughed a little. Catherine could be funny.
“Can we please not change the subject?” Patricia said. “Have you seen it?”
“Seen what?” Catherine asked.
“You won’t be so casual about it when you do,” Patricia said “It’s getting worse.”
“Hector,” Catherine said, turning to me. “Have you seen it?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And?” She asked.
“It’s different from the rest.”
The first accident was devastating to Edward. He was twenty-four and had just dropped out of a graduate program in media studies. He was standing on a street corner when a motorcycle swerved to avoid hitting a child and went over the curb, crushing Edward’s right arm against a building. The rider suffered a broken collar bone, four cracked ribs, two broken legs, and a concussion. Edward’s arm had to be amputated. A foot to the right and he would have died. It was a miracle he didn’t, but you couldn’t say that to him at the time. I’m ruined, he’d say.
For six months he never left the estate. Edward had always been a social animal; he loved being a man about town, and for him to retreat from public life was to give up on existence. Patricia was beside herself worrying about him, and Mr. Farragut preferred it when he wasn’t around. They set up consultations on cloning a replacement arm, but he wouldn’t go, coming up with an excuse or hiding somewhere until it was too late. They argued that he’d be just like his old self if he consented to the procedure. It would be his arm, cloned from his own DNA.
“It would be a lie,” Edward once said to me after an argument with his parents. “It would be the arm of someone identical to me who was never given a chance to live. My arm, but also not my arm.”
“You’d have two arms,” I said. “Don’t you want two arms?”
“Yeah,” he answered. “But not like that.”
that definitely wouldn’t be your arm.”
Edward went silent, but he had a curious look on his face. I didn’t say anything.
“With a transplant, at least the donor would have a choice to give it up and I’d always know it wasn’t my arm. There’d be no confusion,” he said to me. “It would be like using a fork. I’d have no expectations of it beyond the task at hand.” Edward smiled at his pun.
“You need to decide for yourself how to get on with your life,” I said.
He began researching transplant surgeries. After a week, he moved from reading articles to watching videos of procedures. He joined online communities, chatting with donors and recipients. We all thought he was emerging from the darkness. His sudden optimism felt like a rebirth.
But soon the types of communities he was engaging with shifted. He started using terms like self-evolution and anatomical autobiography. He became a member of a group called the Phoenix Club.
He began to plaster the walls of his room with pictures of his head combined with a different torso and legs and arms from different bodies, sometimes of other animals. One had his three-year-old head, the upper body of an adult male model in a tuxedo, the naked arms of a bodybuilder, and the lower body of a palomino horse. Underneath it was the title, “Exotic-dancing Equine Edward.” The earlier pieces he put together were all like that, weird and crude and playful. They were funny. But the more they covered the walls of his room, the more realistic they became. The animal parts disappeared and were replaced by human body parts that were from different bodies but just about the right size to make up an anatomically balanced person.
Then, one day, he came into the kitchen and told his mother he wanted a transplanted arm instead of a clone. She was so happy to see that Edward was ready to move forward with his life that she didn’t question it. Two months later he had a new arm.
Once he fully healed he started leaving the house again, but his social habits had changed. He always went out with other members of the Phoenix Club; they called themselves an “organic exhibit.” They’d all had at least one transplant surgery; some had two or three.
“That’s some kind of fucked-up body cult,” Ana said one night after we’d put the girls to bed. “I know we need you to keep that job, but you have to put up some boundaries. You’re too close to him. Let the Farraguts deal with his Frankenstein bullshit.”
“I can’t just ignore him,” I said, as we sat on a couch to watch a show on our laptop.
“You could avoid him. There’s a difference between ignoring people and not always making yourself available to them.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“You’ll be you,” she said, resting her head on my shoulder.
The Phoenix Club homepage, with its logo of a bird rising from a fire, was on our laptop. This bird was made up of many parts, all taken from different species: the crest of a cardinal, an oriole’s head, a toucan’s beak, a red-tailed hawk’s body, an Andean condor’s wings, and the talons of a harpy eagle. It was hideous and magnificent. “If he runs around with them much longer,” Ana said as she started to doze off, “he’ll want another transplant. It’s the next logical step.”
some final touches for the Gala. Mr. Farragut had asked for the study to be, in his words, “raggedly presentable.” He wanted to be able to pour a few glasses of a rare scotch or cognac for some VIPs, away from the rest of the party, in a secluded space that looked as if it had not been prepared for use. He told me a spontaneous and private venue makes people feel special and only requires a couple of small details to make it appear authentic. An unfinished cup of black coffee neatly placed next to an open book on top of the desk with the reading light left on—that kind of thing. He usually took cream in his coffee, but the sour odor of dairy sitting for too long could make the atmosphere of the room unpleasant.
Patricia had sent her sister to ask if I’d seen Edward and when I answered no she left without a word to look for him.
Edward’s second accident involved the lawnmower. In the hospital afterwards, he said he just wanted to help around the house. He knew how difficult his period of seclusion had been on everybody and mowing the lawn seemed a nice gesture, an olive branch. There was a full-time gardener, so helping with other household chores would have been more useful, but no one loses a hand mopping floors or dusting shelves. Edward wasn’t as depressed as he’d been when he lost his right arm. A month later, he had a new left hand.
Patricia tried to pretend it was unintentional, consoling Edward and waiting on him as he recuperated, and he pretended back. Nobody else talked about it, but we didn’t have to. Marianna, who had been the Farragut’s cook for 25 years, quit suddenly without notice. Even Mr. Farragut seemed upset, and he was never one to pay much attention to what Edward did or didn’t do.
When the bandages came off and Patricia saw Edward’s new hand, she was furious.
“What did they do to you?” she yelled. “Look at those scars. For the money we paid them, we shouldn’t be able to see any at all.”
“Mom,” Edward said, calmly.
“Don’t worry, sweetie,” she said. “They’ll fix this, or they’ll never practice medicine again.”
“Mom,” he said. “I asked them not to blend away the scars. I asked them to leave them as they are.”
“What?” she said. The look on Patricia’s face was one I’d never seen before.
“Mom,” Edward said again. “Are you okay?”
She picked up a quilt that had fallen onto the floor of his bedroom and folded it twice, laying it neatly along the foot of his bed. She paused for a moment, and then walked out without another word.
Edward turned away from me. It was the first time I saw the tattoo of the Phoenix Club logo on his upper back.
“He’s changing,” Ana said when we were in bed that night. “You know you won’t be able to fix him, right?”
“So, you’re saying there’s no hope for him?” I said, aggravated. “I don’t even know what that means,” she said. “All I’m saying is maybe you should learn to like the phoenix because it’s here to stay.”
Ana was right. A year after the second accident, there was a third. This time, it involved a table saw and his right hand.
We could all see it coming once he started taking woodworking classes.
Even Patricia couldn’t pretend any more. She sent him to therapists, a recovery program, but it made no difference. Every one of them concluded that Edward seemed happy and emotionally stable, aside from the intentional amputations and transplants. One even asked if he could include Edward as part of a case study for his new research project. Patricia told him to leave.
Two hours into the Gala, the dinner buffet was open for business and most of the guests were loosened up with three or four drinks. The spread was more decadent than usual: a whole roasted lamb with mint jelly and juniper berry sauce, a dozen jerk-spiced rotisserie chickens, two suckling pigs, a mezze platter station with dips, olives, grape leaves, falafel, and pitas, a table with cheeses, charcuterie, pâtés, and breads from Italy and France, roasted vegetables, sushi, dumplings, udon noodles, and a thirty-foot raw bar. It didn’t all go together but the point was extravagance not consistency.
Patricia held court at one end of the ballroom. She was on her second glass of prosecco and only nibbled enough food to keep sober. Catherine stayed by her side, though she was already on her fourth glass. Mr. Farragut was more socially nomadic, moving from circle to circle, laughing at bad jokes and trying to siphon off insider information. Thomas and Ophelia kept looking for their brother, ...
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