The Organ Broker

by Stu Strumwasser

  What Wallace was alluding to—getting a black market heart without going through the legitimate channels—of course it’s not the same as sourcing a kidney, or part of a liver, or a lobe of a lung. A patient with AIDS will simply not get a heart off a UNOS list, and even a facility on the take can’t hide that a patient has AIDS. How could anyone explain that the recipient was chosen despite being completely ineligible? We were dancing around whether or not to be complicit in conspiracy to commit murder. For this AIDS patient’s family to buy what they wanted, we would have to know in advance who the donor was and where he lived, in what miserable god-forsaken shanty-town he had been seduced by Pierre Fucking Kleinhans, and have the patient ready, because they’d only have four hours. Believe me, I tried to say no. I wanted to be a man who said no to such things without consideration or weighing the fee against the risks, or the harm. But sadly, some part of me was still a man who said, “How much?” even as I made myself sick from it. I know better now, today, as I recount all of this, but only a few months ago I still didn’t.

  ◆

  “Two million is a lot,” I said to Wallace. I didn’t want to ask anything specific about Philip. I didn’t want to show Wallace any of my cards yet.

  “Twenty kidneys, Jack. Double that if co-brokered. Maybe that’s a retirement plan. I assume you’ve got other money. I’ve got money, but a few extra million would always help.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Forget it, Jack. Not on this. Just understand that he’s young, early thirties, I think. Family is loaded. They started at a million and I moved them to five. From one to five. Think about that.”

  “Can he travel?”

  “Yes, but who knows how long it will be that way.”

  “Blood type?”

  “O. Sorry. It is what it is.”

  “Any other stuff?” My mind was racing.

  “AIDS issues. Give me a new email address and I’ll send you the medical records. Send it to your guys at Royston because that’s where it’s got to happen, right? This will be huge.”

  “You realize what we’d become a part of?” I asked him, still not sure I could even do it; but still not sure I could resist. I was wondering about the patient, about Philip, and I have to admit that I was also finding myself lusting for the fee, drifting along in a dreamy way like a teenager with a crush. I felt the adrenaline charge that preceded the rush. It’s just like that excitement that builds while someone is still cutting up the lines, before a single one has been snorted. It’s the rush; the lusty feeling of addiction—and satisfaction. It might not even be Philip, I thought. What if it is? Philip’s father, Harold Lauer, was very wealthy. He was probably the kind of man used to getting what he wants, no matter what the cost might be, and he could spare a few million.

  “Nothing. I’m not part of anything. I just tell sick people who they should talk to and if they get what they need that’s great but it’s between them and some hospital in Timbuktu. I have nothing to do with anything else,” Wallace said casually.

  “You have knowledge of it.”

  “I don’t, you see. And please do not start this shit again Jack because now is not the time to get weepy or unprofessional about who we are. That’s what you need to get your brain around, Jack. Don’t ask questions you don’t want answered and you’ll be a lot better off in life.”

  ◆

  I thought a lot about what Wallace had said and daydreamed about the fee. “A retirement plan,” he had said. There are fewer than a thousand names on the lists who need hearts. Often UNOS actually takes care of them. Black market heart transactions have always been mostly unheard of. This deal on the table with Wallace was unique in that the guy had AIDS and would never pass muster with a god committee at any transplant center at home. This couldn’t be done through regular means. It required the intervention of New York Jack.

  ◆

  Why does someone want and want and want even when he already has more than enough? I think it’s partly addiction and also that money just happens to be the metric. There has to be some measurement for our lives, a reason to get out of bed. The money somehow became mine. I wondered if the client might possibly be Philip but the odds against it were too big. I thought about all of my justifications and I wanted to let them go but it always felt as if doing that would be like falling off a cliff. Over the years, in my rare moments of introspection I sometimes thought about The Man from Dallas. I tried to convince myself that we were cut from the same cloth, crusaders against some vague injustice.

  The biggest realization I had while considering Wallace’s heart transaction was something I imagine most people accept when they’re still kids: life’s just not fair. For years the illusion had somehow fueled my vindictiveness and solitude—but not since I met Mark. Once I met Mark I felt more like a part of things. Ironically, that made me feel more like I had things to answer for.

  That night I spent a lot of time peering into my telescopes. The skies were clear and there were unimpeded views. The closest star to us other than our own sun is Alpha Centauri. It’s 4.3 light years away. It would take a craft traveling the speed of light 4.3 years to reach us from there. The pinpoints of light we see in the night sky from some stars began traveling toward us hundreds, thousands, or millions of years ago. Looking at them is like reaching into a grave and pulling out ghosts. What has happened there since then? Ever since I got my first telescope when I was a kid I hoped to find something out there, skipping over billions of people right here on earth to do so.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE:

  GHOSTS

  The next morning I got in my car before rush hour and drove up the FDR to the Queensboro Bridge. It’s been renamed for Ed Koch, the former Mayor. “How’m I doin’?” he used to say on the news when I was a kid. He had a thick New York accent. “How’m I doin’?”

  The bridge was almost empty. It led me to Queens Blvd and then I drove through narrow side streets into Flushing and parked across the street from the boxy little house I had grown up in. It sat tucked between two other boxy little houses, with shared walls, vinyl siding, and dingy gutters. When I lived there the house was a gray; now it was light blue, and it looked cheery. There were wires hanging down from a broken cable connection, and the ivy was thick and overgrown on the right side of the building.

  I climbed the three small stairs to the front door and knocked. It wasn’t yet eight a.m. After a few moments I knocked again, louder. Then I heard the creaking of the thick, wooden front door being pulled open. It was dim inside, and in the shadows was a small woman in an embroidered housecoat. The screen door was closed and she looked up at me and I could see the features of her face jutting out from the dark, old and wrinkled, but familiar, like a weathered painting of the woman who had raised me many years before.

  “How you doin’, Mom?”

  She squinted behind thick metal-rimmed glasses and said, “Hello?”

  “Mom?”

  Her mouth opened wider and then her eyes did as well and she mouthed the word, “Jackie?” I nodded. “Jackie, what are you doing here, son?”

  “It’s been a long time, Mom. Can I come in for a bit?”

  She seemed to think about it, looked behind her and then back at me, and said, “Okay, Jackie. For a bit. C’mon in.”

  She retreated into the room and I stepped into the house. I had never been there before. I had not lived there. It was someone else. It was a dream.

  The dining room was a shambles, cluttered with plates and boxes and stacks of old newspapers and magazines on the table. The carpet was stained and littered. She pulled her housecoat tighter around her.

  “Come this way, Jackie,” and with a wave of her small hand she led me into the living room. Her hair was thin and gray and stiff with hairspray. She sat on one of the two couches, and folded her hands in her lap. I sat on the other.

  “How are you?” I asked quietly.

  She nodded, as if to say “Okay,” then asked “What brings you by here
all of a sudden?”

  I looked at her. She was dissolving into the shadows and crevices of that house. She was fading into the arguments still bouncing off those walls. “Maybe I shouldn’t come here and bother you. I didn’t mean to do that. Do you hear from Elena much?”

  “Your sister? No. But sometimes. Not like you.”

  This time I nodded, but it was a nod of dismissal. Then I said, “I came to ask you something about Dad. Can I do that?”

  “Why do you want to do that, Jackie?”

  “Is it strange?”

  “It’s strange you coming here now. Eight in the morning on a Wednesday when I have my doctors to go to in the afternoon. I have to get on two buses, you know. Yes, I’d say it’s strange. What is it you want?”

  There was a lamp on the square wooden table where the ends of the two couches met. It was turned on, and one of the thick curtains was drawn open, but it was still dark in the room. The ceiling fixtures were off. In the beams of light streaming in from the side of the living room window between the curtains and the window’s edge there were dust particles gently floating upward against gravity. “Is there anything you could tell me now, Mom, about my father … about what was his problem with me all those years? I mean, he was hard on you and Elena too, but why did he treat me the way he did?”

  “Treat you what way? Jack was a good man. You kids made things hard for your father. He had to go on the road and sell. He had to make meetings. He had to go to all the meetings in all the places, selling shoes to pay the bills and keep a roof over our heads.”

  “He sold jewelry.”

  “Well.”

  “He hit you, Mom. A lot. We never talked about this. But we knew it. Elena did and I did.”

  “Well, I’m not going to talk about that. Those stories.”

  “Are you saying it’s not true?”

  “Is that what you came here to ask about?”

  “Don’t you remember that day, the day Dad found that pot in my room? And he made me go to the basement.” I turned my head and looked at the entrance that once led down a shag-carpeted hallway to a basement door. “Don’t you remember?”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said firmly.

  “And he hit me and pushed me down half a flight of stairs.”

  “He did not,” she said incredulously. “Oh!”

  “But he did. And you know he did. And he urinated on me on the floor. My own father did that. You know that. You know all of those things.”

  “I do not know such things. Watch your mouth. That is a story. Did Elena tell you that?”

  “What?”

  “Look, your father worked very hard. And sometimes you broke the rules. Sometimes I broke the rules. He didn’t even want children. But we were so young and then I got pregnant with Elena and we were Catholic and so things changed and he always told me, ‘She’s your doing, Joan, so you take care of her,’ and he was right to say so.”

  I was struggling to stay controlled but I knew that if I got upset or angry the conversation would end. She was only partly lying anyway—I believed that she truly did not remember those things. “And it was the same with me?” I asked.

  “No,” my mother said, “you were Jim Peterson’s boy, not his, and he hated that. He allowed it, but he hated that you were Jim’s and he had to feed and clothe you.”

  “Jim Peterson? Jim the old cop who lived down the block?”

  “How could you blame your father?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Look,” she said more sharply, “did you come here to upset me? You don’t come by for years and now you want to ask all these questions? Now?”

  “No.” I felt tired.

  “Because you tell Elena she can fight her own goddamned battles!”

  “Alright, Mom. Please. What do you mean about I was Jim Peterson’s boy?”

  “Your father was in Army Reserves in Korea then, and you know how these things happen. Jack was gone for months at a time and I often thought about taking little Elena and moving back in with my mother in New Jersey. Jack had a mean streak, now that’s for sure. But when he came back he said we were Catholics and I had to have you and he wouldn’t let me go and move back with my mother. And he even named you Jackie. Just like him, and just like his father.”

  “He wasn’t really my father? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “That’s enough now, Jackie. Now, do you want tea or do I have to ask you to please go? I have two buses I have to go on.”

  “You’re kidding …” was all that came out of me. I was back in that room upstairs, waiting to see how he might react. I was falling down the basement steps. I thought he’d kill me in the basement that day. Maybe he did. I stood up. I left the living room and crossed through the tiny dining room that connected it to the kitchen. That was the same way I had walked that day, that day when I yelled back at him. I remembered that walk, that gait of a killer. I remembered how it felt, momentarily, to no longer be afraid.

  “I am not kidding!” my mother said. “It’s the Q-26 and then I have to switch at Roosevelt Avenue. Why would a person lie about buses? Why?”

  She had gotten up and I brushed past her and walked to the basement door. I opened it and looked down into the dark at the empty stairway. She stood behind me in the hallway.

  “There!” I yelled. I lunged toward my mother and grabbed her coat by the arm and pushed her to the top of the landing. “There! Those stairs! That’s where your Jack threw a boy down a flight of fucking stairs.”

  “Let go!” I yelled again, seething. “That is where your Jack pissed on his own broken son, his adopted son, apparently. The sick bastard! And there is where you let him,” I said, pointing past her to their bedroom door. “Every time.”

  “Get out. Get out!” she yelled. “Don’t come back here. And you tell that Elena I’m through with her too! Who needs it?!”

  I am not my father’s son, I thought, but instead of glee or relief I just felt more anger. And nothing felt changed by the news. Nothing. The news was about genetics, but it didn’t change the circumstances of my life in any way at all. I walked out of that house and was tempted for a moment to walk down the block and find Jim Peterson. He’d have to be in his eighties. I wanted to find him and shake him and make him tell me why he never shot that prick Jack Trayner in the face.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO:

  A HEART TOO BIG

  A few days later, late at night, I had been out on my balcony with my telescope for hours when my cell phone rang. It was Mark. I was fixated on a tiny point of light I knew to be a double star. The warbling caused by two massive bodies circling and pulling on each other wasn’t detectable with an amateur device like mine, even if it was an expensive amateur device.

  “Jack. Is it cool that I’m calling you now?” He sounded anxious.

  “Yeah. It’s fine.” I was distracted. There might be planets orbiting that double star, I thought. Imagine what a double-star sunset would look like.

  “I called the other number. I guess that phone’s disconnected now? So I tried this one, like you said.” He sounded hoarse.

  “That’s fine,” I repeated.

  “You know, we only know each other a few months now, Jack.”

  “Yes.” I was thinking about his grandmother, sitting alone in that dusty living room, holding on to redacted memories of her version of her life. How will I tell him the story of our family? One day, I’ll have to tell him, I thought.

  “But I wanted to call you. Is that strange?” I didn’t answer him.

  “Jack, what is it that you’re always keeping from me? What don’t you want to tell me? Philip says you have some sort of secret and it makes you untrustworthy? What is it?”

  “He says that?”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know, Mark,” I said.

  “Sure you do. It’s something big I think.” He was practically whispering. I thought he might be drunk. “Who goes and changes phone numbers like
that?”

  I kept my eye on that double-star. It could be millions of light years away, I thought. This could be light from the dinosaur age. What could be happening on that double star now, today? It could be anything. It could even be completely gone.

  “Philip was admitted today,” he said. He paused, then added, “Jack, he’s so sick. So fast … with the, uh … the medication problem …” He sounded like he might start to sob.

  There were lights gleaming up from the street below, and lights behind the window-shades protecting people’s privacy in the hundreds of apartments in the buildings I could see from where I stood. There were stars above me, some glimmering and some—it was more like they were glowering, almost sarcastically. They all shined down on me and I could see plenty with my eyes, despite the New York light pollution. I could see thousands with my scope and there were billions beyond them, all going about their business.

  “Jack, I know it’s late, but could I stop by?”

  “Here?”

  “Or, we could meet somewhere else. If it’s not too late for you. Do you want to come by our place? I’d rather talk about this in person.”

  “Mark, just tell me what’s going on. How bad is it?”

  “He’s dying, I think.” The words came out like a wind between two buildings pushing down a narrow alleyway, scattering stray leaves and candy wrappers.

  “I thought he was doing okay.”

  Then Mark was crying. “I know. I know,” he said quietly through tears.

  I sat down on the concrete floor of my balcony. It was still warm after soaking in the sunlight all day and I could feel it through my pants. I had no idea what to say.

  “He’s gained weight lately. You saw him. Kind of a lot in the last few weeks,” Mark said. “Water weight mostly. I hope it’s okay that I am calling you. I talked to my mom and dad an hour ago. It seemed like I should call you. Mom said to call you—”