by Craig Nova
Then came the Mercedes SUV. Silver. TV in the back. Great suspension. All leather. Compass, GPS, air bags, even in the back. The car was for a surgeon across the border, but it wasn’t a car that he was going to use and it wasn’t for his wife, either, but his mistress, and the mistress knew that the chances of being kidnapped were pretty good these days, especially in the border towns, and so that’s why she wanted the Mercedes. So Sara fixed up the papers and put on the temporary plates, drove to the border crossing in El Paso, a place of some tension, and after the dogs went over the car and after they looked under it with a mirror on wheels and found absolutely nothing, she met the surgeon in the parking lot of a McDonald’s in Juarez, on Calle Antonio Ortiz Mena, but the surgeon said he had something to explain and that she just had to be patient, although, of course, Sara was in no mood to be patient, and, I can say if there is any human being on earth who is not likely to be patient in a McDonald’s with a hot car on Calle Antonio Ortiz Mena, it was Sara in her premature soccer mom outfit.
But the surgeon was apologetic, of course, in a sort of south-of-the-border Catholic kind of way, which made Sara even more uneasy, since that Catholic whiff, which could have been incense, reminded her of death and disease, which of course is exactly the right association, since the surgeon didn’t have the money, but he did have a kidney, for transplant, all packed in ice, and people on a waiting list were paying as much as thirty thousand dollars for a good kidney, and so while he didn’t have the money she could take the kidney and sell it for plenty. Maybe more than thirty thousand. Maybe forty. People’s lives depended on it.
Sara had come this far and she wasn’t likely to turn back now, since, as time had gone by, she had noticed a certain unpleasantness in MD’s attitude about things, not thug-like, not yet, but she imagined it wouldn’t take much to push him over the edge or maybe just show what he was really like. No, what bothered her were two things. Was it a human kidney? And how the hell was she going to get it across the border? The first item she decided she’d have to take on faith, but the second required a little work. She said she’d do it if the doctor went to his office and got his medical license and then drove her and the kidney, packed in ice, in a special Styrofoam box, back across the border, so that if the customs agents looked in the box and found the kidney, the doctor, who had his license, could talk his way around it and say that the kidney was for an emergency transplant, etc. Did it require papers, too? Like a Mercedes?
So they went to the doctor’s office and he got his passport and his ID and they went right across the border, waved right through, since she looked so much like a premature soccer mom in her blue shirt and khaki skirt and beautifully tanned legs (from watching all those games). But now she couldn’t go to El Paso International Airport, not with that Styrofoam box to take through security, and even then (she said in the bar, she could feel the forces of fate or whatever it was, sort of what you see in those pictures of the Horsehead Nebula: mysterious power) she knew that this was going no place good, but the entire sensation was like being at the top of a roller coaster that had just reached the top of its run and was about to fall.
So she knew that she wasn’t going to be able to have the kidney X-rayed when she tried to get on an airplane (and, in fact, she knew of a recent case in which someone who was taking his mother’s ashes to be buried had them confiscated at the airport). Instead, she had the doctor, who was getting increasingly uneasy, drive her to a Hertz in El Paso, just as, before they crossed the border, she had had him fill a prescription for Provigil, which she took, and, after renting a Subaru with good AC, she started driving north, and on the way, she stopped every five or six hours at gas stations to put more ice in the Styrofoam box, to keep the kidney fresh.
The real problem, though, was that she began to think things over and while she had made a lot of money, and while it had gone a long ways to make her feel better about a lot of mistakes she had made, but not all of them (such as me and that I had loved her), she still felt lousy, as though the screenplay, the dead dog, the stolen underwear, the series of dingbats she had slept with all added up to something she just couldn’t shake. So, nonstop, eighteen hours later, after dosing herself with baby powder in the bathroom of the dealership, she went to work.
The first buyer was a man who sat in her cubicle and stared into the parking lot. When she tried to talk options, air, leather, mileage, rebates, her foot kept touching that cool Styrofoam box under her desk. She hadn’t called MD and she was trying, at the same time she sold a car, to explain to herself why she had gone for the kidney (she could have said, “This is a cash deal, Jack”), but then, MD had never told her what she was supposed to do if someone offered her something like an organ instead of money.
The man who sat at her desk, in a sort of cubicle, stared into the parking lot where the cars were lined up with numbers painted on their windshields in starch (Total Steal! Factory Reduction! A Give Away!) and didn’t say a word about the rebate, which was a pretty good deal, since the manufacturers were getting desperate with so much inventory (since those guys who were holding signs that said WILL WORK FOR FOOD sure weren’t buying cars, not to mention just about everyone else), but, instead, he took out his wallet where he kept a check and wrote out the entire amount, tax, license, everything, and pushed it over, and while she was on the phone with the bank to make sure that the check was good and that it was all right for the guy to take the car, Jack Michaels came in and started kicking the brand-new tires on a car with four-wheel drive and tinted glass.
Two-tone. Compass. GPS. TV in the backseat for the kids when you go on vacation. Sara pushed her toe against the Styrofoam box that was under the desk in her cubicle. She had packed it with ice from the service station across the street, taking the box into the bathroom with Barry Hammelman giving her a look that was somewhere between terror and suspicion, but she had said, “Female trouble. Ice helps.”
“Oh,” said Barry. “I’ll have to tell my wife.”
So the check cleared and she had the mechanic get the car ready and when the guy who bought the car drove it down the street she went back to her cubicle and made a notation on the clipboard she had to keep track of the cars she sold. Jack sat on the other side of the desk, the cubicle making them seem somehow more secluded than ever.
He had a new picture of Nadia. She looked even thinner, but she had lost a front tooth, and looked younger, as though somehow the disease was taking years from her, rather than adding them. Sara held the picture. She took her tuna sandwich out of her top drawer and passed it over.
“Aren’t you hungry?” said Jack.
“No,” she said.
“I’ll save you some,” he said.
“No,” she said.
A woman who weighed at least three hundred pounds came into the showroom and got into the passenger seat of a new car, and the thing hiked over like a sailboat in a strong wind. Barry made a sign like “Hey, there’s one. Go get it?”
Sara held the picture of Nadia. The girl had an innocence that left Sara blown back in her chair. The picture showed, in a way she found hard to explain, everything that she couldn’t fix about herself and everything that made her feel bad about that wasted time, which started right when we used to sit in that library and look at those pictures together, the heat of innocence rising along her thigh and mine and her refusal to believe in anything but quick ambition and atoms in a void. Big tears ran down Jack’s face and into the lines next to his nose and finally dripped into his lap.
“She’s sick,” said Jack Michaels. “She needs a kidney and we can’t find a kidney. If she doesn’t get a kidney in two days she’s going to die. I thought maybe I’d come in here and get a car for her mother, to make her feel better, but that’s not going to work.”
And just like that, maybe because of the Provigil, maybe because of the drive, Sara said, “Here. You better hurry to the hospital. It’s been on ice but I’m not sure how much time you’ve got.”
Jack sa
t there as though he had been hit with a hammer. Sort of glassy-eyed and disoriented, but then he came out of it and put his lips on her hand and actually got down on his hands and knees, just as Hammelman came along and raised a brow and said, “Didn’t I tell you about that? What does he want to do? Put his head up your dress?”
“No,” she said.
Hammelman went down the hall.
“But look,” said Jack. “You can’t just walk into a hospital with a kidney. And what about a match?”
“Haven’t you got a nephrologist?” said Sara.
“A shitload,” said Jack. “Pediatric nephrologists. Surgical nephrologists. Research nephrologists.”
“Take this to one of them. If it doesn’t match, I promise you they’ll make a trade. They have patients who are getting ready to die, right, because they’re on a waiting list?”
“How do you know that?” said Jack.
“If you sell cars,” said Sara. ”You learn pretty fast how things really work. Trust me. You think I haven’t sold a car to doctors and haven’t listened to them talk? It wasn’t what they said, but how they said it. They’ll work it out. Half hour, tops, and they’ll be finding a match.”
Jack took the box in both hands and went out to his secondhand Tercel, careful to put the box in the front seat and to turn on the air conditioner. He went over the curb and turned in the direction of the hospital, which was at the end of the avenue in the brownish haze of the afternoon.
So that night, before going to meet MD in the Chinese restaurant, she didn’t notice that a lot of things in her apartment weren’t quite right, lamps not in exactly the right place, books a little sloppy on the shelf, since she thought such distortions were a side effect of that Provigil. Her heart was racing, too. That must have also been the Provigil. So she stood in the shower, soaping her face and underarms, the stubble leaving a little electric buzz on her fingertips, and she prayed, or hoped with the intensity of prayer, that she could get out of this without having to come up with her own money, stored on the shelf in a closet, and which she had put into baggies, not the kind with a grooved seal, but the ones that took a green twist, as though she were staking tomatoes, but as the water became just warm, then tepid, and began to turn cool, she saw this as an indication of how things were, and that she was going to have to come up with the price of the kidney.
In the steamy bathroom, she wrapped a towel around her hair and tucked it in above her forehead, and then avoided wiping the mirror because she didn’t want to see the self-loathing that was obviously waiting for her in the reflection behind the mist on the glass. Instead, with no clothes on, she went to the closet and reached up for the box where she kept the money.
“It’s odd,” she said. “When you have so expected something to be there and when you reach for it, you find emptiness. It’s like the emptiness isn’t just a shoe box, but as though you put your hand into an outer space thing, like . . . ”
“Like the nothing between stars,” I said.
“I doubt it could be that empty,” she said.
“You’d be surprised,” I said.
The goose bumps moved from the back of her hair right down to her hips, and they were still there, coming in waves, as she pulled her underwear on and put on her best, most revealing dress, dabbed perfume behind her ears, and touched up her lips. And, of course, she thought, “Shit, shit, shit, why didn’t I have a safety deposit box, why?” Not to mention that she knew, the way a woman who has been screwed over knows, that MD had gone through her apartment when he knew she was away, just as he was smart enough to know that Sara felt uneasy about banks and the like, that is walking into one and asking for a safe deposit box. Didn’t banks have security cameras, and wouldn’t she be seen, every couple of weeks, stuffing bills into a box like a little stainless steel coffin? And then what would happen when one was filled and she needed a bigger one, and had to ask for it, and then the camera would see her move all the money from a small coffin to a big one? So MD had guessed right.
She went to the Chinese restaurant to meet MD, and as she drove she banged the steering wheel with both hands, and at a stoplight she put her head on the steering wheel and then banged her forehead against it, too.
That night, Sara sat in front of a pu pu platter and pushed the egg roll around with her chopsticks between taking shots of cold vodka, but, she told me, she just wanted to think things over, or to get some time to stop where she knew all this was going, and so, because her chopsticks were clicking together with exhaustion and terror, and because she believed in some “dumb shit mystical way,” as she put it, that time would help her rather than, as she put it, “fuck me and the horse I rode in on,” she fell back on her method for selling cars. That is, she started talking, just words to fill up the emptiness.
“So you haven’t got the money and you came to see me?” said MD. He moved the tips of his chopsticks in a circular motion, as though to sum things up.
“But I wanted to explain,” said Sara.
“I don’t deal in explanations,” said MD. “I deal in money. It’s that simple.”
“The doctor in Juarez didn’t have the money,” said Sara.
“Then where’s the car?” said MD. “You have to have one or the other.”
“Well, he gave me a kidney to sell,” she said.
“No kidding,” he said. “Like for a transplant? There’s money in that, I guess, huh?”
“I gave it away,” she said.
“But you’ve got money of your own. I know that. You’ve been salting it away. In a safety deposit box or something, right?”
All that was left of the pu pu platter were the spare ribs and sesame noodles, which had a sort of amphibian quality.
MD took the news about the money being gone without saying a word, and all he said about what had happened with the surgeon in Mexico was one word, “Kidney.” Then he had another drink and an egg roll at the Chinese restaurant and said, “You owe me forty-five thousand dollars for the Mercedes. Now, I don’t really care where you get it. That’s not my problem. But I’ve got obligations, not only the kids who get me the cars, but other things I haven’t mentioned to you. Debts of one kind or another. And, so, I don’t want to get personal, but that’s the way it is. Forty-five thousand dollars.”
Sara held the empty shot glass that had held vodka.
“I need a little time to think,” she said.
“No, you don’t,” said MD. “You need the money.”
“Did you break into my apartment?” she said.
“Me?” he said. “You aren’t going to wiggle out of this that way. Is that what you are trying to pull?”
“I thought it was forty,” she said.
“Five for juice. For aggravation,” he said. “Get it tomorrow. Now, I don’t want to have to get, you know . . . ”
“I know,” she said.
“Tomorrow,” he said.
The next night, in that brownish, late summer air, like something that had been smoldering for a long time, like a peat fire underground, she walked into the Chinese restaurant and by the fish tank. A waitress had a net and was taking out a dead fish and said to no one in particular, “Bad feng shui. Arrows hit fish.”
Sara sat down opposite MD. He was wearing some new mousse that made his hair look like a wig. He used chopsticks sort of like a spear. He had a dumpling on one and he put the entire thing into his mouth.
“Where is it?” he said.
“I haven’t got it,” she said.
“Hmpf,” he said.
He speared another dumpling.
“Tell me about the kidney,” he said.
“What do I know about kidneys?” she said.
“Don’t be simple,” he said. “How hard was it to get across the border?”
“Not hard,” she said. “I had a doctor with me.”
“With some kind of forms?” he said.
“Yeah,” she said.
“I guess we could get a blank one. Or maybe we could
look one up online. Or just make one, you know, with some desktop software. Steal a logo from some hospital. Get the names of the department of nephrology. I’ve been looking that up.”
The bubbles in the fish tank now rose in line like a chain, silver and oddly spaced, just like in a movie about scuba divers. In the bottom of the tank sat a pirate’s chest with some gold coins spilling out, and next to it sat a mermaid, her hair discreetly flowing over her breasts.
The next day a tall man with long fingers, who seemed to be about thirty pounds underweight, came into the showroom. He went from one car to another but he mostly stood and flicked the aerial of one back and forth, and when Sara asked if she could help him, he went with her into her cubicle. He had a small black bag, and his hands shook when he took out the blood pressure cuff and the stethoscope.
“Keep your hands off me,” she said.
Barry Hammelman came by the cubicle and said, “Oh, our clientele is getting better and better. Why, we’ve even got doctors now.”
“Ex-doctor,” said Sara. “Isn’t that right?”
“I’m having some discussions with the medical board,” said the man.
“Well,” said Hammelman. “Sara’s the one to talk to about a car. Improves your image.”
The ex-doctor smiled a sour sort of smile.
“I guess,” he said.
“Let me take your blood pressure,” he said to Sara.
“I’ll talk to MD,” she said.
“OK,” he said. “He was just worried about your salt intake. Hard on the kidneys, MD said. You know, people are concerned about that kind of thing if a transplant is involved.”
Sara told me her hands began to sweat, that she imagined being stretched out in some dentist’s office or in a motel or someplace like that where, facedown on some starched sheet, they’d take both kidneys. And if they did that, what else could they take? How much was she worth? Did I begin to see the horror? How many boxes would they need? All packed in ice. So maybe it wasn’t forty-five thousand any more. Or maybe that’s what they wanted, just one kidney, but she doubted it. She knew the real problem was going to be worse.